I am all over the place at the moment but it feels ok. I go where the mood takes me (which is quite often to the top shelf of the fridge door where there is a block of Green and Black’s white chocolate). So what am working on? From top to bottom: The hand quilting on Amelia’s quilt - that’s taking me a while. And I am still making lots of those punkdorf dolls. One for new baby Georgia, one for Lily, one for Amelia, a tiny one for Mirabel, one first cousin once removed Baby X and so on. The doll pictured is for new baby Georgina - the other’s neck was way too floppy and the puckering really annoyed me and this one is a vast improvement, (although, very annoyingly, the string inside the head which squeezes the face into the correct shape seems to have come adrift so she is still kind of wonky looking). Her name is Tali (until otherwise named) which is Tongan for “waiting”… she was almost entirely made while I waited for news of her birth. And under that? I am always working on the garden these days and I am waiting on capsicum seeds to germinate in my biodegradable toilet roll pots… I may have inadvertently overheated them. And below that are a couple of pieces of trashy old ebay finds which are waiting on the back porch for a lick of paint.

But the project that is exciting me most today? It’s not exactly a craft project, it’s more an exercise in project management. Here’s a little clue:

More to come later.

Lily loves to pod peas. She has such a sweet, methodical way of popping them out. It’s a bit of a joy to watch. The olives? Her other passion.

And speaking of little peas - My dear friend Kim had her baby last night. I can’t be any more excited. I spent most of the night tossing and turning and waiting for text messages with updates. Kim is my all time super-star-action-hero. And now little Georgina is here and she is beautiful. Amelia announced to her class at ten to 9 this morning that she has a new Fairy God Sister (which is perfectly logical because Kim was her appointed Fairy God Mother). While all this was going on, all the way up in Sydney, my lovely one and only cousin and his wife were going through much the same and little baby X (still waiting on that name) will be next in line for one of my Punkdorf dolls. We will get to meet him in the New Year. I keep weeping… so much emotion!

…I have three 14″ dolls that I bought from Nova toys in the US that I would like to sell - I bought them thinking I would never actually get around to making my own version, and here I am making them. These are the dolls which “are made by Quechua women who participate in a social outreach cooperative in Peru… The dolls’ bodies are fully jointed for posing and sitting and their hair is hand-stitched to their heads and forms two braids which can be undone to have pony-tails.”

They are quite lovely, in the true, classic Waldorf sense. If you are a fan of Amanda’s SouleMama site, you will probably recognise these dolls from appearances around chez Soule.

I bought them without clothes (thinking I would at least do that bit on my own) though they do come in their underwear as pictured. They have been sitting in the box they arrived in, still in their cellophane bags for the last month or so. I bought them when they only cost $99, so I am very happy to send them on to someone who is interested for the cheaper price of USD$99 plus postage (through Paypal only).

Rather than selling them on ebay I thought I would give Loobylu visitors an opportunity to buy them so please email me ( loobylu at gmail dot com ) with your order of hair colour preference (brown, black and red) and it will be first come, first serve. Thanks!

*** Updated to say they have all gone to good homes! Thank you! ***

I finished another Waldorf / Punkdorf doll today. This one is a big one, around 50cm (20″) from head to toe. She’s still very wonky with an oddly shaped cranium (think Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Scull) and I just can’t seem to make any improvements on the puckered neck but she suddenly got a lot more charming when I added hair and eyes and a mouth. I am hoping she will be completely to-die-for when I finish her off with a matching dress (she is wearing a dress belonging to another doll here).

This girl was an instant hit with all the small people in the house, but is possibly reserved for little Miss X who is due to arrive any moment just a few streets away. There was some gratuitous sobbing when I had to break it to them that “Floppy” was off to a new home and I had to patiently emphasise all that stuff about how the special thing about these dolls are that they are made with great love and a particular child in mind and that they can’t belong to just anyone, and if they want one, it has to be made especially for them etc. etc. It seemed to do the trick. So now I have Christmas orders. “One with blonde hair and blue eyes, a light blue dress with purple stripes and pigtails … no… braids and red bows” for Amelia, and “One with pink hair and pink eyes” for Lily. Hmm. And I will have to practice the “made with great love” bit a whole lot more, and stop saying “crap, crap, crap!” quite so much.

Lots of lovely rain last night meant lots of snails. The the excitement surrounding the pillbugs has worn off a little but snails are the new “It” creature around here. There’s nothing more thrilling for the junior entomologists than watching a snail devour a lettuce leaf - just as was enthusiastically theorised. So I thought they might enjoy watching a little of the BBC’s My Family and Other Animals (which I mentioned in September) and true enough, they watched with wonder, but then Amelia started getting scary ideas about having huge towering collections of cages full of wildlife in her new IKEA Expedit shelves. 

