Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Salad
Yum.
Monday, October 30, 2006
daisy hook
A domestic detail from the house of friends - blue and white are colours all through the house, even in small details like this. I like the offset of the hooks
It also looks like a figure, with the shadow - but I didn't realise till after I'd taken it and loaded it on the computer. They be the purtiest boxing gloves I'd'a ever seed! (!).
Sunday, October 29, 2006
Fruit & Veg 2 mosaic v.2
How to fix a punctured tyre with fabric
Had to get a puncture repaired yesterday, and golly gee, picked the tyre place which is oh, three minutes from a patchwork shop... well, I'd rather spend three-quarters of an hour in a patchwork shop than in the tyre place with a bleating out of focus telly and well-thumbed car mags.
And sometimes fabrics just follow you home, you know? The oriental fabric bottom right was the starting point.
No, I don't know quite what I'll do with them. Make a quilt, will that do for now? (Must remember next time I get a puncture to budget for the fabric purchasing as well as the tyre repair!)
Saturday, October 28, 2006
Vegetables
Late on Friday, it wasn't so crowded, and I couldn't resist pulling out my camera as I did earlier in the year.
Here's a set of the photos I took yesterday
and here's the March set.
How beautiful are fruit and veg? Wonderful colours, wonderfully individual shapes even within the same type or family, wonderful texture - AND you can eat them!
A few more of these photos may creep in as daily ones - I love the sense of cornucopia, fruit and veg filling the lens with colour and light.
Friday, October 27, 2006
Thursday, October 26, 2006
Grevillea
Isn't it elegant and amazing? They're easy to grow and they flower and flower (or are they bracting and bracting? - who cares, they're noice either way).
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Vintage quilts and knitting needles
I love the repetition in this picture - knitting needles, rolled quilts, folded quilts.
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Vintage cups and saucers
Fine china has something so graceful about it.
Australian photographer Olive Cotton's photo, Teacup Ballet, captured a wonderful view of cups and saucers.
Monday, October 23, 2006
A Year of Color: Salmon
They're a vintage quilt I saw at a show, dollhouse, quinces, sunset.
Sunday, October 22, 2006
Reading: children's picture books
I was reading some favourite children's books today with children I have known for most/all of their lives, who will soon be living thousands of miles away, the chance to share books like this gone.
These ones have been favourites:
The Elephant and the Bad Baby (Elfrida Vipont & Raymond Briggs), Where the Wild Things Are (Maurice Sendak) and The Man Who Walked Between the Towers (Mordecai Gerstein).
I can recommend them all wholeheartedly - story and imagination and space for aha! which is so valuable in children's books.
The Elephant lulls them with delightful repetition, then does an abrupt about face to catch them out.
I have seen, over and over, Sendak's book transfix a child aged between about 4 and 7 in particular - something about it makes tremendous, compelling sense to them.
Gerstein's book is the newest of the three, chronicling in spare words and at times vertiginous illustrations Philippe Petit's dangerous, extraordinary walk on a tightrope between the almost-built World Trade Center towers in 1974.
And there is, inarguably, something about curling up on a couch with a picture book and children that a computer, with as many bells and whistles as you like, cannot capture.
Saturday, October 21, 2006
Cannoli (no gun)
In You've Got Mail, Tom Hanks' character quotes from The Godfather - "Leave the gun. Take the cannoli."
I didn't do either today, although there was, as you can see, PLENTY of cannoli, and as it was in a RSL club, one of the returned services league displays of militaria was bound to feature a gun or two...
Friday, October 20, 2006
Racing car
Isn't it amusing how your eyes can be opened to noticing different things when you're interested in something new? The films in the DVD player in the last couple of weeks have included one of my all-time favourites, Life as a House (in which there is a multitude of architectural models at the start of the film, before the full-size house-building begins; and Suddenly 301> (known as 13-30 in the US, I think - Jennifer Garner & Mark Ruffalo) in which the dream dollhouse made by one of the characters for another of the characters is a critical plot element.
Is there a theme here? I wasn't trying to create a list of dollhouse films (I did a list of films featuring quilts years ago), let alone select viewing choices based on dollhouse content!
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Farewelling
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Balls
I'm not sure I'll manage without dropping some.
(at least they're pretty colours...)
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Lampshade
We have such a cornucopia of choice in decorating styles, and yet it's fascinating how one item like this can conjure an entire room. Gentle colours, age-worn furniture, comfort. Not necessarily cluttered, but with the evidence of lived lives in the room.
I can not comprehend how anyone lives in a streamlined moderne box of a room as illustrated in some magazines - don't they own books, the bric-a-brac of daily life, any kind of nod at who they are beyond clean lines and a spartan emptiness? Or have the stylists emptied anything that would evoke humanity?
As I make progress with the dolls' house (more pics soon) I'm observing how I think about that space, those rooms, how I am creating, in miniature, rooms that will tell a story.
Monday, October 16, 2006
A Year of Color: Tan
Vintage homemaking and needlework books
And this style of book is far from dead - there are always new versions. Shannon Lush has had a huge hit with Spotless, published by ABC Books - there's still a hunger out there for old fashioned stain removal (and I believe she's doing one on other housekeeping matters). In fifty years' time (if not less), Spotless will be on shelves like these.
Sunday, October 15, 2006
Country church
Saturday, October 14, 2006
October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month
At a friend's 50th - she fought breast cancer in her mid thirties, and wondered if she would reach fifty - she talked about this fight in her speech, and said that through it, her son had been her hope, her daughter, her joy, and her husband, her strength.
If you'd like to use a pink ribbon image on your blog for October, FD's Flickr Toys has a page of ones you're free to use (like the one I've used in the right hand column).
