Aqua antics

The tennis final is on tonight so what on earth am I doing here blogging? Who thought updating every single day of the year was a good idea?

So in brief: Sunday – lovely empty day. Apart from 11 cat dresses that needed sewing we had no obligations so we decided to take a quick early morning dash into the Aquarium which is hugely expensive and largely unimpressive. Amelia managed to find Nemo which was extremely exciting. I took some photos of her finding him, but I am exceeding my bandwidth at the moment and it’s all getting very expensive, so you can find them at flickr.

After lunch I started sewing and have finished one cat which is my official A Month of Softies submission. I can see that I may spend quite a lot of time over the next week finishing all their outfits. I am still not completely sure what I am going to be doing with them because I have a couple of different options, but it is highly likely that I will be auctioning a couple on Ebay in the next couple of weeks.

Cat Factory 11.36am

I have spent a lot of time this morning mixing and matching fabrics to try and work out how to dress all 11 of my cats. I am not actually sure how they suddenly became 11 – I thought I was only working on 10 and instead 11 have come to the party, and I have already given one away to Christina – so my cats seem to be multiplying. To stop the shenanigans I have put them into their own individual hermetically sealed (kinda) plastic bags. Now they look a bit freaky.

Big-P checked the mail box on the way to the restaurant last night and found two great parcels. One from an earlier ebay craft book splurge, and one was some fabric from Laura who makes great bags. I am not sure if you can see the detail in the one on the left but it’s kimono fabric (I would guess) that has tiny little rabbits on it. Very cute. It will be perfect for next month’s Month of Softies… oooh what can that theme be?? Stay tuned!

Cool it

Thank goodness it’s a little cooler tonight. We have just taken Amelia out for Japanese food which was relatively stress-free despite having a tired little girl still recovering from a big day. There was an mini toddler pool party in Vermont South this morning, a long, hot and tiring car ride through the suburbs on the way home because I got really really lost, a trip to the library (mainly to pick up our ACMI films) and an extended Hooley Dooley dance session in the afternoon. So the heat is less intense tonight but it’s been so awful. Yesterday I squirted Amelia with the hose out in the backyard and she thought she had died and gone to heaven. I had the sprinkler nozzle on and I was pointing it into the air and letting it rain down on us (it’s a trigger hose and we were doing it near the beans which needed the water, so please don’t email me and say “what about the water restrictions, huh?”) and it was bliss. My mum got in the way a couple of times and shouted at me that she didn’t like getting her feet wet so from then on Amelia and I both thought it was pretty funny to “accidentally” spray Nan-nan. Now we are going to watch one of our newly borrowed movies… let me just check with the family as to which it will be: Suspiria it is!

Lamplight

After my entry the other day about my exhibition and its midnight theme and my problem with the black murkiness of the over all show, I had a lovely email from Amy who sent me this painting by John Singer Sargent; “Carnation, Lilly, Lilly, Rose“. It came at such a perfect time. It’s so beautiful. The lanterns are almost exactly the ones I have been trying to illustrate and it’s great to see how some else has captured their iridescence. Mine have been more like this:

A bit more like a planet glowing away in space. I will have to work on it.

The delicate nature and the gentle light in Sargent’s painting has been such an inspiration for the latest piece I am working on. I have tried to loose the really dark background that most of the other pieces have, but I do like having a kind of spooky, murky thing happening. It makes the little creatures who are nestled amongst the leaves and flowers seem just a little bit vulnerable and a little less straight-out cutesy.

I just bought myself an early birthday present on Ebay. I can’t wait to receive this book – it’s all in Japanese of course, but the instructions and patterns are usually pretty clear… hopefully. If not, the pictures themselves of these amazing and sometimes kitschy 1920s and 1930s Japanese dolls still makes it worthwhile.

A Month of Softies participant Tashina pointed me towards this very useful tutorial on Craftster – “Stuffed Felt Monsters Tutorial” — a great reference for people wanting to get involved in A Month of Softies but are unsure where to start. Craftster has a lot of good stuff for making softies in the Toys, Dolls and Playthings section.