lady bird and bumble bee....

After dropping Bantam boy off at work I had a couple of hours to myself so I thought I'd have a little lie down. As I lay there I started to drift off not to sleep but to that other place- you know the place and as I did all the things I'd been looking at and reading about (I've had a thing for old embroidery of late) anyway as I lay there my head started to clear and finally it became empty- in a good way! All the clutter left and I knew what I wanted to make. I have been thinking of miniature embroidery brooches on linen. And finally today I knew what and how I wanted to do them.

So I raced off to "Art Mart" fortunately they are open 7 days a week and I got some unprimed linen. It has such a lovely coarse weave and it has nice body too.

Chicky babe finally made me understand how to find the micro focus function on my camera so I was able to take a couple of close ups, with thumb to illustrate the scale.

Here it is almost finished, I don't have a brooch back to finish it off with. (Oh and this is a short scarf I'm working on at the moment, I've also almost finished a Chevron cardigan I started a couple of weeks ago, I've finished it enough to wear it I just want to make it a bit longer, I forgot to take a photo of it!)


Close, close up!

The most important thing I realised today was that to relax is not enough. To create properly and connect with your ideas and what you want to do you need to be able to clear your mind to allow space for the ideas to flow into. And this makes timetabling 'creative time' a bit tricky.
Obviously for me I need to find a way to clear my mind of the day to day rubble to allow my imagination space to "percolate' (It is a bit like a coffee dripper, my imagination has to flow through all the things in my head until it forms a creative puddle, hopefully into some sort of "cup" and not a messy puddle!)

Oh gosh! I just realised it's not sunday anymore no wonder I'm a bit tired it's after 1am!

Tea in blogland

Ok this is not doing my work but I just felt like spending a morning in 'blogland' drinking tea and eating crumpets- they were gone before I got to the camera!

I'm having a lovely morning browsing beautiful things and listening to Creative thursday podcasts...(I'm sure she's listening to some of the things in my head sometimes.)

and dreaming of embroidered miniatures for brooches.

P.S some time later-

I'm now enjoying croissants and green tea for lunch while still browsing.
although I will have to stop soon to take Bantam Boy to work and pick up Chicky Babe from a sleep over party.

I'm still here!

monument hill fremantle

It's been a pretty hectic few weeks. And just this minute I have finished drafting the last of my 250 art comments that my school admin has insisted that I do even though the union and the department signed off on an agreement that comments were only required for English maths and general comments. So not only do I have those to do for my classroom of year threes I have 10 art classes to do also. well at least the drafting is done and now its just a matter of entering them and the grade allocations into the computer system. I can't do anymore at the moment because the system closes down at 12o'clock. I found this out on Thursday night as I had just finished typing in a whole class worth of undrafted directly typed comments into the computer system. I pressed save and a page error sign came up. It was 12.03 and the system had shut down and I lost all my work that had taken ages! (I should have saved as I went along...I may have said a few naughty words at that point!)

Last weekend I caught up with a friend of mine who I've known literally all my life. Her parents lives in the house behind my grandmother and we more or less grew up together. To call her my friend is an inadequate term- she's more like a sister to me. She was here for a while from Kalgoorlie because her brother was very unwell with a brain tumor. We had made plans to catch up over the weekend but she was unable to do so until Sunday morning. So we went into freo for breakfast. We had a lovely time catching up but underneath the laughter there was the ever present sadness at the immanent loss of her brother. We left the cafe with her feeling a little lighter after having laughed about things that otherwise would make us cry. Then as I drove her back to her dad's place we got the call to say that her brother had just a few minutes earlier passed away. She grasped my hand and my eyes filled with tears....it does not make driving easy! Thank god I was with you she said. Then the poor thing had to go and break the news to her dad.

I had to go into school and try and get some of my class reports finished off but I made the decision to take the Monday off to support her if she needed me or wanted me. I'm glad I did because she rang me in the morning after a terrible night and asked me to come and get her and take her out for a coffee. She had been trying to be a support for her dad who is quite old and sick himself and she needed someone to lean on herself. So I went to pick her up and ended up taking her to a lovely little local cafe (after a detour to Monument Hill so we could both cry and she could hold my hand without me having to fear I would cause a traffic accident.) It is amazing though her capacity to laugh in adversity...although I think we were both being somewhat manic in our laughter.

