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a portrait of my children, once a week every week in 2013 via Che and Fidel

He : the bird in a nest at a wonderful new park.

She : shiny with sunscreen, giggling at a silly Dada. She is proving difficult to capture with a natural expression as she is usually either talking or posing for the camera in some ridiculous way.

Crochet cushions and holiday musings

I learnt to crochet at a class nearly two years ago. I was a very slow learner and of course did not manage to finish the class cushion during the three sessions. By that time I decided that I did not actually like the colours I had selected and could not force myself to finish it. Then I fluffed around making bits and bobs but not really starting anything that could be termed a project. I went to Spotlight and was not overwhelmed by the wool colour options there either. Finally I found a pattern for a cushion cover that was not too holey as I didn't really want to see the cushion through the crochet and chose some colours that seemed more me.

And then it just took another year or so to finish it. The back is crocheted too, same pattern, slightly different combination of the same colours. (And somehow with about 20 extra stitches per edge). I  had no idea how to actually join it and ended up just chain stitching the sides together ( with a bit of leapfrogging over those extra stitches, hence the puckering). To be honest I'm still not totally sure about this colour combination. I think it's the egg yolk orange that is giving me pause. Although it does rather compliment the bird house. And it is actually finished, woohoo!



Meanwhile I have been letting the kids loose on the deck with the paints.

And with home made slushies. (Anything to counter these hot hot days we are having).

I stumbled across this lost art work done about  18 months ago  in prep and popped it in a frame.

And we managed a quick holiday trip to Ikea and came home with these two glorious duck egg blue velvet cushions. Velvet + duck egg blue + Ikea are three words I would never had put in a sentence but look at that for just $36 for both including the inserts. Love love love.

In other news, our plans had the engineering completed just before Christmas. Now we are just waiting on certification and unfortunately we just found out that the certifier is away until the end of the month. The builder has  seen the plans and given us the option to continue to live in the house or move out and we are completely in two minds about whether to stay or go.

And of course we are counting down the months left using our dogs breakfast of a kitchen.

Nurse Nancy essentials

Liongirl has completely been swept up in the love for her favourite Little Golden book about Nurse Nancy. It has been given pride of place on her bedside table for weeks. It appears to actually be a reference book for nurse-hairdressers (she plans to do a double degree) in training. She has been bugging me for a little shelf just like Nurse Nancy has for weeks.

See Mama, Nancy has a tea set and bandages and a little red phone......

Since we had most of the accessories already, all we needed was a little shelf. Look what popped up at the oppie for $12 when I was dropping off bags of declutterings. Well, this is after a good clean and some undercoat.

A sample pot of a new Dulux colour called Tapioca and a little organising and voila. Apparently all we need now is  a little red phone.

All the goodies on the top two shelves are op shop finds, the little toadstool money box turned up the same time as the shelf. This baby doll has already received her full quota of  bandaids, needles and wet nappies. I am getting daily blood pressure checks and applications of yellow eyeshadow and glittery lip gloss.

Meanwhile the boy has been doing quite a bit of this,

and I have been spending my spare time trying to finish this two year cushion (oh the mortification). Can I add that crocheting in 30 degree summer heat is completely bonkers. At least it's not a blanket.

Aside from the de cluttering, I am on a project finishing frenzy. Watch this space.

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a portrait of my children, once a week, every week in 2013 via Che and Fidel

He :  Has the most beautiful smile. In his happy place, a cave of cushions on the lounge with his favourite books. (that would be the Usborne See Under the Sea and the Gem and Crystal Bible)

She :  Reading Little Golden books to herself, most days she has 'done' her own makeup, blue eyeshadow is the favourite.

I was undecided about whether to do this 52 week project. And then my boy posed for a photo and every time I glance at it, my heart sings. This child who would descend into hysteria at the sight of a camera for three long years, who does not find his happy place easily, is growing into himself, a calmer, more focused and kinder version. It is a welcome reminder of how far we have come. 

Lucky

I would never have thought I was a lucky sort of person. I think back when I was fourteen I did win a plant in a raffle. And maybe $50 once on a scratchy. With hindsight, I have now revised my thoughts on being "lucky". What if lucky is not actually winning things or exceptional good fortune, but the absence of significant or catastrophic adversity. Having spent thirty plus years of my life without catastrophic adversity, I never appreciated at the time exactly how lucky I was.

