Australia Day, the weather and other bits and pieces

Happy Australia Day to all Australians, and to the people taking out citizenship today.  We are having a quiet day at home, with a traditional barbecue tonight.  There are big celebrations around our district, with many having to be moved indoors as we have had so much rain in the last few days.  The wet season finally arrived on Wednesday night and by Friday morning we had had 280 mm rain!  Mackay was very lucky.  The trough which brought the rain suddenly got a move on as it passed over us, but has gone back to being very slow moving again, so the poor souls at Gladstone are having massive flooding, and Brisbane is expecting very heavy rain by tomorrow.  Incredibly Birdsville in south west Queensland has no had temps of over 40 degrees every day for a month, and no rain at all.  We have crazy weather in Australia.

I thought I had managed to put a space in between the photos, but never mind.  I can finally show you a photo of a sunset I took before Christmas using my phone.  I have only just managed to transfer the photos to my computer after my son came home from holidays and came to the rescue!  I have written everything down, but if I haven't done it for a couple of months I still seem to have trouble.
The next photo is a lovely shrub flowering in the Botanic Gardens which does not seem to have a common name and the Latin one is a mouthful - Larsenaikia jardinei.  I had to take a photo of the label to remember that!

The Cassis Fistulas have been glorious this year.  Again this was taken a couple of weeks ago on my phone.  The rain has ruined the display now.  Unfortunately they are classified as a weed as they seed profusely and clog up waterways.  These trees will ultimately be removed from the Gardens but we appreciate the display till they go.

I have been having a play.  I bought Lynda Monk's book 'Exploring dissolvable delights' before Christmas, it has some lovely ideas to follow through.  This has not photographed true to colour, but the top coat is Jacquard Lumiere metallic blue/green halo, so it changes colour when looked at  from different directions.  I used tissue paper adhered to pelmet vilene, and painted in several layers.  I wanted some more texture so scraped some moulding paste through a stencil on the panels and then painted over them.
The bottom layer is kunin felt painted, stitched and then foiled with copper foil, after which I had fun attacking it with the heat gun.  Normally I avoid making holes in my stuff as it is usually intended to be handled frequently so I want the end result to be pretty robust.

The vessel stands about 24 cm high and is not really skewiff - that is my photo, not holding the camera straight!