Click here for the link.
Vintage bread bins
Among all the big stuff, there were a few miniatures. So I photographed the big stuff and invested in a couple of things for dollhouse use. As you would.
Friday, October 13, 2006
Op-shopping finds.
A good day's thrifting - we enjoyed ourselves.
(An op shop is an opportunity shop = goodwill/oxfam/charity shop with second-hand goods)
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Coming soon...
Maybe I'm the only person excited by a croquet shot. But that's OK - it's my blog!!!!!
ttys.
Croquet
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Bitacle warning
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Thank you.
Moving house
It's all got to go somewhere when the electrician and wallpaperer are at their work. Although the removalists could have been a tad more careful.
My favourite blog entry of the day is this one!
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Victorian cottage
Monday, October 09, 2006
Flannel quilt
- well, except when the weather's warmed up and flannel is suddenly heading for at least six months of being irrelevant.
It's NOT a Christmas quilt (flannel? for Christmas in Australia when it's usually over 30degC? Puhleeeze!) - the fabrics I had came together like this, what with the redbird fabric and the house fabric. I'm sure it will still work next year, midyear, midwinter.
I often use flannel for the back of quilts, particularly when they're for a child, but it's a while since I made a flannel-front-and-back-and-binding. As we're coming into summer, I won't be making any more for a while - too hot to wrangle through the sewing machine.
Sunday, October 08, 2006
Reading: white + Christmas
There are a couple of places in my house that could do with some white paint, or lighter paint. The wider world attaches 'shabby chic' to all sorts of frizzy-frou-frou, when she is often enough more likely to assume less is more, rather than a roomful of stuff letting nothing be seen properly.
Did a big spring clean of the living room yesterday, and it was good to have had this book in my head. I'm not sure you could have seen the difference - but I did, as I dusted and vacuumed and put things in the rubbish or the opshop box.
The Christmas issues of craft magazines, which come out in October, are starting to lob in. This one includes the results of this blog entry and this one . So I don't really have to make any Christmas craft - I was stitching and quilting months ago!
Saturday, October 07, 2006
Reading: a favourite magazine cover
(I didn't blog about it at the time, and wanted to work it into this ongoing blog narrative).
My quilting/craft to-do list includes a flannel quilt, an applique cushion, a two-colour quilt and something entrancing in the craft line involving old wooden egg cups. Variety! The spice of life!
I do plan to do the lighting in the dolls house this weekend, though. Just because.
Friday, October 06, 2006
Thursday, October 05, 2006
No bull
Did you guess that it was dollhouse scale? That's one inch=one foot, if unlike me you haven' t been studying the subject with notable intensity in the last month or so...
I visited a dollhouse shop today. The blue house now has a white table to go with the pine chairs, and a white mantelpiece containing a fireplace that will light up. And I've had instruction in how to go about wiring up lights, so that should happen soon. A lit fireplace seems kinda corny, but also kinda nice. Still waiting on some skirting and cornice pieces.
Some old metal furniture pieces arrived today courtesy of eBay, and I'm so glad the photo was overexposed - they weren't white, but my current favourite colour, aqua. Probably 1950s. I don't think I'll use them as a suite, but separately.
A favourite monthly email came today too, the Quilt of the Month from the International Quilt Study Center in Nebraska. Always a great glimpse of quilt history - you can sign up for the email on their site (which has lots and lots of lovely quilts to see in the archives).
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
Sandstone wall
I've also seen cliffs of it alight in the late afternoon in the Cudgegong valley between Lithgow and Mudgee.
I only truly realised its warmth and light when I'd visited other cities with different stone as their foundation - granite, for example, which has its own noble beauty but not that warmth and light.
I once lived in an 1850s cottage with random stone walls like this. Very thick walls - you stayed cool for the first couple of days of hot weather, but then, once they warmed up, the house was an oven.
Even though this photo was taken as the light was ebbing, the stone still shows its wonderful variety.
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
New sheets for spring
Aren't our lives an accumulation of such small things? Some are gifts, and some choices. The way you take your coffee, the cushion on your favourite chair, the dancing heads of flowers in your garden, a garden, the endless variety of a cloud-painted sky, the fall of sunlight through leaves?
Monday, October 02, 2006
49up
The series remains (intrusively) brilliant - it is a gift that these people, who had no say in being chosen, choose to participate so many years later. Thank you.
Seen in a cinema (I hate chatty people in cinemas - it's not a DVD IN YOUR LIVING ROOM, FOLKS) it was nevertheless fascinating to hear the (nonverbal) reactions - gasps of recognition, amazement, pleasure, laughter at the humour to be found in the everyday of life. However intrusive it is in these people's lives, others, every seven years, feel as though they're catching up with friends; and having a chance to measure their own lives, achievements, failures, their own journey over the seven years.
Brilliant, inspiring, thought-provoking. Recommended.
Read Michael Apted, the director of the series, interviewed by film critic Roger Ebert here.
September mosaic
Which is my favourite picture? Probably the soda bread, for sentimental reasons and because I'm happy with the light and the cloth cradling it.
Which is your favourite picture/blog entry from September?
Sunday, October 01, 2006
Dolls' house attic renovation in progress
The white block represents the not-yet-arrived wardrobe. A false wall behind this will conceal the wiring board for the lights (which aren't yet installed). There will also be skirting board, and a wallpaper on the flip-up roof (not visible here) and some sort of window solution (still thinking on that one).
The 'bed' is a Carlton Ware ashtray which has recycling potential as a dolls' house bed. Or so I believe.
Plenty to go, but progress made.