voucher giveaway…

I was very excited at the end of last year when I won a rug voucher from an online store called buyster.  Their range of products is amazing from rugs to lighting to furniture. Their customer service was impeccable and their delivery costs surprisingly reasonable.  My sister now has a great looking rug in her study… Now one of you lucky folk have the chance to win a $60 voucher to spend on any of their goodies…. Just leave a comment here by Midnight AEDST Friday 12 Feb and I’ll announce the winner on Sunday 14 Feb (Australian residents only…) Contact me with your email and I’ll pass it on to buyster so you can collect your prize.  Good luck!

PS – some of my favourite things on buyster – rug and carafe above and these gorgeous lamps below…

scrap fabric & textiles scarf tutorial

OK – this is a quick and easy project that will use us all those scraps of fabric, bits and pieces of wool, buttons and I even included some pieces of an old shrunken knit…you can use anything!

I had some ‘Washaway’ backing that I wanted to try (see HERE for a product description) because I was using a lot of fine, transparent, silky fabrics. It makes for a stable base but you have to make sure you wash it thoroughly or you can be left with stiffness in the fabric. (Actually, the next scarf I made I didn’t use it and it turned out just as well…) Experiment…

I set my machine to zig zag, selected some thread that would tone in with the fabric and then just started joining bits of fabric… you can ruche, scrunch, fold, gather and just keep adding bits until it looks right.  Try it on and make sure it long enough and that your interesting bits hang in the right places…

I think it’s wise to stick to a limited colour palette and choose fabrics in similar tonings… can you see there’s a bit of wool in there?  I added the vintage lace and button on one end to weigh it down… you know I haven’t even snipped the threads or hemmed the edges!

Here is lovely Sarah modelling it for us…. think of it as sculpting with fabric – and GO CRAZY!

9 year old girl music…

What has got me scouring iTunes and YouTube this morning?  My 9 year old girl went on a trip with another family and a bunch of her girlfriends recently and came home complaining (read ‘hysterical’) about not knowing the songs on the radio the other girls were singing along to… (we have had this conversation once before by the way…) We were having this debate in the car with our family whilst P and I were singing away to Gold 104 (it’s our occasional sentimental guilty pleasure!)…  and whilst I said I understood the peer group being important, we tried to explain our loathing for commercial radio (generally), and why we listen to independent stations…. We should have just stuck with the ‘compassion’ bit…. so here I am looking up ‘Fireflies’ or some such thing for her as she has taken to shutting herself in her room with her radio.  (We do have a friend who won’t let her kids play anything she doesn’t like!… worth considering…. but I do want Nim to develop her own discernment etc…)  Help me out here…. some of you must have experienced this…. I want to hear about it…

PS  I did look up Paris Wells for myself – you might have seen her sing Lonely on RockWiz – just stunning!

Adelaide…

Whilst in the great city of Adelaide watching the popular Tour Down Under… I did get a little time to explore the retail precinct of Glenelg… found a couple of cute little shops and one of them was called The Ivy Room where they stock this funky recycled plastic jewellery by Batucada (which I’d never seen before….)  The black bracelet on the left is my souvenir of Adelaide (and am working on the necklace!)

By the way Adelaide was so family friendly, bike friendly, beach friendly, PT easy, food yummy …. I would recommend it to anyone….

Read…

The book I’ve just finished is The True History of the Hula Hoop by Judith Lanigan. Check out her website which outlines this remarkable woman’s performing history… and has a clip of the Dying Swan hula hoop act she talks about in the book.  This book was mentioned in The Age recommended reads for the Summer, and I’ve got to admit the quirky subject matter piqued my interest… I loved how she had the two parallel stories going – the contemporary Catherine finding her skills and then gigs around the world’s festivals – (not always easy)…. juxtaposed with Columbina who is travelling and performing with a clown troupe way back in the 1500’s… and the stories start to overlap in interesting ways.  And on Australia Day I felt a little bit proud that a large part of the development of hula hooping happened here – in Australia!

a new year’s poem from a long time ago…

Movie matinee – new year’s day
Flickering pictures and the utter darkness numb the brain
Photos taken spontaneously (after the revelation of the year)
Red Lambourghinis bought extravagantly
The fact that Dan should buy a boiled egg from an insignificant milk bar
(they didn’t sell sandwiches!)
….and the mysterious Brazilian matches
… the possible cover up for a gun running syndicate?
Ethereal dreams about heroin and crowding into the shower
(scene from Psycho?)
Bizarre new year’s resolutions
That won’t be hard to keep
who knows the answers to all these trivial questions?
The answers will only be revealed after…
… A Kiss from the Spider Woman….

Little Ashes…

The gals and i saw Little Ashes at the Astor on Sunday. I’m sure the multitude of teenage girls in the foyer were there to see as much as possible of Robert Pattinson (Twilight) playing Salvador Dali – and we were all well rewarded with a full frontal of him…. I wonder how they went with the content though… more about his homosexual relationship with Lorca, the Spanish poet than Dali himself. Lorca’s poetry was a highlight, a small insight into Bunuel was interesting, but it’s a film that could have benefitted with some ruthless editing…. 3 out of 5 from me…. David and Margaret?

mainly going well…

My two can come up with incredibly imaginative things when left to their own devices -example above of Nim’s…. one good old hedgehog mix – the idea went from big hedgehog to little hedgehogs to (finally) Persian Mice – the Persian Fairy Floss was inspiration for that!  The two of them also had a great time dressing up in old cut up jumpers that later in the day were speed increasers on the big curly slide…. one of the less positive activites of today was the ‘honey fight’…….. there’s always a downside right?

read…

Anyone who was ever listening will know that one of my favourite books is The Time Traveller’s Wife.  So with much anticipation I recently finished Audrey Niffenegger’s latest novel Her Fearful Symmetry.  I am one of those people who needs a hook in the first page and this one got me in straight away and kept me interested and wanting the next chapter… Her quirky characters are fascinating – 2 sets of twins, an obsessive compulsive neighbour, the cemetery historian who can’t get over his dead love…. and the cemetery is a character in itself – full of stories… I wish I had the imagination of this woman….  I was thoroughly satisfied with this read, and wish she was one of those prolific writers who released a book every year….

my favourite of the kids’ christmas presents..

Anytime I see this Djeco stuff in the shops, I’m impressed…. we’ve had some lovely stickers of theirs before, and then I got this stamp set for Romy for Christmas hoping to entice him more to the crafty activities table…. he has had a couple of goes with it and we all enjoy it …. see more of their stuff HERE.