Hurry up and wait

The deck is now on - but no guard railing yet, so we didn't venture too close to the edge.  The view is spectacular.

A girl can never have enough storage.  I had these shelves and cupboards built in downstairs against the back wall - space that otherwise wouldn't be used for anything.  All my books will go here, plus any overflow from my sewing space - overflow??

Between out two last visits to the coast, they had a huge rain event that resulted in the shire being declared a natural disaster area - pretty ironic in a place where severe water restrictions are in place!  Roads, bridges and lots of other infrastructure was damaged when they got more than all of 2009's rainfall in two or three days.  The good news is that our house stayed dry -so the builder obviously got the drainage right!  Although others, on low lying ground weren't so lucky.  A huge amount of forest debris and litter was washed down the rivers and creeks into the sea, which is closed to swimming because of the health hazards.  The normally pristine waters are murky and tea-stained from all the eucalypt debris.  The usually clear, clean beaches look quite dirty and scruffy. 

It will eventually all settle down and go back too being clean and tidy - I guess its just mother nature at work, reforming and reshaping the landscape.  There is still beautiful texture to be found on my beach walks.

The title of my post refers to the frustration of waiting, when the house is so close to being finished!  The closer it gets the harder it is to wait.  There is a lot of concreting, path laying and driveway forming work to be down outside in the next two weeks - hopefully there won't be anymore 'rain events' for a while!

Texture and shape

Isn't this a great image? Karl took this a few visits ago when we found this thing, which I have forgotten what it is - sea anenome?? - on the beach.  Doesn't it just inspire embroidery ideas? There are lots of treasures on the beach with the most wonderful texture.  I love the roundy protuberences on this oyster shell, and look at that subtle colouration.

This abalone shell has even more interesting textures, and love those colours! (click for close ups)

Scrumbling along

My little bundle of pink and green scrumbles is growing - it is about the only creative thing I can do in the apartment, and it travels well, so I get lots done when we go down to the coast.  Speaking of which.......we went on the weekend to deliver our front door and have the builder install it. 

Ta da...............

Here it is.  Of course it will look better when the handle is on, the surrounds are painted and properly finished, but it is looking good already.  I don't really understand the process, but this is an ordinary (albeit large) front door made out of some sort of composite wood - with glass inserts - that has been treated, so now the surface is copper and the greeny bits are real patination.  Cool, huh!

The surround will be painted the same purpley colour that features on the other side of the house (see picture in last post).  This will then set up a triadic colour scheme, similar to the one I used in this piece.  I am looking forward to seeing this finished, as I think it will look pretty impressive! 

The next big thing to be done is adding the deck on the beach side.  I haven't given a lot of thought to HOW things are built, but apparently, building a curved deck is tricky - you need a template.  So, the sub floor had to be fabricated somewhere else, then it will be flatpacked and installed at our place.  So, where to construct it? - on the floor of our builders own house which is under construction.  He is building a huge house perched on the side of a hill with a spectacular view out to Gulaga (shown crowned in mist), across Wagonga Inlet, and the bridge into Narooma, and around to the coast, out to Montague Island and beyond.  Pretty impressive!

Anyway, Joe, the amazing carpenter has knocked up the sub frame and it will all be dismantled, flat packed and shipped a couple of kilometres down the road to be installed at our place - neat, huh?

I do like some of the idiosyncratic things I see around the place - I spied this little set up last time we were down but didn't have the camera with me - so when I say it was still there this time, couldn't resist stopping for a shot.  You can click on the image for a close up, but this is a large cactus (with a strange lean) on offer for $30.00 (a steal!), and a smaller, round one.  Not sure if the pot on the end post is also for sale, or is part of the garden decorations.  What amuses me is a) this was there two weeks ago and still hasn't sold, and b) it is just sitting out there and anyone who really wanted it could just help themselves.  Think about it - if no-one even wants to steal it, they are hardly likely to pay $30 for it, are they???

Went for a walk on the surf beach at Narooma and saw this sign on the rocks (click for bigger) - it wasn't there last time. 

There was a lot of rain the day we arrived - nearly three and a half inches, which was pretty impressive.  So we took the short drive down to Whittakers Creek, just outside Dalmeny to get a photo of it with some water actually in it.  I took photos of this place many, many years ago, when we first visited the area.  I have always had a hankering to do a textile piece capturing this scene.  I even started once or twice, but couldn't capture it in a way that I was happy with.  When we move in and I have all my 'stuff', I think I will give it another go.  I think I need to abstract it to get it to work - will have to work on my tendency to be too literal and just focus on the essence of the place.

There is lots of inspiration around - wonderful colours and textures everywhere.  This shot was taken at the other end of the surf beach from the sign.  The orange bits seem to be some sort of minerals in the rocks, while the greeny gold bits look like some sort of plant growth - a fungus perhaps? 

