one hundred boxes

that wild wind a few days ago blew in the change i have been wishing for , for so long. so now we have to pack up this house /farm. !!! i have moved in the past. packing was really no problem. but THIS time. oh we really have quite a bit more stuff. he hee... so i'm going to be busy sorting and throwing and packing ...that should be fun right? amidst all that we need to find somewhere to move to, in the next few weeks. nothing like everything happening at once.
we have a dream place in mind, ..can we find it? i'm really hoping yes.

windy

today while the wind blew wildly..and it still is blowing madly outside... i played in the kitchen with my gocco. i printed so many pictures and some fabric also. i was in that space of gocco printing bliss that i have come to love. the possibilities continue to grow.

i hope the wind is blowing some wonderful changes our way. it seems by the end of this week we may be looking for somewhere else to live..or maybe re-organising the way we live here?. there is so much unknown. but all the things i do know are the things that matter.

this is my painting i'm working on, playing with.

tennis

too much thinking

on the weekend we saw some very friendly kookaburras and lots of wrens. they like to eat coconut did you know? a plate of coconut outside and there were wrens coming to it all day. blue wrens...so very beautiful.and here is another gocco print (disaster). it would make a good bag for oats i thought. i do like the word hello though. i will make another hello print i think. think thought though ..ha? too much thinking.

the beginning and near the end

i made sindri a top from the fabric which is a combined print of mine and sindris ideas. i love that. and sindri loves it. i've ironed the print hoping that will be enought to set the print. i might iron it once more and then nervously wash it today.
this is a red print of a little red gum girl on some shimmery gold cotton fabric. i think it will make a special gathered skirt or maybe a kaftan / smock type top for a little girl.
i have squeezed some printing of fabric into my life..somewhere between being awake and breakfast time, or at midnight while the world around me sleeps. maybe it can show that i have squeezed it in. prints that aren't so perfect. colours that i wouldn't choose if i were sitting in the daylight in some other situation. but this is what it is for now. i really love being able to get an idea out of my head onto a piece of fabric. almost instantly. it may take a while for me to get to the ideas where i actually love what i see before me, but i have to wade through a lot of backlog in my head. so i'm having to be patient with myself, and my family are being patient with me.. food takes a bit longer to get into their mouths.. the washing pile is taking over the floor space in more than one room!!! but the kids are as happy as ever and my boy doesn't complain. so the tidiness of this place really mostly just affects my mental state. and if i'm having a good time in my little corner of happiness then it's all o. k for now.
the auction for our farm is this week. its a strange thing. everything could change dramatically all in a day. im trying to trust that everything will work out perfectly.
im also trying to remember that the people who challenge us in life have something to teach us about ourselves. its much easier to look at somebody else rather than ourselves.
so anyway, veda hasn't received her surprise if you are wondering...the time hasn't been right yet. i'm saving it for the perfect time...i will know it when it is here.
and now i must go enjoy the rest of this freezing cold sunday in front of a hot wood fire.

warm and nice

today our very sweet friends came over for lunch. lunch was delicious pumpkin soup that they brought with them. how lucky am i . it was nice to be inside our warm incubator. sharing dreams and laughing and forgetting about all the worries that sit in a cloud above my head.

how amelie loves to have her friends come to play with her. its such a beautiful thing to watch your kids have friends, and be friends. so the horses were all going somewhere? and there was also some interior design going on.
today two wonderful parcels came in the mail. sindri got some tattoos from his aunty 'retta which he told me to hide in his room, and veda got annoyed that she never receives mail. which wasn't quite true. what she didn't know was that in one of the bigger parcels was a surprise i had bought for her that she is going to flip about. ( i hope and imagine.) i was going to save it for the perfect time but i have had it here all day while she's been at school and i don't know if i can not give it to her. i'm so bad at doing that. the suspense kills me. so maybe i can wait until saturday morning..when she will wake up and find her surprise hanging on a coat hanger at the end of her bed. something she has wanted for a long long time.

the other parcel was more gocco supplies. oh yes. :-)

cyclone level 2

i knew another storm was coming. not the one in sydney. the one in my micro world.
if i knew it was coming i wonder what i could have done to calm it down before it arrived. could i have done anything? or is it just the way it is? like waves. coming going rising falling.
im feeling that there is also a volcanic eruption in the horizon. jeepers! what am i going to do to shelter us from the debris? a holiday at the beach would be perfect .
in the kitchen..ie kitchen, playroom, lounge room, art room, sewing room, bird aviary, oh yes and at the same time..the kitchen..... tonight, sits one FINISHED scarf for me and the three kids who will no doubt wear it/ fight over it .
.. and a big pile of fabric because i got a little over enthusiastic at spotlight today. now i'm going to have to do something with it.. move over all that other stuff on the kitchen table....its the sewing machines turn.
we need two kitchen tables.
no actually we need to hurry up and move to a biggggger house. or a same size house with a big studio for me. ok..and a fourth bedroom for veda.
in the kitchen is also an even bigger pile of washing that needs to be folded. oh the pain.
my mum came to stay the night this week. she's getting cuter as she gets older. i wish she would stop rushing back home. we must scare her away.
and finally. would anybody like to buy a farm?

monster sunday

yes the fun continued today...last night i wrecked another screen. .gee that hurts. so i was holding onto the last screen i had...but...today i found three more in the BOX ..hooray :-)

so it was Sindri's turn today....(i ruined his screen last night)... we had lots of monster-y fun with one of his drawings.. and whenI accidentally overlapped an image...oh wow ...another corner turned. we made pictures that look 3D. very cool.

