Birthday time again

Gosh, it is nearly two weeks since I last posted, the time has simply flown!  Our grandson Alexander turned 9 last week and had a fancy dress party to celebrate.  His theme was Zombies and he tried to look as gruesome as possible for the photo.

 Hamish is still very taken with pirates, especially the blowup parrot, which did not stay on his shoulder for very long!

The DIY party shop came up with the goods in the form of a headstone for the tombstone cake!  They certainly do things differently these days.  The kids all had a good giggle over it - a chocolate mud cake hid underneath the icing.

 Of course they all had to pore over the present opening.  Alexander is besotted with Leggo, which obviously his friends knew about so he had lots to put together that night.

 One reason I have not posted for so long is that my sister had been up here visiting and the time has simply flown.  Unfortunately she brought the unpleasant weather with her.  We had really magnificent weather all over Easter and today, when she has gone home again, the weather has turned equally beautiful!  We still managed to have a lovely time without too much rain, just overcast and 30 knot winds blowing!

On Monday afternoon the sun sort of came out so we went for a drive and I took this photo looking into the sun at one of the beaches near here.  I rather like the effect - the tide was well out, so the sand looked like black strips.  I think the photos should enlarge if you click.
Now I need to get stuck into making more souvenirs before we go away at the end of next week to a conference in Cairns.  Hopefully in the next couple of days I shall have time to catch up on some blog reading as well.  I have missed it.

My last page sent and some souvenirs

Ritva has received my Hundterwasser page so I can now show it to you.  You can enlarge all the photos by clicking - ad when you see the thread at the top left of the photo here, you will be glad to know that I saw it before I posted it and cut it off!  I forgot to take another photo though.

 I first heard of Hundterwasser from Dale at The Thread Studio, she is a bit fan of his.  There are amazing images on the web if you google him.  This rally is the last picture from This year's swap.  We all have some wonderful pages to put together in some form to display.  I just have to get around to doing it!

 I have been making a few more souvenirs to get my stocks up.  There are a couple of fairs in late May and of course I don't know how long I will need to recover from my knee surgery before I will be back at the sewing machine.

 The colours are not quite right in this photo, I have tried all sorts of editing techniques - the two lower cases should be a bit bluer than they are showing here.  I used evolon as the basis for them, just for a different texture.

I am quite happy with this notebook cover after being very disillusioned when I first made the fabric(?)  It is tissue paper and one of Lynda Monk's techniques, but to my shame I can't remember exactly which one, and of course in my usual slapdash fashion I didn't take notes of what I was doing.  I do know the slip is PVA glue set in a mould and then painted and gilded.  I like that finish.
Today is Good Friday, the start of Easter.  We had a brief shower overnight but the weather is glorious again today.  The south-easter has got up however and that usually brings showers in three days so perhaps we will have a wet finish to Easter.  Have a happy Easter and I hope you can all do all the activities you wish to do.

The Mad Hatters' Parade

I have to share this photo of our youngest grandson Hamish in the Mad Hatters parade at his school.  The children made the hats at school - with a lot of dedicated help from the teachers I would say, and then the Grade 1 and Grade 2 children paraded before the rest of the school - and doting parents!

 Hamish is on the right.  You should be able to click or double click to see the photos better.

This is the lovely page I have just received from Janny in the Netherlands - the last page in this round of swaps.  I can't believe the year has gone so quickly.  This year is vanishing before my eyes, a quarter of the year gone already - scary thought!

Absolutely fabulous weather here at present, lovely cool nights and sunny days with not too much breeze.  Too nice to stay indoors so I am off to fertilise some of the plants in my garden.  I hope you are all enjoying the weather you like.

Soggy, soggy day

 There is not too much happening around here today - the wet season has made its presence felt well and truly. We have had over 500 mm rain in the last 6 days, 100 of them since midnight and it is only 5.30pm, so there is plenty of time left for lots more before midnight tonight!  these are just two photos I have taken in our garden trying to show the rain - which doesn't really show up at all. 