Now that I have been on the receiving end of a high tide swell of adversity that was so bleak and so persistent that I felt close to drowning, I have a whole new perspective on luck. When the tide finally went out, boy did I feel like the luckiest girl in the world. And now every day without significant adversity is a lucky, lucky day.

And do you know by some freakish coincidence that supreme luck and catastrophic adversity sometimes go hand in hand? I know this because I have personally met not one, not two, but three people who have won Lotto. (I have a job where people confess all kinds of secrets) And one of those families, won Lotto in the same year that the husband/father of young children underwent a bone marrow transplant for leukaemia. I would guess that the odds of these two events occurring in one family would be around one in ten million, I wonder how they felt about "lucky".

So, now that I spend every day feeling lucky, how do I explain these prizes that keep arriving in my letter box? Lovely  Ellen Giggenbach had a giveaway of a choice of any print in her collection a while back and this is the one I chose. She makes all her  prints by hand from cut paper art  and the colours and patterns are retro-licious.

I am hoping to order this one for Miss Liongirl when Ellen re opens her shop.

With this flurry of new year sorting and organising I finally grabbed a handful of nails and threw up all my favourite prints and thrifted paintings and embroideries. This wall is going to be demolished in a short while so I did not even need to be precious about all those holes.

And there is nothing better than winning the prize of a book you really,really want to read. Elaina from A Little Bit Country NZ picked my name out of a hat for her prize of A Home Companion by Wendyl Nissen. I am about half way through but can say I feel very positively towards any author who advocates that all mothers need to escape for a few days in their own vintage caravan several times a year and if this is not possible, to at least harness a "caravan attitude" and carve some space for just themselves.

Thanks so much Elaina, this is a most wonderful and timely gift. The other books, well they were my heavily hinted for Christmas presents, this is a time of year for reading and new inspiration. The little book bottom left is indeed by the lovely Ellen who sent me the bird print, David Jones also stock some of her notecards and journals and I was lucky enough to stumble across one.

At the very start of the year I was lucky enough to win a beautiful calendar from Jodi at Che and Fidel.
Pop over to Ella Leach Designs if you need a family style calendar for this year, I thoroughly made use of mine in 2012 and they are beautiful.

And even the boys were not neglected in the giveaways this year. We were the lucky winners of a Lego City Alarm game from Em at The Beetleshack and every time Roboboy gets me on his own, we have been playing it.

Now all I have to do is find four things to send to the op shop so Betsy and I can remain in a neutral stuff balance for the year.

2012 Before and After

I was unsure about how to start this new year. Do I acknowledge the last twelve months at all or do I just sweep it all under the rug and make a fresh start today? This last year has been the least chaotic for our family in a long, long time. We did not buy a house, sell a house, have a new baby, have children that were constantly sick or needing operations, start at a new school/kindy or discover any new dietary limitations for anyone in the family.

Our complicated child in this last year has seen his paediatrician twice. Prior to that he was known by six specialist paediatricians and a selection of therapists. For us, it is quite a novel thing to only be dealing with the usual, the everyday. There are of course ongoing complexities for our family but they are all old and familiar and I am a seasoned veteran with these and mostly in the last twelve months life has become much simpler. 

My chosen word to represent 2012 was " Grow". Ironically, this is the first year in six that I probably did not have to grow much at all. In hindsight, the previous six years that were so hard, so challenging, caused me to grow so, so much. Of course you don't realize while you are doing the growing.  So this year was perhaps a year to "Bloom" instead. For me that meant being able to take the time to do things that make my heart sing, instead of just doing what is needed to keep everyone else afloat. 

There is a lot of colour and pretty on this blog. There are a lot of frills and fluff. When your life is a layered cake of complex and difficult, it is so good to have a space to go that is all about the icing and sprinkles.  Here are all the befores and afters from this year while I crafted and created to my happy place. (I didn't feel that I did much at all this year, but surprisingly it's not as insignificant as I thought).

What became of my gratitude project? The one where I planned to post a letter of thanks every day for a year. Well, I did around 90 and then gradually life just got in the way. Many months passed and I had not written a single thank you. Then our much loved neighbours, the Menace brothers, moved , to the new house they had built a few streets away.