I could lose myself in printing.. next...... fabric.

oh my gocco goodness

Veda could not wait. Understandably.

it's early saturday morning, and i have to say...i am bursting with excitement. it's like we have been lighting fire crackers in the kitchen...that sort of joy.... but no...what we have been doing is playing with our newest family member. a print gocco.

i bought the gocco off ebay and i was so lucky, when the BIG box arrived ( god i love getting mail) i opened it to find something like gocco heaven. not one but TWO goccos and TWO fabric stampers and heaps of ink and everything else i need. i don't need two of course....but now I can give Veda one to have forever... hopefully they will keep the gocco alive. I need to join the save gocco movement because my goodness....it is sooooooooooooooo fun, sooooooooooo exciting and soooooo addictive. We had the best time printing- after we worked it out. We wasted two bulbs because we had the print facing the glass the first time. oops. And we used the gocco pen to draw our pictures and it worked so so well. Its so much cooler than I imagined. Can you tell Im excited lol.

So Veda has printed a zillion beautiful fairy wrens that she drew. Each time we added different colour ink we got a surprise when we looked at the print. The excitement!!

My girl print was quite boring really he hee.... but the possibility of printing on fabric.....oh goodness...if it works i'm going to seriously burst.

Our Saturday morning has been wonderfulllll- a new little world has opened up.... the only problem is that we have to stop to eat...and that we will soon be out of screens and light bulbs.

And we also now have to leave the house...yes that's right, leave the warm cosy gocco nest...to go to the vet for one of Murrays cows. It has mastitis. And we can't have that can we?

I guess we could get some cardboard to print on while we are in town at the vets? yes...good idea. ok..off we go.............

my friend the bird

in real life its a willy wagtail...but i do love little blue wrens.

sideways

thankyou for the rain.
my daisy bush is very happy, flowering for the first time in her life :-)
i don't know why but i am always drawing eyes looking sideways. why is that?
i like it. but why.

untitled number one i think.

i have no new photos to share because i took the batteries out of the camera and put them in some toy. some silly toy that the kids played with for maybe 5 minutes. i will reclaim the batteries tomorrow.

so i went through the photo dungeon in the computer and found this photo. it is an example (a fantastic example) of what can be found on my kitchen bench. and on the kitchen table, and the floor , the couch, the entire lounge room and the bedrooms are not enter-able! i'm torn between letting the kids run wild with their imaginations or tying their hands behind their backs and just feeding them at feeding time ! the very moment i make space they are in it. making a cubby, or piling cushions..... making something amazing., they really are amazing but gosh sometimes i gets so so tired of all the STUFF surrounding me.

oh and guess what i found out today?..Sarah Blasko is touring again.... in Hepburn Springs in July. We will try our hardest to get there. so exc i t ed.... Minda? come. ? yes ?

in other news I just ate an almost full packet of gaiety chocolate wafer biscuits and now i feel quite sick and fat. silly me.

and finally.. a gocco is in the mail, maybe on a plane or a truck,.. a train?? on its way to me. god i hope i can make it work.

goodnight. time to go sleep off this sugar-i-ness. = crazy dreams for me tonight. maybe i should go borrow the kids worry dolls and put them under my pillow. the kids love their worry dolls. it's such a sweet, beautiful thing. to believe............... we have an elf living here that takes things. -says amelie.

seriously. goodnight.

wow

i saw this amazing work over at this nice place and they instantly reminded me of Sindri's awesome drawings. He has these fantastic adventures and battles and explosions that seem to be so real in his mind that end up on the paper in front of him. I love to watch him draw. How beautiful they would be , embroidered. And these embroideries above are also simply beautiful.

energy

this weekend i......
made a quilt for a new little baby girl Sienna, a cousin for our 3 chickadees.
made a skirt for Veda by tracing the pattern off another of her skirts that she will wear.
took the kids to see baby Sienna in hospital..she was one day old. and so so so little. i could have held her all night. except amelie and sindri also wanted to be on top of me.
ate thai takeaway for tea and lunch the next day. oh so good. today i declared thai chicken green curry (hot) would be my last meal on earth if i could choose.
went to see sindri play at auskick... dressed in his football outfit looking oh so cute.
did a lot of knitting of my scarf. its a scarf because that is all i can knit.
mowed the lawn late this afternoon in a late energy burst. and then went on a bike ride with the kids. my legs nearly died on the way.
phew.
there is no wonder why i fall into bed at night..or more accurately, don't want to get out in the morning.

the colours of my pastels

once upon a time i really loved to draw with oil pastels. i drew and drew and drew...i really loved the texture, the colours, the smell. i have my tin of pastels sitting in a (dusty) corner of my bedroom, probably sadly waiting for me to pick them up again.

maybe one day. or maybe not.

here are some of my pastel drawings. i'd like to get them made into smaller sized prints. or even smaller..cards.

maybe one day. or maybe not.

it was nice to open my folio and find all these drawings, like meeting up with old friends or maybe more like finding an old piece of clothing i used to love to wear.

on the first day of winter...

this morning was eerie, wild, rough. i was woken from a bad dream by a rude phone call, it wasn't a good start to the day. so i went outside and these images are what i found in and around my garden. there is certainly magic going on around me all the time...if only i open my eyes wide enough to notice.