Hot and Not – on a Wednesday

klaush

Another Wednesday has sprung on us again. I’m sorry I didn’t get to visit last week if you played along. Solo parenting is to blame! Clearly I need to get more organised.

Here’s how:
To play along, it’s as easy as writing up your own hot/not list on your blog and then linking back to me here at loobylu.com and then adding your url to the widget below.

Hot

Klaus Haapaniemi (above) – I’m late to the party but I am loving the work of this Finnish born, London based illustrator. So good. I have been drooling over his dinnerware in a store while I was doing my Christmas shopping and came home to google him and feel my heart explode as I look at all his amazing work. And look, Christina found this gorgeous flash website he illustrated – just in time for Christmas.

Rainy Tuesday. It was only momentarily a hassle to have to go out shopping in the pouring rain yesterday. While I managed to get quite wet around the ankles, it was still such a delicious novelty.

Chance meeting with Christina – she was stepping out of Minimax having been looking for a trifle bowl, I was zooming past to get to the dollhouse shop to look for little miniatures to incorporate into some last minute decoration making. We spent a pleasant half hour attempting to tick off things on our respective shopping lists.

Vanilla Macaron – I still think my friend Paul makes the best macarons in Melbourne, but I tried a vanilla macaron the other day from a cafe and the vanilla flavour was delicious. Like ice-cream in a macaron.

Holiday posts from the Kiddley archives. We were so lucky to have a huge group of talented guest bloggers with amazing tutorials for holiday crafts and activities on our Kiddley site around this time in 2006. Scroll back through the pages for good things from the likes of Amy from Angry Chicken, Amanda from Soulemama, Sarah from the Small Object, Heather Bailey, Christina Gordon, Lyn from Molly Chicken, Carly from Moopy and Me, Kathreen from Whip Up, Alicia from Posy Gets Cozy, Asha from Parent Hacks, Andrea from Hula Seventy, Alison from Six and Half Stitches, Fiona from Hop Skip Jump, Heidi from My Paper Crane, Stephanie from Little Birds Handmade, Amber from Kids Craft Weekly, Myra from My Little Mochi and Blair from Wise Craft. Even as I type up that list I am stunned by the amount of cool people who helped us out with Kiddley in the December of 2006!

10 Years of Loobylu and all the kind comments, tweets and emails I received.

Tiny knitting – for some last minute decoration making.

Not

Phil is away in California. That makes me a bit sad. Things which are usually his domain keep going wrong – batteries going flat in the smoke detector in the middle of the night, the oven going up to full temperature and refusing to turn off,  internet connection stops working, heater stops working… and I still can’t make a good coffee. Now I am just waiting for a plague of spiders and cockroaches to attack. On the bright side, I am proving to myself that I really can cope with all these “Phil” things. Apart from missing him, of course.

Sore tippy-toe muscles. “What?!” I hear you say… Changing smoke detector batteries in the middle of the night required standing on a chair with my eyes half closed. And the ceiling seemed suddenly very high up so I had to strain and stand on the tippiest of my tippy-toes. I woke up the next morning with excruciatingly sore feet and calf muscles and realised I had given my rarely used tippy-toe muscles a work out. Agony!

Colds, headlice, pot belly, not enough sleep – all the usual suspects.

How about you?

Nathalie Lété painting a shop window in Tokyo

Nathalie Lété is one of my favourite artists and here she is painting a beautiful shop window in Harajuku, Tokyo. I am feeling inspired to paint some white on one of my windows in the studio – once I finish tidying and I can actually get to the window.

(via wishthimble – so good Fran!)

PS. Thank you for all the lovely, kind words yesterday. I got a wee bit teary!

10

10

On this day ten years ago I published my first post under the moniker Loobylu.

Yep – I’ve been doing this for 10 YEARS. I did take a whole year off in 2006 so I have been debating with myself as to whether this is a anniversary of note or not, but I think I have decided that regardless of anything else, I have spent a whole decade, (more than a quarter of my life) online and that’s worth mentioning!

Lots has happened over these last 10 years – online and off. I can’t even begin to tell you how many good things Loobylu and the world of blogging has brought my way – including friends, laughs, confidence, opportunities, and lots and lots of amazing inspiration – some of it life-changing.

So thank you to YOU for reading here and sharing in all the good stuff and putting up with occasional whinge. Thank you for commenting, or emailing, for mentioning me on your blog or in your article, for buying my stuff on the odd occasion and to the kind souls for sending me stuff in the mail. Thank you if you just drop by and check out my stuff from time to time. I hope you stick around. I know it gets a bit shaggy about the edges, but that’s the way life is and that’s how I like it.

