Although I am not officially updating this site again until the new year, I thought I would quickly post a reminder that A Month of Softies submissions for December are due by the end of the month so please send them in! Happy New Year — and please donate some money if you can to the Tsunami appeals.
Oxfam CAA appeal
UNICEF Appeal
Christmas Eve comes whispering in. The wind was blowing through our open window before dawn and heavy grey skies promise a far cooler day than yesterday. I love Christmas Eve - entirely magical.
From tomorrow evening there will be a house guest using this room so I am going to take a blog break and be back in the New Year.
Thank you to those who visited loobylu this year (my fifth year!) and to all who left encouraging, supportive, useful and/or entertaining comments. Thank you for your emails and for buying Christmas cards. Loobylu continues to be one of the most wonderful things in my life just because I feel a part of a bigger community of like minded souls. I hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday break and that 2005 begins with high spirits, high hopes and belly laughs.
xx
Even though I am spending copious amounts of time painting rooms in various colours in my head and figuring out exactly where the herb spiral might be located in our paved wonderland out the back of our new place… there are still plenty of real world things going on right now to keep us busy and plenty of other things which will occupy the next 60-90 days before we actually get to move in.
This week is all about hurried baking, hurried rough drafts to be sent through to clients, hurried last minute market visits, hurried decisions about salads to serve on Christmas day and hurried pre-christmas get togethers. Fortunately (oh so fortunately!) I haven’t had to hurry my contribution to December’s Month of Softies - I finished it the night before last, calmly sewing the lining into place rather than frantically throwing it together which has been my habit until now. Here it is hanging in the lemon tree. You can see that I have drawn pretty heavily from the cushion I spotted in Home Companion magazine which you can see here. I tried to put my own twist on it but I am not sure how successful that was…
It’s pretty huge - more like a Christmas Ugg boot but perhaps it will last well into Amelia’s teenage years when Father Christmas might be asked for a pair of shoes or a lap top… ok it’s not quite that huge (nor is Father Christmas’s budget), but it’s certainly roomy. Large enough to put in this year’s heavily requested sand-pit toys.
The buttons all come from old family collections, apart from the gingerbread girls who have been in my own personal collection for a few months now. I think they’re sassy.
I used a scrap of my favourite Liberty print as one of the wrapped presents at the base of the tree. I love that fabric. I want to use it as little as possible on the most important projects so that it lasts and lasts (apparently it’s a seasonal fabric which will mean they may not get it again) but at the same time I want to splash it everywhere.
Big-P and I are doing lunch for the family on Christmas day. We have decided to go simple and recognise the fact that no one wants us to heat up the house by doing a roast so we are getting some take-away hot chickens from the very nice local hot chicken shop and then making a treasure trove of salads. My favourite will be the Chickpea Salad with Ginger Dressing - I have posted the recipe here because it’s so good:
Chickpea Salad with Ginger Dressing
1.5 cups of Chickpeas soaked overnight (but I use canned)
salt
4 tablespoons of Ginger dressing
1 small onion, finely chopped
1 red pepper, cored, seeded and diced
2 tablespoons of chopped parsley
Ginger Dressing (makes a fair bit, keep for later! very tasty)
3/4 cup peanut oil
4 tablespoons soy sauce
2 tablespoons lemon juice
clove of garlic
2.5cm length of ginger, grated finely
Drain the chickpeas, place in pan and cover with cold water. Bring to boil and simmer for 1.5 - 2 hours or until softened, adding a little salt towards the end of cooking.
Drain thoroughly and place in a bowl.
Pour over 4 tablespoons of the dressing and toss well while still warm.
Leave to cool.
Add the remaining ingredients, toss thoroughly and transfer to a serving dish.
Ah! I just signed the biggest cheque of my life! We just bought a house! more details later…
I think I may have finished all my Christmas shopping — I am quite impressed that I didn’t do my usual last minute panicked dash out to Chadstone to join the jostling hordes to find totally inappropriate presents for unsuspecting family members. I managed to avoid altogether the tire-kicking crowds that bring out unexpected and quite scary misanthropic feelings. There is still a bunch of baking to be done (any one have a good shortbread recipe?) but otherwise I am all set to go - mostly thanks to the awesome powers of Lotta Jansdotter - whose stationary will suit young and old and is very cool and classy and not too expensive.
Now it’s time to kick back and cut out some paper snowflakes - and enjoy yet another incongruous decoration for a Southern Hemisphere Christmas.
I also went out today and bought shoes. Carrie Bradshaw I am not - I hate buying shoes. I have troublesome feet so the selection of shoes to choose from is pretty limited and mostly designed for old ladies who also have troublesome feet. Luckily there is always something decent from Kumfs but I will have to plod around feeling none-to-glamorous.
I have finished working on the hard stuff (which is the applique) for my contribution to December’s Month of Softies, now it’s just a case of sewing it all up and lining it. It is indeed Amelia’s christmas stocking. I am being extremely sentimental by using bits and pieces of fabric and thread and buttons that mostly mean something. A button from a cardigan from when I was small… some of the previously mentioned thread from great great grandmother’s stash… some gingham from one of Amelia’s old baby wraps and so on.
