Welcome to My Crib!

Welcome to my crib! Well no, not my house but really my crib! And here it is! I think in December last year, I spouted on about upcycling and never got around to posting the finished result, and this is it! As a child of the Blue Peter era, I think Valerie Singleton would be very proud of what I achieved with a wooden wine box, a variety of sticks, moss and branches (all collected in the wilderness and dried in my oven, yes the smell was appalling), a bit of straw and plaster of Paris. 

Here we are at the half way stage, all in all I think it took about 100 hours because I started diddling about with wells, an open fire with a cooking tripod (and flickering flames), dried herbs hanging from the ceiling, a table laid with wine, plaster bread and salami and to be honest I was so in the flow, it was only the hundreds of burns from my hot glue gun that prevented me from building the whole of Nazareth. 

Building projects at Christmas have a great tradition in my family; my father’s flaming gothic cathedral (polystyrene and a 100 Watt bulb are not a good combination!) and my mum’s attempt at a crib! Inspired by Bavarian cribs ( there are really the most fabulous cribs to be seen/bought and viewed at Christmas), she decided to carve some fantastic wooden figures for just such a crib. My mother was a dab hand at handicrafts, you name it, she'd tried it! From macrame, through enamelling (the stench was revolting and my dad was furious about the burnt holes in the kitchen lino which came from dropping the hot copper enamelled pieces fresh out of the kiln), to horseshoe nail jewelry ..... you name it she'd tried it ........ except for carpentry. I don’t know where she got the idea that a piece of wood and a Stanley knife were a good idea, especially when nobody was about but she let rip one Saturday afternoon, the result being 10 stitches in the palm of her hand and all ideas of carving went out the window. 

Fortunately, I know my limits and decided that buying the figures was a much better idea and anyway with all those burns wielding a Stanley knife was impossible!