pears and paint

This is my creative space. My dining room/ kitchen table. It seems that that is where I always end up, even with a studio space, I like to be in the middle of my house. I like the light through the french doors and there is the air conditioner to keep me comfortable. One day I hope to have a house that has a nice room just off the kitchen that I can leave all messy and another area that I can keep nice for when visitors come, a parlor to receive my visitors. I cant see it happening in the near future unless there is a significant lotto windfall! So my visitors will just have to keep loving me for who I am not how tidy my house is (or isn't!)

I've entered some work in an exhibition coming up next week and true to my usual form I haven't finished it yet. Well in truth, this morning I sat down to actually start the painting. Well, in my defense a large portion of my not painting time has been taken up with the thinking about painting time that goes on in your head first, so I wasn't procrastinating really I wasn't. I was percolating, thinking and creating. (Yes I've almost convinced myself that is what I've been doing.)
Anyway I've worked on it most of today and  it is very very nearly completed and I'm actually pretty happy with it.

(I just noticed as I added this photo that the flowers that bantam boy bought for his girlfriend are a bit worse for wear! Also the light is a little poor by the time I got to this stage.)I am making a second crocheted gold pear to go with the one I made during the holidays so they will be displayed together. Not with the painting as I had originally intended but together as a pair.




I've also painted the house over the holidays the kitchen is now white and the lounge is such a pretty blue.

I am so happy with the colour. It is so calming and relaxing the yellow was not really making me happy and I had become quite sick of it. Most paints change colour with the light but this one seems to have a real depth of colour and will appear sometimes quite blue and at other times tinged with green. It was a miss-tint that I convinced the paint people to add extra green to to give it more of a teal look. It is pretty much saturated with tint, I think that is what gives it it's depth.

I've been back at work this week and that has kept me pretty busy. At the end of last year I had to move the stuff out of my classroom into the art room as I am now 4 days art specialist and 1 day admin relief taking classes for a couple of level 3 teachers who have extra duties to do outside of the classroom. Anyway it meant that the art room which is also used by others for T&E - therefore FULL of stuff for that and art now contains my classroom teaching stuff! On top of that we have more kids and the classes are bigger which means I've had to put in an extra table to accommodate the children. So I had to play tetris with all the stuff in there and make it look like an art room for the last few days of the holidays. Thank goodness for Tim who came and helped me rearrange desks and repair shelves etc and keep me company!!
He is also good at making healthy snack. He was pottering in the kitchen and asked if I'd like something.
"Mmmmm, some fruit would be nice." and this is what I got!

Holiday checklist

I finished off my skirt from previous post, completed the hemming of the white lounge room cushions, lost 100g, made curtains for to cover the glass panels on the kids bedroom doors (they are frosted but they like to cover them up to keep out any light using towels and it's been on my list to make curtains for a long time!) 

 I made cushion covers using some fabrics that I had in my stash and a new one I found recently that kind of holds them all together, it's the white one with circles.

 I also crocheted the pink heart to finish off the little round blue cushion that had lost it's button and was looking a little shabby.

I liked the way that the patterns went together so I thought it would be nice to make a quilt for my bed- a thin one because it's getting to that in between time of the year when it is too cold for just a sheet and too hot for the thick feather quilt. I didn't want a regular square quilt or a fancy patterned quilt, I wanted something less formal but wasn't quite sure how it would look. So when I found this one. The third one down or the first one from Anthropologie it inspired me to get started.

 I remembered that I had a pile of little crocheted doilies that I will add to the deep purple squares. This photo doesn't do the colours justice - when it is done I'll take a photo outside in natural light. Speaking of outside...

I also started painting those metal chairs and table legs from the garden make over post. My sister decided we were sanding them back today, as it turned out she weeded a bit more and her hubby ended up doing the grinding and I did some painting.

The best thing of all is that I picked up Bantam Boy from the airport today! Yay my baby is home again.

And there's still one more week left of holidays!

Brrrrrr...

It's so cold here at the moment. My two girls looked like Sesame Street monsters rugged up in the computer room last night.

Yesterday I taught knitting to a very small group of children in a holiday workshop. There was a little boy who was 6 and two 9 year old girls. I thought it is important to show them how to cast on and cast off so we made a small square which I sewed together for them and they made little finger puppets. They added felt bits to create eyes and wings etc. They were cute but I forgot to take pictures (of the puppets not the kids!)

