Hurrah!

A few things I love lately...

Happy Birthday for my hubby for yesterday - Hurrah!!

I made caramel slice and chocolate balls to celebrate.  The chocolate balls were way too oaty (oatey, oat-ey??) - had too many oats.  I think I prefer rum balls and won't be making the recipe again with just oats.  The caramel slice on the otherhand was to die for and we're down to the last slice for the photo so it looks a bit crumbly!!  The spotty plate I bought in Amsterdam from a wonderfully nice lady whose studio we stumbled upon while wandering about the canals - Corien Ridderikhoff (just checked out her website - gorgeous ceramics and a lovely site too!).  I love that spotty plate so much!  It is sooooo nice having a kitchen to bake stuff in too and a normal oven (though I feel sorry for our old oven which couldn't be reused).  The recipes are from this lovely cookbook from the cool people at Frankie magazine...

My latest obsession is for felt bowls...

This absolutely exquisite felt bowl is by Quilt While You're Ahead - wow!  Lovely blog too.

And these lovelies are from Vallery's Gallery on Etsy... Beautiful!

Ahhh...felting seems like a perfect winter activity to me...now if I can just get my craft room unpacked and set-up I can get back into some crafting and try out felting... The weather forecast for Perth this weekend said a maximum of 15 degrees, rain, hail and severe thunderstorms - perfect weather for staying inside and unpacking the last of the boxes I think!  Hope your week is going well wherever you are :)

Back home!

We're back home!  The suitcases are still in the middle of the bedroom and we're awake til 3 or 4am with jetlag and not getting up til midday but all the washing's done and the pets have been smothered with hugs and kisses...oooh we missed them!!

Europe was fantastic.  We rode the London Eye, climbed to the very very top of the Eiffel Tower, ventured through France, Switzerland, Italy, saw the Colosseum, explored Pompei, pushed over the Tower of Pisa, smiled at Mona Lisa, played in the snow in Switzerland, cycled around Berlin, watched the Sound of Music in Salsburg, survived Bratislava and fell in love with Annecy, San Gimignano, Orvieto, Budapest and Prague and David and Knut.  We ate and drank and laughed and cried and sung and danced and had a wonderful time with wonderful people.  If you're thinking of doing a group tour sometime with a group that's not too structured and lets you do your own thing but doesn't attract the boozy crowd or the fuddyduddies, I can definately recommend Kumuka!!  They do tours all over the world too.

Now we're home I'm looking forward to catching up on all the happenings in the crafty blog world and itching to get into my craft room - unfortunately it's still stacked with boxes yet to be unpacked!  Ah well...no rush really... although it's nearly July!!  I can't believe how quickly this year if flying by.  I'm so looking forward to alsorts of creating in the next half of the year :)  Yeeha!

1. Big Ben, London  2. Eiffel Tower, Paris  3. San Gimignano, Tuscany, Italy  4. Colosseum, Rome  5. A very tatsty pancake, Amsterdam  6. Jungfraujoch, Switzerland  7. Knut in the mud, Berlin  8. Pompei, Italy  9. In a gondola, Venice

On holiday

Europe is beautiful.

We are having a lovely time.  More soon.

Unpacking and packing

Happy Mother's Day!  Unfortunately my poor Mum has a gastro bug - a yucky thing anyway let alone on Mother's Day - so we will be celebrating Mother's Day on another day.  Another celebration I'll be celebrating at a later date is this blog's anniversary!  Yes, one whole year has sped by and I haven't done half the things I intended to.  But the blog has been motivating over the year anyway and it's been so lovely to meet you all in blogland!  I didn't have a house a lot of the time over the past year but now our renovation is finally done I can tackle some of the things I've wanted to do.  At the moment we're still unpacking the house stuff and doing heaps of cleaning...

We're off to Europe on Friday so we haven't had much time with the house but it will definately be nice to come home to a finished house (and no more boxes!!).  So, with all the busy-ness of late, I have decided to celebrate blog birthday at 14 months rather than 12 - which will give me a bit of time to plan some fun so watch this space come July :)

And while I think of it, does anyone know of any bookshops in London that sell Japanese craft books?  I've had a bit of a search on the internet but haven't really found anything - or do you know any places book or crafty-wise that I should visit in London or Europe?  We are definately off to the V&A, Liberty and the Tate in London but any recommendations for France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Hungary, Austria?  I can't really take it in that we're going yet - I think it will hit home once we're sitting on the plane.  I love flying, love the food, love the whole experience (albeit the sitting down for hours isn't that great - I think it's 14 hours to Dubai and another 10 or so to Heathrow!).  I have been checking out plane seats on Seatguru.com which is very fun but can be quite stressful too as I suddenly become competitive and panic I'll be down the back of the plane near the lavatories or near screaming infants or with underseat storage where I can't stretch my legs... ah the dilemmas!  I'm not sure if I'll get a chance to post before we leave but will have a go at posting overseas.  Yeeha.  Hurrah for holidays!

