off to my last day at work

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens
Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens
Brown paper packages tied up with strings
These are a few of my favorite things

Cream colored ponies and crisp apple streudels
Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles
Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings
These are a few of my favorite things

Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes
Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes
Silver white winters that melt into springs
These are a few of my favorite things

When the dog bites
When the bee stings
When I'm feeling sad
I simply remember my favorite things
And then I don't feel so bad

phobia

My Illustration Friday attempt for "phobia".

My Mum loves Mr You, but not too long after we got together she pulled me aside for a mother-daughter chat. With an expression on her face as though she had discovered that he was one of those people who picks his nose in the car while stopped at traffic lights, she launched in to her chat. It was short and to the point.

“Flossy, he’s just lovely, but I don’t think you’re going to be able to carry his children”

right…

She was referring to the fact that I’m very short and he’s quite tall. She continued…

“He will have tall babies and I’m not sure your body will cope.”

So you can imagine what that did for the fears I already had about having kids!

Co-incidentally (before I saw the new IF topic), I’ve already confessed these fears just recently. The cliff notes are that I have a phobia about being pregnant and breastfeeding. (Is it any wonder?)

Turns out I’m not the only one with this fear, so it seemed strange to me that this very comprehensive list of phobia’s doesn’t have anything to even remotely describe it.

Sure “Arachibutyrophobia” is there: the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth!!! But not a whisper about pregnancy, childbirth or breastfeeding. Might I suggest this list was prepared by a man.

Seriously, peanut butter on the roof of your mouth??!! In my opinion that’s one of the pure joys on this earth! I know having a baby is also one of those joys, but I might just stick with the peanut butter for a little while longer, thank-you very much.

NOTE: I realise after having a second look, that this illo may raise concerns. Let me assure you, despite how it looks, Mr You is not Big Bird!

johann's tash

Two people get on the train today, obvioulsy strangers, they sit behind me, not together, but nearby.

Nice Man: "So what song was that you were just singing?"
Nutty Woman: "Oh, yes that was (insert name of some concerto here) by Johann Strauss! I adore singing Johanne Strauss. Johann Strauss was from Austria, he composed wonderful dance songs..." and she launched into an essay about Johann Strauss, after obviously already having sung one of his numbers while waiting for the train.

At this point I put my ipod on. Later, during a quiet point in between songs, I could hear her still talking about Johann Strauss in great detail. I managed to quickly grab a pen and jot down this little gem before I forgot it:

Nutty Woman: "Johann Strauss's face was very good looking, he had a moustache!"

Well, I'll let you be the judge of that...

If you ask me that's no mustache, that's a beard who's chin part couldn't bare any more classical music and ran away to ROOOOOCK with this dude.

chalk the walk

We nipped into the city today to check out Chalk the Walk, Pavement Art Festival. I think my expectations were a little high as it wasn't as impressive as I expected (see Julian Beever's work for an example of my rather high expectations), but there were still some great pieces.

I didn't even notice how 3D these aliens were until I was looking at my photo's...


This was our favourite; gnarly octopus...


And then there were these pretty ladies flashing their birthday suits around a gorgeous garden. I really liked this one too, although you probably already knew that after seeing the shadow of my happy little spirit-fingers!


p.s. I don't normally get about town spirit-fingering things I like... "Hey bus driver, nice ride man! Spirit Fingers for YOU!"
I was actually just stretching up out of my short body to try and get a better photo, but then again I didn't realise my fingers got so happy when taking photo's either until I saw this. Maybe they do this more than I realise.

not helping

If I was to tell you Mr You asked if I was “ready to get sprogged up” this morning, I realise I may need to elaborate.

I want to have a baby… just not now. I’m still a few years off (I’ve been saying that for a few years now). Before I’m ready I have to somehow overcome my mortal, yet somewhat irrational fear.

