What else have I been doing with my summer?

Since there clearly hasn't been much textile art happening, what have I been doing?

My garden has been rampant this summer, because of all the rain. The back garden has survived on washing machine water for several years, and was reasonably lush, but everything has gone mad in the mild wet conditions. Here is one day's harvest from my tiny vegetable garden: The dark coloured things are Purple King beans.
I'm about to start planting seeds of cool season crops. I'm especially looking forward to the peas!

Textiles, anything textiles!

All I've blogged about lately is Scatterdays, mostly because my usually slow progress has slowed to a crawl for some weeks. This is one reason why:

Yes, I'm tidying and reorganising my workroom, in preparation for a new year of creative effort. Of course, tidying involves the equivalent of fitting a size 22 body into a size 12 ballgown! I'm gradually making progress, which will be aided by the arrival (soon, I'm promised!) of my second workroom table, with lots of lovely storage underneath it. It will be for cutting and painting and similar standing-up/ sitting on a stool activities.

In between bouts of tidying (it hasn't always looked quite this bad!), I have been making quite a lot of pants. I have trouble buying pants that fit me nicely and I was getting tired of jeans, so I've invested a lot of energy lately in drafting a pattern and making some pants that suit the shape I actually am, not the one some marketing guru thinks I should be. Here are the results:

Not bad, eh? I'm not done yet, the next pair are red.

When I get a moment, I'll show you the results of the Secret Block Swap from last year. I (foolishly) didn't take any photos of the blocks I made so they may take a little while to see, but I will put up the ones from the other members, Lorinda, Karen and Sharon, as soon as I can get to the design wall to lay them out.

I haven't made any art at all lately, but I have a cunning plan to make some ATCs once I get my workroom to rights. Stay tuned!

Scatterdays

Scatterdays begins with an E this week, and requires something white, something from the garden and something terrifying.

Energy and enthusiasm eluded me this week, but eventually I extricated myself from ennui. I chose one of the several White Elephants that live in this house for my white objet. I have a white elephant Christmas decoration, now sadly packed away, and another white stone elephant thatlooked extremely ecru in the photo. But this one looks and is white, beneath all its gold embellishment.

My "something from the garden" actually inhabits the street outside. I was assured by elderly residents that it's a eucalyptus sideroxlyon (OK, I admit, I had to look that up!), otherwise known as the Red Ironbark or Mugga. Its native environment is the western slopes of the Great Dividing Range, but it's also an everyday street tree throughout Australia. We once had an avenue of E. sideroxylons down our street but now this example is exceptional.

"Something terrifying" extended my expertise extensively. In the absence of ideas, I was going to share a photo of an extremely terrifying thing I found recently - one of the red wines we bottled at the third N.Epping Wine Bottling in 1995, which emerged, blinking and dusty, from the back of a cupboard. From memory, the 1995 bottling was not an especially good drop, so only an extremely enthusiastic oenophile would attempt to experience it. (Or do I mean the exact opposite of a oenophile? More like a couple of desperate university students?)

However, I found something more E-related in my mother's extremely elderly educational resources from Another Age. She was educated in an era when England had an Empire. The title English History is self-explanatory; that's all they were taught at Adavale and elsewhere in 1931. The book sections are: The Growth of Civic Freedom (from the Anglo-Saxon moot to female emancipation), The Growth of the Industrial System (from Manors and Gilds (sic) to The Industrial Revolution) and Growth of an Empire Based on Liberty ("How the American Colonies Were Lost" [sob]through to.. oh gee, a couple of chapters on Australian self-determination, via chapters on the British bringing liberty to India and being cruelly rejected, and bringing liberty to the South Africans and beating those evil Boers, who eventually saw the error of their ways and showed "such a loyalty to the Empire that has surprised and pleased all its members." So there!). Why is this scary? I wonder how much of our modern world view will stand the test of time, or will future generations look at what we take for granted now and laugh? Will they snort, "Global Warming? They were so naive back then!" or "American cultural imperialism? They didn't last long, did they?" I sometimes think that it is the things we all know without doubt to be true that will turn out to have been egregiously in error. Just as the British Empire was going to last forever, bringing enlightenment to the entire world.

Scatterdays

This week I bring you V, from the car, the office and the kitchen.


As I know no-one who owns a Volvo, I valiantly considered photographing a valve from a vehicle, but this vesicated the vestiges of my feeble wits. Instead I bring you various vents and a visor, all thoughtfully made from vinyl and much more available.

As my office is virtual these days, I could only find these volumes on Visual Basic in my office, and a verso from one of them. (This is one of those occasions when a classical education comes in handy! A verso is the back of a manuscript sheet or, in the case of bound books, the left hand page.)

My kitchen is full of various victuals, vivers and viands beginning with a V. Here are some red wine vinegar, some vanilla and those essentials to vivify Australian life, iced VoVo biscuits! I didn't photograph the many vegetables, including the bucket of potatoes and inevitable volume of beans I just harvested from my vegetable garden. All we need is the vodka (ah I forgot, we have the potatoes for that!)and starvation is narrowly averted, yet again.

Scatterdays begins with an S...

.. and that's appropriate because I just scraped in!

