actually finished in 2008

actually finished in 2008
Originally uploaded by textileseahorse

i know i cheated a bit by having 2 photos of the recent cowl and i didn't take a photo of the finished kermit socks but i did a lot of things in 2008. dyeing with indigo and with eucalyptus, painting, mixed media, felting, sewing, one bed quilt and some knitting.

a bit reflection later - 2008 was a strange year often polarised by great things happening at work and on the creative side but terrible, painful things in other parts of my life.

but hey i actually finished stuff (and the less said about leftover unfinished projects from 2007 and beyond the better)

learning to photoshop

days of sloth

christmas day set the benchmark for sloth around here - there has been a whole lotta lounging, reading christmas books, moderate cooking, eating and even the odd bit of housework (just to keep the house from being subsumed by a tide of dog hair - b-the-d is shedding a small mammal's worth of hair every day)

i have however started and completed a knitted garment - if a cowl constitutes a garment.
i used ilga's beech wood pattern - very easy with enough changes of pace to keep me interested but not anxious making. i used some soft handspun wool that i bought 3 years ago in byron bay and a skein of luscious handpsun silk from artemisartemis.

christmas day

and i'm still in my jim jams at 2.30 - my sort of christmas day :)

we got up at a civilised hour (8.30ish) and there was much excitement and a flurry of present opening. apart from my wondrous camera m gave me a lovely assortment of pressies
albertus rex loved his flying screaming monkey (an excellent stocking filler) and m was similarly entranced by his t shirt (it says 'hello my name is inigo montoya you kill my father prepare to die' and is from the best t shirt place in the world)
w has his career set as a wooden chef - he now has a wooden stove, wooden supplies and a wooden birthday cake
and e loved her kimono
poor old billthedog was a bit bemused by the whole thing
leisurely breakfast was followed by leisurely lunch and i'm now uploading the legion of christmas photos to flickr.

dinner will be roast beef, vichy carrots, zucchini and roast potatoes followed by panettone bread and butter pudding and cherries.

happy cmas to all

and to all a good night.
we just did the santa thang and we are tiiiired.

see you in the morning :)

snakey and summer pudding

we went to the kris kringle night market on thursday night and w saw lots of soft toys and of course wanted them all. he really wanted a snake though and there were none to be had.

so i made one.
it's more than 8 feet long...... the sewing part was ok - but the stuffing! i felt like a navvy by the end of it all.
but he is a handsome snakey and w loves him.

and the summer pudding i made last night

was wonderful!

on a less cheery note, we seem to have bought a grinch christmas tree which leers at us from its corner and made its feelings clear by falling on e as she was blamelessly sitting on the sofa eating her pudding....

christmas.....

one glass of champagne and look what happens

christmas at my mum's place.

and here is solomon in all his glory - matted and framed (which makes him sound like a down and out criminal...) but isn't he lovely - as is my Mother of course
more photos if you can bear it over at flickr

new toy

urbane scrumping gave me a wondrous birthday/cmas present - a very sparkly, glisteningy camera.
it is beautiful and very obedient and can do all sorts of clever tricks.
it can make w look like this:
and it took the photos at the wiggles concert with no flash :)

toot toot, chugga chugga

yes folks, it's that time of year again.... the big red car rolls into melbourne just before christmas every year, and every year w and i go along and sing and dance and have a fabulous time. well i do and w looks cautiously enjoyful of the whole thing.
this year urbane scrumping joined us and was pleasantly surprised at how far the wiggles had come since 1997 when he took the then 2 year old a to see them at a canberra primary school hall. no more cardboard cutout big red cars and they had multiple changes of costume although all in their signature colours, of course.
i was so happy i bought the ears
and the t shirt

i did buy a light up wand and a helium balloon for w - it wasn't all about me!

launched!

today we launched the project my manager and i have been working on all year: Dardee Boorai: the Victorian Charter of Safety and Wellbeing for Aboriginal Children and Young People.

dardee boorai means 'strong children' in the language of the gunnai people of gippsland. it has been a fantastic project to work on - lots of consultation with Aboriginal communities and strongly influenced by the Aboriginal advisory committee as well as government.

