bags with buy-able-ness

I am so excited to announce that a couple of my handmade bags will be for sale! Yes, I've finally gotten around to making some bags to sell. These babies are on their journey to Artstream Studios right now, as we speak.

bag o' birds


all seasons trees


lone wolf


They are due to arrive at the shop in the first week of September (that's next week). So keep your eye on Susan's blog, and the online shop for their arrival.


I also made this little purse, out of some vintage fabric I picked up at the local secondhand store, for my friend for her birthday. I call it the "Spring in the South" purse, and I LOVE the fabric.

Now that I've finished all those, I can start packing all my sewing gear. Yikes!

a bit more show and tell

Here are a few snaps from our trip away last week. This one is, you know, pretty Spring flowers (they're just too hard to resist).


We have a friend who's parent's live up near where we were looking for a new home. We were lucky enough to be able to stay in their granny flat. And when I say lucky, I mean it. Their house was lovely, on a beautiful block of land in the bush. It made such a difference after driving around towns all day long (for a week) to be able to come back to a "home" at the end of each day; flop on the lounge and have a cup of tea. We can't imagine how different our week would have been if we had to stay in a cheap, soul-less hotel. Anyway, the first and last shots in this bunch are the view from their back veranda. The middle photo is the red dirt at Valla.


One of the towns we were looking at had the most amazing mosaic all along the front and side of the local police station. The mosaic was apparently made by one man, and you could honestly spend all day looking at it. It's made to look like a set of waves rolling in off the ocean. But on closer inspection you realise it's made of cups and plates, and teapots, and soap-dishes, and porcelain figures, and dolphin shaped bottle openers, and bunnies, and bulls and all sorts of paraphernalia!!! Like I said it's amazing!


Driving around a suburb one day we saw 3 kangaroos on someone's front lawn. (One of them had a pouch full of joey). So surreal for a city girl to see. We stopped the car, and took a few snaps, and talked about how we could train Tilli to sit in a pouch. heeee.

look!

You know how I mentioned I had finally made prints of my illustrations, well yesterday I dropped off 5 big prints and 2 small ones to a fantastic new children's store in a nearby suburb. The prints are limited edition giclee prints, and are framed with lovely big mats. They looked so nice once they were all finished, but they looked even better in the shop! It was so surreal seeing my works framed and on the wall of a shop, they suddenly looked all fancy, and I had a split second of seeing them as though they weren't mine.



The shop is quite new, and is the type of place you dream about owning. It has the coolest vintage wallpaper, and she had filled her store with amazing items from all over the world (some of it she buys straight from Etsy!). It's rather "boutique" (translation: a little on the pricey side), but in the best kind of way, with unique, quirky, well made things. Clothing, decor, books, softies... It's really a most unique store. And she plays fantastic music.

I went in there one day. The store was brand new. I don't know what came over me but I introduced myself as a local artist and mentioned that I do childrens stuff. It was so unlike me! Anyway, one thing lead to another and yesterday at lunchtime I delivered my first batch. By closing time 2 big prints had sold already! (fingers crossed that it keeps up like this).

Anyway, if you're in Sydney, go check it out. The shop itself is well worth a visit:
My Messy Room
111a Smith St, Summer Hill.

soon to be

Thanks so much for all your kind comments, and for getting excited with me. And since you asked so nicely...

1. This is the side view of what will soon be our new home (notice all the trees).
2. And there's Mr You again, this time he's sussing out the beach down the street.

mission successful

After spending over a week driving around nearby towns (well nearby to where we'll be moving) we looked at a LOT of houses, and know all the areas quite well. I'll tell you one thing; DON'T ever take a house based on how nice the photo's on the internet look, that's one lesson I became very aware of. I don't know how they do it, but those real estate photo's are incredibly deceiving, it's all about what they don't photograph.

Anyway it was a fun week, exhausting, but fun. And on the long drive home we got the phone call to tell us that our application was successful on the house I liked the best! It was so hard, some houses were nicer but in bad locations, some were on beautiful blocks but not convenient to anything, some were bigger but smelly and kinda gross... So we had to do some weighing-up and working through.

Anyway the house we'll be moving to is so cute. It's unusual and hard to describe (half brick, half Queenslander, big shady verandas), it's not as new or spacious as others, but I loved it right away. I don't know why, there was just something about it. It's nestled in amongst palm trees and backs onto the bush. It's green and lush and only a short walk to a gorgeous, practically deserted beach.

It's a 15min drive back into town, (and I was sooo relieved to see the town does have sushi, so I'll be fine). The suburb we'll be in doesn't have much itself, just the essentials: a corner store, a fancy café, an art gallery, a hairdresser and a bottle shop, and that’s it. What else do you need? It's surrounded by bush and beaches.