My first Scatterday is Medical and it's that most useful of gadgets, a sphygmometer, or more correctly, a sphygmomanometer. Sphygmo, from the Greek sphugmos, pulse, and manometer, a pressure gauge, from the Greek manos, thin and metron, measure. So you won't be surprised to know it's a device for measuring blood pressure! (Medical types have literal minds, it seems.)I'm relieved to tell you that the stress of Christmas hasn't caused my blood pressure to soar, or anything serious like that! I don't quite know why we own one of these things, but we do.

My second Scatterday is a beverage, Sabra. This is my favourite liqueur of all, and possibly even surpasses my love of schnapps (none of your fancy flavoured rubbish, the real deal!). I don't have a bottle of schnapps in my cupboard at present (sounds like a reason to buy one!) but I do have this bottle of Sabra. It's an Israeli liqueur, which tastes like alcoholic Jaffas. (For those not lucky enough to live in Oz, Jaffas are round orange-coated chocolate sweets. They are delicious but they are also famous for being rolled down the aisles in picture theatres when I was but a young thing, making a significant clatter. It was always a hard decision whether to eat or roll.) This is quite an elderly bottle of Sabra, and I'm not sure you can even buy it in Australia these days, certainly not in mainstream grog shops.

Then, we have Christmas. Now it would have been so easy to photograph one of the several seasonal Santas that have stirred from their annual sleep, but instead I've selected a Star. This star has graced my Christmas tree since 1981, and was bought from an early precursor of the Oxfam shop, somewhere down in the inner city. It was constructed in India and the miserable smidgen I paid bought someone something, way back when. If you look closely, you can see one of the Santas below it (he's banging his own drum, I think) and over to the left, a snowman, who for some reason is carrying a shiny parcel. He dates from 1984, from a set that included a downhill-skiing Santa, some soldiers and a sitting-down snowman. Sadly, they are somewhere out of shot, but certainly present. David the chief tree dresser insists that every decoration must be included. Since I buy at least one each year, this number is not inconsiderable. One day, the tree will fall to dust beneath their weight.

Finally, as an extra, I bring you Stones, given to me by my god-daughter several years ago. And with them, I wish everyone a very happy Christmas, and a peaceful, safe and satisfying New Year!

Scatterdays D

Sorry, no actual photos this week, it's been that kind of week.

Had I taken photos, they would have been:
Sewing: My trusty darning foot on my sewing machine, and the difficult darts on the stretch cotton sateen pants I'm making, from my tried and true pattern, that did not want to describe my diameter but rather develop it to new dimensions. Dastardly darts! They have been disciplined into doing their duty now.
Vehicles: The dump truck and digger that the helicopter pilot I showed earlier drives when he's not detailed to fly helicopters. I think this toy set might develop into a theme like Pennie's Babushkas!
Touchy Feely: Well obviously, something I like the touch and feel of is David, but to keep this clean and family-oriented, I decided to photograph dirt. Yes, dirt, specifically the very lovely rich clean smelling dirt of my veggie patch, which is rewarding me by producing beans and tomatoes and silverbeet and beans and basil and baby squash and... did I mention the beans? Should anyone desire a few beans for dinner, by all means descend upon my garden to your delight and delectation. It's fast reaching the point when anyone foolish enough to visit me is obliged to leave with a bag of beans. You have been warned.

I also planned to photograph my collection of Dupioni silks. I have metres and metres of maroon Dupioni and magenta Dupioni,and a deep purple and a bright watermelon (this one a find at St Vinnies' op shop), a cerise one and a turquoise shot with purple, a bright blue shot with purple and a dusky pink and a silvery grey-brown. Yep, I love this fabric and whenever I see it at a good price (like half price, or in the case of Vinnies, 2.2m for $6!), I just have to buy it. I expect someone will have to drape them over my coffin in due course, but until then, I love it and occasionally make myself something from it, when I want to feel really special. OK, maybe if I get a minute one day, I'll photograph them for you anyway - they really are delicious!

So this week, you get to exercise your imaginations! On to next week!

Scatterday begins with a K

I'm early this week, because tomorrow I'll be partying with the Sydney SCQuilters. This week's Scatterdays photos begin with a K and are In My Neighbourhood, Dangerous Things and Blue Things.

In my neighbourhood, there is a kindergarten, of course. (I'm sure I'm not the only one to have one of those!) But it's right across the street from the shopping centre, where you will find our lovely pharmacist, Kim. We also have a Kent St, along with streets called Dorset, Somerset, Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridge, Oxford - bit of a pattern here, do you think? But I didn't get over there to take a photo.

My dangerous things are Knives (and I bet I'm not the only one to think of that too!)since I put the kibosh on kern (an Irish footsoldier) and a kestrel (hunting bird dangerous to smaller birds) and our collection of weapons doesn't include a knobkerrie. Though I think there's a kris about here somewhere. I included the Staysharp knife because a policeman friend of mine told me, back in the seventies when they became popular, that they were the Number 1 implement in domestic stabbings. There's dangerous for you!

My blue thing is my knitting bag. I made it in the fourth grade, so I was probably about 10 years old. Back in the dark ages, we girls were taught sewing while the boys did woodwork, and I remember being very envious of them! See my beautiful embroidery? I think it was probably unpicked a dozen times - Mrs Muller was a perfectionist! But by gee, her lessons have stayed with me these many years.