My Thailand inspired join as you go hexagon rug is growing slowly but has taken a back seat as I've started a crocheted cardigan in plain black machine washable 100% wool. I'm thinking of adding some embroidery on the neckline.

I'm steadily working through sorting through stuff and organising but making sure to balance it with some fun stuff too.

Today I had lunch with the girls at Hubble's Yard Cafe. Our table was in the back room and the sunshine was streaming into the room through the lovely old lead light window.
Delightful!

Beginning to see the daisies not the weeds.

Things are looking up. Bantam Boy has had his extra reading time for his TEE approved. My principal has given the ok for me to have the time off to support BB which is great because we will have to travel to an external examination place to do his exams. His school is about a 5 minute drive but the college we have to go to is about half an hours drive. And we have to go in peak hour traffic. So having time off means all I have to do is focus on him and getting him there on time and as stress free as is humanly possible for these things!

I am on holidays for 2 weeks. Again! You have to love teaching for that.

But something else I love is when a project goes well. I just had to share with you the work of a couple of my year 3 kids. These two did a particularly good job. We have been learning about "the world". We've been reading and writing about it. For T&E(technology and enterprise) I told them they had to select one type of habitat to create a diorama showing what it was like. To do that they had to use their Society and Environment research skills to find out as much as they could about their chosen part of the world. All around the outside they have added information and interesting facts about their region. I love it when one project goes across a number of learning areas.

The one above is a Northern Forrest complete with a bear and salmon in the river. The one below is a tropical rain forest.

What I love most about this one is that the little girl has crammed it full of vegetation and created labels for her diorama just like the ones she has seen in diagrams in her reading.

And my final piece of good news is that I have finally been able to install my bath! It has only been sitting in the car port for 2 or 3 years. But every time I got close to having the money another thing happened to take priority.

Now don't look TOO closely as you will see that the old stained sealant that held the glass shower screens in place has not yet been scraped of the walls and floor. There is also a fair amount of building rubble and dust on the floor from where the plumber went through the wall and Tim drilled to put up a shower curtain. I could have dealt with that first but I went and bought bubble bath and relaxed a bit instead. When I closed my eyes I couldn't see the mess.
So the bathroom is up there on my list of holiday projects. Hopefully I'll resist the temptation to get in it and just close my eyes.
I have a tin of paint to freshen the whole room up. I have plans to sew some new clothes -if I can get BB to move his oil paint covered art work off the dining table(that stuff goes EVERYWHERE!!!) I'm halfway through my zig-zag rug which BB wants very big so it will cover his double bed, at least he likes my crochet unlike Chicky Babe! I laughed when I saw Cate Blanchett wearing a crocheted dress (a granny square one at that!) and the appearance of crochet in the local fashion awards in the Sunday paper. What will she do if the stuff her weird mother is doing becomes fashionable! She will face a dilemma then!

Last lazy holiday projects.

I finished my black dress.

However the fabric has sequins sewn into the embroidered sections and they scratch my arms when I move. Not a dress for all day wear, which is a shame because I thought I would wear it for work.

I've been watching Dr Who DVD's with the kids. Don't ask me how many we have watched! But it has been lovely spending a couple of days this holiday slothing around chatting with them. While I've been watching the T.V I've kept my hands busy with my crocheted flowers.



I had intended to use them on a floral panel on a handbag, but as I'm working I thought that I might use them on some purple felt as cushion covers.

I'm playing with different ways of constructing flower forms. I started to repeat a design with 6 petals thinking that I could join them and make a rug. (I'd need a lot more David Tennant episodes for that!) Unfortunately my crochet is so 'free form' they don't seem to tesselate.

The photo below was taken with the flash on, I don't like the way it washes everything out. I am playing with the settings on the camera and have discovered how to stop the flash and change some of the settings for different conditions. Another medium to explore in my spare time!

Finally having all the unfinished flowers everywhere was too much for me so I made a headband with some of them last night.

It's hard to take photos of things on your head on your own! Maybe I should have used the flash here because you cant see the edging- that took me the length of a movie to work, frog and rework, frog and rework until it was acceptable. (The problem that comes from not using a pattern)


As I worked this I wondered what it would be like to make some of the sections in silver wire- I've knitted bracelets before, thoughts of earrings started to play in my head using sections of the flower forms....

and chokers or bracelets...

but I really MUST tidy my room today. It was the one holiday project that I should have done but all the wants and whimsy got in the way. Housework will always be there tomorrow sometimes the creative urge is not.