I abso­lu­tely des­pise cables and their assor­ted mes­si­ness. In these pho­tos you should only see a cou­ple, the hun­dreds of others are quietly and neatly hid­den away from view. The one trai­ling the bot­tom of the war­drobe is the anno­ying net con­nec­tion to the Xbox that wouldn’t fit through the dri­lled hole at the back (inside) where the power enters. It’s nice being able to hide away the TV and con­so­les when they are not being used. The room also has 5.1 surround sound setup with correctly posi­tio­ned spea­kers in cor­ners. The small shelf lying behind the screen makes a nice cosy area for con­nec­tor cables to come through from below (away from view); hou­sing the DVD wri­ter, iPod con­nec­tions, card rea­der and such. The screen also dou­bles as a USB hub. So I am happy.

My bore­dom during these holi­days has led me to new hob­bies that grant me oppor­tu­ni­ties to be crea­tive. My latest craze is sten­ci­ling! On Thurs­day I went out and bought a can of spray paint, some 100gsm prin­ta­ble card and some other ran­dom help­ful oddi­ties. I then used my sister’s “scribe” as shown below to begin my work. I’m a com­plete new­bie when it comes to this and I plan to do a lot of expe­ri­men­ta­tion in the next few days invol­ving multi colour designs, pain­ting with a roller, using chalk to touch up after pain­ting and dif­fe­rent tech­ni­ques. Below is my second ever sten­cil of Don­nie Darko (the first was merely a proof of con­cept to check that I wasn’t was­ting my time on something that would look shit). I spent about an hour or so sor­ting out the sten­cil for this one and then I applied a heavy spray pain­ted layer while it was ‘tac­ked down,’ that was a mis­take, look at the white splod­ges and how the paint splur­ged everywhere!

So next time I went with just a light spray with the finer parts held down from above using small rocks and weigh­ted objects. Didn’t turn out too bad and with the edges trim­med would look quite good moun­ted. I may make some modi­fi­ca­tions and add a blue hoo­die layer to this.

This is my latest effort (below). It took roughly two hours to make the sten­cil simply because the hair took so long and at times the brid­ging was hard to con­ceal. I was being adven­tu­rous with this one and pur­po­sely chose an image with dif­fi­cult areas to cut away. This isn’t the grea­test of sten­cils to spray due to all the tiny little bits but I tried it any­way. I plan to go out and buy some paint, rollers and colou­red card to make this look nice tomorrow.