happy birthday to P and all other lovely Taureans!

P's birthday today...so happy birthday lovely husband and to all the many Taureans that I know!
Here's P's birthday card sketch...two lovely dogs :o)

happy anniversary!

6 years today since P and I were wed!  I picked some of the few autumn roses that we have at the mo...both P and I agree that these are much nicer than the lanky and characterless long stems that you can buy...so these days I request no flowers on occasions like this!

Instead, we had a lovely dinner at Quaff in Toorak Village, close to where we were married at St Johns church.  We had a nice surprise that there was a sculpture exhibition along the strip, with various sculptures being shown inside the shop windows...we had a squiz after dinner...

And when we got home, an amazing surprise for me on the coffee table...a Lily Serna number puzzle book...much better than long stemmed roses - yay!

garden windfall

I've been starting a series of workshops in the studio to unpack what is happening in this space...privileging making is the focus and I'm experimenting with what this means in various ways in the garden and the workroom and hopefully making some more tangible links between the two.  So far I've been thinking about dressing the garden and the workroom and objects within the space...

 It has been a windfall of sorts with a bit of rejuvenation being injected into my work...but I also had a very suprising garden windfall on the weekend...I was weeding and tidying up the garden edging under the apple trees and what I thought was a bit of rubbish (maybe something pulled out of the bin by the doggles or blown into the garden), was a cripsy $20 note!  It might just have been washed and fallen out of a hung on the line garment pocket, but I like to think that like the said rubbish sometimes does, it blew into the garden in a happy accident :o)

Gem and Hugs also got blessed and dressed by the garden on the weekend...pretty pups!

belated birthday

I've been super busy getting sorted out for the start of teaching at uni which begins next week...it's always a jolt to the system at this time of year and it forces a massive re juggle of priorities...and it's been a slow week anyhow as it was my birthday on Monday which has started my week off in a lacksidaisical kind of way!

I was lucky enough on Monday morning to find that my teasing georgia and graham thomas roses were kind enough to give me some blooms for my birthday...ta t george and gra gra!

...and my mum in law came and gave me some beautiful sculptural flowers...

I had to work...*blah*...but I did manage to pop out to the posh op shop where I bought some pieces of retro poly knitwear (I can't resist!) and also this lovely deco vase which will be fantastic for my lax stemmed david austins when the next abundant flush comes...

My favourite pressie was from hubby P who after some serious hinting got me bananagrams (oh it's an anagram!)...I saw it at third drawer down ages ago and have hankered after it ever since...

This was the message I found the next day when I got home...which was particularly sweet since my message that morning had been "please unpack the dishwasher today" :o)

p.s. this is not the intended use of bananagrams, it's a fast paced word game that is side "splitting" and very a "peeling"

it's a first...gemma and hugo, you've got mail!

birthday, baby cardi and beans

I'm amused that absolutely no-one has taken me up on my christmas giveaway offer of a plum jam recipe...maybe no-one else has any plums either!

I've been distracted by other bits n bobs anyhow...my lovely pal Belinda held a birthday party for her little boy who turned 3...she put on an amazing lunch and spread of party food...here's my origami'd birthday card, envelope made from a page from the weekender mag and the wrapped pressie using some of my gleaned paper remnants from my digi printing...

The pressie was an origami book and paper set :o)
I also made a start on the next sock yarn baby cardi...another pal is having her bub number two in february so I'm getting in early!

And I picked the first of the purple king beans which I have growing alongside and twining up the meyer lemon which is espaliered on the back wall of the house.  Not a bad weekend!

plum update and a christmas giveaway!

The lorikeets of a week or so ago have moved on and gemma has been finishing off anything that was left of the plums...

You might not have believed that I have a plum eating dog...but not only that, she's a plum picking dog!

Be patient with me re the dog pics...I just find gemma so darn cute when she does this (as you can see hugo is none too interested!)...and it's the only plummy amusement I'm going to have this year.  I'm wistfully thinking back to previous plum abundance...this next piccy was the low down branch that gemma was picking off after she was finished yesterday...

