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Total Bargain

For all things that come to an end, something else begins, well that was my reasoning in arguing for the Christmas Tree to stay up till I went back to uni. Well actually it was that Mum and I would be away for the twelve days of Christmas and we wanted to be able to enjoy the tree 🙂 Yep I go back to uni in 17hrs so the tree was taken down today. Even though I had rigged up a watering system for it this year to ensure it stayed green for as long as possible, it died quite a few days ago. Almost everyday Pabbi would whinge and whine asking if the tree would be taken down today, the answer was always just a couple of more days. The living room now has a bare patch and the curtains lack decoration now as well. Oh well, Christmas always comes around soon enough.

Whilst on my lunch break yesterday I spent a delightful time at the clearance racks in Myer and I walked out with a pair of stone coloured Italian cotton Country Road pants (which means I now have 3 pairs of gorgeous CR styled pants) and a gorgeous emerald green silk v-neck top. Which I wore of course when I went out last night to farewell my night fill manager, who at the tender age of 20!! is going to be trading manager (i.e. 3rd in charge) of the Bi-Lo store at Airlie Beach. He’ll be a store manager in ten years or so probably.

Whilst looking on the racks I also saw this gorgeous pleated silk Country Road balloon skirt which I tried on and loved except it had this one problem, I didn’t like the balloon look, which Mum tells me was high fashion in 1957 and that people would add netting so that they would balloon up even more.My plan was/is to unpick the skirt from the lining and kill that balloon look and hem the bottom so it would just be a straight pleated skirt but I am slightly sort of starting to like the mini balloon. Who knows?

Mum and I went back this morning to look at the balloon skirt which I did pick up and I managed to get another Country Road skirt which will be nice for uni and a pair of cropped JAG jeans also perfect for days at Uni when jeans would just be death due to the heat 🙂

Grand total for 1 top (AU$99.95), 2 pants (AU$99.95 & AU$189) and 2 skirts (AU$229 & AU$ 139) at RRP AU$756.90.

Price I paid after staff discount and two stages of clearance? AU$267.27

Total bargain, I say 🙂

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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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Christmas

tree

My little collection of Christmas presents.
Benni Hemm Hemm Cd from Karl – Can’t decide what I love more the artwork in the CD or the songs – modern Icelandic Folk with some Led Zep/Guns N’ Roses influence.

A Short History of the Twentieth Century by Geoffrey Blainey from Matthew, I have come across Blainey’s works in my studies but have never really read any of his non-fiction works only a couple of his novels.

2005 Swarovski Annual Christmas Ornament 🙂 to add to my collection and a map of Morocco to plan my big trip – from Mum and Pabbi.

It was a very nice night 🙂 and now I am in the final stages of switching over emails etc, before in a couple of minutes Mum and I head off onto the open road on day 1 of our 3 day trip to reach Tasmania. See you sometime 🙂

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Merry Christmas

Hope everyone has a nice and enjoyable Christmas with heaps of fextive cheer 🙂

Pabbi is currently speaking to Karl, Mum is mashing the spuds, Matthew is helping with something and I am hear, sorting things out for when we leave in the morning.

We are about to sit down to Christmas Eve Dinner with all the traditional Icelandic trimmings, then after the washing up is done, we will gather round the tree to exchange the presents. 🙂

This Christmas Card is one we recieved from friends of Mum’s but I just love it so it shall be my card to you all 🙂

Christmas Card

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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 quilt is posted

Christmas is coming and that means full steam ahead on all creations, the bummer is that most/all of the people I am making gifts for read this thing, so I can’t exactly post photos of them till they get them which isn’t for ages yet 🙁

However I can say that my back is sore from the amount of free motion machine quilting I have done in the last day or so, the person who gets this present is very lucky because if it wasn’t Christmas I would be keeping it myself! Full of blood, sweat and tears I tell you well actually full of 3 bobbins of thread! Thanks for Mum for showing me how to do free motion quilting.

Yesterday I also posted Jökull’s quilt so as long as the ship sails smoothly, he should see it in three to four months. I even wrote Jökull the Glacier Boy on the shipping label 🙂

Quilt 1 backing fabric

Exams finished 1 week ago and I am already going stir crazy! Only 3 and a bit months left of summer holidays. ugg. I am already lined up to make Matthew three new pairs of pyjamas and to clean the kitchen and living room (paid work) so maybe it won’t be too bad. On Sunday I am going to see Ben Lee at the Zoo with Sam and Andrea 🙂 so that will be good, happy days. 🙂