Halloween-style weeding

I spent a lot of time in the garden today, whipping it into shape ready for vegetable planting. While the kids scrabbled in the leaf litter looking for pill bugs to put in their newly established pillbugaterium, I filled our green waste wheely bin with armloads of weeds. Once I got into it, I was too enthused to stop, so I kept piling weeds and prunings on to the brick paving. I’m not exactly sure what I am going to do with this mountain of vegetation. Did you read The Nargun and the Stars when you were young? It’s a spooky Australian tale which has stayed with me ever since I read it when I was about 9 or so. Instead of ancient rocks which move around at night, I have a huge weed pile - which I hope stays where it is.

** Just for those who are feeling incredulous, I did add the fireflies and teeth in Photoshop.

Smug Pumpkin

This is our ridiculously over priced Halloween pumpkin. This will be the last year I buy a ridiculously over priced pumpkin. I am going to save the seeds and attempt to grow my own. If that doesn’t work, next year we will carve into a completely affordable pumpkin, which we can also eat the insides of, and be done with it. Those with Canadian blood running in their veins will spend some time tomorrow carving this into something spooky. As in previous years, it will sit on our front verandah in the warmish weather and attract a bazillion little black flies for a truly hideous Halloween display.

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Congratulations to Aleece who was the lucky winner of this past week’s give away. She submitted a link to a delicious looking recipe for Mushroom Barley Bake which I am most definitely going to make the next time we do baked chicken. Thank you for all your comments - what a fabulous stash of good things. Just in case you were wondering, to keep it fair, I deleted any duplicate comments. Stay tuned for another give away next week.

Everyone loves a Give Away #1

** Update to say comments are closed and I will be drawing a winner as soon as Lily has her afternoon nap! **

I have just finished putting together a package for a fellow blogger whose work I really appreciate and who has been a big influence for me in the past month or so - she has made me feel all inspired again. And as I was putting it together I thought, you know who I also really appreciate? It’s the people who come and visit my blog, and who sometimes leave kind and supportive comments and the people who send me nice emails and the people who just visit and read what I have to rave on about at any given time. Well, that means YOU. So thank you. I really appreciate what this blog has given me over the years, so I thought I would have a series of give aways as a very small token of my enormous gratitude. I’m starting small so as not to set the bar too high; this week I am giving away a bundle of fabric and trim - bits of Japanese prints, novelty reproduction pieces and a nice piece of Kaffe Fassett as well as a copy of the book I illustrated for Klutz.

All you need to do to play is leave a comment between now and this Friday 12 noon Australian EST after which I will use the very funky random number generator to pick a recipient. Rather than just saying “pick me!”, please leave me a link to your favourite internet recipe. (Mine is Princess Meg’s Birthday Celebration Cookies, from Loobylu c. 1999. Yours doesn’t have to so gratuitously self-referential if you don’t want it to be!). Feel free to use tinyurl if the link is enormous.

Please make sure you include your email address in the comment information so I can email the lucky winner for a postage address.

10 days lying around in bed got me all sentimental about the important things in my life, and there’s no getting away from the fact that this blog is one of those things. xx

Room to move

We finally moved Lily’s great big chunky change table out of her room today and over to the nursery of a soon-to-be-born baby who will be living just a few streets away. It’s left a great big lovely gap which was quickly filled by a dollhouse that was looking for a home and suddenly lots of inspired play. I love how a room rearrange can bring on squeals of delight, spontaneous dancing and some friendly, sisterly pre-dinner play time.

Do you remember Lily’s room? It’s looking much nicer these days. Next project is to find a new “big” bed ready for Lily to vacate her cot so that we can hand that on too. I am having fantasies about a vintage style wrought iron bed painted red (a la Cath Kidston - c 2006) - but that might have to be moderated somewhat. White would do just fine.

Over the last few months we’ve been throwing around the idea of moving house - ideally we’d like something a little closer to school so the girls can eventually walk, something with a bit more light, something dream-house-like. But of course, now it looks like the wrong time to be moving house on a whim so now instead it’s Operation Nest… After three and a half years it’s time to turn this house into OUR house and stop whinging about its quirks of which it has many and embrace them fully. Quirks are cool. Stay tuned.

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Children’s Rooms Copenhagen - new title from Paumes. Mmm nice.

Birthday cake

I am on the mend. Each day I manage to spend a few more hours out of bed which is such a good thing. I have been getting so bored and frustrated with my lack of energy.