here is a photo of my desk from my december 4 day of photos - you can see a mock up of the dardee boorai poster in the bottom right hand corner. (as you can see my desk is an oasis of peace and order)
and here is the whiteboard that was the engine room of the charter :)
no photos of the launch i'm afraid - i was too busy wrangling participants. but the highlights for me were the traditional dances performed by the kinder kids (so 4 year olds) who go to the Yappera Children's Service where we held the launch and the 3 busloads of delegates from the World Indigenous Peoples' Conference on Education who were doing a site visit to yappera as part for the conference and who joined us for the launch. so now copies of the charter will go back with them to Canada, New Zealand and Belgium as well as all over Australia. because our charter is the first human rights charter for Aboriginal children and i'm really really proud of that.

you can check out the charter and (sometime next week) you can see some video footage of today's launch here

woooo-ooooooooo!

i quoth for the first time in my life at a concert. urbane scrumping and i went to a day on the green last night and saw mark seymour, the angels and the hoodoo gurus and it was wooooo-oooooooo!
i sang, i danced, i jumped up and down, i shimmied and i had a fabulous time :)
it poured with rain off and on but stopped for most of the sets. and US and I were equipped with plastic ponchos that US' parents had bought in peru to venture into a waterfall so we only got damp around the edges.....
and those who know me will know what it means when i say i had 3 glasses of red - in picnic wine glasses so probably 2ish normal glasses. i usually go cross eyed and blurry after 1 glass so this was a bit of a binge for me. but i stayed upright and danced along the top of the alcohol.

best bits

• crowd singing to the classics - 'throw your arms around me', 'holy grail', 'wipeout' and of course 'am i ever going to see your face again' (for those outside australia the angels sing this and the audience refrain is 'no way, get f***ked, f**k off')
• smiling at US through the sheets of rain
• looking around at my fellow demographic as we sat on our picnic chairs, covered in plastic sheeting and singing songs from the 70s and 80s and thinking 'this is what the retirement homes of 2050 will be like'

but oh my knees!

morning window-sill

morning window-sill
Originally uploaded by textileseahorse

6am thursday 4 december. first photo in my 'day in the life' thang. not sure it will be - mixed media, flickr set, photoshop matrix?

possums

westcountrybuddha asked why the possums were being kept out of the trees in the parks. well, the answer is that they were too sucessful - there were so many possums that the trees were suffering and so some of them (trees not possums) have wide metal collars around the trunks to prevent the possums from climbing up and committing great depredation. in new zealand they have become a real environmental problem.

the same thing happened with fruit bats about 5 years ago - they were having a fabulous knees up in the botanic gardens and completely destroying the trees. so they were moved first to the fitzroy gardens and then to yarra bend. soon they will be visiting my fig tree for light snacks.

there are still enough trees for a sustainable possum population and you can often see them in the evenings. this little possum was lying on the grass as i walked through the park a few weeks ago.

trees

i'm going to be taking a lot of tree photos for the next little while and posting them on flickr. i thought i would spare textileseahorse readers unless there are particularly interesting ones (tree photos that is, not readers) but there is a piece brewing in the far reaches of my creative brain..... keep an eye on flickr if you are interested - they'll all be in a set called 'looking up trees' - natch..

this one is a date palm (i think) in the treasury gardens on my way to work yesterday morning - the metal band is to stop possums climbing up. quite a few trees around melbourne have these collars but enough bare necked trees remain to keep the possums happy

dinner

was squid ink spaghetti and baby octopus sauce (garlic, ginger and chili fried in olive oil then simmered with a tin of tomatoes, just as the pasta is nearly done, tip the baby octopus in and voila - yumbo-bumbo)
and some twilight shots

challenge quilt #2 - stellar

here is my stellar quilt - background of black velvet with layers of severely altered paper and lutradur. the orange red centre is made of brown paper with many layers of paint, bondaweb, wax crayon, shiva stick, angelina and walnut ink and melted with the heat gun (using maggie grey's technique from 'paper, metal and stitch' -a brilliant book). the top layer is painted and shiva sticked lutradur, finished off, after stitching, with the heat gun. free motion machine stitched and hand stitched - it has a lovely crunchy surface.
inspired by this photo taken by urbane scrumping i had lots of fun making the fiery centre and endless trouble getting the right black on the lutradur. ironically the right black ended up lacking depth so i attacked it with shiva sticks which gave the piece much more energy and visual texture.
i'm still not sure which way up it should go....