And that's about all I can see on the tree, so this years harvest is a total of three plums!

I'm not going to have any jam to give away this year...so for fun I'm offering a giveaway to blog readers...if you would like one of my plum jam recipes which I was folding up yesterday for christmas cards, send me your snail mail details to remnantgleaning@gmail.com and I'll post one out to you - anywhere in the world!  Hopefully you have more fruit in your neck of the woods than I do right now :o)

p.s. this final pic is last years jam :o(

kris kringle

We had our RMIT staff Christmas party yesterday...it was lovely and jolly with lots of food and drink and so kindly provided for us by the fashion program...
We had a secret santa/kris kringle where we had to bring a secret pressie within a $10 price range.  Since I've been wanting to focus being a bit more spontaneous with making, I had an idea for a crafted kris kringle and went for it...

I decided to use a technique I was playing with when I was developing ways to tessellate the leather remnants...this is a sample modeled by a 1/2 scale mannequin where I've punched holes in the leather and joined with jump rings...

I have a stash of parts club bits from when I was in Tokyo a couple of years back so I got these out to see what I could utilise...

 I had some beautiful quality kilt pins, so I grouped together some of my teensy leather remnants that I've been saving (I realise that I've developed a filtering process where I have a different technique for different sizes of leather remnant and this would be the last stage!) with one of the pins to create a brooch.

This is in progress...I had to play around with slightly different sized rings to get the balance and the fall of the pieces right to my eye...

I stupidly didn't take a pic of the finished piece and I wrapped it all up nicely in a re-purposed box and some of the paper I spoke about here and gifted it onwards before I realised...but I liked how it ended up being evocative of a some kind of a map of a continent, maybe Africa, but open to interpretation...it went to a very lovely person...S.R. I must catch up in the new year to get some photos!

privileging making

I've been struggling for a long time to work out what sorts of things I should be making and doing within this PhD.  You might have noticed that there's been a lack of designed and made stuff on here for a bit...a symptom of my lack of confidence and confusion over what I can responsibly bring into the world given the ethical issues attached to a lot of stuff...it's quite disabling...
Anyhow, I do make a lot of things for myself and the house which I fill my everyday life with and I'm thinking that it might be of use to start paying attention to and seeing value in these things.  It's pure love of making and/or transformation of ideas into reality that drives the creation of my more personal projects, which I think I lose when I try to get serious and more considered!  So my aim going forward is to privilege making...

So...I thought I'd start documenting and sharing some of my current/past/ongoing projects...

One of the things I always have on the go is a baby cardigan from sock yarn...I'm of the age where all my friends and family are having babies and this particular style goes down the best as a gift...

This is the second one which I made a few years ago (thanks to my pal for taking a pic for me...her second bub is wearing it now...I'm really bad at taking pics of these before I gift them!)  I must have made about a dozen of these now...They're made from 4ply printed sock yarn...

I always keep at least a couple of balls on hand...one ball makes one cardi...I think the cardi above was a smaller size as I had enough to make a beanie too...I love how the colours and stripes develop as you knit, it feels like a nice surrender to serendipity :o)

I usually make the 6 month old size...they're nice and versatile as the rib stretches out as bub grows...it's knitted sideways starting at one cuff and finishing at the other...

My latest making is something I've been thinking about doing for ages with the remnants from the cardigans which I've been collecting...it's been a bit of a guilty pleasure when I really have other things to do, but sometimes it's food for the soul and so satisfying to act swiftly on the desire to make something when you want to do it without any pressures...

I've been making granny squares, just a plain ordinary 5 round square, but so beautiful in this yarn...the colour changes take on another dimension and unpredictability in crocheted form and I love grannys in a thinner ply than you normally see.  This is all of the remnants made up now, so I'll join these to make a scarf or mat and gradually add to it over the years to come.  Also nice that I can pick out which squares are made from the remnants from certain babies cardi's...lovely!