Of course, today was the day I needed to do a big shop at the supermarket, but at least that is all undercover and I didn't have to brave any flooded roads.  Many of the schools have had to send children home early and some have probably still been caught out by some of the flooded creeks in the district.  This used to be a frequent occurrence in the 1970s, but of course we have had a population explosion since then, and there are some very amazed people at what is happening.  We are nicely high and dry, shouldn't be worried even if there is low level riverine flooding tonight with the high tide.  That really amazed me when I was first married, the idea of two floods a day with the tides was so different from the inland floods I was used to - a couple of days to come up, a couple of days staying up and another couple of days to go down again!
I even went to my water exercise class yesterday in the pouring rain!  We were like drowned rats getting into and out of the undercover swimming pool and it was exceptionally noisy with rain beating on an iron roof!
Now I had better go to look at the pickled pork I have cooking for our dinner tonight.  I have done a bit more creating, but nothing much to show yet.

I am on a mission

I have all these pieces and more sitting on the end of my workbench - I pull them out and look at them...and look a bit more...and put them back again.  but NO more.  They need to be used and I need to make a lot of souvenirs

 I am sure everyone has a stash of pieces waiting to be used - I don't think these even qualify as UFO's, but they will turn into something.

 The piece on the left was part of a sample for Playways many moons ago - I haven't thrown anything out yet, but I think I shall be soon, I am getting desperate for storage space!

These papers can be jazzed up and used for covers I am sure...........so, watch this space!
We have been getting lovely rain for the last few days, badly needed as we haven't had a proper wet season yet, but I am a bit sick of it now, and the forecast for Monday is for anywhere between 100 and 300 mm.  I am supposed to be going to a water exercise class on Monday morning - not sure I want to if the rain is as heavy as that.  This class is supposed to be helping me build up my muscles in preparation for the knee surgery.  There are about 40 in the class and some of them are in a really bad way, so I don't feel sorry for myself when I am there.  At least my knee will get better, the ones with MS are very unlikely to.

More pages

 This is the second last month for this round of page swaps.  Above is the one I sent to Peggy in USA - her theme is shades of pink

and this one came to me from Anne in Germany.  She has used inchies on pieces of felt, and some lovely embroidery around them all.
I don't have anything else to show you yet, I am working on my April page to send away, but can't show it yet.
I have been back to have the stitches out of my hand, which is working very well, so I am thrilled about t hat.  However, I had a big whinge about my right knee which has not improved at all so the upshot is that I shall have a total knee replacement on 5th June.  That gives me three months to sort my head around it all, time to exercise and strengthen my leg muscles, and then nearly 4 months before we want to go away on a holiday!  Sounds easy when said like that, I hope it works like that in real life.  It will be done here in Mackay, I don't have to travel away and I have great faith in my surgeon.  He replaced a knee for a friend of ours a couple of weeks ago and Arthur was walking without a crutch in five days.  I hope I can do the same.

Orangequat tree

We recently bought an orangequat tree and planted it in the back garden.  I had been looking for a kumquat tree, but the only ones available did not look very healthy and this tree looked very lush.

I had never heard of this before and assumed it was some new hybrid, but when I googled I found it is a cross between a Satsuma mandarin and a Meiwa kumquat and was developed in the US in 1932!  There were 6 fruits on the tree which I watched very closely till they eventually ripened.

 There was not much to make jam out of, but the microwave came to the fore and this is the result.  I am thrilled to discover the fruit is really tasty - now I shall have to wait 12 months for some more fruit to make some more!

These are the latest bits from Fabulous surfaces.  The piece on the top right has been finished as a brooch, but I am not sure if I want to make them all into brooches or not, so I am thinking for a while.  I didn't feel I had quite enough highlighting with the sprays I put on after I had used the white spirit - or maybe I did not put enough treasure gold on.  Anyway I then wiped across the top with some moulding gel and brushed on some luminarte powders.  The photos don't really show up the colours properly, I tried lots of different ways to take them and edit them, this is the best I can do.

My hand is recovering well, but I seem to have burst the stitches in one of the cuts so I am having to be careful.  There will be a bit of a callous there, but it will be in the crease of my hand so will not be a worry, and my fingers no longer ache or stick half closed!  That is what the surgery was all about so all is good.