Croftville

Spinning Newspaper

For the ultimate recycling, Greetje van Tiem has spun yarn from old newspapers. It looks quite beautiful, but I'm guessing not very waterproof.

read how she did it here.

False advertising - don't mess with me

It wasn't a good day to mess with me.
An hour and a half in the dentist's chair and two temporary crowns later, I was feeling a bit battered and a bit unable to pronounce 'S', 'T' or 'C'. Luckily, the multiple injections into my gums (sorry, sorry, but I like to share my pain around) meant that nothing was hurting when I went back to work, and I provided much amusement to my co-workers, by asking if anyone had seen my scissors and trying to "exshplain" what I'd just had done.

Later in the afternoon, when half my tongue had woken back up, I decided my stomach could no longer be ignored and I dug out my emergency work soup, thinking if it got really desperate, I could suck it down with a straw.

And here we come to the false advertising part of the post. The packaging on my soup was a beautiful green. The colour cauliflower and pea soup should be. I was excited. Numb, but excited.

Then I opened the lid, and saw this:

This is brown. Not green. And yes, i know it looks gross, but as I said, I like to share the pain around.

(almost) Wordless Wednesday

Bertie and Oliver participate in Wordless Wednesday. Except when Oliver is involved, the best anyone can hope for is almost wordless.

Today he is reminiscing about when he gets almost empty yoghurt pots. We haven't yet had to employ the jaws of life, but it is only  matter or time.

Exhibit A

Monday Chocolate

Sometimes the best thing to do on a Monday is eat Haigh's chocolate. Before 9.30. But stopping in time for lunch. Except lunch is then delayed as tummy is full of chocolate.

gutter gardening

As seen on homegrown.org, you can grow vegetables in anything! It looks like the lettuces are doing really well.

Culture and Food

This weekend I went to a sculpture exhibition at Australian Galleries in Collingwood. The sculptor is a wonderful, inspiring man who taught me sculpture at Ballarat Uni - Peter Blizzard.

photo from www.peterblizzard.com

He taught me a lot about negative space, shapes within air, how to find inspiration in my surroundings, how to choose materials that already hold a beauty within them, even before they are shaped, moulded and fused together.
A lot of what I learned I apply to my life outside art, and that's the best kind of education.

I also made honey joys. They were yum.

Recyling into beauty

I found these bowls on Design*Sponge - my latest blog-find that I'm trawling through the archive on.
They're made of PET bottles - all those soft drink bottles that get hopefully recycled, but often just thrown away.
In the hands of Gulnar Ozdaglar, they turn into ethereal bowls, light fittings and jewellery. And all the holes are made by hand. One at a time.

long weekend

Today was a Monday Public Holiday - and it was great!

I watched the Will and Grace marathon on Foxtel with Bertie and Oliver, ducked out between the heavy rain showers to plant out my broccoli seedlings, made a banana and pecan cake with this recipe, drank mugs and mugs of tea and surfed the web - a lot!

Below is a pic of the cake, it's not as blurry in real life.

Tumbling away

I blame Loobylu.
She was the one who introduced me to Tumblr and now I'm a little bit hooked. Just a smidge.
Every time I see an amazing image or blog entry, my first thought is to tumble it. I love having all these pics together - like a big virtual inspiration board. And I can't loose track of where it came from, either.

At this stage I'm still going to work. Fingers crossed Tumblr won't win.

Freya Tumbles

Extreme gardening part 2

The rest of my extreme gardening was done today. But not by me. It was time for the professionals. They came, they waved their magic chainsaws and wa- la!

Below are some shots of our garden before (with emphasis on the dangerous looking trees) :

the view from the back door...

And lastly, the big scary tree:

It was dying off, the roots were rotting out and it had its sights set on next door's architecture...

The after pictures are quite dramatic:

And as promised, here is a shot I took from the back gate looking towards the house showing the whole of our back yard. (It's the first time I've seen the whole length too!)

Now I can plan my new trees...