A few weeks ago I mentioned that I have completed the fourth (and final!) felt book, this one being for my nephew Ty. Now that I have given it to him I can put up some photos of the pages in the book. So, without adding to what I wrote a few weeks ago, here they are! Click on the images if you want a closer look;
About a week and a half ago we got on a plane to fly to Sydney, mainly for SIM meetings. At the time K was sick so after months of asking when we were going on the plane she wasn’t able to enjoy it as much. Poor K! Michael had meetings the day after we arrived but because of K being sick I stayed in the suburbs of Sydney to allow her to rest. This turned out to be a good thing as little L came down with the same thing the next day.
This shot was taken when K was recovering and just before L was at her sickest, hence the smiles;
I decided to take the girls out into the sunshine of Engadine for the morning. Along the way we saw this little guy just slithering his (or her) way across someone’s driveway, we moved along quickly:
After our week in Engadine (thanks Steve and Kaye!) we headed to a campsite near Chatswood for ‘Simmering 09′ which was a camp for SIM Australia. On that weekend the girls both started to get a lot better and K had her 4th birthday. The cook in the camp kitchen made her a special cupcake and the whole camp sang Happy Birthday to her, plus she opened some presents.
Here she is saying thank you to her friend Lexy for her gift:
After the camp was finished we went to Penshurst, where the SIM apartment is and stayed there for 2 days and three nights. We were able to catch up with my cousin on the Monday afternoon, he lives near the beach so the girls got to run around in the sand. When I say ‘the girls’ I mean K because L didn’t like it one bit!
The next day (our final day in Sydney) we went to the Powerhouse Museum. This turned out to be the best day out of the whole time in NSW, there’s so much for kids to do there. They both had a fantastic time. There is an area called ‘Zoe’s House’ where kids K’s age can push little mining type carts around on rails filled with rubber bricks and then use them to build walls of a house frame. K and L both loved this area and we went back there a few times during the day. There was also a garden type play area, an outdoor play area and lots and lots of buttons to push all over the museum. I think K’s favourite place though was the section with technology and robots. There is a dancing robot there which is basically a factory type arm and its programmed to move to the beat of different songs. She stood in front of it for a very long time and also kept going back to it.
K watching the dancing robot
There is a section of the museum which was right down my alley. It was full of design history and had some amazing examples of furniture, clothing and jewellery. The bangle below is made of plastic:
And this is a very famous chair!
I loved this designer fabric:
So that was it for Sydney…..or so we thought. We got up on Wednesday morning around 5.30am and looked outside our window only to see what I thought at first was thick fog. As we all know, it wasn’t fog at all but the huge red dust storm that appeared over the state over night. We drove to the airport in the dust and felt as if we were back in Africa again during Harmattan. There were layers of dust on all the cars and even a dust trail on the road. Our taxi took a very long time to get to the airport due to diversions and of course our plane was delayed, although only for one hour. Here are some shots at the normally clear airport:
We are now here in Cairns visiting my family. As we got off the plane I thought ‘oh, clear blue sky! Yay no dust’ but unfortunately we all woke up the next day to just as much haze (although its more a shade of grey/white here) as in Sydney. The dust storm has followed us up the coast (and thats a loooong way!). Doesn’t matter though, Cairns is full of sunshine compared to Perth at the moment so I don’t mind.
Over the last 5 weeks or so I have had a few custom orders which have each been quite big and time consuming within themselves. This of course has limited the amount of other claying I have really been able to do.
Firstly, I did some key-rings for a charity here in Perth as in this previous post. They then contacted me again and asked for some more key-rings.
Next I was asked to do some samples for a new Christian catalogue of products so I came up with some key-rings, necklaces and earrings. These have words in the millefiori caning so it took me up to 12 hours to create the canes for the job. After sending off the samples, here are the end results from the resulting order:
In the middle of those two orders I did an order of cupcakes and lemon meringue pies for Liza over at Letters 4 Lilly. The colours were chosen by a bride in the States and will these will be used on top of a bouquet (hence the wire).
All of these orders have taken up most of my claying time although I did make an attempt at a necklace somewhere in there. This is what I ended up with:
I have been writing down ideas for a new range for my shops and will start on it some time before Christmas. Looking forward to getting back into the clay although custom orders are always welcome. Somehow they seem to stretch my creativity, pushing me to try things I would not usually think of. A challenge is always good I think!
Recently Spoonflower had a special on where they would print up two swatches of your own design for free, including shipping. Irresistible for me (I had some fabric printed there a while ago) so I uploaded my two experimental designs. One is from an acrylic painting I did a while ago and the other is from my own design of ‘beans’ which I started drawing as a teenager. The beans were originally done in gauche which gives a very matte, chalky effect. So here are my two swatches, I quite like the beans and can see myself doing something more with them in the future:
I finally got up the courage to attempt to knit a sock (and hopefully two socks) about a week ago. So far so good and I’m actually enjoying it. Using four double pointed needles is not as hard as it seems and after my last attempt where I knitted a hat for L, I thought I’d give it a go.
This is it so far, next comes the bit I probably will get lost in….the heel. I’ll update at some time in the future to see how I went.