I thought I would include today a photo of Amelia’s 6th birthday cake from when we were up in the country. It was the day before I fell apart with a hallucinogenic fever and looking back I now fully understand why organising any kind of birthday party seemed incredibly hard. The cake was from a packet and completely fell apart, the games were limited and the guest list was incredibly short but the whole thing taught me a little lesson - Amelia said to me “That was the best birthday party ever!”. It really doesn’t take much to make a kid happy (and enormous amounts of sweets and frosting will save any cake in the eyes of a 6 year old).

Happy 6th birthday my beautiful girl. Imagine that? 6!

Gorgeousness: Studio Violet

PS. Thank you for all the sweet get wells over the last week. It helped so much! xx

Japan is for another day

Hello! Here I am.

I have been in bed for the last 7 days - pneumonia! Well, if that doesn’t knock it out of you, nothing does. So very sadly we had to cancel our trip to Japan. We were supposed to fly out yesterday but there was no way. I am trying to be positive about the whole thing and am looking at the rest of 2008 as a blank page ready for all sorts of action - or recuperation anyway. Gentle times are planned.

Lily’s quilt

My first ever quilt! I thought I would do a show and tell - because I so very rarely finish anything of this magnitude (and it’s only a crib quilt!).

Actually, it’s been finished for quite a while now - but I hadn’t taken the time to photograph it. On Thursday both tikes spent a large amount of the day snuggled on the couch under their quilts so I got a chance to snap it in use.

This quilt couldn’t have got any simpler in design but I really like square quilts. That being said, I am sure if I mastered those tricky corners I would really like triangular quilts (looking at Fiona’s beauty - who couldn’t?).

I did lots of hand quilting on this thing - in retrospect, I think it’s too much. But I wanted to get that wrinkly vintage look.

And does it ever get used? Not really - Lily prefers her light, cheap Ikea doona. What can ya do. It’s good for those sick days on the couch. Next I have the hand quilting to do on Amelia’s quilt which will take me about 14 years, at least.

Library day (and lots of parentheses)

Still working my way through that big list of things to do.

Today I made a mad dash to the library to return a stack of books - but I took a moment to browse the shelves and borrow an even bigger stack of books for holiday reading (and listening - nothing like Library audio books for a long car drive). We’re off to the country for ten days and there’ll be plenty of sitting by the fire in the evenings reading books (usually through closed, exhausted eyelids) and talking about how good it would be if we had enough energy to get up and get out the scrabble board.

I love it when you find a title in the library which you have eyed off on the shelf at the book shop and decided that to purchase it would be way too indulgent but it’s very nice anyway (see above right).

I also love it when you find a title which you have seen on other lovely people’s blogs and thought “ohh I need to find a copy of that!” and to have it turn up like a little gem in amongst a couple of dozen other far less appealing dvds. (see above left).

I loved My Family and Other Animals when I was younger - I was determined that I would end my days living on a Greek island with a house full of animals (anyone who knows me and my fears and allergies will find this mildly amusing). I recently stepped out (which makes going out sound far more special, which it really is these days) to see that Abba movie … what was it called? Mama Mia! That’s right… with a bunch of girl friends and decided that my younger self had been entirely on the money when it came to nice places to end your days. Ok — enough of my free form ramblings. I am off to keep at that list!

Things I am doing

Today involves:
Packing for the school holidays
Buying champagne for my bestie’s baby shower
Ordering cakes for my bestie’s baby shower
Starting an illustration for some nice girls
Attending a “linen party”
Returning library books
Entertaining sick children
Grocery shopping
Thinking about zombies (well, I am)
Filling in forms for the Child Care Rebate
Sorting out an invoice with a doctor
Laundry
Dinner (chicken and basil and cashews? Mmm yes)

Other things I would like to be doing:
Watching Project Runway (both US and Aussie versions)
Crochet
Eating King Island Dairy vanilla yoghurt
Starting secret project for my bestie’s baby
Listening to some music
A proper blog post
Reading a book (rockin’)
Checking out my enormous list of favourite blogs
Pre-ordering Moomin book three

Rabbits are multiplying

I am getting there. I found a couple of spare hours today, ransacked Lily’s room to turn it into a photo studio of sorts (you should have seen my scary looking lighting set up… towers of bed-side lamps teetering of mountains of stacked furniture), did some very amateurish styling and photographed three of the five rabbits in various set ups and then my camera battery ran out… and then we had to find the recharger… and then I needed a cup of tea… and then I realised that the rabbits aren’t actually finished and I was going to sew little buttons on their dresses… how did I forget that?… and so it comes to a grinding halt for the time being.

I don’t know if I am going to get a chance to list them for sale until late October when we get back from Japan - perhaps by then the 5 rabbits will have become 10 as I have a whole bunch more cut out ready to be put together.

But I thought this was a cute shot regardless.