I’m not afraid of babies. I have actually grown to love them, I’m even much less afraid of childbirth than I used to be. It’s the other stuff that makes me physically squirm; being pregnant and having a whole other person growing inside of you! It’s not a vanity issue, it’s more the result of watching V and Alien movies at too young an age causing long lasting damage.

But the worst pasrt is that I can’t even say the “L” word without feeling nauseous. You know, the “L” word that describes what happens to allow you to feed your newborn baby. Eeeeeeeeeeeeeewww.
Let me clarify; I have absolutely NO problem with women breast feeding, I think it’s a wonderful and natural thing… when other people do it.

It’s become such a joke for Mr You and some “so called friends” that they often say things just to take pleasure in my displeasure.

Once, when at some friends house for dinner, I walked into the room at the tail end of a conversation just to catch Mr You say “…yeah, watch this” he aimed toward me, loaded and then fired “Lactating Sow Udder!”

Oh! And how they all rolled in the aisles in hysteria watching my body twitch and my face contort into a shape similar to the way it would if I was to lick the belly of a moulting cat.

“Don’t you want a sprog slurping at your boob?” our friends, parents of two children themselves (or sprogs as they refer to them), managed to squeeze out through the laughter. "C'mon, spit out some sprogs". And on it went.

So, back to this morning with Mr You reading a news article about the current baby boom, reading a sentence out loud to me here and there:

“…will help avoid the economical downfalls of our aging population”
“…but will cause schooling crisis in a few years, and eventually an extremely competitive employment market”
“… are they attributing it to the baby bonus?”
(our government, believe it or not, offers a baby bonus of $5,000 for newborn babies)

Then he asked me, “Have you seen the new advertising campaign about having children before you get too old?”
“No” I replied, and sighed at the mounting pressure to hurry up and get over this roadblock before I’m “too old”.
He spun around and looked at me when he heard me sigh, concerned.
Then asked, “Are you ready to get sprogged up?” right before the taunting laugh returned.

That’s not helping!

change

My Illustration Friday attempt for "change".

As I perch on the edge of a very large life change myself, this week’s theme couldn’t have come at a more poignant time for me. Next week is my last week working at my job that I’ve been at for 8 years. I’m about to step over the edge into the unknown to try and move my working life away from the big beige business world, and align it more with my creative aspirations. Become more colourful.

My plans are small, vague, unformed, and cloudy. But you’ve got to start somewhere right? As exciting as this new start feels I’m petrified. Scared about how I will feel not being at my job after so long, thinking of what I will miss, and what I do next.

I find change hard. It’s a strange see-saw between excitement about a new opportunity, and a sense of loss and fear of the unknown. But there are many things I’m looking forward to. I’m grateful for that excited curious anticipation that is sitting just behind the fear, egging me onward. And I’m looking forward to taking the next step and seeing what colour I become.


EDIT: This is a re-worked version of my illo which demonstrates the effect I was originally after much better. My idea was based on colours growing out of the beigeness, but grey works better, and my beige was too bright. I guess the colour is already starting to seep in.

katamari

Okay, so I'm a little late off the blocks, but have you played this yet?

Last night I got to play Katamari Demacy on Playstation for the first time. It's SO my kind of game. There's bright colours, weird but cute characters, there's no blood, and the aim of the game is to push a sticky ball around and pick up bits of stuff lying around. It starts off small, picking up hair clips and batteries, but eventually your sticky balls gets so big that you can pick up fish, cats, people, buildings, etc, all to a snazzy tune. It's adorable, addictive and leaves you with a strong desire to to tidy stuff up! (Granted, with a ball of tangled sticky tape, but still, cleaning up is cleaning up).

cover your eyes

“You’ve got to just be cool” Mr You tells me. His Fonzie like mantra rang straight through both ears as I filled with excitement to the point of giddiness this week when I received a comment from Shauna.

Shauna’s What’s New Pussycat was the first blog I started reading regularly, and I still do, the first one that made me get the point of blogs. I’ve been reading her posts for years now; she’s wickedly funny, entertaining, and an impeccable writer. Even though I’m a huge fan (or maybe because of it) I’ve only ever lurked, so when she left a comment for me this week I completely freaked out.

