A chrissie gift...

This beautiful spoon was part of Trudy's gift to me from Holland...it is so pretty and now I have a special mug and special spoon that I can use every day for my morning coffee...I'm very particular and need the right utensils when I eat and drink...they have to be pretty..I hate ugly china and cutlery so this is perfect..thanks Trudes..

Op shop finds from my trip to Stanthorpe..

3 rolls of vintage wallpaper....yay!!!!

Very old Readers' Digest covers

Fabrics from an old quilt...the one above is the original and below is the fabric put over the top...I didn't want the quilt just the fabrics and I love them so I sat for a few hours and unpicked them.

Another lot of Readers' Digest covers - all to be used for new journals...and close-ups of some of them below...quite lovely.

And these...an absolutely gorgeous old kids' book and the one on the right is an old cookbook....

Christmas dinner with mum

I was caught out with my mouth full in this picture...

Santa arrived with prezzies for everyone...

Mum's friend Joanie with her dog Brownie..

and mum opening one of her prezzies from us...

Mucking around with art...

I've been preparing some more books to make..I'm doing the online bookbinding class which I LOVE...so I went through my little collection of old books that I had kept for no reason apart from loving them and now they will become new books that will hopefully be used...Or sold..

Sitting in front of tv one nite I was bored but too tired to really do much else so I sat and drew faces on some beach pebbles I had collected...this was lots of fun..

Travel Journal: Melbourne.

So I had fun carrying this little journal around Melbourne...writing a bit here and there...I have yet to print out some photos to add so I have some blank pages left for those...

Throughout my original book I used old photocopied pics from my family's travels as backgrounds...

...the angelhead carving above is a photo I took years ago on the outskirts of Melbourne...

and this girl above is from a vintage postcard...she is actually standing in an Iowa cornfield originally...I really liked the way she is looking out into the distance and so wanted her in here...

The black and white pic above right is of my mum walking along the cliffs in Tasmania when she was about 17..she is all rugged up with a walking stick cut from a tree...and then the photo up in the lefthand corner is of Florence taken by my dad on our travels when I was a teenager...nothing to do with Melbourne but of course to do with travelling...and the map of Australia on the golf ball is about the PGA President's Cup which is why we were in Melbourne.

Art

I have started some more wire hearts...the vines are on and the foliage and flowers are in progress...on the heart below I spent a few hours sewing vintage fabrics and scarves into what I thought looked like flowers but at the end of it all I realized it all looked as though I had just wrapped some old material around the wire...hmmm..all that for not a lot. So back to the trusty wire ribbon roses...or roses made from gathered ribbons...like the pink one below. I'm trying to achieve a look that is floral and pretty but not too twee.. unique I suppose...I'll keep going until I achieve the effect I want...it will happen..it just sometimes takes longer than I want when I'm not even sure what I'm doing..(make sense?).

These 3 paintings are finally finished..I think..I have added some stitching to them if you can see that..I really had fun with these...I had no idea what they would be when I first put paint on the canvasses so it was very freeing..