So in no particular order, here are my favourites and my bests who have meant something to me and my online life, people who have inspired me, supported me and made my life a whole lot better over the years (over the DECADE!) – I may have forgotten very important people, probably glaringly obvious people… that seems inevitable (sorry!)…

Amanda Soule, Kylie Gusset, Van Sowerwine, Daniel Bogan, Peta Calvert, Bronwyn Quilliam, Derek Powazek, Heather Champ, Paula Abilheira, Ben and Mena Trott, Megan Reardon, Amber Carvan, Kirsty Macafee, Shannon Lamden, Christie Fowler, Pip Lincolne, Alicia Paulson, Amy Karol, Hillary Lang, Jenny Harris, Elissa Baxter, Erin Lewis, the other Kirsty, All the lovely Aussie craft & writing & food & mum bloggers, Ben and Suzette Hosken, Christina Gordon and Paul Stephens, Fran Atkinson, Rachel Power, Suzanne Janes Schmalzer, Tania Howells, Meg Ulman,  Anne, Lliam, Paul and Lara, Nic and Jud, Cassandra Allen, Gayla Trail, Anne Wilson, Maggie Mason, Jeffrey Yamaguchi, Someguy, Heather Armstrong, Anna Dorfman, Kathreen Ricketson, Shauna Reid, Samone Bos, Ben Ryan, Eliza Floyd, Theresa Smythe, Mimi Kirchner, John Martz, Buster Benson, Ward and Andrea Jenkins, Camilla Engman, Carly Schwerdt, Witold Riedel, Fiona Dalton, Jhoanna Monte Aranez, Nikki Hall, Rosa Pomar, Emira Mears, Alex Beauchamp, Melissa Hicks, Keri Smith, Christine Castro, Ada Saab, Kim, Claire, Marnie, Richard, Emma, Lizzie +  Mick and my big, crazy, blog loving family and my 2 little girl humans and PHIL of course.

THANK YOU! Here’s to ten more years – when we’ll be able to check our favourite blogs directly plugged into our brains.

xx

What’s Hot + What’s Not

dover01

Back for another run down of the good and the bad around here.

And don’t forget the game plan:
To play along, it’s as easy as writing up your own hot/not list on your blog and then linking back to me here at loobylu.com and then adding your url to the widget below.

Hot

The Dover Design Sampler: Free royalty free images to download for your personal use every week. I am slowly building up a folder of great and highly diverse images including this great samurai guy.

Christmas tree decorating day! It all started with croissants and high excitement.  I did lots of deep breathing and letting go of my control-freak nature and let the kids decorate the tree in the way they saw fit. It has big empty patches and highly intense clusters but the kids had a lot of fun. Ok… so I might do a bit of sneaking about at night and rearranging… I just can’t help myself.

Finishing Nanowrimo and starting new work. My manuscript got very earnest by the last week so as a antidote to earnestness I am writing a zombie book … for now. Because, well, why not?

Sloppy Joes – this is my all time favourite “can’t be bothered” dinner. It’s pretty yum – Phil calls it Candied Meat because there’s a lot of sugar in it and it’s sweet as sweet. We use red capsicum instead of green and I use my mum’s totally delicious tomato sauce so it’s kind of “healthy” and a dash of worcestershire sauce is mandatory.

Hanging art work. Oh my goodness. Phil hung our Timba piece and any guilt about buying art has been completely overpowered by how flipping good the artwork looks hanging in our rather odd lounge room. It makes us feel a lot happier about where we live.

Dan Zanes and friends – always pretty hot, but they’ve made a little resurgence in our house this week. They make me happy and the kids are doing a lot of dancing. Oh look, you can follow Dan Zanes on twitter.

Christina’s prints: I know they were on my Hot list last week, but after dropping in to visit on Saturday afternoon and scoring a couple of my very own prints, I am so impressed with how they came out. The printer and the paper she is using seem to bring out the oil paint quality so well. She’s put even more up this week. So many good ones to choose from.

Cleaning the studio: I am pulling fabric out of cupboards and folding, sorting and purging. My paper recycling bin is stacked full. Dust bunnies have been captured and tamed. My big goal is to get the room ready for a new year of work. I think it may take the rest of December to get there. Studio inspiration at share some candy.

Not

Head lice – blerg.

Lily’s asthma – but getting better again. There haven’t been so many nights of lying awake listening to her cough this time around.

And that’s it! What’s happening with you?