Then and Now event

We are not happy - again.  Our internet was down from early Friday night till this morning.  At least this time the phone line did not vanish and Bill was able to ring our provided late on Friday night only to discover that the problem was in the Telstra exchange - in fact lots of Telstra exchanges.....grrrr.  He has now filed another complaint with the company but I don't imagine anything will come of it.

Yesterday we had a very successful Friends event at the Botanic Gardens - a walk and talk 'Then and Now'.  The weather behaved and the rain held off till we were all under cover enjoying a BBQ.

 While I was listening to the commentary, I took the opportunity to take a few snaps of other things,  This huge Bunya pine has a barricade around the base till the last two nuts have dropped.  The picture (in the wrong place) shows a couple of nuts which dropped two years ago, the ones this year are much bigger and will continue to get bigger as the tree matures.  They weigh over two kilos and fall from a great height so would do a pile of damage if you happened to be underneath.

 This magnificent rooster has taken up residence in the Gardens - he has been there since just after Christmas, not hurting anyone, very friendly till he looks like being caught then he is off like greased lightning!  We assume he was dumped, but maybe he just escaped to a better place.

 Bunya nuts which are immature.

 I love this little gate leading to a gravel path leading nowhere in the Heritage Garden.  It represents a gate to the garden of Rawson's Hollow, which belonged to the Finch Hatton family, one of Mackay's pioneers.

These crinum lilies are flowering in front of a representation of the fernery at Rawson's Hollow.  They are flowering all over Mackay at present, they are one of the most popular species for street planting and are looking marvellous.
Today was a glorious sunny day, just the sort to make you feel really glad to be alive.  One cyclone has formed and then gone heading off to the east of us thank goodness, but there is the threat of another forming in the Gulf of Carpentaria later this week, which could make life interesting.

More 'Then and Now' photos

Finally I have been walking in the Botanic Gardens with my camera so I thought I would show another couple of photos of contrasts.

 This photo was taken in March 2006 when the second stage planting was only just commencing

 and this is the same spot with the camera angled slightly more to the left a couple of days ago.

 I had walked through the shelter and out onto a boardwalk to take this photo, again in March 2006

This is taken from almost exactly  the same spot this week.  The water level in the lagoon is much higher after all the rain we have had.  I actually couldn't walk any further out on the boardwalk - my foot was almost in the water covering it!
What was originally a very hot part of the Gardens is now a very relaxing shady walking area.  Just at the moment the lagoon is relatively clear of weed, but the hot, humid weather will make it grow rapidly.  I wish we could get the people upstream of the Gardens to clean out their part of the lagoon - we clean up ours, but every time there is a flush of water, the weeds all appear again. 
I have not been walking much for quite a while, I just couldn't cope when we had the very hot, very humid weather, and since then we have had many days with heavy showers when i want to walk.  I know I am a squib, but light rain is one thing, heavy rain is quite another - and I only have one comfortable pair of sneakers which I need to wear all the time.  that is my excuse anyway.  I also have a sook of a dog who hates getting his feet wet.  He is so funny to watch when he needs to go over the wet grass, he almost goose steps.  Just as well he ended up with us and not with a farmer who wanted a working dog!

Silk paper box

When I belonged to the Fibre Fever Group, we had a birthday group who exchanged fabric birthday cards.  My collection has been languishing in a box in my workroom until now.  I have finally made a box for them.
 As usual, I forgot to take progressive photos - tut, tut.  I made some silk paper by the easy and quick method - laying out my fibres on some baking paper, spraying liberally with spray starch and ironing them dry - under another layer of baking paper of course!  I backed that with pelmet vilene and cut the pieces to size  before embroidering all over them.

 Blogger has done strange things with uploading these photos and I cannot manage to get them right, but you can scroll up and down.  Oh, I just managed to move one photo down to the bottom, I am not going to trust my luck to make any more changes.  The colours are wrong, but my camera doesn't seem to like purply blue shades and always makes them much more of a puce shade, so use your imagination.
The decoration on the top of the box is a piece of silk velvet with beads and cords over the top.  The beads I made from paper rolls on a knitting needle (thinner than a satay stick), then rolled on a glycerine pad and dipped in Opalettes embossing enamel and heated.  I really love those embossing powders, they have some scrumptious colours.  The cord in machine wrapped, then twisted around and hand stitched in place

 After I had sewn all the sides together - this time sewing each side to the base before sewing up the sides - much easier - I glued some gold braid to the edges as a finishing touch.  If you double click you should be able to enlarge the photos.

 Can't separate this photo from the above, but it is a small purse made for part of my Canberra grand daughter's birthday present.  She happened to see my little makeup bag while I was visiting last year and greatly admired it, so now she can have one of her own, not that she is into makeup yet - or she wasn't last year, but who knows with a 12 year old high school girl!!  She loves glitzy stuff so I have foiled some hearts on the fabric which is not showing up very well in the photo, nor is the glitzy spray all over the fabric.  I am not sure how long that will last with handling, but it looks pretty just now!  The base fabric is evolon again, I am in love with the feel of that fabric.