Before thinking it through I dashed to her site and (sadly in the most uncool fashion) left the gushiest, most babbly comment EVER. I can’t even remember what I said now, something that resembled a giddy star-struck teenaged girl. I think I even compared myself to Tom Cruise jumping up and down on Oprah’s couch. eeek!

It was pret-ty bad.

The next morning flashes of the incident popped into my head. That awful feeling you get the morning after a big drunken office Christmas party and awake with a bad case of make-up smear among other things, flooded my entire body. That feeling of distant, unsure, but impending regret.

Pensively, through and apprehensive grimace, I clicked on the link to where I last left the offending comment… and it was gone! (that’s a bad sign)
BUT what’s worse, the entire post on which I left the comment was also GONE! Completely disappeared! No trace what so ever. That’s a really BAAAD sign.
(I hoped that maybe I’d dreamed the whole thing, but in every messy morning after somewhere deep down you know it’s real.)

I don’t know what happened, and it hurts me to think about. I eventually ran the whole scene past Mr You, prefaced with “Am I being paranoid, or does this seem bad?”

“OMG you’ve done it now” He shook his head “What have I told you? You’ve got to just chill out and be cool”

After a day of biting my lip and chewing my fingernails I returned to the scene of the crime. They say the guilty always do. And as though under a socially-spazmostic spell (or curse) of some kind, I left yet another long babbly comment on the next post. I couldn’t stop myself. WHY????

Anyway, it appears that Shauna has been watching nature shows about being under predator attack in the wild and has assumed the favoured survival pose. Fold your arms in tight, protect your vital organs, drop your head, avoid eye contact, stay very very still and don’t… make…. a…. sound.

Sorry Shauna. (gulp). I didn’t mean to creep you out. I guess I've learnt that I’m more of a Joanie than a Fonzie.

farm flossy

My Illustration Friday attempt for "farm".

After realising (when I was young) that neither my parents nor Santa were ever going to give in and get me a horse, my next tactic was to ask for a cow. I may not have been able to trot along on top of a cow, but I had a vision of me walking through the neighbourhood lazily chatting away to my cow, easily leading her by a rope as she willingly followed chewing on a straw of hay. How could Mum say no to a cow? It could keep the lawns nice and tidy and give us milk, it was a perfect plan, (despite having nowhere to keep it).

When I asked Mum she laughed and told me “You couldn’t keep a cow, they have to be milked before dawn every morning”
I’ve always enjoyed sleeping in you see, it’s a bit of a joke for my family.
She continued, “By the time you got out of bed the poor cow would have an udder so full of milk it would probably burst!”

I never got a cow… or a sheep (which was the next thing I asked for).
So this illo is my interpretation of a farm run by me; tidy lawns, neglected cows.

more on twins

Last weekend gave me two new insights into my recent fascination with twins.

The first was catching up with a friend I went to school with (I haven't seen her in 12 years, she's here on holiday from New York where she now lives). She is an identical twin, or at least that's what I had assumed all these years... It turns out that they're not identical (they're the other type). Even though they look identical, one is left handed and the other is right handed. Who knew?!
She was telling us how they did a Disney-like switcheroo at school one day, and pretended to be each other for a whole day (although she said it was really hard writing with the wrong hand all day long).

Did you know identical twins have exactly the same DNA? I didn't.

The second insight, well not really an insight, more of an interesting fact really....
Anyway, it was when we were at the Ben Folds concert. He was speaking about his twin daughters, telling us one was born around 11pm before midnight, and the other a few hours later after midnight. So even though they are twins, they have different birthdays, and GET THIS, are different star signs!!!! How cool is that!?


