There’s always a very motivated part of my day, and God help me if nothing can be done in that time.. Half the time I find it goes on cleaning if I’ve not been seeing Niamh. She’s been so fantastic recently, it’s great that she’s at the age where she’s can interact with everything and have an opinion. Which is a mixed blessing But she makes me smile no matter what..

But I don’t get to spend as much time with her as I’d like to. And while I’m not with her I tend to have a lot of free time. I’m trying to make to most of my limited resources and stretch my budget as far as it’ll go to fund any kind of project I can put together. In the last week I’ve found that my daily ritual now includes a trip to B&Q to inspire these projects. I buy a little something every time I go to keep my spirits and be as productive as possible.

The project I’m currently working on is pretty low cost since it’ll be make in two sections that both are time consuming and require a lot of sensitive work. It’s going to be a recreating of something I stumbled upon while researching weaves for making chainmail. A WW1 ‘Splatter Mask’. I get the feeling that in a war situation it’s highly impractical, seeing looks to be an issue, but at the protection it gives the face I’m sure it had it’s place in the early tanks then trenches. It’s whole appearance is cold, harsh and haunting. I’m hoping I can recreate these qualities with new materials and that the age will still come across. We’ll see, I’m only at the chain fringe at the moment. Using 3mm rust proof steel, which is defeating me, harder to twist around a bar than I imagined. But it’s four filling.

When it’s finished I’ll be handing it straight over to If you’ve not seen his stuff I highly recommend having a cheeky gander at his musings. He makes amazing textures that I’ll be harvesting his brain for later in life.. But right now I’m happy to collaborate. We’ve known each other half our lives, sat side by side in art classes for a large portion of it and always said ‘We should do this, this and this..’ and never did.

Other than that I’ve been booked to shoot a Wedding in a beautiful building next summer, don’t have any other jobs on the horizon but the search continues. My job seekers is keeping me alive and active. Yesterday I actually picked up my camera for the first time in a while Nothing particularly fruitful but it was nice to see I didn’t completely suck at using it.

How are people!?