Rodney Olsen over at ‘The Journey’ has written a post all about Cancer and how it has affected his life. Rodney will be cycling to raise funds for cancer. Here is what he says on his blog:
As well as giving people opportunity to tell their story I’m about to undertake a bike ride of over 500 km to raise funds for Cancer Council Western Australia. Click here if you’d like to donate through a secure website.
I’ll be joined by six other cyclists and each morning for a week I’ll be sharing cancer stories on my 98.5 Sonshine FM radio programme before hopping onto my bike just after midday to cycle to the next town.
Feel free to pop over to his blog and read about what he’s proposing that we do…..its a good read and a good cause.
A few months back my hubby asked if I would mind making a Pinata for the youth group which he helps with each week. I had plenty of notice so put it on my calendar to start 3 weeks beforehand. This turned out to be a good thing because in-between getting it dry during winter and having a lot of other things to do (including that week of sickness) it took me exactly 2 weeks from start to finish. Before you look at the photos below let me explain. The pinata is meant to be a calf and the reason its yellow is because it coincides with the story of the golden calf found in Exodus 32:1-35. I’ll admit, mine turned out to be more hippo-like than calf-like but somehow I don’t think the youth group kids are going to care. So here goes, the series of steps on how I made a pinata (including the things I’d do differently next time):
Gather newspaper and a balloon
Put flour (3 cups to 2 cups water) into a bowl (a nice wide one is easier to use)
Get your helper to stir the mixture till all the lumps are gone
After tearing newspaper into 1 inch thick strips, dip into the flour mixture and stick onto the blown up balloon
Layer one complete (make sure you cover every tiny bit of the balloon)
Layer 2 complete. I only did two layers due to time but I would recommend doing at least three layers. Make sure you allow the pinata to dry completely in-between layers, otherwise it will become moldy.
Add legs using cardboard tubes. I cheated a bit here and used wide packing tape (clear) to hold them on under the newspaper.
Add a head. I used half an egg carton
Cut a hole at the tail end of your creation (yes K is looking inside). Keep the piece you cut out.
Once the head and legs are dry, put lollies inside the pinata. Make sure they are sealed lollies. Put a hook of some sort at the top of your pinata before sealing the hole. (see how I did it two pictures down).
Seal up the hole using the piece you cut out. As you can see we had no newspaper left!
Create some way to hang the pinata. As you can see I used string but this is not the standard way to do it. Most pinata’s have a hook at the top but mine was not thick enough to hold the weight, this is why its a good thing to do more than two layers if you have time.
Add ears
Add Tail
And now the fun part…paint! I mixed a couple of colours to get mine more golden-ish.
Once dry do the very last step…..let your helper add eyes using a black marker
And here you go, one painted golden calf/hippo-looking pinata.
Most pinatas are brightly coloured and often have layers of crepe paper so you could add that too. I’m hoping someone takes some photos of the kids destroying this little guy and enjoying his contents. Hope you’ve enjoyed our pinata progression.
Its been a while since I put some of my moleskine scribbles on here for feedback so here goes. These are similar to many others I’ve drawn and I have been using them for many different outlets including the already blogged about stamp carving and within my polymer clay work with mica shift. I even had some printed on to fabric using spoonflower as I blogged about here. A while ago I used the images and carved stamps to make pincushions and hand stitched felt brooches. I have so many plans for these sketches….one day, maybe soon I’ll actually put them into place and start using them in my shops. Here are some of the latest sketches:
The other day K was sitting at the table playing with her little tiny dolls house and I had a thought. I remembered how simple it was to add a little road around the house so I dug around for some black paper and a white pencil. A few snips with the scissors and a few marks drawn and she had her own little mini Bathurst racetrack around her dolls house. The green part in the middle is a green mouse mat that our library was giving away (brand new) due to a clean out. Made a great little lawn area for her tiny dolls house. I intend on adding some little stop lights and signs as well as some trees, probably made using polymer clay for her (and later little L). Its so easy to enhance their play by doing something simple like this. Anyone else had a simple idea to enhance play as well?
For the entire of winter we have managed to stay relatively healthy in this house (apart from a 2 day virus that K got). Then 10 days before the end of the winter season K got a throat infection that sent her temp to 38.4C. She was over that within two days and then last Saturday (4 days before the end of winter) she got a cold and L got croup. K is nearly over her cold but L’s croup developed into a cold, ear and throat infection.
Its always hard when your baby is sick, they can’t tell you where it hurts or how they feel and you can’t tell them things like ‘just cough it up (gross but true)’. Last night was night #5 of her and I spending time together at the hours of 2am, 3.30am etc…We are all tired (except K who just carries on regardless). Hubby has spent the last two nights in the spare bed in K’s room so I could have L in our bed and try to keep her a little upright to slow the cough. Our little K talks loudly in her sleep and so he is worn out from listening to her all night!
We are getting there, many parents experience this and much worse and its all part of parenting. I have so much to do but this week has been all about cuddling little L and making sure she recovers. Praise God I haven’t caught anything…a miracle methinks!
