Cabin fever

We are adjusting to being in a one bedroom apartment in town while waiting for our coast house to be finished. It is a bit cramped, although during the week, we just get up, go to work, come home, go to bed, get up again, etc. Weekends are a bit more of a drag -no garden, no sewing room - no room, period! So last weekend I grabbed the chance of a last minute sign up to a fabric painting class that Helen Godden was giving here in Canberra. Good fun. This piece looks like it could do with a good iron - but in fact, the fabric is perfectly smooth.

The scrunchy effect is achieved with the paint. The paints we used are finely milled acrylics from Genesis Creations . They don't change the hand of the fabric like the thicker acrylic paints, and are easy to use. This piece was sort of tie dyed to give the flower effects. I think this one will be good to do some machine stitching on to bring out the 'flower' centres and highlight the petals.

The next one was fun to do - some judicious manipulation of the wet fabric - I can see this technique has potential for creating cosmos type pieces- er, cosmos as in the universe, not those yellow flowers!

And the usual salt techniques work great.

The final piece was painted onto good old unwashed cheap as chips, calico. This will be good for practicing some machine quilting.

My husband was quite impressed when I showed him what I had done, commenting, how did you do that, you can't paint for nuts?? (!). Well, that just goes to show what a good teacher Helen is - and I must make the disclaimer that the flower in the last piece was traced off a drawing of hers - and all I had to do was colour within the lines - Karl is quite right, I can't draw for nuts!!

So that filled up Sunday.

Saturdays are spent for the most part at my daughter's place where I take my washing as we don't have a washing machine in the apartment. It means I get to spend some time each week with the little fellow who is quite a delight.

Drool and all! (click for closeup). Definite signs of being a redhead- those Irish genes on his mother's side are exerting themselves.

As for the coast house - well, it is coming along. The external cladding is finished and this scaffolding should be coming down any day now.

The 20,000 litre water tank looks like a spaceship has landed. Rather inconveniently, it has been placed (by a large crane, apparently) exactly on the spot where it needs to be dug in - but the builder seems unfazed, assuring us that they'll just roll it out of the way when it comes time to dig the hole. Hope it doesn't roll down the hill and take a number of tourists out before coming to rest on the beach!

This is the view from the street side. Those blue bits will be rendered and painted.

While we were down last we decided to recover our pelican from the gallery. The Christmas/summer holiday season is fast approaching and the town gets very busy - we didn't want to risk them selling our pelican to someone else (again!). So we walked in and said, we have come to collect our pelican, and the guy (not the one who sold it to me), said, okay, let me help you carry it to the car (it is very heavy). And off we went - no ID, no receipt, no request to prove that we are the rightful owners! They obviously do things differently in the country.