EDIT: I should really get into the habit of checking my facts more before posting. Mr You quietly mentioned to me that Ben Folds has a twin daughter and son, not twin daughters as I had said.
And I also want to thank my good friend Jen from Island Arts who seems to know much more than me about twins. She let me know that my twinny-friend could very well be an identical twin after all as it is not uncommon for identical twins to have reversed features (i.e. right and left handed). Thank-you and sorry for the clumsy post, I just got a bit too excited I guess.

dreamscape

A while ago I had a crazy dream, Shoofly did a painting of it for me (for the swap we did), it arrived last week. Isn't it great?! I love it.
It's bigger and more dark and moody than her normal pieces, and the details are amazing; I love the spider in her hair and on her dress and the incredible Howls Moving Castle building in the background. But the coolest bit is that the girl even looks like me; big head, little body, blue-grey eyes and long hair with curls on the ends (the hair is even parted on the same side).
Anyway I'm so thrilled to have one of her pieces, it's beautiful and completely different to seeing it on a monitor.
Not only that, I also got a Polly print, a glass pendant and a colour-in book that Shoofly did for her job once! Such a fun package, many many thanks.

Last weekend's summer weather was short lived and we're back to pouring rain. We went to the Sydney Opera House on Saturday night to see Ben Folds play with the Sydney Symphony Ochestra. It was excellent, a bit strange at first but then they got used to each other by the second song and the rest was quite incredible.

Spent all day yesterday getting a start on sewing a new lot of bags. Rainy days aren't so bad when there are bags to be made.

safe as houses

My Illustration Friday attempt for "safe".

I would love to know how or where the expression "safe as houses" originated. Does anyone know?

archipelago

I have a little tradition: ever year I go to see the Spring Flower Show at David Jones (a fancy department store). It's on in the first week of Spring every single year, and every year I'm amazed. The window displays and whole first floor are decked out with live flowers, plants and trees. This years theme is "Archipelago: a sea of living colour", so amongst the orchids and frangipanis were palm trees and giant tiki totems, as the store became a mini Tahiti. The windows were decked out like Gauguin paintings, while others were like underwater reefs. It was less fragrant than other years, but still delicious.

shoofly's bag

Shoofly finally got the bag I made for her, so now I can share it with you guys without spoiling the surprise.

The brief from her was that she likes to carry a very small bag, 6x7 inches with a 51inch strap, and a zipper to close it. (She must wear it across her body with the bag part sitting at hip height). She mentioned that she prefers subdued colours and that she normally wears plain colours, (not a bright pattern person). I looked up her bio and found out that her favourite colour is green, so I started there.

Rather than using patterns as the main feature, I wanted to focus more on interesting fabric textures (but still keep it subtle).

I’ve had the soft olive green Egyptian cotton in my stash for a while. It has a lovely almost fluffy-flannelette feel to it, but you wouldn’t know this unless you touched it.
The main body area of the bag (the purple and brown) was loosely inspired by Shoofly’s recent shoe purchase.
I was a very happy shopper the day I bought the purple fabric. It’s a raw Indian pure silk usually costing around $70 a meter, but I managed to pick it up for half the price! There’s no other way to describe it but sublime. It once again feels soft and almost fluffy, and you’d never really guess it was silk as it has more of a linen look to it.
(Shoofly: Because of this silk you won’t be able to chuck the bag in the washing machine, unfortunately it’s dry clean only).

I added a very dark brown velvet ribbon, once again inspired by the shoes.

Back to the front flap…

The leaf fabric is a vintage piece of upholstery fabric that I have a few small scraps of. It was left over from the cushions of a cane lounge we had in our house when I was a child (when we lived in the hot, tropical, rainforresty, north end of Australia). I’ve sewn some light blue lines over the top for decoration, and left one of the edges unfinished. The other edge is bound with a bit of the bag strap (to make it more coherent), it comes beyond the bottom edge to make it easy to grab when opening the bag. I’ve also sewn on some buttons to tie all of the colours together, add weight and give a cute crafty look.

