By sion, on August 31st, 2007%
 I don’t spend nearly as much time just sitting around outside since I quit smoking, so my days of charming the birds are pretty much over – nowadays I just toss suitable scraps out & have a bit of a chat when I see them. Happysacks next door is a smoker though, and a pair of kookaburras obviously heard about his largesse from the magpies. I’m a bit worried about the mess they’re making of the rail fence: I do hope it’s their toes doing all the damage, not their beaks, because it’s made of those treated green logs that seem to be poisonous to every living thing. Anyway, said fence is between us & the park, and they were in residence when missie & I went to play on the swings yesterday.
 I’m always surprised by how bloody big they are up close, especially given the dainty stature of the sacred kingfisher. The camouflage thing gets me too – I mean, you look at a buff-bellied bird with dark wings & tail & head, a honking great oversized beak, and blue flashes on the wings to boot and figure there’s no way they blend in with any damn thing … and yet sitting in the shadows on a jacaranda branch, I’d have had trouble spotting him if I hadn’t already known he was there.
By sion, on August 31st, 2007%
I forgot to add that since I was putting myself in penury for the laptop I also grabbed an easel. I’ve got a tabletop one, but I have some big canvases that need a standing (One Day When I Get Rich I’ll have a grown-up one like June’s, but meantime this’ll do foine tankee).
By sion, on August 29th, 2007%
that’s all.
OMG SQUEEEEEE!!11!!1 and stuff.
can’t wait to get my itchy little fingers on it …
know what’s funny? I’ve been resisting XP since it came out, sticking with trusty old W2k even though it meant giving up all-night Warcraft sessions & giving up on AoE & AoM & Cultures & B&W because it’s hard to play with random squares of ground that look suspiciously like your desktop and sprites who go semi-transparent (or just vanish) at the drop of a hat. I never even got to try Starcraft *sniff* … ANYWAY. So. I resisted XP because it is of the devil, managing to be even more officious & knowitall than previous vers of windows, with random bizarre events apparently designed to make me totally lose my shit, and on top of this general ARGH/ICK is perhaps its most grievous sin: visually being macOS’s inbred bushpig-ugly cousin to boot. If I’m forced to use a box loaded with XP, I switch to the classic desktop before doing anything else, but every tedious step taken to get the damn thing to let me do what I need to reminds me of that awful bulbous blueness still there, underneath, waiting, icky start button gleaming like a suppository …
so it totally amuses me that “downgrading” to XP looks like the smart option. Because Vista seems to be worse in oh, so very many ways.
Somebody port CorelDraw & PP to linux, & I’ll have Ubuntu installed on this baby before you can blink.
By sion, on August 21st, 2007%
there are some pics of Woodwife etc up there as well as the bushfire shots. Feel free to laugh at my terrible leaf & feather practice pieces.
By sion, on August 20th, 2007%
did some sewing the other day, which I just realised I forgot to get pics of. My first practise feather (not COMPLETELY horrible, but definitely amateurish & probably very obvious that I’ve no clue at all where you’re supposed to even start), a ferny feather (laughably bad. No really, HAHAHA OMG so tragically malformed), the self portrait jobby I never finished for the SCQuilters retreat, and Woodwife. Woodwife is going to need some lift – probably a bit of zingy extra quilting, and it may end up being the first piece I get around to actually sewing beads on. The feather practising was done in some new variegated threads I received on Thursday along with my quilting gloves & a few other goodies; I’m far more impressed by the thread than my sewing heh.
We’re up at Repton at the moment, bit of a getaway while mum’s housesitting. Somebody had a lovely time in the monster bathtub last night, as you can see (well, I hope you can – apologies if the pics suck; I’m using sis’s mac notebook & the colourspace is alien, so if they’re horrible I’ll edit & re-up when I’m at home. Yes, this is why I need a laptop of my very own! That and email and stuff like forgetting not only my password but my login for my own blog …). Anyhow, so I’m fiddling with a few pieces. Butched up & made a start on that bushfire fabric mum dyed up while the Newcastle girls were in town:
Again, no idea what these pics look like on a PC (and my apologies to mac people to whom my pictures always look like crap). On top of that, I only have a guest account and the only imaging program on this is bloody iPhoto, which (sorry mac afficionados) SUCKS DONKEY DINGDONGS.
