Shrink Plastic - the world 10 times smaller

This is not a great photo because I don't have any artificial lights that I can use with my camera and at this time of year, the moments of good natural light are few and far between.

I was recently asked to teach a class on shrink plastic. This was supposed to be one of the items that we'd do in the class (although my plan had been to get the students to colour and decorate theirs) but it takes nearly two sheets of plastic to do this and I neglected to mention to the store owner that she needed to get in lots of shrink plastic.

It uses one of the Creative Expressions trunk box stamps, stamped onto shrink plastic four times with either StazOn or Jet Black Archival (if you're using Jet Black Archival you need to leave it for longer to set). Each panel is then cut out and decorated, then shrunk independently as you can't get shrink plastic to bend once shrunk - well, not easily. These are stuck together using a really strong glue. I've used E6000, but that is so difficult to buy in the UK. Any good strong glue that dries clear will do the job. I started by sticking the front and back panels to the bottom. Then I stuck the flaps to the front panel and the flaps inside the box to the back panel. The flaps for the bottom were stuck on the outside. Then, I stuck two of the little tabs to the edges of the top panel, waited until it was dry, then attached the flaps to the top panel on the outside edge so that I could angle them outwards a little so that they would fit neatly over the top.

Ah, gay Paree

Paris is wonderful. If money were no object, I'd be happy to live there. But until I can speak the language better, it is not something that I would do.

Getting to Paris was easy. Get the train from our local station to Paddington, then Tube it to St Pancras. We thought we'd be able to withdraw and change money there, but no, everything isn't open yet. So we grabbed a snack and checked in. We left on the Eurostar just after 12 and 2.15 hours later, we arrived at Gard du Nord. Metro'd it over to our hotel and dumped our bags.

We walked up towards Bastille and I whipped out my camera - only to discover that I'd left the card back in the printer at home. We found a shop that sold cards and continued walking to Bastille where we found a North African restaurant to have dinner in. It was a little disappointing as far as North African food goes, but then we both like exciting food.

The following morning after a leisurely breakfast, we caught the Metro up to Clignancourt where you'll find the largest flea market in Europe with over 2000 stalls. Unless you're looking for rip off Dolce & Gabanna or similar, it isn't cheap. We had crepes and other great street food for lunch and walked our feet off. I found a great store that sells any number of watch parts that you might want. I picked up about 30 watch faces for €10. I saw some really cute old Lâncome ointment tins but he wanted €4 each and I didn't think they were worth it.

We caught the Metro back into the city, made our way to the river and walked to Pont Neuf where we picked up a boat tour and went up the Sienne where the picture of the Eiffel Tower was taken. We then went up to the Jewish Quarter in Marais and found a lovely Jewish restaurant where we were served a variety of things that went with bread until we were stuffed. We tried to get to see a movie but the only cinema nearby was only playing things dubbed into French. We gave up and went back to the hotel.

On Monday morning, we had another leisurely walk to Bastille, this time following along the top of the Viaduc des Artes which is an old railway track that has been converted into a green space running nearly all the way into Bastille, so named for all the little shops located in the railway arches underneath. We picked up the Metro at Bastille and went up to Montmartre, where we found the most wonderful fabric shops. Although I was tempted by lots, I restricted myself to six metres of the most wonderful purple/red shimmer fabric which I hope to have made into a blouse.

We had lunch in a lovely little brassarie and learned a great lesson for Paris: if you want good food, stick to what the French know how to do best - French food. After lunch it was a trip on the finicular up the hill to Sacré Coeur - beautiful but they don't allow photography inside. However, we did do the roof walk and got some fantastic photos - look, there's the Eiffel Tower again.

We gave into buying a few things in the local souvenir shops but managed to avoid the artists who were touting for business and started the gentle stroll down the hill taking photos as we went. You see, Zandy has a new camera (a beautiful Digital SLR) and so everything became a photo op.

We got back down to the main drag and walked along to Blanche and found a lovely patisserie that was doing baklava and suchlike and each picked up a snack. We walked down to the Moulin Rouge and took a few photos - well, I did anyway. Zandy's camera can't cope with as low-light situations as mine can.

Having caught the Metro back to Odeon we found a cinema playing English-language films and saw "Lions for Lambs" - fantastic movie, highly recommend it.

Tuesday was our last day and we really only had a half day. We went down to look around Notre Dame. Now, they have no problem with you taking photos as long as you don't use flash - so we took lots and lots of photos. The scale of the place is impressive. However, I'm less impressed than I would have been 16 years ago, because there are so many wonderful churches in Britain that (in my opinion) equal or better Notre Dame.

Still, the scale of the place is amazing and you can spend a lot of time wandering around it and still not see it all. We crossed over onto the south bank and wandered around until we found another cute brasserie to have lunch in. Our order had just been placed when our friends Lana and Toni discovered us, so the four of us had lunch together.

It was then back to the hotel to pick up our bags and head back to Gard du Nord where we arrived for our train with less than 10 minutes to spare.

Arriving back at St Pancras, we decided rather than rushing back to Paddington to get the first train out, hitting the rush hour and therefore probably not getting a seat, we instead went to one of our favourite restaurants behind Euston station before coming home at a leisurely pace.