Engineering wise, this was the trickiest bag I’ve made so far, (I don’t use patterns when I sew, or recipes when I cook – mind you I probably should get a recipe book as I’m not very good at cooking at alllll).
Because the silk is quite delicate I lined the entire bag in a strong pre-washed calico, and also a thin layer of wadding to give it body and make it sit in the right shape (not go floppy and have the rounded corners sit round, even when there was stuff in the bag).



There were a few annoying yet common traits about small bags that I really wanted to avoid. Even though it’s small I wanted it not to be squishy so I added an inch of depth (which I lined with heavy weight interfacing to keep it sitting square). I also wanted to make sure that it was easy to get your hand in there; there’s nothing worse than a small bag that you have to force your hand in and out of. To avoid this I made the zip extend an inch down either side of the bag, not just along the top, to make the opening larger.

The lining is a cute pyjama like print, which once again ties the green and purple together. I prefer light coloured lining in my bags, it make it easier to find stuff.
And finally the strap is a subdued blue with a purple-ish pattern.

Shoofly has told me that she loves it (and I can’t tell you how relieved I am).
I had heaps of fun making it, and I hope she wears it every day!

sprung

SPRING!!!! And boy am I happy about it! It’s like Spring flicked the weather switch on its way in and suddenly it’s a beautiful sunny 28 degrees (that’s 82.4 for all you Fahrenheit folk). It feels so wonderful, especially as just a few days ago it was so cold. I was saying to Mr You today that because the change in temperature was so quick and extreme, it felt like we had gone somewhere on holiday.

We spent the day outdoors soaking it all in. I picked a package of fabrics up from the post office this morning, then we joined Elle and Kilkenny for a long lazy café courtyard breakfast. After that we stopped in a guitar shop on the way to an outdoor market. The rest of the afternoon we pottered around the garden, cutting our small patch of grass, observing new blooms and drinking tea. We had such a relaxing holiday like day.

I’m experiencing that amazing sensation of uncurling my heat-retaining posture, unclenching my hands, and taking a long, steady, deep, sunny, breath in, and out.
I know that’s not the end of the cold, there’s always another chilly snap before the end of Spring, but for now I have a taste of warmth and am looking forward to more of it.

While we were at the market today we bumped into Wendy, a lady I used to work for. I haven’t seen her in about 8 years, so it was amazing to see she still has her stall there after all this time. She’s a ceramic artist, and when I was at Uni I worked part-time in her studio helping her make ceramic kitchen wear to sell at the market. She’s one of those excentric arty people you don’t come across too often; someone who is perfect for that lifestyle and enjoys every minute of it.

Her studio (with glass ceilings) was upstairs of her inner city terrace house. When you stepped inside you could have stepped into a little house in Provincial France: complete with a pianola, hand-painted silk wall hangings, black and white checked tiles on the kitchen floor, handmade plates, bowls and cups, a paved courtyard built around an olive tree, and 3 dogs and 3 cats. She’s a sweet loving lady who surrounds herself with family and friends, and treated her pets like her children, tying a bandana around their neck each day before taking them out walking. (When she did this you could see the pride fill in their little doggy chests).

We stopped and chatted with her for ages, we were so happy to see each other, she insisted on giving me this sweet “Pirate & Mermaid” platter. I was chuffed, even though I made stuff with her for about 3 years I don’t have a single piece. I painted a portrait of Lacey-T on a platter for her 21st, I painted a plate and a tile for my Mum, and another platter for my Dad, but forgot to do anything as a memento for myself.
This myth-filled platter captures Wendy’s whimsical style perfectly, I’ll treasure it.

It’s so encouraging to see someone living a life based around their creativity. Especially since I handed in my resignation at work yesterday. Yes, you heard right (gulp). I’m not going to say too much about it because:
1) I’m still in shock, it doesn’t feel real yet
2) I’m working up till the end of September
3) I have no idea what I plan to do after that
4) And if my mother hears about this… eeeeek!