And in case anyone’s been wondering: yes, sometimes my posts are titled by snippets of spam.
By sion, on August 10th, 2007%
I have a new student in my Monday classes, and – jumping right in the deep end – she’s decided she wants to do a peacock. We made a pattern from a photo and I got her started on some eyes. We had a bit of an issue with the colours; we were very sure there was no orange/red (as per our very old source photo), but we couldn’t quite remember what colour that section should be. Turns out after more research that we were right when we were looking at bronzey-goldy-coppery sort of colours, but we just didn’t trust our memories. In any case, I set her homework of tracing off all her eye sections onto vliesofix and doing some practise feathers to see how they’ll look with details stitched.
 Today, since I actually had a day at home by myself with nothing I’m supposed to do for someone else and only housework on my Really Should list, I decided to make a sample myself. Postcard-sized, because, well, just because. I overworked it I think, and I should have had either a feather or a photo to refer to instead of relying on memory, but the idea definitely works. There’s a little series of photos, if you want to follow the process along:
      
By sion, on August 7th, 2007%
So … anyone interested in coming along to a residential workshop? I’ve got the use of my sister’s sea change home up at Repton (near Coffs Harbour) for a couple of months while they’re traipsing around the Americas, and she suggested we could use the space to run some workshops. Residential optional, actually; just throwing it in to sweeten the pot for faraway peeps. The accommodations available range from a proper bed in an ensuite room > sleeper sofa > large daybed-type couches > assorted (good, newish) mattresses on the floor, so it would have to be first in best slept.
I’ll have some photos of the space to share soon, but meantime here’s a few datapoints about the place:
- 2 bathrooms
- new gas heater
- massive “great room” with 2 walls of glass/windows
- perched on a hill – verandah (with outdoor gas heater) off the great room overlooks the river & farmland & if you hold your mouth right you might even see the sea
- two invisible cats in residence (mentioned only in case of allergies – I seriously doubt anyone will set eyes on them)
- massive covered carport out front (great for dye/paint workshops)
- little shops a few doors up & over the road
- yuppie industrial kitchen, gas BBQ, or takeaway <15 mins away
- assorted home theatre appurtenances
- broadband
Workshops under consideration are the pictorial applique (usually 2 X 3 days, but we could probably do one long one if enough people prefer), fabric dyeing and fabric painting.
Time frame would be anywhere from Aug 17 through to end of September, so if you think you might be interested leave a comment on the blog, email, or ring me to discuss timing etc.
By sion, on August 1st, 2007%
random cool stuff, mostly scored at the Salvation Army shop. I go past it after dropping el at daycare, and it’s over the lane from the shop, so they see a lot of my spare change.
Couldn’t resist these little eye & lip stamps, even if they do look suspiciously Bratzish/anime/etc. They cost all of a dollar. 
 I love this book (50c, although it still has its original “7 1/2″ – pence, I assume – price penciled in a corner) – around A4 size, it’s on that thick, hard-to-tear canvassy-looking paper, and it’s in surprisingly good nick given its age. No idea what I’m going to DO with it, of course …
 
 
 These … I dunno what to tell you. I have no earthly use for them, but they’re adorable. Teeny little cups with handles made of teeny little pistols. They may end up on ebay, but they had to come home with me at least temporarily just for novelty’s sake.
 This was yesterday’s coolest score. It’s hugely thick, and it’s all blank pages, and it was marked as $2. When I took it to the counter, Peter started to gush and then realised someone had removed the index of car parts that he’d been all excited by. Absolutely fine by me, but he was horrified … so he took a dollar off. Very smooth paper, ideal for pens & hard pencils. Way too heavy to carry around, but who cares.
 I christened it this afternoon, figuring it was time I removed the digit & derustified my sketching. It turned out a bigger problem than my oxidisation was el “helping” by bumping my elbow, trying to convince me I needed to draw with her pen, and rearranging the stuff I was trying to draw. The last got her a stern talking-to, especially as I hadn’t noted yet the shadows cast by the top brush, so it looks a bit surrealist floating above the quarry tiles. No biggie, just annoying. I remembered during this process why I don’t particularly like drawing with biros, which could mean I need to do more of it or just give it a miss because life’s too damn short. In any case – BIG BOOK!
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CHITCHAT