What to do in winter

... when it's cold and damp outside!


1. Bake bread
2. Run around the park with the dog
3. Look for colour around you

I'm gradually adjusting to the fact that it is winter in Melbourne, and that the house is chilly all the time, except when I'm cooking. (Mmm... now, if I needed inspiration, that would be enough!)

It's a bit daunting, facing the prospect of job-hunting, but I'll get there. In keeping with the plan to draw something everyday, I was off to the art supply store yesterday to get a few coloured pens. The textile paint accidentally became mine, too.


I was out in the garden in my big fluffy sheepskin slippers, photographing the paints in the cold winter sunlight this morning. It's exciting to be drawing again!

B

Waking to rain

This morning I woke up early to the sound of rain - it felt very, very early, because it was still dark, but it was probably only 6:30. There's nothing better than listening to a soft fall of rain on the roof while you're all warm and snuggly in bed with big puffy covers and your one true love (snoring gently, ahem.)

It's lovely to get back home and gradually unwind. The unruly piles of random stuff are gradually moving away like some ultra-slow vortex spiralling into the black hole of tidiness (as you can tell, tidiness does not always sit well with us). So now you can see most of the floor of the spare room again, and some of the table, and some of my desk. And I made scones. Achievements.

The funny thing is, having lived out of a suitcase for three months with a limited wardrobe (two trousers, one dress, 5 shirts, two jackets) - I'm beyond all patience with my crammed-in bulging wardrobe and drawers of shrunken, stretched or simply unsuitable clothes. I mean, I didn't miss any of it, so clearly I need very little of it, right?

So the day after we got back, and in the last few days, I've been going through everything. Yup - nope - doesn't fit - didn't like it anyway. This time I'm even making myself ditch the 'maybes'. So far there are three large bags by the door, and I've only done the drawers and 1/3 of the closet. I'm dreading the rest of it. It's hard to keep up the strong spirit of willpower (me being a hoarder and all), but I'm trying. I've got to get the stuff out of the house quick before my resolve wavers and I get used to it all again.

Anyway. I've been catching up on what's happening in the crafty city called Melbourne, and there I'm loving what I've found!

First things first, I want to take classes here at Thread Den. So many of them look great, and one of my resolutions on the trip was that I was going to learn to screenprint, and to sew garments properly (as opposed to making it up as I go along). I'm in!

I heard all about Thread Den on Craft City Melbourne - is this new, or was I just blind?! Ah, looks like it started a day or two before I hit the road in May. It's a collection of reviews of great places to find crafty goodness, supplies and provisions for a crafternoon out and about. Best, it's arranged by suburb, so you can check up on what's local, or hit an area with your craft friends for an afternoon out.

And I've subscribed to MixTape zine - boy, I can't wait till my first issue arrives! I've been looking at their blog and reading reviews, and I'm so curious to see. I'll let you know when it arrives.

Last, but not least: a little stitchin' -

A little rash of hexagon fever passed through yesterday, leaving me weak at the knees and collapsed on the sofa with stacks of sixes of various colours all around me. A flower later, and no more papers, and I finally managed to stop. I've got to learn to wear a thimble all the time: I just hate pushing the blunt end of the needle through my fingertip - yeeow.

The last few stitches went in on my mini-quilt for the Craft Sanity collaboration. With a binding and a label, we'll be there soon!

I've got a sleeping dog on my lap - mmm, toasty! - and so it's time to drink some coffee and stop this over-dog-one-finger typing nonsense.

B

Dignified Dawg

Now, here's something I will not do. 

This lucky Louie is wearing a handmade coat, courtesy of the good folks at Quilting Arts magazine. While I generally love their magazine and appreciate their creativity, I can't see our Toby putting up with this. Ever. (Or maybe it's just me who's got a well-developed sense of dignity.) 

We picked Toby up last night from the friends who have

 kindly looked after him for the last three months. Shoulder-high leaps and bum-wagging wriggles - we think we remembers us. Even so, I'm not making him a coat.... 

(Jacket by Pokey Bolton; photo credit Quilting Arts magazine 2008)

Playing with your food

It's nice to be home, but the jetlag makes me walk around the house all day, moving things from one room to another and back again. Or at least, that's how it feels. And waking up at 3:15AM. Man, I hate waking up at 3:15AM!

But one of the best things about being home is the kitchen. We went to the Queen Vic Market this morning (*sigh*, my one true love!), and now I get to play with my very own kitchen and all those lovely recipe books again. What to make first? Something simple: roast chicken with wine and something, I don't know what yet - maybe pinenuts and garlic. Mmm. And baked winter veggies. 'Cause yes, it's winter folks, and it's pretty chilly in here at night.

And now I'm online catching up with some reading - and amused by these amazing whimsical carved food art treats, spotted on Bibi's Box and as reported in the New York Times in the article Knife Skills: Creating Feasts for the Eyes.

There's a slide show of some pretty awesome food art, including the lemony bear above - which is credited to Saxton Freymann, author of many books on the topic - on the New York Times' Playing With Food page.

The travel quilt: finishing stitches

We're home. Three months of around-the-world excitement, bag-lugging, photo-snapping, talking looking and thinking, and here we are: back in our little house. We close the door behind us and the travelling is all over.

Or not.