A grey day up here, but we have done very well out of the weather - we have had three lots of 250 ml (10 inches) or a bit more, with a couple of weeks in between each to let the ground start to dry out.  We haven't had any wind damage either - not like the poor souls down south who are going through all the gales and flooding yet again.  Amazingly Western Queensland is still in drought, and Victoria still has fires burning....crazy.

Not happy

You haven't heard from me for a week now because we were without phones and internet - along with a large proportion of our suburb.  Both the business phone and the home phone went off the air early on Monday morning, much to Bill's displeasure.  His work depends on email and internet access, so he was stymied.  Telstra assured us they were working on the fault and that it would be fixed by Tuesday night!  I rang every morning to be told a slightly different story, but thankfully on Friday the service appeared to be restored - well, the business line and  the internet was.  I had dial tone on the home phone, but when I rand my son who has caller display on his phone the number which I appeared to be ringing from was a completely strange one to us!  Back to calling Telstra again......oh, the techs are still working on the line and will have it fixed shortly............................What do I do about the number on my phone, can I use the phone?....Yes, go ahead, no idea who is being billed for it!  Well, that lasted for about an hour, then I lost the use of the phone again.. Grrrrr......Telstra is very generously allowing incoming calls to be diverted to my mobile at no cost to the caller or to me, but outgoing calls are a different matter.  Of course the call centre is probably somewhere in Malaysia and they are just reading off the screen in front of them so they don't really have a clue - they keep telling me our complaints have been lodged with their superior and we will possibly be compensated!  Bill is waiting till the home phone is fixed then Telstra will certainly get a blast, and there had better be definite compensation or he will be off to the ombudsman again.  He has already won two fights with Telstra in the last few years.

Having had my rant, I will show you a couple of photos.  our Botanic Gardens are ten years old this year, so we are holding quite a few events during the year to celebrate.  One of these is a then and now exhibition to show what a long way we have come from the green field site in 2002.

 These two are in the wrong order, with the lower one taken in 2003 and the top one quite recently

 This is what the site used to look like when we went walking there before anything was started

This is the closest I can get to the same position - lots of land shaping etc has gone on here.  If you double click on the photo you may be able just to see the deck and the building behind those trees!

 This is now a jungle almost, as you can see from the photo below.  There are very few exact comparison photos possible as everything has  grown so much over the ten years - and that is just the way we want it to be.

We have had lots of rain so the whole Gardens are looking beautiful and green right now, although the caterpillars are busy as well!

Journal cover

There has not bee too much creating around here lately - life seems to have been an almost continuous round of appointments, and none of them very interesting either! The joys of getting older seem to mean lots of visits to doctors, physios, optometrists, chiropractors etc - but at least we are still here, and still moving! Oh, and throw in a couple of visits to the accountant as well.
I have made a journal cover using one sheet of the oiled paper I made recently.  If you double click you should see a bit more detail.  The base fabric is evalon, coloured with transfer dyes, then sprayed heavily with pearl glimmer mist. That is not showing up in the photo, but gives a lovely gleam to the fabric.  I love evalon, it feels quite like suede.

My camera does not seem to be catching the colours properly, this is a bit dark, but looks washed out if I lighten it any more - at least you get the idea.
Thank heavens the weather has cooled down a bit here, much more bearable.  We had 72mm of very welcome rain yesterday as well, now the sun is shining again.  Our part of the world has been so lucky, missing out on both floods and fires, I feel so sorry for everyone affected by those catastrophes.  The weather seems to be just as crazy in the Northern Hemisphere as well, I hope all my blogging friends there are out of harm's way.

45 years on

We certainly looked a lot less lined in those days - and quite a bit slimmer!  A hot, sultry, February day in Brisbane for one of  the best days of my life.  I remember being furious with the driver of the hired limousine taking me and my uncle to the church as he kept driving round and round the block making me 10 minutes late for the ceremony - he said there were still too many people standing outside the church waiting to enter!  They were standing outside hoping to catch what breeze there was before going inside where of course there was no air conditioning and not too many fans either.

We are having a quiet day, then going to have dinner with the family tonight.  Dougal and Nikki celebrate their 12th wedding anniversary tomorrow, so we will have a double celebration tonight.

Thank goodness Dougal is a computer whiz - he spent the morning here sorting out Firefox for me - it seemed to have really tied its knickers in a knot this time, but hopefully all is good now.  Then he moved to the TV and brand new DVD recorder.  Our old one gave up the ghost last Monday.  We bought a new one and Bill was able to install it and get the TV going again, but I couldn't understand the instructions to do anything more complicated than that.  I know they are written in English words, but not in a way that I could understand - I am sure most of you can relate to that!  I have now discovered that I can record two different programmes at the same time if I want to, or even watch a pre-recorded programme while simultaneously recording another one - the wonders of modern technology!  I often think there is nothing much worth watching on TV, but it is amazing how often there are two programmes worth watching on at the same time, especially when I have to go out.
Nothing much creative to show you, but I have been steadily beading one of the oiled paper images I showed you  a while back and I think I shall make it into a book cover in the next day or so.

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!