They may as well have moved to the Outback. Our yard was suddenly quiet after school and I realized that the year of  precious memories of happy, noisy  gangs of children playing in my backyard was a moment that had passed by. I wrote my neighbour (the mother of those wonderful boys who accepted my complicated child wholeheartedly) a thankyou card for making such a difference in our family's life, just by sharing her children with us. 

She turned up at my house a week later to thank me in person. She told me that she had just been out doing a presentation to the Country Women's Association in rural Queensland. That she had been envious of the solidarity and support that these country women had for each other. That she was saddened that her life in our little suburb did not reflect this kind of care and connectedness. And then she arrived home the next day and there was my card in her letter box. We both had a cry. And if that is not a sign that this gratitude project is an exceptionally meaningful commitment, well just bludgeon me with a hammer.

I did in fact write a list of resolutions last year but given my penchant for scribbling on scraps of paper, it is nowhere to be found. I suspect I achieved very little of it. I am only cross about not doing a camera course to learn how to use my camera properly, I did try three times but each time the course was on a day that I work. Hopefully, this year it will be easier to make it happen.

This year, I suspect is going to be very full, very busy. There is supposed to be a renovation for Betsy you know. It is supposed to start in March. I know in advance that it is supposed to take around four months. I have the good sense to know that this could be delusionally optimistic. I also have the good sense to know that it is probably going to be somewhat painful to live through but at the end it will be so, so worth it.

But the mantra for the year ahead I could not distill down to a single word this year. About a year ago, a lovely girl posted a few comments on my blog. I popped over to her blog to see what she was all about. I liked her blog a lot. It was about living simply, with less. Strangely, after commenting that day on my blog she did not post again and has not for over a year. So I won't link you over there but will say thank you to her for providing the words for me for 2013.

Less Stuff, More Life. 

I have felt bogged down by our stuff for the last three years. We have been culling and selling and donating more than I could ever have imagined and we are not done yet but we are getting there. As each item leaves our house, I feel a bounce in my step. It all started when I read this book, It's all too much by Peter Walsh a few years ago, when we were moving into Betsy and realized we had way too much stuff. 

Much of our stuff was child related paraphernalia and as time passes much of it is no longer needed. A small number of the most treasured toys and books have been boxed up to keep, most is going or gone. It is getting easier to be ruthless and emotionally detach. I am quoting William Morris daily.

"Have nothing in your home (life) that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."


Ugly serviette holder made by me in Grade 9 woodwork- gone. Shoes from my wedding that were ugly and uncomfortable - gone. Every sipper cup in the house- gone. Thankfully milk glass and vintage sheets fulfil both criteria to stay  so there will still be some very selective op shopping.

Luckily, these two are both useful and beautiful so they get to stay. Hugs are a rare commodity, sometimes she gets lucky and he tolerates it. This is twelve months ago.

This is yesterday. She is catching up with him now, soon they might look like twins.


Happy New Year to you all and may you all have more life and less stuff this year too.

A little pink and green house

So, the leftovers have all been eaten, the wrapping paper has been recycled and there are new presents to keep the kids busy. Time, me thinks, for some crafty pursuits. This little house was supposed to be ready for that special birthday last week.

There is nothing better than being surrounded by a pile of vintage wallpaper and the biggest decision of the moment to be what colour to put where. This wonderful assortment came from Ada Bea (who makes and sells her own very inspiring range of little houses), also a selection from Pomme de jour who sends out little bundles of assorted patterns she has collected.

I decided to use predominantly a pink and green combo for this one as that was probably the most acceptable  colour combination for miss Liongirl.  So here is my ta- dah!

And this was the plan from the start.

To go in this spot,

in here. (I won't whinge about the quarter strength Hog's Bristle wall colour because you all know how much it bothers me already). It actually looks the least hideous in this room as it gets so much natural light.

So, I'm off to make one for myself now. With quite a lot less pink this time. Just wanted to share the view out my lounge room window where I have been plonking myself regularly to drink cups of tea.

Actually maybe looking at all that pink and green had something to do with my wallpaper colour choices.

The neighbour's poinciana and our pink crepe myrtle happen to be flowering at the same time which I don't think has coincided in the past and it is glorious. And obviously quite inspiring.

Time for another cup of tea.