Yay!

How exciting!  Katy at I’m a Ginger Monkey was giving away two of her handmade beautiful birdy mini quilts and lucky lucky me was one of the winners!  Oh yay!  Thanks so much Katy.

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Photo is Katy's!!

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We’re still homeless as we wait for the final bits of our renovation to be completed.  The first coats went down on the floorboards yesterday but it’s pouring with rain in Perth this week so the floors are going to take longer than we thought to dry.  We have been alternating between other people’s houses and I am really, really looking forward to getting back in to our own house, with our own bed and having our pets back home!!!  Poor pets.  Matilda is staying with friends who have a Westie too – hopefully she’s having a good time and being a polite house guest (hrm…she is a Westie though..) and poor Shmoo is staying at a cat motel.  I have never put Shmoo in cat accommodation before – he usually stays with my grandparents if he can’t stay in our house but they’ve gone away this week!  The cat motel people seem very nice though (odd that it’s called a cat motel – like the cats could drive there in their little cars…hehe).  Nearly there though – this time next week we should (HOPEFULLY and fingers AND toes crossed!) be back in our house.  Aaaah.  And hopefully have a bit of time to rest before we go jet-setting to Europe (yay!!).  Will be nice to have access to a computer again too!

Meanwhile, I have developed a vintage poster obsession and thought I’d share some of my favourites (art.com is having a 25% sale this week).

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The schnauzer one reminds me of Matty’s friends at the park and the white cat is such a Shmoo!!  Oh pets I miss you!  We will see Matty tonight when we take her for a walk and I will be popping to the cat motel to visit Shmoo…hopefully he has time between massages and spa baths for visitors...tehe!

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Hope your week is good....nearly the weekend.  Yay!

A million and three things

Wow.  Things have been very busy in the Atkinson house.  We are gearing up to shift everything out while our floorboards get sanded and polished.  It’s like shifting house but really we’re just shifting everything out into the backyard and front porch and then back in again a week later!!!  Thankfully, everything will have a new spot and will be better organised – that’s the plan anyway ;)  We are cutting it very fine with finishing our renovation and then going on holiday – looks like the builders will finish up the week before we leave for Europe!  At least my sisters will have a new house to house-sit while we’re away J

Because of the move, our computer has been dismantled and most things have been packed, which has made blogging a bit tricky.  There’s a few things I’ve been thinking about though…

First up is the RSPCA’s annual Million Paws Walk – Hurrah!!!!!  It’s on Sunday, 18 May 2008 and is held in capital cities and other areas around Australia.  I absolutely LOVE this event and have been every year for the past seven or eight years but this year it has fallen on the first weekend we’re away.  We will be at Portobello Road Markets on the Saturday morning and off to the V&A, Westminster Abbey and Soho on the Sunday while the poochies are walking along the South Perth foreshore!  At least I’m missing out on one of my favourite yearly events to visit some awesome spots in London!!  If you want to get involved in the Million Paws Walk or support the cause with a donation (yeeha!), visit: http://www.millionpawswalk.com/

 

We had Bookclub Tuesday last week but I haven’t had a chance to post about the book – plus I haven’t read the book as I ran out of time.  Our next book is The Enchantment of Lily Dahl by Siri Hustvedt – I’m yet to purchase it though!  But, I have been reading this lovely book that Brendon gave me for Easter (we avoided giving chocolate to each other as we had a lot of it – plus I’m addicted to Hot Cross Buns so more chocolate probably wasn’t a great idea…).

Linen Crafts: 40 Projects for Home and Body by Florence LeMaux and it’s beautiful.  Well, of course a book about such a lovely (and diverse!) fabric should be beautiful but sometimes crafty books aren’t as fabulous as you hope they would be.  There are some ‘different’ projects too and the photography is beautiful.  The downside is the measurements are all in inches/Imperial, which is a pity as most books now have the centimetres in brackets at least!  Beautiful book though.

And finally (though there’s a million other things I’ve thought about sharing but haven’t made a note of – must get better organised one day…), there’s UK-based textile artist Naomi Ryder and her fantastic real-life embroidery.  I love how she draws things and then creates beautiful embroidered artwork.  I love lots of the ‘cutesy’ embroidery out there but it is inspiring to see real-life things embroidered too – and her work has such detail!!

 

Now I’m off to get cracking on a million other things I have to do… but pretty soon I’ll be squirrel-watching with my hubby in Hyde Park and taking a few moments to relax.  Hurrah!  Have a great weekend!