I feel like I do when I've just completed a really big, really involving hand-quilted quilt. You plan and cut and sew and work on it for months. Starting it is exciting, but sometimes you have to find the energy to pick up and keep going. You learn to fall in love with it all over again somewhere in the middle. You make mistakes. -And if you're me, you veer of the plan and make adjustments partway through. You see new things in the process, get into the rhythm of it, breathe and relax while you're stitching and think of other things. Sometimes big problems sort themselves out, quietly, at the back of your mind while you are stitching.

So too with travel. A really long trip takes planning, time, and a different kind of energy than a short holiday.

You start off on your adventure, and everything's exciting. Sometime, perhaps several weeks later, you make a few mistakes and you get tired, and perhaps a little overwhelmed by the enormity of the trip (just like a quilt!). You need somehow to learn to love the travel life again - to think about what you're seeing, and to allow yourself just to be who you are, wherever you are. Not defined by house, friends, job, car, clothes, culture, language - all of those things we use when we're at home to say to the world "I am this kind of person". Everything is now, in the present tense.

Weeks on the road and your ties to home re-knot and re-arrange themselves: some friendships become more important to you (as you realise how much you're looking forward to seeing them again), and others are reunited - people you used to see every week but who you've left and moved away from. Those friends are still there, still themselves, only maybe a little bit different, and that can be exciting.

Finally, with the deadline in sight, you start to pack things in. When I quilt, I nearly always miss my deadline by a week or two, and the same with this trip: we decided to extend our stay and return a week later than planned. Which has its own challenges, not least financial! We fell prey to the 'just one more thing' trap as we tried to see to much, got sick, had to sleep - and finally, took those last days in Vancouver, the last stitches on the binding of our travel quilt - nice and easy.

So here we are: back in Melbourne, from summer to midwinter, in our chilly little house with all the leaves off the tree in the yard (hey - who stole the leaves? Oh yeah, winter started while we left).

And we're all wrapped up in a cuddly quilt of our memories.

Doing some drawing

While sorting out some stuff at my parent's house, I came across a big box of my old sketchbooks from 10-15 years ago. Maybe a dozen or more, thick books filled with not-so-good and rather-good drawings and ideas - they were pretty inspiring, because I remembered what it was like to play and draw ideas every day.

On this trip, I've tried to draw something, even if only something small, every day. This is a big thing because I haven't done that for about 10 years - basically since these sketchbooks got put away. -And although I'm enjoying it and I'll persevere, it's annoying how much I've forgotten (like how to draw convincing feet!) Grr. It's not that I didn't want to draw, all those years, it's just that other things - like learning to embroider and to quilt - took over. And so drawing retreated into a corner and instead of drawing and painting anything that took my fancy, all I did were the occasional black and white cartoons for many, many years.
I sat down and drew this one after the Quilt Hunting expedition at the O'Keefe ranch, having seen a stack of folded quilts in a cupboard just like the pile in this cartoon, above.

It's amazing how some feedback sets you running again: I've been working on a collaborative project with a new friend, Jennifer of the CraftSanity blog and podcast (watch this space: we'll be launching it very soon!), and also enjoying looking at the incredible leaps in skill made recently by my Dad as he paints more and more often, and takes lessons and challenges himself. (And he's organising a fantastic Canadian art show, Art Visions 2008). So I am trying not to listen to the demons and to learn to draw feet again - I can see from the old sketchbooks that I once knew how, so it can't be all that bad!

At the bottom of our suitcase, as we head into the final, homeward leg of our round-the-world trip, I've got a fat soft big old sketchbook, busting with ideas. -And the last 50 pages are empty, so I've got some work to do: time to fill 'er up!

Quilt Hunting, part 2

Well, it wasn't only quilts that we found at the O'Keefe ranch - there was also a cowboy exhibition in the museum, with all sorts of artifacts, including these beautiful embroidered gauntlets.

The caption reads: "Beaded and fringed gauntlets were extremely popular among the cowboys of the BC Interior. These gauntlets from the South Okanagan are ornamented with beadwork and embroidery".

When I first saw the gauntlets, they reminded me of the embroidery you tend to see on Canadian First Nations' items, such as moccasins and gloves. There are a few examples in the Textile Museum of Canada, such as this embroidered and beaded decorative cuff (presumably for a coat), made by Woodlands Cree in Western Canada, c. 1880, or this pipe bag from Ontario, of about the same time.

Most of the photos in my previous post were from the Schubert House, on the ranch -- but of course, there was a main house, which was decorated in rich style as befitted a successful ranching entrepreneur of the late 1800s.


The recreated ranch house kitchen...


... with a triple Irish Chain quilt on display below the window.

The very expensive William Morris wallpaper on the stairwell and hall. Somehow this stairwell manages to be dark and rich-looking, but not gloomy. Perhaps it's because of the light wood of the banisters and the high contract on the wallpaper, or perhaps also because the staircase is freestanding and there are no supports or posts constricting the space?

You can't see it in this picture, but a judiciously-placed mirror enabled the lady of the house to glance up to the upstairs landing from the parlour - just to make sure that there were no eavesdroppers amongst the children of the house!

And finally, upstairs in one of the bedrooms, a beautiful washstand sits next to the bed with a faded beauty of a log cabin quilt. The colours of the room are cool and comfortable, but not dull - simple and charming.


- Now I want to go and make a log cabin quilt!

B