I have that horrible sick feeling…

5 years ago we holidayed in the UK and I loved the textured wallpaper that lined the walls of a few of the places we stayed at. It was like puff paint – raised and spongy – and there were some beautiful designs.
I was so excited when we went into a hardware store (I have no idea why we did that on our holiday!) and discovered rolls of wallpaper that you could tear off small samples for free! I collected a sample from every roll and carted it with me for the rest of the holiday, planning to do something with it when I got home. For 5 years it has been sitting in the cupboard waiting until I finally had an idea for it the other day. But when I went to the cupboard to get it out I could not find it. I have searched high and low throughout the house and I cannot find it anywhere. I had a big cleanup last year before Maya was born and I now have this vague memory of discussing with Sean whether I was actually going to do anything with the wallpaper samples or not. And now I can’t remember for the life of me whether I threw it out or put it away very, very safely. I have that horrible sick feeling I have thrown it out. Of all the junk in our house and of all the things I could have thrown out. Sigh…

A million photos

In a bid to update my blog more often and to do something with my arty photographs which are just wasting away on my computer, I am going to try to post a new photo or series of photos every few days. (Maybe I'm setting the bar too high considering I only post every few weeks but lets see how I go!) This is today's photograph which was actually an accident but I love the colours.

Our Holiday

We recently spent 5 days in Callignee at Mum and Dad’s and we all had a great holiday. (This is going to be another one of those long photographic blog entries!)

We had a few very hot days watching beautiful fluffy clouds..

And we spent most of our time out in the cool shade of the paulownia tree which has flourished since the bushfire… There was lots of water play (Mum and Dad have a spring fed dam so no water restrictions were breached)…
There was some pegging fun…
Lots of laughing at “silly grandad”!
Moments spent watching Maya learn to roll (and at only 16 weeks!)… Note the quilt she is lying on – one of Mum’s many beautiful handmade quilts.

There was some climbing up charcoal trees…
And falling down charcoal trees… ouch!
Followed by some sprinkler fun to wash off charcoal…
Sean helped Dad put the roof on the woodshed…
And Dad spent some time staring at his new shed (a bit like the in colourbond ad) … Although the woodshed is not quite complete, it’s a big milestone for Dad to have that done. But there is still plenty of other work to be done.

Khye enjoyed our picnics for afternoon tea every day – particularly when they involved biscuits…
Kiera had stacks of fun running around finding sticks…
We saw some great light shows. First was the neighbours garden filled with Christmas lights… Apparently they won the best Christmas lights in Callignee – not too much competition this year with most residents still rebuilding after the bushfire.

And on New Years Eve we were treated to this fantastic “nature’s light show”…

I managed to catch a lightning bolt!

And yes this is lightning!

New Years Day we went for a drive up the road to Tarra Bulga National Park – one of the last remaining temperate rainforests in Australia. The bushfire just missed the Park, so it is a lush green oasis after being surrounded by the devastation of the fires.
There are many pine plantations on the road up to Tarra Bulga which were not so lucky and burnt in the fires, and unlike native vegetation, pines do not regenerate. But the native trees around Callignee have now well and truly sprouted and are looking really fluffy dominating the bush once again with green…

So how were your holidays? What did you do?

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and New Year and hope that you had lots of fun too!

Mr. Owly

I started making him more than 12 months ago, but when he started turning out a bit wonky, he got banished to the bottom of the sewing box. Khye went into hospital to have his tonsils out recently, so I thought I would rescue Mr. Owly and sew on his big night eyes, beak and soft heart shaped belly to give to Khye when he returned home. He loves Mr. Owly (almost as much as white teddy!) and he doesn’t care that he’s a little wonky. I even like his wonkiness now!

Khye moments…

Today I asked Khye what he would like to eat for lunch and he answered with “a cow mummy”! Here is the cow: He is made of a pineapple body, banana head, sultana eyes, apricot wedge ears and cheese legs. Of course he ate the cheese and nothing else!
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The other day Khye had been chatting to white teddy in the dining room when everything became very quiet. I went to check what was happening. This is what had happened!:
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Last week Khye was playing outside on the deck and I could hear him chatting away to himself…but it was echoey. I went outside to find him inside the clothes dryer!:

Hopefully there are many, many more Khye moments to come!

Meet the new arrivals …

…giraffes!
These three are now available in the spunkee online store. www.madeit.com.au/spunkeestuff

The following two giraffes were the first ones I made and they didn’t make it to the store. Khye decided to have the green giraffe and he gave the red one to Maya. I haven’t even had a chance to embroider their eyes yet!

Callignee update

We went back to Callignee for a couple of days recently. It doesn’t look quite so black and stark now. The trees are looking fluffy, the spring flowers have popped up, the grass has grown and the weeds have come back with a vengeance. Mum and Dad still have a lot of work to do cleaning up, building the woodshed and keeping the weeds under control, along with plenty of other things too. Here are some photos from our recent visit in November and an earlier visit in July.

Mum’s garden is looking beautiful once again:

A fantastic piece of molten metal found under one of the burnt out cars (it's about 5cm wide):

One of Mum’s sculptures made from the rusty bits of scrap metal found inside the cars:

I love her boobs!

The new front gate is in:

The current woodpile:

And the beginnings of Dad's new woodshed:

Around Callignee:

It’s sad to see so much clearing going on – these poor tree ferns are the only things left in this gully:

Untouched natural regeneration in the Flora Reserve: