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An Afternoon at the Queensland Art Gallery

This past Sunday, Mum and I went into the Queensland Art Gallery to look at a couple of exhibitions, one that had it’s last day on Sunday and the other two had opened the day before and oh it was such a wonderful jaunt.The first was “Made for this World”, contemporary art & the places we build, which was an exhibition aimed to encourage children to look twice at the places around them, it had some great activities to do including making bridges or whatever structure you wished from short flexible bamboo skewers and masking tape using bridge drawings by Cai Guo Qiang as ideas. Another activity was to go dotty in Yayoi Kusama’s “The obliteration room 2002”, which has an online version here. The last hand-ons activity was Icelander Olafur Eliasson’s “The cubic structural evolution project 2004”, which invited patrons to build buildings out of white Lego pieces to be placed in a constantly evolving city (photo below).

The cubic structural evolution project

The other two we went to see were Margaret Preston: Art and Life, which is an extraordinary exhibit of her paintings, monotypes and prints as well as photos and objects from her life. This exhibit is a traveling one organised by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, so if happens to visit a town near you, I strongly urge you to visit. The actual website of the exhibition is here.

The other was Grace Cossington Smith: A Retrospective Exhibition, which is also a traveling exhibition but organised by the National Gallery of Australia, the tour website is here and features an exhaustive online catalog of her work. We didn’t spend as much time in this one as we did in the Margaret Preston one but it was equally as amazing, I really liked how in comparision to Preston who I felt emphasised the structure of the flowers and buildings in her work, Cossington Smith emphasised the colours that she saw that made up her subjects not always the colours that we would see in a scene. Quite an enjoyable afternoon, which we finished off with a browse of the Art Gallery Shop 🙂

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shoes, ornaments, a bag and so much more.

Stream Shoes The other day I picked up a pair of Source Stream sandals and they are just pure bliss, I have a hard time with shoes from wearing a 9.5 but mostly finding shoes that are always comfortable and can wear all day. Well these certainly fit the criteria and they are so funky as well – the images on the straps are sunflowers 🙂

I have been after some new work pants for a while now but finding good work pants is hard as well. Pants need to be loose fitting, breathable, big pockets etc so that I can actually fill the shelves instead of standing like a bean post, well I found a pair in the most unlikely shop. I was in Mountain Designs and saw some travel pants, which fitted all the criteria – black, loose, pockets, breathable. Score! What makes them even better is that they are a 55% Hemp/45% PET blend, dude my pants are a bong! (yeah I know that the hemp they grow for fabric is different to the pot kind but still), the best bit? They were reduced from $90 to $40, score!

Mikasa Cake Stand

How cute is this little cake stand from Mikasa? It is 5.75″ wide and 4″ high, perfect for taking photos of a single slice of cake or some biscuits 🙂

Villeroy & Boch Ornaments

Two more purchases, as my family and friends know, I have a very good relationship with Christmas Ornaments, we go together like Vegemite and cheese or milk and milo, so when I saw these in the Vileroy & Boch store at DFO, nothing was going to stop me taking them home with me. They are from the Scandinavian Christmas 2004 series, which was the second year in V&B’s Christmas round the world annual collection, Russia was 2003 and America was 2005.
A bag for Rachel

This is a bag I made for a friend who loves cats and is quite fluent in Japanese, so what better than a bag based on a pattern in a Japanese craft book and Japanese quilting fabric? Idea for the bag is from this book (the middle one on the front cover) – ISBN4529040011. Crafting Japanese entry for the book.
Pandanni

I love Pandani! They were such cool plants to play with whilst in Tasmania, the way the leaves formed corkscrews was just so cool, so here is a layout I did on them earlier today 🙂

Well that is for the moment, I was in the middle of making a bag but I ran out of thread 🙁 so now I am playing in photoshop and chilling out to the crazy/beautiful soundtrack.

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Ribbon Log-Cabin Block


I borrowed this gorgeous book out of the library the other week called Vintage-Style Quilts by Flora Roberts and one of the projects in it was a ribbon pin cushion which was constructed on a similar method to a log-cabin block, inspired by the idea, I grabbed some cotton, lots of ribbon and got started. The block is about 8″ square.
The elephant in the middle is from ribbon that was used to trim the curtains in my bedroom and the others are 3/8″ ribbons that I have collected in the last year or so from scrapbooking.

