Instead of blogging...

I made Christmas wreaths! Pretty no?! We have a large bay tree in the garden and all I had to do was bunch the stems together and wire it up. One is for my ma, and one for this lovely lady.

ps. I just got a very late birthday/early christmas present of this book. It's dreamy.
pps. I won the Haiku Thank you giveaway over on Che and Fidel! I am as giddy as a school girl! Thank you Jodi- and *hi* if you are visiting!

Curtains

Our bedroom is sandwiched between the dining room and sunroom. Which kind of means it doesn't have any windows. Which is why the whole room and floor are painted white. The cute french doors are awesome though and the sunroom will be our own mini lounge room and dressing room one day. We've been needing a bit of privacy though - I've been dressing tucked in a corner and doing mad dashes in front of windows - but no more! Et voila I made some curtains!

Cute hydrangea cotton voile (How DO you say that word??) is from spotlight. I even did it properly (I prefer cheating when it comes to sewing) with pins and ironing and attempting to cut in a straight line and double folded seams. Uhuh. One job in the massive mountain of jobs ticked off!

So. He made a film...

Well. This is awkward.
But also. Awesome.
Husbando got proactive and decided to make a wee film for our local short film festival. He asked me if I'd be in it. And I... (thinking he'd never actually make it)... said yes. I've completely gone against my techies code of conduct and done some actor-ing. The shame!
But actually, it is rather good - completely down to him and his story writing, directing, camera operating, editing, sound, lighting, cameo and just generally doing it all skills. I picked the costumes and um... did what he told me to.
Anyway - here it is for you to see and it would be super, super awesome if you could vote for us in the People's Choice Awards right here. It literally takes one click, you don't have to fill in any details, just click on "Tim Kurylowicz - Follow Me"
Oh yeah! And it's about blogging! Here we go:

Follow Me from Tim Kurylowicz on Vimeo.

Before & After: Compost heap

Look! We actually finished something!

The veggie garden is well under way growing us winter treats, but the compost heap was sitting like a an ugly mountain in the middle of the garden. We made it's enclosure using entirely recycled materials with the exception of the screws holding it together. Everything else was found in our sheds. The paint is from sample pots and the posts where just dug in to the ground. Slowly, slowly the bigger picture will come together!

Timmy built most of the structure. We sunk the four corner posts into the soil, put braces across the sides and back. Found some ripple iron to do the sides with and then painted old fence pailings and screwed them all in. Now Tim (and the worms) have 4 square metres of compost heap heaven (he is calling it the worm palace!) - pretty generous I reckon!

Fig Jam

On a walk with the dog the other morning Tim found a fig tree leaning over the side of the road laden with fruit. I joined him on the dog walk this morning with stealthy plastic bags in pocket to pick as much as we could carry - 3kilos it turns out. The property which the tree is growing out of is owned by an older lady, who clearly is never going to pick them, and we figure we will give her some jam in repayment...

The jam is on the stove right now filling the house with the most incredible smell and I'm so excited for my first proper bit of country cooking. (That said, I have been making home made lemonade since getting here.)
I thought good old Stephanie Alexander would help me out with a jam recipe, but alas no. So I turned to good old taste instead and used this one. I've doubled it, using 2 kilos of figs, and 1kilo of sugar, 2 lemons plus rind and a cinnamon stick. The other kilo is going to be eaten fresh, made into desserts and salads over the next couple of days and perhaps dried too.
The amazing news is there are heaps more figs to come on the tree so we will be going back every couple of days to collect some more. Lola is going to get very sick of that walking route I think!

Check out my kitchen assistant... so helpful.