We talked about what made someone successful. Her brother was a good man, a loving father and brother. He was not well known in his field of work, he did not have an 'important' job, he was not rich. Yet he was well loved and we agreed that that was in the end the most important thing.

To live a simple life well, to love and be loved, the little acts of kindness that touch peoples lives. Here is a quote from Emerson that says it better than I can...



To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends, to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch…to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded!

My town

Last weekend Bantam Boy needed to take some photos of an urban setting for an art project. So we spent the afternoon dashing about town taking photos. Some are taken from the car as we dash about. Others we stopped and I kept the motor running and knitted as he walked about taking snaps here and there. At one stage where parking was readily available (Freo is impossible on sunny sunday afternoons!) I parked and hopped out and played photographer too.

But I must give credit to Bantam Boy as the main creative force behind these shots.

I thought seeing as I now have hundreds of photos of my home town on the computer I'd take you on a tour of my place. I was born here, grew up here- wandered a little and returned.

This is 'the old bridge' it separates the river and the harbour.

harbour....
...river.
I lived just up from here when I went to high school between the old and the new bridge(You can see it here Bantam boy is standing on a wooden plank under the old bridge, people fish from it). I spent many hours along here. One time we were in a rubber dingy Just near 'the new bridge' when we spied a shark fin. we paddled in frantically only to realise that we could have been playing with a pod of friendly dolphins. I also had an epic unrequited crush on a most quirky fellow who lived beyond the new bridge. So I took to walking my poor little Australian silky terrier on the long walk past his house. Sometimes I'd be brave and pop in to say hi because although he did not return my feelings we did 'hang out in the same group of friends.' Poor dog she had such short little legs and it was quite a walk. No wonder I was very thin in those days.

(Arty Shot)

"The old bridge" is made of wood it was the 'old bridge' when I was very young and they started to build the 'new bridge' only about 1km up. As little kids my sister and I logically reasoned that they needed to build a new one because the old one was old and therefore not good. We held our breath every time we had to drive across it!

That will do for now I'll do some more later, I really should go into work while there are other people there this morning. (After being threatened with being stabbed I don't fancy going in on my own!)

Sock

Well one done....not sure that I feel as excited about the second one. I'm having trouble with the rib at the top of the next one, and that's the easy part. I'm just too tired. I've had a cold for the last 7 days and my year 3 class had to present the assembly this week. That meant extra stress and props and costumes to organise. Plus I have a prac student in my class (although he is quite good so far it's something else to contend with) We did a play of 'Where the Wild Things Are'. One of the parents commented saying it would not be too much of a stretch for these kids. They are a very "lively" bunch of kids.

Tomorrow I have to be up and off early as I've decided to go for Senior Teacher Status, that means extra study and that means tomorrow and next Saturday will be spent doing extra school work. But in the end it will mean a significant increase in salary so that's a bonus. I'm thinking that I could drop a day a week and with the increase in pay not notice it so much.

PS. I now have one warm comfy foot and one slightly cold one! (Yes I am now walking about the house with one sock on.)

K17, k2tog,k1,turn, P6,P2tog, P2, turn.....AGAIN.

This is why I started knitting again.
I wanted to knit a sock- well hopefully a pair of socks. So I bought some socky yarn from the yarn shop, silk and nylon I think, it feels nice but it splits a bit as you work making unravelling something you don’t want to have to do. This is my second attempt. The first didn't get beyond the band.

The difficult thing was the pattern did not make any sense at all to me. I could not for the life of me imagine what those k1 sl1 psso’s would translate to. So I just had to free fall following the pattern and trusting that something sock like would emerge. It was actually quite challenging to follow something without understanding or visualising how it would work. Now I know you will laugh but it was a bit like bungee jumping -well as close as this control freak will get to it. I had to plunge into the unknown, trusting someone else's directions. It was ... a bit sad really that the most exciting thing I did this long weekend was face my sock fears!

So I read and re-read the pattern decided that it was indeed another language totally of which I could only vaguely grasp part of what was being said to me. So I just started and hoped for the best.

And remarkably it is sockish and I am on the downward slope working toward the toes.

Next challenge- Make the second sock.