Hurrah!

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!

Home Sweet Home

Slowly, slowly, bit by bit our house is finally coming together.  It's been a really long process and now I understand why people go on about it a bit when they're renovating or building a house.  The builders are going to gut our current kitchen (that's building speak for dismantle) this week and we'll hopefully be using the new kitchen and it'll be 'goodbye' to the port-a-loo and the outdoor shower - YEEHA!  I can't wait to see the shower sitting in the skip bin on the verge - it's actually been really handy that we've been able to live in our house during the renovation but I am so over it now...two years and counting...although they didn't demolish the back of the house until May last year (it took a year or so to get the plans drawn up and approved).  Anyway...we're nearly there...

 

And I'm nearly there with the Doormouse House too!  What on earth was I thinking taking this project on???  It's been heaps of fun but also very tricky with the 'smallness' of it all - my hands and wrists have cramped up a few times from sewing such small things.  I still have a coffee table, arm chair, bed, cot, baby mouse, daddy mouse and mushrooms to make but the main part is done and I managed to sew in a zip - a huge accomplishment for me as zips and buttonholes stress me out - especially zips sewn through the middle of fabric tree trunks...

 

At least sewing a doormouse house is a quicker process than real life house renovating!

Lucy the sausage dog

Hello!  My name is Lucy and I am a...

...sausage dog! 

I'm sure you can see how I got my name (the sausage bit...)...

...nice to meet you!

I finally tackled my sewing room....as much as I could while we're renovating anyway.  We've had new floorboards installed in the back of the house and we ripped up the carpets at the front of the house when we first moved in.  At some stage we're going to have to remove EVERYTHING from the whole house so the new boards and the old boards can be sanded and polished at the same time.  I find this slightly funny (hysterical!) as I have no idea where we're going to put everything...hrm.  But we'll cross that bridge when we get there and in the meantime my craft/sewing room will remain an 'organised' mess until the time of 'The-Big-Clean-Out-And-Shift-Out' arrives.  I have cleared enough space to complete a few projects, however, and Lucy had been ticking around in my head for quite awhile.  I'm so happy I finally got round to making her, which was great fun except when I sewed her front half to her sausage body inside out and had to unpick it all but I have never sewn a sausage dog together before...or a sausage for that matter...  I adapted the pattern from another  pattern for a fur dog in an old craft book but I ended up re-shaping the head, gussets, tail, ears, feet and inserted a sausage body, so I basically altered the whole pattern and ended up drawing my own.  I had the idea to use different fabrics to make a sausage dog after I learnt to make a log cabin quilt and had a whole heap of fabric strips.

Lucy is made of red felt and some lovely cotton fabrics - strips of fat quarters I've collected from different places - and she has a black felt nose, black glass eyes (I had some on hand from teddy bear making - phew!) and she has a couple of vintage buttons on her ribbon collar.

  She seems quite happy on the bed but Matilda is yet to discover she has company in her favourite sleeping spot.

count your blessings

This is the last week of my holidays until I return to a job that I really have had enough of.  I started looking for a different job a month or two ago and got offered an interview for a job I would have LOVED about five years ago.  In the end I decided not to go for the interview as it was a bit like chasing an old dream that I'd since replaced with new dreams.  Funny how the start of the year is full of the new and the old.  Anyway, I was determined not to waste this last week of my holidays - despite today being 40 degrees in Perth again (that's 104 Fahrenheit apparently) - actually I just checked the BOM and it's only 38 degrees today (only) - whatever, it's still hot and muggy in Perth and I'm whingeing about it and feeling bad as there's floods in other parts of Australia and places with ongoing drought so I really have nothing to complain about.  Anyway, the heat and our renovation make it difficult to do all the things I had planned for my holidays - ie craft!!  My craft room is such a mess I don't know where to begin and the three rooms we're currently living in have boxes stacked floor to ceiling.  I don't know how people renovate houses when they have children - there's just the two of us and two furry pets.  Matilda is barking at the sound of a nail gun - I think she's had enough too!!  Ah well, it will all be worth it - we keep hoping it'll be finished by next Christmas at least and hopefully we can put up our tree this year!!!

On a brighter note, the gardenia is flowering...aaaahhhhhh the perfume!!!!

Matilda enjoyed the flowers too...

 

and, in a very round-a-bout way (isn't that always the case in blogland?!) I stumbled upon this lovely blog - sotreadsoftly - and the author's wonderful website - I love the colours and her designs and the 'specialness' of the things she makes - I love that bird cushion!

And while reading her blog's old archives, the phrase 'count your blessings' found me and reminded me how nice it is to have a house (albeit half-finished) to live in, family to love, pets to cuddle and flowers to smell (another lovely phrase is 'stop and smell the roses').  If I can't get into my craft room to sew and create, at least I have access to the internet and all the inspiring blogs out there!

My sister Jess gave me two Japanese tea cups for Christmas featuring owls...

