Miscellany – Bookmarked!

Bookish crafts: DIY Pillowbed

I’d been meaning to learn to use a sewing machine for a while now, because while I can hand-sew just fine, machine sewing is dead handy for my endless crafting, costumes, and the never-ending list of hobbies I find myself involved in.

You may have seen this on the blog’s FB page (or my social media accounts if you know me personally), and here’s the story behind it: my sister, who’s teaching me to sew, showed me a pillowbed on Pinterest (evil, evil Pinterest) and I decided to make one as my first project. Now it’s basically just sewing the seams of the pillowcases together, but I count it as a major achievement for LVL: Noob.

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Exploring the new #Pottermore

My cousin Dianne and I have been on a Harry Potter high since our Harry Birthday party in July. If you don’t know us (yet), our shared love of Harry Potter is one of the cornerstones of our relationship (actual blood relation aside), and now that she’s moved out of town, tickling the sleeping dragon (e.g. our Harry Potter fandom) has been a great way of dealing with separation anxiety.

So after the party, we started a leisurely read-along of the books (e.g. one book a month; so far we’ve finished Philosopher’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets) and we’ve been running up our phone bills with a flurry of messages throughout the books because we can talk Potterverse until your ears fall off. For cousins who’ve never been far apart for very long their whole lives, who can communicate to each other with nary a bat of an eyelash — Harry Potter has offered a lot of comfort even though we’re miles apart.

Our latest obsession (while waiting for the October 6 release of the illustrated edition Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and vainly attempting to ignore the presence of a £135 deluxe illustrated slipcase edition) is the new Pottermore website.

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Love Among the Stacks

Aside from books, I also collect Sylvanian Families, which are miniature toys that hail from the ’80s (released the year I was born, in fact). I played with them as a child but never had any of my own, so I’ve spent the last couple of years building my collection.

Because this is a book blog, I don’t think my critters have ever appeared here, but I recently completed my first full diorama (I’ve only done vignettes in the past) for a contest (theme: love) and of course I couldn’t help going bookish.

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New bunch of bookmarks

When it comes to bookmarks, my philosophy is one can never have too many. I must have hundreds stashed away all over the house and even at my office, and yet for some reason I still manage to find myself in inopportune moments where I have to use a receipt or a table napkin to mark my place in a book (crazy, right?).

It’s been a while since I showed you bookmarks from my collection, and I realized I’ve amassed quite a few neat ones in the last couple of years, so here they are!

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Hello from AFCC 2014!

Greetings from Singapore, where I have just attended the first day of the Writers and Illustrators Conference of the Asian Festival of Children’s Content. It was an amazing first day featuring a stellar ensemble of speakers and inspiring talks, great company (hello friends, old and new!) and a stack of signed books to go in my luggage.

It’ll take some time for me to transcribe all my notes from the conference, and upload the photos from my camera, so in the meantime, here’s a look at the National Library of Singapore, where the Festival is being held. In previous trips, I’ve always passed by the huge library building on book hunting jaunts at the Bras Basah Complex right next door, but I’ve never actually been, so I was quite excited to set foot in this library.

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