My Creative Space*

There is a big spotlight here. And I mean B.I.G. When going in to grab some curtains for our guest room, I couldn't go past these three fabrics. They look fabulous together and awesome in our living room "colour scheme" {read: what we have and how it is vaguely coming together}. Anyway, being lazy when it comes to sewing, and only having an antique (gorgeous) hand driven sewing machine, I cut around some cushion inserts I had, sewed 3 sides together and made one piece of fabric long enough to make a tuck at the end, like on a pillow case, for the cushion to sit in. No buttons, no zips, no hand sewing. Genius. I don't know why I hadn't thought of it earlier. Anyway, as long as you don't look inside them at the wonky sewing and loose threads, you'll see they look rather splendid!

Oh yeah and the pink one is all creased because I just got up form sitting on it to take the picture! Tehehe. Nothing like a bit of real life eh?


More Creative Spaces over here.

Position wanted: Full time present wrapper.

 

I think possibly my favorite part of Christmas is wrapping presents. I've daydreamed about just wrapping presents as a job. Oh man. Does anyone need me to do there wrapping for them? I'll take payment in the form of mince pies or one or two of these cushions... 

P.S. This is last years wrapping efforts that I never got around to posting... Home made potato print stars, and book present toppers (what are they called?)

Mini succulent...

Inspired by this, I grabbed a knife, a cork from our cork collection (adorning the kitchen door frame) and got to it.
* CAREFULLY hollow out your cork.
* Fill it with fine slightly damp soil.
* Pop in your mini succulent (snap a little bit off a bigger one and strip back the bottom few "leaves").

More Creative Spaces here.

Brown paper packages...

...Tied up with... well anything! I love me some brown paper. It's cheap - don't get fooled into buying it from a fancy paper shop (maybe that only happens in my suburb?) - get it from officeworks or some other mega stationary store then do with it what you will...

 

* Just add confetti.

* Or add string and a tag..

* Make it lacy.

* Draw on it. (This would be amazing in a neon pen too!)

* Stick a letter on it.

* Stick a doily on it!
... and obviously there's always ribbon.
Annnd more idea's than you can poke a stick at here...

Link Love: Wreaths

Wreaths. I am pretty excited to have one, just as soon as I have my very own front door. Here's some of my favorite this year, some are home made and some are shop bought. Which one would you choose?

* Sticky wreath

 * Beautiful colours!

 * Love the Australiana look of this one.

* These are so up my alley.

* For the reading type.

* A more autumn feel.

* Living wreath.

My Creative Space*

So last week I had a little (brace yourselves I'm gonna say it:) Crafternoon with my craftastic friend Cat. She is the talent behind our hanging pot in our bedroom. So I thought I'd get her to show me and therefore you, how it's done.

You need:
Some yarn
A pot
A plant
Some soil and a bit of gravel
Scissors
Crochet hook (optional)
A friend (also optional but makes it easy for us less craftelly endowed and first timers)

My Creative Space*

 Pillow Cases. After realising that the divine but out of my price range Castle linens where not coming my way by my willpower alone I decded I had to get to it and do something about the lust myself. After all, how hard can a pillow case be? Errrr... Quite? For starters I did it off an old pillow case that had a tear in the seam. I picked it apart and just um... cut around it straight onto my new fabric... No, I didnt even pin it in place. Yes, I am extrordinarily impatient (you could also say lazy) when it comes to sewing. Anyway, I did it. The spotty ones were easier as I could follow the rows of spots to get my lines straight (sending me just a little cross eyed!). Just no one turn them inside out and inspect the seams! Ha! Look they even have fancy folds in them and a hood to keep the pillow in. Am planning on adding spotty buttons to the grey ones... Just as soon as I can work out how to do button holes!

Oh, and clearly I don't iron. Actually, we dont even own an ironing board!


More creative Spaces here.

Terrarium

Okay, so I've been pronouncing it TerrANIUM (like Geranium) for aggges now.... yes, yes, I am a grown up. Hem. Anyway, talented friends made us Tim this beautiful thing for his birthday. Isn't it marvellous!? I'm going to harass her into showing me how to do it and then I'm going to tell you how to do it! Yeah? Yeah! Name submissions are now being taken for the gnome.