Pillar

Hurrah for the weekend!  Time to de-brief, time to sleep-in, time to re-energise.  I hope!  Actually, I'm not good at sleeping in anymore... I wake up early-ish on the weekend and think of all the things I want to do... like catch up on blogging and sewing and crafting and all things other than food shopping or cleaning the house or doing the washing....hrm.  I've always thought weekends should be three days long - one day for chores, one day for socialising and one day for anything you please!!  Yar!

I made this little guy this week.  He popped into my head last weekend.  He's had a few names suggested for him but none have fitted quite right yet so for now I will call him Pillar.  Funny how sometimes names just come and other times they don't.  On the way home from work I was listening to one of my favourite guys on radio and he and his partner had a baby girl two weeks ago and his co-presenter asked her name but they still haven't named her and they have another six weeks yet before they have to give her a name!  I know some cultures wait to give names to their babies but a name is so intrinsic to a sense of identity and it seems funny to go for weeks and weeks without a name.  So Pillar it is then!  Pillar is made from felt and cotton fabrics and some of my favourites too - there's one of Heather Bailey's Freshcut designs (his end) and some Lecein fabrics (the polka dot one and a couple of his Suffolk puffs), which I really love.

After people commented on my last post, it got me thinking about left brain and right brain and I found this quiz, which was bizarrely accurate - even though it says it is for teens and I'm kinda twice as old!  sigh.  Interesting stuff anyway.

Hope your weekend is happy!

Einstein the Easter Bunny

Reading the paper this morning caused me to have an existential crisis.  Ridiculous really.  I try not to read the paper too frequently (for various reasons - there's only one paper in Perth, I have to deal with it at work, it hasn't got anything in it I want to read, I get my news from the radio/internet, can't find the time to read it, etc etc) but I'm going to be in the job market later in the year when we get back from holiday.... perhaps this caused my existential crisis rather than the actual paper... Today's paper has the job section and there was an article, several pages long, on the resources boom in Perth with in-depth vignettes featuring mining industry jobs.  In case you're not aware, Perth - or Western Australia as a whole - is in the middle of a resources boom.  People are flocking here from interstate and from overseas to make their fortunes working in the mining industry and good on them for doing so (unfortunately the flip side of this was the front page article where there's increasing rates of homelessness and families that can't afford to live here anymore who are doing it tough).

Now perhaps I sound a tad bitter and that's certainly not what I want to be but in Year Two in Primary School I began a diary detailing my inability to do well at maths.  I can spell mathematics and that's about where my ability with numbers begins and ends.  Yup, I know it's no good admitting you're no good at something cos then you never really will be and yup, I know I might be ok if I tried but really, after years and years of sad diary entries ("I got 2 out of 10 on my maths test today - better than yesterday's score"), maths tutors (more interested in talking about their guitars) and times tables on the back of the toilet door, I absolutely know that I am not good at maths - and yup, I know we can't be good at everything.  I was ok at Biology in High School but I got six percent (yes - that's 6 out of 100) on my report for Chemistry.  So, Science isn't my forte either.  I gave up maths halfway through High School and picked up English and English Literature and I loved History and Art too.  So now I kinda know, having done an Arts degree, that I'm definately more made up of creative stuff than mathematical or scientific stuff.  All the mining jobs require a mathematical/scientific background.  I don't even want to work in the mining industry (I cried when I travelled up North and saw the mining 'super pits' and the big gaping holes drilled into the Earth).  But there's not likely to be a craft boom in Perth anytime soon.  Sometimes it's tricky living in a city in a State that thrives on resources and football when you're not a maths/science person and you can't stand the footy-obsession (sorry to anyone who loves football - my hubby included).  So after reading the paper, I drew a picture of a bunny and made him up to give to Amelie for Easter.

His name is Einstein and he is good with maths and science (he likes to count his easter eggs and divise scientific formulae based on their circumference and diameter and he loves pi too).  Einstein could work in the mining industry if he wanted but he prefers to be spotty and swish about in his fancy knitted scarf and dream of ways to magically multiply his Easter eggs.  He is very good at dreaming.

Happy Easter!  Hope you have a lovely time and the Easter bunny pays you a visit (watch out for his pythagoras charts as he skips by ;)

Hurrah!

Four things

Anna (Ayama-Chan) from Sew What has tagged me to share some things about myself in groups of fours.  Well, blogging is still relatively new to me but I love knowing there's a community of like-minded creative people out there so here goes...

Four Jobs I've Had:

1. Children’s Book Specialist (fancy title from working in a bookstore) -  I loved the books, some customers tested my patience but, I loved the books
2. Journalist (one day I might write for a publication I love)
3. Editor (yup, maybe one day for a publication I love)
4. Teddy-bear maker (I used to sell a few and some have travelled the world from Canada to Scotland – including a biker bear who I made a little leather jacket and bandana for!)