I really liked the movie - it’s charming with its quirky characters, deliciously decaying Greek villas, 1930s textiles and clothes and, of course, (as Alicia pointed out to me when I suggested it for her ultimate list of movies to watch for the interiors) there’s Matthew Goode.

So now Amelia is talking about hermit crabs, and the resurrection of the old fish tank as well as all the little creatures which scurry out from the undergrowth as I weed garden beds. What she’d really like (she keeps telling me) is a dog and a tortoise - just like the young Gerald Durrell - and that other great animal lover, Eloise.

Meanwhile, as the builders standing on top of the structure next door staple-gun with abandon and sing along to Bon Jovi’s Dead or Alive, I will continue to dream of swanning around on Corfu (pre-World War 2, particularly).

This is the view that can be seen from our bedroom window. The people who bought the block of land next door have subdivided the property and are building a two story, three bedroom town house in the backyard. This is the first floor, one more to come. It’s unbelievably compact and scarily close to our fence. But, that’s progress, hey? And I try to look at the positives, like - I guess it’s a good thing to be building up suburbia so that we prevent the greater suburban sprawl… but I am starting to feel just a tad hemmed in, what with this and the other place on the other side of us towering over our yard.

(And yes, they killed the creeper on the fence.)

So my urge to uproot and run for the hills has intensified - but in the meantime, I plant my vegies and think about how there are things that can be done right here which will make me feel like we are a little closer to my fantasy life of rural bliss. It’s really just a state of mind — right?

(I nicked the title from the Slow Guide: Melbourne blog - thanks Martin - it’s my new ethos).

Over at Retrosaria you can buy lengths of beautiful ribbon designed by Camilla Engman. I ordered two metres and I am determined not to hoard this but do something creative with it… maybe an Olive + S Lazy Days Skirt (a wonderful free download). That would be perfect.

Look what’s on the agenda this weekend.

I have just got back from our local nursery where I bought a small tray of the things we found most useful in our vegie garden last year. Tomatoes, basil, zucchini, cucumbers and squash for starters. The little yellow squash were the biggest surprise hit of last Summer. While they aren’t really a vegetable that causes much excitement when we buy them from the greengrocer, fresh from the garden they are melt-in-the-mouth delectable. But today’s great thrill was finding Digger’s Club heirloom tomato seedlings for sale! Hooray! I get their catalogue every season and sometimes splash out on a few packets of exotic sounding seeds but we haven’t had much luck with our tiny little tomato plants that grow from the packet - mostly due to our lack of commitment. Seedlings are very exciting.

This year we are keeping a firm track of our receipts for all that we buy for the vegie patch  - it will be interesting to see if we actually manage to save anything by growing a lot of our own. The expense is always huge at this point - mulch, compost (if only we had some local horses!), seedlings etc., not to mention our longer term plan of getting a rainwater tank installed. Today I spent $55 on seedlings.  Hmm. Mind you, last week I spent $3.50 on a very mangy bunch of basil (non-organic) at the greengrocer (of which half I couldn’t even use) so even just the two punnets of basil I brought home today could theoretically save me $55 or more… I just need to plan to make loads of pesto.

On my bedside table. Isn’t this a beautiful study in similarities and contrasts?

(please ignore the dirty kitchen floor - but extra points if you can spot the red mini pom pom).

We had such a perfect, gentle weekend. It’s always hard waking on a Monday and feeling that wrench as the realisation of the upcoming rush-to-get-out-the door kicks in. This morning we woke late and got to school just before the second bell but we somehow managed to keep things cheerful.

This is the list on the door inside one of the kitchen cupboards which Amelia refers to almost every day when getting ready and packing her bag for school. She kicks around all morning; drawing, playing the piano, constructing elaborate plans for tree houses or performances, gazing into the plastic container where her pill bugs live, slowly getting dressed in unbelievably drawn-out stages while all the time chat chat chatting. Thankfully, when we hit the urgent, last minute race to get away, there is this list for making life easier. As Meg (who is an old friend and author of my new favourite blog) wrote, the world can be divided into those who keep lists, and those who don’t. Amelia has most definitely inherited my keen love of all things list-like.

* * *

Speaking of kids - Mixtape - The Kids Issue is now available for preorder at the Mixtape online shop. I did the cover illustration and if the content is at all like that of the previous issues, it will be a rad read.