I know, it's sounding idillic isn't it? But wait... it's called Emerald Beach! hehehehe, I'm almost giddy at how "golden" it all sounds. So anyway, now I'm getting excited. The next 3 weeks leading up to the move are going to be full-on. And I'm still supressing the sadness that will errupt when I acknowledge that we'll be moving 7hrs away from all our friends, but at least now I know we'll be going somewhere so lovely they will all be dying to visit.

p.s. the photo above is an attempt at a before/after, from/to kinda thing.

tilli lily

I felt bad leaving this space for a week on such a wingy whiney way (see previous post), so here's some cute and pretty to brighten up the void while I'm gone. (Also so Mr You and I can look at her while we're away).

1. Doing her best to look innocent and as sweet as pie
2. Showing off the name tag I made for her out of fimo. I made a whole batch actually. It sews on like a giant button, has her name and our phone number etched in. It's great because nothing that dangles stays put, so at least this one she can't grab and pull off. Plus it's light-weight and easy to spot. (And, yes that is a pot of stones. It used to have a plant, but she "removed" that. Now there are just stones that heat up in the sun, which she likes to sit on, and then flick about. In this pic she's just warming up to catapult one across the room).
3. "I is in your greenery impersonating your bloom!"


Enjoy your week. I intend to return with more time, good news and photo's.

slack slacky slackness

I've become such a slack blogger of late. Life is just getting so hectic, it's all in the way. This week I've had the flu, Mr You is sick in bed today with some nasty stomach bug, and the house stuff seems never ending. This week inbetween the open houses, we had groups of building and pest inspectors through. All banging on the walls, talking loudly on their phones, stomping through the house, clambering under the floors and through the roof, and then walking 100 year old dirt through the house.
I can say quite certainly that I am soooooooo sick of mopping up after strangers.
It's quite difficult to cull stuff, pack boxes and sort crap, while still keeping the house looking spotless at all times. There should be a prize at the end of it all... at least a tacky trophy of some sort.

This is the final week of it though. The house auction is on this weekend, and then the countdown is really on. We're going away to find somewhere to live next week. A semi-holiday with a BIG agenda. Basically we can't come back until we've secured a new house to live in, so the pressure is on. My internet searches have drifted from looking at sensible suburbs close to a decent sized town, with an airport and broadband internet etc, to pockets of secluded houses by the beach, nestled in the bush. Totally un-sensible, but I think I'm just so in need of a holiday, that my search has dreamily shifted to places as far away from hectic-ness as possible.

In amongst all this some very exciting things have been happening for me. I've been making some new handbags to send to the store at Artstream for September, I've managed to convince a new (very cool) children’s clothing store here in Sydney to buy some prints of my illustrations... Oh I've finally MADE prints of my illustrations, and business cards (that's only been 18 months in the making, heh heh), AND I've managed to get an article and illustration in the next edition of a new zine. It's all just happened at once and is keeping me extremely busy. It's so exciting! Really exciting, but I think it's getting lost under all the house drama. Oh well, I promise to provide links and pics and much more info as each of these things actually comes to fruition.

I'm so looking forward to getting through all this house stuff. For all that planning that is cluttering my mind to just peel away as things get done. To clear space and allow in a little light and breeze. I'm hoping once we get back we'll be able to stop over-thinking, start doing, and be able to spend more time with our friends in our final weeks in this sparkly city.

I'm also looking forward to being able to spend more time here. Catch up on what you guys have been up to. Post more often than once a week. Have time for pictures and Illustration Friday again. ...And stop moaning. I'm looking forward to the lighter side of life.

Bare with me.

p.s. We managed to find a really cute cat boarding place for Tilli to holiday in next week. It has an outdoor area with a fish pond, with live fish! That'll keep her occupied, (and console us a little).

i has a lucky girl

Look! Vanessa made this gorgeous stamp colllaged frame for me. Isn't it amazing?

Here take a closer look:




It's a frame but I really can't think of anything to put in it that won't detract from how beautiful the frame is in itself. So I think I've decided to put a mirror in there.

How come I recieved such a fanciful package? Well a little while ago Vanessa asked me to paint a picture of her friends as a wedding gift, to them, and in return she promised me one of her amazing stampy creations. And that's not all, I also got magnets, (one that's a map of Sydney as a keepsake for when we leave), a cool mixed CD, lip gloss, and a hand knitted "dishcloth" (although there is no way in the world I'll be using it on dirty dishes! It's far too nice).

Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you Vanessa. I absolutely love it!