New month of a new year and still cold.

Start of 2010 and still a cold snap in fact it has been cold since December. I have been having difficult sleeping at night due to the freezing temperatures and my hands freeze up when crafting or doing creative work. During my time offline I have been trying my hand at bead embroidery again and undoing the some of my earlier work. Hard to keep beads stitch even as you see in the picture the facet button doesn't fit well in the peyote circle. I felt inspired to bead since I discovered Art of Bead Embroidery by Heidi Kummli and Sherry Serafini they create colourful and exquisite collars, cuffs and pendants. Don't intend to match their quality of work because they specialise in one thing and I have a tendency to bounce in between different crafts.
This year I will have to decide to focus on one or two things. At the moment I have started a new papercraft project as in assembling models, this one is pepakura dragon which is tricky because the folds are reversed so the finished work doesn't resemble the render image in the viewer software also I discovered each part is separate so far I have completed the head, whiskers and forelimbs. Maybe one day I'll create a model of my own. One day once all the long term major projects have been finished.
While everyone was mulling over cold turkey on Boxing day my family and I had lobsters. There don't seem any real customs at Christmas, like special rituals other than decorating the house and being drunk silly at New Year's Eve. I rather celebrate Chinese New Year because the food is more nicer and last for 3 days, last year I was in Hong Kong for the festival. This year it falls on the same date as St Valentines.
I took this photo this morning, yep more snow and worse than last time. There is over 4 inches of snow. Yesterday, I have received an envelope from Mailarta something wonderful to cheer me up in this climate. The cold snap is not set to clear for a while in the meantime I can play on the Wii and return back to crafting.