Creating

In August last year I started sewing a soft toy for Gorgeous Girl’s October birthday. Well, life got kind of crazy and it didn’t get finished, so I put it aside intending to finish it for a Christmas  present instead. However, I got stuck on the instructions and took it unfinished to my fabulous friend Kerin who is my sewing guru. She looked at what I had done, said 4 words (hand baste it first) and then helped me finish the sewing part of the toy.

Stuffing however, had to wait until we reached PNG and my stash had arrived.

10 months in the making. Meet Bob the Rooster.

Gorgeous Girl grabbed him and ran around the house singing ‘cockadoodle doo’  and then informed me very seriously that: “This should be the last soft toy, Mummy, I have enough now”.

The pattern can be found in the book More Softies. This is the second pattern from this book that I’ve made and I have my eye on a few more. Gorgeous Girl spent the evening going through the book pointing out other toys I could make for her, so I guess she got over the feeling of having enough toys. 🙂

I recently finished knitting up this hat for charity.

Gorgeous Man commented that it reminds him of an old-fashioned swimming cap. Hopefully there will be a mother out there who likes the vintage look.

Gorgeous Girl is on holidays this week. She gets 4 weeks of school holidays and then she gets an extra week because we will be in Australia for the first week of term 3. She is not impressed. She would much rather be at school than at home. Anyway, she asked to do some stamping this week and while she had my stamps out I also made a card.

I’m trying to build up a little stock of cards to have on hand to give when needed rather than having to make one for each occasion.

I’m not a natural scrapbooker. I produce my best pages when I have other people to scrap with and bounce ideas off. However, I don’t know any other scrapbookers in PNG and I don’t have a local scrapbook store to visit for inspiration. So I look through my magazines and find a layout that sparks an idea and then use what is in the stash. My last 2 scrapping sessions produced these layouts.

Gorgeous Man and Gorgeous Girl found this little guy outside a few days ago.

They brought him inside briefly for a quick photo session.

Um, yeah, need to tidy that corner of the lounge room…

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Connected

I now have internet at home. I am such a happy girl. Gorgeous Girl is on school holidays at the moment, but I’m hoping to sneak some time to catch up with my bloggy friends. I only have 692 unread posts in my Google Reader… We will not discuss the price of internet in PNG.  Suffice it to say that when one of my facebook friends heard how much I was paying they commented that it was ‘gold-plated internet’.

Since I last blogged I’ve been to Australia and back. Attended a conference (got to sit in a room with some of my academic heroes, that was kind of exciting – too shy to speak to them though) and did some shopping. Gorgeous Girl needed a booster seat for the car (she’s outgrown her car seat) and we couldn’t find a booster seat here in PNG. That was the main thing, plus a lot of other little stuff, like organic soap and shampoo.

Two days before I flew out a truck turned up with all of our things.

This bookshelf was too tall to fit up our narrow staircase, but the removalists thought laterally and were able to get it into the house via the balcony.

The room at the end with the open door is Gorgeous Girls.

Going to the right is our bedroom, the kitchen and the dining area.

I left Gorgeous Man with this mess.

This area has now become my craft and study ‘room’.

To celebrate being reunited with my stash I did a little scrapbooking. The photos were taken by my very talented sister-in-law and the chicken (chook) belongs to her children.

The frame on the page was an insert from an old photo frame. It had gotten a bit grubby after many years of use. I remounted the photo that was in the frame and kept the insert. I covered the grubby marks with the lettering. I think it has worked out quite  well. As much as I love the layered look, I find it very hard to do and so I think I just have to admit that I’m a clean-line scrapbooker at heart.

Next post: more scrapbooking, a card and some charity knitting.

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