I have no idea what I will do with this block, Mum has suggested making 12 tiny ones to go round the edge and turn it into a cushion cover or to make it the feature of a bag. I have no idea what I will do other than sit and look at it 🙂 Ideas?

In other news
Readymade Magazine now has a blog.
Check out these awesome lights from brightlights-littlecity.
Uncooked – cards that well make you laugh like others have not before.
Lastly, perhaps you may have noticed that I have my very own favicon for my site – favicon 🙂

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dude, it’s all about the pink.

Some time after finishing High School in November 2002, I started to become shall we say more girly, in fact a few of the high school girls say that without a doubt I am the most changed since school (I’m cool with that). As I started to realise my girly side, a whole lot more pink started appearing in my life and well yesterday the ultimate piece of pinkness arrived. Can you guess what it is from the picture below? Yep a PINK Motorola V3 Razr, I can still remember when I first saw the post about them over on Shiny Shiny, I was just in utter bliss. I had to get one!! So I started tracking the prices on Ebay (meant I saved about AU$200 on the price) and when the price was right, I hit that little button and bought one 🙂 We are now a little Razr family as Matthew has a Black Razr 🙂
dude, go the pink

This is actually only a fraction of the pink things I own, some clothes are in the wash, my wallets are in hand bags, my bin is on the floor, sheets in the linen cupboard etc etc. What can I say; it’s all about the pink!

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the coolest kid

funky shower cap

A week? or who knows how long ago, I had a super fun day with Andrea, where we spent next to nothing on great finds and spent a lot of time laughing, the shower cap on Gertrude to the left is one such find. I am the coolest kid in town because without a doubt I do have the coolest shower cap 🙂

I could bitch and moan about how life is at the moment but I am not going to do that, because we all know we hear enough of that in real life, so why carry it on here? So I’ll have a moan about Christmas instead.

My family all know that I normally full of the Christmas spirit, begging that we get the tree a day earlier this year, when can we start eating all the extra-special Christmas biscuits (coming soon to a blog near you), pouring over the yearly family updates we get from far-flung family and friends, thinking up the perfect presents, going nuttso over *Fine European* ornaments.

This year it hasn’t started happening yet, feeling bit scroogish here, so in an attempt to banish that evil spirit, I am making all sorts of cute yet primitive ornaments (also coming to a blog near your) to adorn the tree when we get it next week. I am going to haul myself down to the shops tomorrow to absorb some cheer and find those presents.

Christmas is in less than ten days.
Eleven days till Mum and I hit the road.
So much to do before then.

ohh and I almost forgot the best thing 🙂
Mum and I went into give blood the other day and I wanted to get the whole 470ml of blood out of me this time unlike the two times before so, you know I drank 4L of water between getting up at 4:25am for work and the appointment at 2:15pm. Well the blood was gushing out of me so fast I almost burst the little holding bag that that get the first dregs in. Seven and a bit minutes later, I had donated the whole 470ml! Go Helen! We won’t go into details about what happened afterwards but to say, Helen gets a bit faint headed after offering herself to the vampire… And GO MUM for having her 50th whole blood donation that day as well!

As I have said before I hate giving blood, the copious amounts of water, the faint-headedness bits and all the rest but just knowing that slight discomfort it gives me is less than that of the up to three other people who need my B+ blood.

That almost puts the Christmas hat on me, so with ten days till Christmas, I challenge no ask you to take a couple of hours out of your time and give the gift of blood to some strangers this season.

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the sweetest day

The 6 5 things that make this day stellar.

1 – My new lens arrived – Canon EF 70-200mm f/4L USM

2 – a sweet little care package from my second mother, Tracy.

3 – Bought U2 tickets 🙂 Andrea, Matthew and I are going to U2 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂

4 – Ben Lee is on Live at the Chapel tonight!

5 – Veronica Mars is on TV tonight, it premiered last week, sure it is slightly pointless but fun.

6 – Now that I have typed this out, I can’t recall the sixth thing 🙁