Meanwhile Eleanor is going bananas on ebay - which is great as it is all going to UNICEF.
Speaking of UNICEF, Amelia, Big-P and I are enjoying UNICEF’s Advent Calendar this year with illustrations by one of my favourites Elisa Kleven. Amelia springs about each morning until we get it down for her so she can open the next window. I used to love Advent calendars when I was little - such a simple delight.
Speaking of delight — Christina has posted photos of the amazing “Dicken’s World” that she and Paul put up every Christmas. I am in awe. Big-P just stopped by my computer to check it out and we have decided we will have to make one next year! Ha! We’ll see. 
Eleanor the Roller Skating Elephant is now up for Auction on Ebay. I am donating the money she makes to UNICEF… so bid away! I am doubtful that it will make it to any overseas destinations for christmas, but I will happily make a little gift certificate which I can email to you for you to print if you intend giving it as a gift.
I am hoping that Philip Milne will contact me! I have an order from you but no shipping address has come through. I have tried to contact you via email to no avail. I hope you see this.
Back from our holidays. We enjoyed incredible thunder storms and didn’t enjoy the many, many flies. I am glad to be away from the spiders and the mouse poo that mysteriously appeared every morning, but miss the night time frogs, the morning kookaburras, the cheeky horse out the window and the kind ladies in the post office who were so helpful when I took the odd order of christmas cards down to mail. It took Amelia about four days to settle in and to stop being incredibly frustrating in that frustrated-toddler way. Once she got into the groove, she started to smile and play happily and run through the garden in the late afternoon screaming at the top of her lungs into the wind just for fun. She loved all the animals and was particularly keen on the puppies but couldn’t stand going out in the heat of the day because of the flies that insisted on buzzing around her face. I have a very keen memory of her standing in chin high dry grass in the paddock behind the house in her funny little sun hat bawling as the flies hung around her in a huge cloud. They were so annoying.
I hit a bit of a jackpot. Mum had mentioned that there was a fair amount of thread, fabric, buttons, lace and other miscellaneous bits and pieces in the back sleep-out which had been shut up in cupboards for years and years. So I went for an investigate and apart from having to dash from the room from time to time due to a black spider emerging from some nook or cranny, I discovered a cornucopia of embroidery thread - I guess because my great great grandmother lived out in this house in the country and would probably have only visited the city occasionally she must have stocked up on her threads. And boy did she stock up! Instead of one or two hanks of white she has a whole three boxes of white DMC thread - want blue? There are about 15 shades of blue to choose from. And she also used a lot of very fine, beautifully glossy silk thread - which there is less of but still enough to use here and there. It all smells quite musty so I am going to hang it all out in the sun to see if that will help — otherwise I might have to gently wash it which scares me a little.
There was also a few useful bits of fabric, cards of ribbon, buttons and lace but an added bonus was stumbling upon a huge box of exquisite iron on transfer patterns for embroidery from the 1920s and 30s. Ah wow! There is enough there to keep me going for the rest of my life. While not quite as hip as the stuff that Jenny Hart produces and while a lot of it is useless and rubbishy some of it is elegant, some of it is beautiful in it’s simplicity and some of it is fabulous in all it’s tackiness. I felt truly lucky to have found my own Aladdin’s cave out there. I want to use some of the threads to make two cushions - one for Amelia and one for my little nephew James. I think they might treasure these cushions in years to come knowing that the threads came from their great great great grandmother’s stash.
Just quickly - a few people have asked me what the meaning is of November’s theme for A Month of Softies which is “Holiday Hang-Ups”. Here is a definition of “hang-up” I found on the web. So, as I mentioned in a previous entry, it’s an interpret as you like theme but the basic idea is that it is something that you can hang and also related to the holiday season (such as a tree ornament or some kind of wreath or mobile or something). You are most welcome to ignore the ornamental part of it altogether if you wish and just focus on the idea that a hang-up is also an “emotional preoccupation” - for example that it’s some kind of personal problem that one might have with the holidays. A grumpy Scrooge doll would be perfect. And so on. Please remember that ultimately anything goes. I apologise to the folks who do not speak English as their native language for a theme that is a slight play on words. Let me know if you are still having problems with its interpretation.
Meanwhile, I am off to the country for a week with Amelia and my parents. I am looking forward to the break, but not to the eight hour car trip with a restless toddler. I am taking multiple projects of which I will probably work on maybe one if I am lucky. Plenty of walking, swimming and playing with puppies is planned.
Unfortunately I had no time to do a Illustration Friday this week, but Penelope has launched the Illustration Friday web site and it’s great. It has forums!
I have just done the last update to the Month of Softies gallery for November - there are now 9 more elephants to see (scroll down to the bottom). November’s theme is now closed so it’s time to start on the next one - and I have already received one photo for December’s theme!
