The weekend

Can you guess how we are going to spend our
extra-long weekend (in addition to our
Easter commemorations, of course)??

Visiting Melbourne

Thanks to Phil's parents and some dear friends, Phil and I were able to enjoy some quality time together without kids, in Melbourne. There was lots of quilt admiring, of course.And we thoroughly enjoyed Melbourne's cafe and restaurant culture, consuming a rather large number of coffees, and eating out everday... We walked the centre of Melbourne inside out and back to front (pretty much spent three days walking, hobbling back to the hotel at night when we could barely take another step).Oh, and to save carrying our own bulky camera everywhere we took one with which we were rather unfamiliar. You can probably tell. Looking at the above photo, I was thinking we'd stumbled on achieving the clever tilt-shift thingy my sister does (I think she had to buy an expensive doodad, and take a workshop to do it) until I realised I smudged the lens somewhere along the way, and the rest of the photos all had that artistic looking blur over half of the image...
Other highlights included the Look! exhibition at the State Library - lot's of original artwork from children's books, including many books in our own collection - as well as an exhibition of the original artwork for Graeme Base's The Waterhole.
We spent a day clothes and shoe shopping (we had a significant list which we managed to achieve) and another day exploring Fitzroy (Brunswick St, and Smith St) where there were so many interesting little shops and cafes.

My favourite thing about Melbourne, though, was sleeping for 11 hours, uninterrupted! I don't think that's happened since somewhere in the '90s. We're usually doing well if we manage six in between kiddie toilet stops or kiddie nightmares or baby bottles or alarm clocks.

My quilts at the Australasian Quilt Convention 2011

Phil and I returned this afternoon from three wonderfully wintery days in Melbourne. We had a great break, and I'll share more highlights in another post, but for today, here are some images of my quilts in the Convention space, just to give you some idea...
Oops, that's not a quilt! That's one of two posters I had printed, incorporating photos of work-in-progress, just to give some idea of the process involved. As you may already have noticed, the Royal Exhibition Building is an awesome space for an even like this!
(Those are my quilts at the left of the image above, behind Dianne Firth's beautifully bold red and grey quilts (unfortunately I can't recall their titles right now, but they are part of 'Elements' by tACTile).
I was rather excited to find that the closest stall was my recurring favourite (Western Australian) quilt show stall The Thread Studio. (That's them at the end of my wall of quilts). I was also very happy with the setup I was given for displaying my quilts. The pin-up boards worked a treat, and we were very pleased to find spotlights installed when we returned the morning after setup. Thanks again, Judy, for this wonderful opportunity to share my work!

My bags are packed, I'm ready to go!

By tomorrow lunchtime I hope to be in Melbourne hanging up my quilts
at the Australasian Quilt Convention. Maybe I'll see you there?

Source of hilarity

If you happen to hear uncontrolled giggling coming from our backyard that'll probably be Daniel, delighting in the fact that his party tooter unrolls when he blows through it.It's about the most delightful sound you will ever hear. Until he works out that the thing actually toots if you blow hard enough. The siblings are under strict instructions not to show him that.

A time for rain

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven:

a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.

That passage comes from Ecclesiastes 3, and is rather deep and meaningful for a post in which all I really wanted to say was "I'm so glad that it is finally the time for rain!" After six months of summer, it is oh-so-refreshing. (The Seekers' tune for the above passage has been playing through my head all day, so I thought I'd include the text on the basis that God has a time for everything, including rain, even if it does seem a bit slow in coming, to our way of thinking).

Sorting out loose ends

OK, this is major technological advancement for this little blog. Hope it works! This is a video clip of my thread burying process. I know it fascinates a lot of people that the threads are tied off by hand in this way. Maybe you can see from the video clip that once I'm going, it's a smooth and relaxing process!

In case your wondering, the steps I am going through here are:
- selecting a pair of threads to tie (each line of stitching has two threads - the top thread and the bottom thread - at its beginning and end)
- tying a granny knot in the pair of threads
- trimming the pair of threads to the same length
- threading them onto the needle
- using the needle to thread them between the layers of the quilt
- trimming off the excess thread