Nearly there!

Well, I haven't posted for a while, mainly because there hasn't been anything vaguely interesting to say. Christmas and New Year came and went in a (hot) blur. Being in the apartment was a bit of a drag - still is, but the end is in sight.

We went down to the coast for an extra long Australia Day weekend to check out the house - and it is looking great. The kitchen was being installed while we were there, and it looks fabulous! Of course it will look even better when the walls and ceiling are painted and the floor tiled, and the glass splashback installed - all of which is happening in the next couple of weeks.

The laundry is also in - except for the under bench washing machine, which is sitting in a crate in the bedroom, waiting for the tiling to be complete.

Now that the scaffolding is down it looks more like a house, but still a bit of cleaning up of the surrounds to be done - I guess that is last, as they still had diggers and little earth mover things scurrying about doing drainage and plumbing things - I had no idea there were so many pipes buried under the average house!

The big water tank has been laid to rest in its spot, so isn't so intrusive. That little baby holds over 20,000 litres of water!

Apart from the painting and tiling,the next big visual development will be the addition of the deck - it will go where the blue horizontal band dissects the lower and upper halves of the building. Can't wait until we can open these bifold doors and step out onto it! This is from the dining area, and on the other side is a sliding door into a sheltered courtyard, where there will be a barbeque and woodfired oven, so no matter what the weather we will have a comfortable place to sit outside.

The other big excitement to come is my front door - we are having it treated so that it will look like copper with a patina - if you are interested, check out this website to get an idea of what can be done.

So, nearly there on the house front - we expect to be moving in within the next six weeks.

I did start to go a bit stir crazy during the recent hot spell, so I (inexplicably) decided to get some wool and do some more scrumbling on my pink and green project. There isn't much wool to be had in the shops in this weather, but I scrounged up a few balls, a crochet hook and some knitting needles and got scrumbling again. I also sent off to the lovely Prudence and got the second edition of her book - I have the original, which is in storage, but decided I needed the visual stimulation of all the lovely pictures in the new version to get me going. It is very frustrating being cooped up here with little opportunity to create, but it won't be much longer and then I can unpack all my lovely stuff and get cracking. Can't wait!

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.

He is keeping us company in the apartment for now.

Making progress

We had an extra long weekend away down at the coast to check on progress of the house and just relax. Unfortunately, it rained most of the time, and was unseasonably cold - bloody freezing in fact. I felt sorry for all the campers - it is school holidays and there were lots of family groups - imagine being stuck inside a tent for days on end with restless children and nothing but rain, rain, rain - and very cold rain at that. Ugh, doesn't bear thinking about. I did get quite a bit of handsewing done on my octagon blocks, so all was not lost.

They have started cladding the house, although if we keep getting rain this month, as forecast, that will slow progress down. Our hopes of being in by Christmas were (gently) dashed by the builder - we might just squeak it, but we'd rather wait and move in with absolutely everything finished so we can just kick back and enjoy, not spend the first month rushing around finishing landscaping etc.

Sometime back I spied this fellow in a local gallery. He is the work of a local(ish) artist from Bermagui, Murray Ambler. I just love him. We always see pelicans on our walks and rides around the inlet. They hang around where the fishermen come in to clean their catch as they know they will get the fish carcasses. Here is the real thing doing an amazing balancing act.

We watched him glide in gracefully and make a perfect landing on this light. They are very big birds - our sculpture is life size and very heavy, given that it is made of recycled junk yard metal. I do rather like him though - we just have to decide where he is going to go exactly - in the meantime, the gallery is babysitting him for us. Although that caused a few problems as the weekend I bought him, the fact that he was sold didn't filter through to some of the other gallery staff and they promptly sold him to someone else. Fortunately, the artist kindly agreed to make another one for me, even though he is apparently 'over' doing pelicans and has moved on to other things.

We did have a couple of days - or parts of a couple of days when it stopped raining and the sun peeked out, although it was still cold. Here is Mt Dromadery - called Gulaga by the local aborigines - guarding Wagonga inlet - a pristine body of crystal clear water where oysters are grown.

This is looking north along the beaches of Kianga and Dalmeny. Can't wait until we are living there fulltime - can you blame me?!!

A picture of innocence

The grandbaby was baptised on Sunday - here he is being held by godmother, Auntie Clare, with proud parents (and godfather) looking on.

He is wearing the family christening robe knitted by my mother - very fine, lacey wool. Jus as well, as Canberra (and much of the rest of SE Australia) was bloody freezing! Some spring weather.

His mum and aunties wore it before him - he is he first of the next generation.

The continuation of a family tradition.

That's a good thing.