^^^ That's what my mum keeps saying to me!

I'm now a trustee of the Pound for Piper charity raising money to help restore the memorial gardens for the Piper Alpha disaster 24 years ago. We had a press release today as we're now an official charity, I run the facebook group, collate emails and do adminy things.

I'm still working for Felisfire but as a volunteer being paid in site currency. It's fun and I really hope it grows to be a little bit of an earner, either directly or by proxy... I've got a massive load of work to do for that for the Advent Calendar event so I'll upload that to my scraps when it's done.

I've been calling various companies to pick more brains about casting! Doing it all yourself is rewarding but oh so exhausting and I'm finding it really overwhelming, so I'm trying to twist Rob's arm into helping me out every fortnight or so, just an evening to help do some casts or something.

I have a proper dragon in the works, I posted a WIP of a dragon a few months ago on Tumblr but I was so unhappy with the head it got put on the back burner. I've been resculpting it over the past few weeks and fired it a couple of days ago, along with ordered all the glass eyes for it from Germany and more silicone I hope to have a finished example to show you all in a couple of weeks. I'm not sure if it will have latex wings or not, but I'm leaning towards it being a yes.

Bats won the last poll by 1 vote over kirins! Western dragons came last so... Of course that's what I had already sculpted... haha! I will do bats after the dragons and then kirins after that, they will be making their debut next year.

Commissions wise... You will have seen Cloud and his wonderful wings That's partly why I haven't been around for a full month. I spent a week making a pheasant gryphon intensively to try and get the mechanism right, another week making Cloud and then Mum decided it would be a great idea to put a wood burning stove in the sitting room, so we had to roll back the carpets, knock down the wall we had built to block up the chimney, pull off the wallpaper... Then put it all back together again! Took a fortnight combined with the Pound for Piper charity stuff, but it's done now and the sitting room is very warm and cosy. I am also proud to say I can now do plastering and hang wallpaper.

There is a video of the new wings in action on the pheasant gryphon here: [link] There will be a video of Cloud's wings with me talking over it up in a couple of days or so, while I edit it.

And for those of you who are in the know... Rouko is doing really, really well! We took him to the beach on Sunday and he ran and ran and ran... Ran into the sea, ran over the rockpools, ran through the seaweed, got soaking wet and stinky and could not have been happier! Rob and I were beaming, and afterwards he was hardly limping at all. His leg has put all of its lost muscle back on, he is back to his old self. Ahh!

SO to round it all up I will have :gaiawolfess:'s commissions up within the following week along with some WIP photos of the dragon casts. Normality is sort of resumed (although what is normality...?)

OH and a note for Etsy purchases: The christmas cutoff date is the 20th of December, if you are buying a custom doll you will need to buy it on the 10th of December to give me time to get it done!

Time for a glass of wine...