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Stranger things have happened....

Been doing a bit of papercraft this week. Working on a few mixed media projects too, but they are not finished yet so I will refrain from posting these until they are.


I bought a couple of magazines lately, so decided to use some of the freebies to make a card. The background was a paper pad from Docrafts magazine, as is the anchor, which was die cut from white card and coloured with gold wax. All other parts were from a stamp set from Creative Stamping magazine. I stamped the porthole, cut it out and attached it with foam pads. The pirate is stamped, coloured with promarkers, and fussy cut, and the image in the porthole was two stamps, the wave and sun coloured with promarkers, and the sky inked with distress ink.

A father's day card. I die cut gears from Tim Holtz paper, attaching it back to the rest of the paper, which I covered with a crackle paste through brick stencil. I rubbed wax on the bricks, before putting it on a kraft card and covering the edges with blue ribbon. I then gathered some bits of ephemera, including some scrabble tiles before adding a paper doll with a party hat.

pick a tv show
watch from beginning to end
will I love it too?

Admittedly this is one of my easier options, though surprisingly difficult to first choose a series, and secondly to watch it from beginning to end in a week, especially when you have a full time job and other obligations. With that in mind I plumped for Stranger Things, a Netflix original series, with only eight episodes. It's been a while since I watched eight episodes of anything in one go, let alone of a series I have never watched before.

There were a few cliché's that niggled at me. The single mum of a missing child. The deadbeat dad who only wants financial compensation from the death of his son. The group of losers (it's always the losers that end up in the middle of a situation. I'd be interested to see it from the popular kids/bullies point of view.) The chief with a drinking problem and a tragic past. The shady Government scientists. The fact that a lot of minor characters were there simply to add a layer of antagonism, but were very one dimensional themselves (bullies, one very annoying high school couple) A lot of these stood out, particularly in the opening episode.

That being said... the series is bloody good, and that is in no small part to two things. Number one is the setting. It's set in the eighties (for some reason the decade I was born into is very popular, especially at the moment) and it is incredibly authentic. The relationship between the children reminds me a little of Stand By Me. The second thing is the acting, which is by and large flawless. Of note is Eleven, and to my surprise also Winona Ryder, who in playing the mother of the missing child is a complete revelation. I look forward to season two, but I do hope they downplay some of the clichéd parts (I'm looking at you 'bully made to piss his pants' scene, although that was compensated by the later confrontation between the bullies and eleven.), and remove a few of the superfluous characters.

So this week was an easy one. There was a reason for that but it's not something I need to go into on here.

Ems


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