Yup - thats' the last fruit mince pie.  I'm off to close the kitchen door and the noise of renovations, drag myself away from the internet and fill my last week with some of the things I've been meaning to do... despite the heat.  Can you run and smell the roses too??

of good character

Our street is mostly character houses with some new houses dotted in between and a bit of the seventies here and there - a brown brick carport or a porch with arches added in.  There's probably an average amount of houses for sale on the street and although there's one or two Federation homes that are heritage listed, I get nervous when I see a for sale sign out the front of an old home that's aged gracefully but needs a little TLC.  I get nervous because more and more people seem to demolish these old homes, subdivide the blocks and build new homes.  I understand why they do it but I do wonder if maybe they should look at newer suburbs instead if they didn't want to live in a character home in a 'character' suburb.  There's a for sale sign on one house near the corner where an elderly Italian lady and her dog live - we call the dog 'stumpy bluey' because it's a blue heeler crossed with something with short legs (I found out later it's a blue heeler/corgie cross!).  I got nervous when I saw the sign outside stumpy bluey's house and on the way to the video shop yesterday afternoon, there was a 'sold' sticker on the sign.  There was also a few boxes of free books on the front verge and some old wooden windows.  On the way back from the video store the elderly lady and stumpy bluey were out sweeping the driveway.  I spied a book on shrubs in the box and the lady called out to help myself to the books.  I ended up with an armful of gardening books and went up to thank the lady and we got chatting.  What a lovely lady!   She has lived on our street for almost 40 years and raised her four daughters here.  One of her daughters bought the house over the road.  She is moving to a retirement village near the border of our suburb and stumpey bluey ("Yoda"), who is 14, is moving with her.  The house has been sold to an investor who is renting it out.  Hopefully they will do it up and not demolish it.   So many memories are there!

The seventies gardening books have some fabulous stuff - this cat - embellished deckchair and a butterfly version appear in "New Ideas for Outdoor Living: An Australian House & Garden Publication" - there's no year on it anywhere but I'm pretty sure it'd be out of print.

Thank you Elizabeth and Yoda.  Wishing you many happy memories in your new home.

To deck or not to deck

Our house renovation is going well (touch wood - thankfully there's lots of it around).  We might even be in by Christmas....maybe.

Here's the new outside with walls:

And rendered with doors:

Now we're waiting for floors...

But the next decision we have to make is whether to put a deck out here or just pave the lot:

What to do, what to do....

I really enjoy working on houses and the whole building process but I can oh so see why people hate it - showering outside, boxes piled high and dust EVERYWHERE is beginning to get on my nerves.  But I think the hardest part of the whole process is having to make so many decisions and just when you've decided on one thing you have to make a decision about something else and cos it's part of a whole process, you don't get to see each decision you've made anywhere near the time you made the decision.  I'm really not good at making decisions quickly either.  Ah well, it's all good fun.

Still here (but not so still)

It's ages since I've had a chance to blog and it feels like I've neglected a good friend.  I have many excuses, mostly I've been busy at work (my day job unfortunately rather then work I'd like to be doing!) and busy with house things.

But there's loads of good news - I've got holidays coming up, which will be plenty of time for crafting, and I have oooooodles of ideas and projects in mind and books to read and photos to sort, and our house renovation is coming along very well - we have a roof over the new section of the house and there's no longer a giant puddle in the kitchen when it rains.  And, blissfully, Spring is around the corner!  I've always loved Winter more than Summer but I'm over showering outside during Winter and it's too cold at night to run out to the port-a-loo!

I just checked out the eBay auction for One in Ten - a beautiful show of support for a very worthy cause.  I have to be very careful visiting eBay though as I am prone to wandering and get distracted easily (clever how that works).  I just stumbled upon this devine vintage quilt top, which I am in love with:

  It's such a lovely pattern.  I think it may inspire another project to add to my ever-growing 'to do' list.  Funny how some holidays are planned for staying at home, pottering around and generally relaxing - as opposed to 'travel' holidays - but these pottering type holidays are quickly filled with activities...

Another of my 'to dos' is to sort out our holiday photos - from our UK trip in July/August last year.  The photos are still sitting in a bag, although we did spend an evening this week making up a photobook through Snapfish to give to my parents-in-law as a holiday momento (we travelled with them).  Creating the photobook was heaps of fun and Snapfish have wonderful customer service, which impressed me enough to let others know!  It was nice to look back at the photos too - might be time to plan our next holiday (a travel type one)...

Our house...is in the middle of a renovation...

I returned to the land of the living today, well to work at least.  sigh.  It was the same old but a novelty to drive again and all the plants and trees outside looked so nice - funny how everything becomes 'new' again once you've been stuck in bed for a week...

We live in a 1924 character home - I cringe a bit saying 'character' home or 'old' home after we travelled to the UK last year where houses can be considerably older than 1924!!  I love our place though.  It had a very dodgey extension added to the rear of the home - apparently an eccentric Viennese architect lived here many years ago and used the front of the house as his office - just the type of character you want 'tweaking' the house.  He did a few odd things to the front and the gentleman we bought if off had also added bits and pieces to the back, which made the back of the house look a bit Alice in Wonderland - it sloped a lot and the back narrowed right down to a tiny back door with the ceiling just above your head.  We decided to retain the majority of the original home - the bedrooms and kitchen - and demolished the back to make space for a sympathetic rear addition, including a bathroom, lounge/dining, new kitchen, laundry and an extra bedroom - basically a new house stuck on the back of some front bedrooms!!  It's actually been a (touch wood!) smooth process so far - although it did take 12 months to get plans drawn up and approved.  Here's the back of the house as it started to be demolished...

Matilda was very impressed when the old loungeroom floor was ripped up...

Then it all came down and it felt a bit strange...

But while I was sick, they put in a sand pad...

  and then a concrete pad...

Hurrah!  Despite living among towers of cardboard boxes in the front of the house and having everything in such a mess all the time and having to shower out on the porch in a makeshift shower made from bits of our old pergola, it's been fun.  It feels nice too to be fixing the house up, as if the house knows and it's saying thank you to us for caring about it.  Now, if we can just get the garden to say the same thing eventually....

If you're in Perth and have any interest in ancient Egypt, the Egyptian antiquities from the Louvre exhibition will be here 21 July - 28 October, 2007.   Artefacts and art from ancient Egypt will be on display, including jewellery, ceramics and linens - I am just awestruck that these things have survived for such a long time.  Pre-exhibition tickets are on sale now.