Four Favourite Movies:

Oooh this is hard as I love films....

1. Definitely Baraka
2. Definitely the Three Colours Trilogy (which I’m counting as one)
3. Definitely anything starring Cate Blanchett (also counting as one choice) including Oscar and Lucinda, Elizabeth and Babel
4. In fourth place are all my other favourites including Love Actually, Amelie, Blood Diamond, Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, Gosford Park, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Babette’s Feast, Star Wars Episodes IV, V and VI (the originals – not with Jabba with a tail…), Bend it Like Beckham, anything 007, The Labyrinth (yup – born in the 70s, grew up in the 80s), The Dark Crystal (ditto previous point), After the Wedding, Match Point, the list goes on and on :D

Four Places I've Been

These are places I've loved in amongst the places I've been:

1. Plockton, Scotland
2. Thulhaagiri, The Maldives (yup, it really is Heaven on Earth)
3. The Ring of Kerry, Ireland
4. Portobello Road, London

Four Places I've Lived

1. In the country
2. In the city
3. South
4. North

Four Favourite TV Shows

I don't really watch that much TV anymore but I have loved these shows:

1. McLeod's Daughters (in the days of Claire and Tess)
2. Sex and the City
3. The Block
4. The Farmer Needs a Wife (haha!  Yup, we were addicted to this - and Average Joe too!!!)

Four Favourite Radio Programmes

ABC 720.  I love the gardening show with Sabrina Hahn.  I love Drive with Russell Woolf.  I really dislike the sports obsession the ABC has and wish cricket and football would find their own radio stations - and why don't they have a craft segment??

Four Favourite Foods

1. Thai
2. Vegemite
3. Dark chocolate (Oxfam’s is best!)
4. Ummm…aeroplane food!!  I love the compartments and I love waiting for it to come up the aisle and I love the fact that if I’m eating it that means I’m flying somewhere!

Four Places I'd Rather Be

1. The Maldives
2. Scotland
3. At the park with Brendon and Matilda
4. Relaxing at home

Well, whenever I read these types of lists on other people's blogs I am excited to see if we like any of the same stuff, am intrigued by other people's quirks, or am excited to read about something I hadn't heard of before.  I hope there was something in my list that someone somewhere found interesting??  If not, well they're my favourite things anyway :)

Now I'm tagging these four people who as Anna said to me, "If this isn't your thing, I completely understand!  Just try not to 'break the chain' ":

1. Katie from A Little Bird Told Me. So
2. Stacey from Three Red Trees
3. Katy from I'm A Ginger Monkey
4. Jacinta from One Little Acorn - hey Jacinta, I just realised you already did this in February!!

If you guys want to particpate I'd love to read about your favourites but if you're not keen to do it then I just want to say I love reading your blogs anyway and they're four of my favourites ;)

 

Unwrapped

Another weekend over already.

We went to Unwrapped: The Marketplace this afternoon.  Here's what the blurb said about it:

Unwrapped: the marketplace South Perth will showcase the best of Perth's emerging design talent in a vibrant outdoor event, held on Mends Street, on Sunday March 16, 2008.

The first Unwrapped was held last year and it's definately an event that Perth needs.  There were 46 stall holders listed in the program.  Loads of uni graduates.  Most of the stalls were jewellery or fashion.  There wasn't really that much diversity.  I hope the event grows though and they open up for design talent beyond fashion and jewellery - it would have been nice to see more homewares and textiles and art - although the jewellery and fashion at the event were interesting.

There seems to be something odd in Perth with anything 'cultural' - although my full time job (which pays the mortgage but I'm certainly not passionate about) is in public relations in a government department so maybe I just get to hear more of the backlash against anything cultural - eg "why do we need to redevelop the foreshore/put up a statue or public art/build a museum/stage opera in the park when we could put the money into health/education/police??"  I'm all for funding health, education and police, along with all the other important things that keep our society bubbling along nicely, but I think that cultural events are just as important and these things need just as much support and attention as do new roads, sporting events, etc.   - it's Sunday evening and I'm not as coherent as I would like to be (tierd brain!) so I hope this makes sense.... really I just think Perth is a great place to live but sometimes people here get a bit stuck thinking narrowly - although with the monopoly The West Australian has in this State, it could be something to do with the media here... but that's another story.

This evening I made another Jaunty Cat.  This Jaunty is for my manager Virginia.  She wanted a Jaunty in her favourite colour, which at the moment is aqua.  I couldn't really picture an aqua Jaunty so this Jaunty ended up with an aqua ribbon instead (well, as close to aqua anyway!).

Thank you for the lovely comments about the Dormouse House on my previous post.  Amelie has been playing with it each morning I hear and loves it very much.

   Aunty Bec & Amelie playing mouses.