A Sassy Girl Collage.

At last I finished one of my collages, purposely made for one of my best friends. I put in lots of symbolism, as it was all about her. It was a very belated birthday present, and also a housewarming gift.

I found the quote on the web, and had to think of her. The quote inspired the rest of the collage.

 I use many magazine pictures for my collages, and alter, add and subtract at will.

There is the sassy girl, all confident and open, and being just how she should be.

She has wings to go, wherever she wants.

She wears an apron for practicality, and green for new beginnings. 

White innocence is still underneath, covered by the red of womanhood.

The cage lies discarded behind her, empty with the door shut. 

For the bird has flown. 

It sits atop the mirror tree of growth.

 I think they look at each other knowingly, so now and then.

I framed it as well, recycled of course.
With a lick of paint.
She really liked it!

New Zealand Kingfisher.

I heard this kingfisher one sunny morning. It was in the oak tree outside, I managed to snap its' picture before it zoomed off. All lemon-yellow fronted. It didn't turn around to show its' greeny-blue back unfortunately. 

Off to find someones' gold fish in their pond, a juicy big insect, or (I heard a neighbour report) to spear a fantail bird......! Horror!

Hobbit Teatime after Hard Tidying.

My hobbit cup.

My favourite afternoon tea cup was given to me by my Wellington daughter. It was made by the same pottery studio that provided the crockery for the Hobbit film. It is nice and chunky with a birds egg-speckle. And together with some home made cake, I feel very hobbit-like.

Studio all tidied up.

In the end it only took 2 of my holiday days to totally tidy up my studio. And everything was put away in the proper place too, downstairs in the storage room, and even that looks tidy; all boxes labelled on the shelves and tags hanging of zip storage bags.
Even my spinning wools and felting wools are separated.

The cutting table bared of mess.

Some of my tools and tool bags are quite retro. That is my parents' old bread box. Full of papers.
I also use quite a few old suitcases, and paste pretty papers onto large shoe boxes.

Painting station cleared for finishing work.

Fox in his box next to my table, he likes to be close. 

He is 17 years old and can get a bit confused sometimes.

Sunny corner in the new laundry.

In the mean time, my Love has finished the laundry and it is now fully operational.
It is very compact, and clean and practical.

The tub.

There is a small tub with a swivel tap, big enough to stand a bucket in.
It's all I need.

And I can close it off with 2 folding doors. These now have white frosted glass in them, so the light comes through but not the view of 2 big machines.
What a handy guy I have! Thanks Darling, you are the best!

Masks and Mess.

Wolf fingerpuppet.

Remember I told you I had performed the story of the Wolf and the three pigs with finger-puppets for the class a while ago? Well this was the wolf finger-puppet I needle-felted. He looks nicely wild with shaggy bits of gottland wool curls as his coat.

 Hungry eyes and a teeth-filled open snout. 

He'll huff and he'll puff!

My paintings for the school production masks.

Speaking of puppets, year 3 and 4 had to produce a variety show, and a Pinocchio readers theatre was chosen by our teacher for her group. That means that a bunch of kids are Pinocchio, and a bunch are Gepetto , with one of the bunch being the actor, while they all speak in unison.

The teacher was able to find some character faces for masks on the web, which needed modification, but I painted  6 of the characters masks ( incl. Jimeny Cricket, not shown). We copied them and glued them on to cardboard, they sat above the childrens' mouths, so that we could hear their voices. 

It went very well, they lasted 4 performances, produced very cheaply!

I am an awesome teacher aide!

All the magazines and books for ripping up.

You know how you see photos of these beautifully designed and decorated studios of multi talented artists? You even have whole magazines devoted to "studios" and "where women create".

It's very inspiring, and makes you drool at the mouth of course.

Then reality hits.

Do they actually get used?

Where are their piled up books, spare bits of paper, the dried up paint spills?

The coffee cup with half the contents, from last week?

My cutting and laying out table is somewhere under this.

The sewing project that utterly, I mean Utterly Flopped.
Left in a corner. Together with that basket of threads that just can't be classified and therefore has no real place.
Do they have a cat that might have pooped under the table?

My felting table...yeah,right!

And all those things that these artists had taken somewhere, perhaps to work on at Club, and coming home they "just for now" popped on to the table.
Did they find that the tube of glue had leaked and left a rock hard puddle on the cutting sheet?

And my painting station: un-usable.

Cause I have all that. 

It just happens.

By itself, honest.

Spinning in Springtime.

Sunshine on the table.

Not having a big budget for flowers, I often buy flowers from a roadside stall. $3 for a bunch of cheer is awesome, and these daffodils were often replaced in the early spring.

Breakfast table.

We are an old-fashioned family, we set the breakfast table the night before, and always eat at the table. Stops you from rushing with your food, and is a great slow start to the day.
I love creamy porridge with dried fruit in cold weather.

Last September I attended a Spinning Workshop in Woodville, a one and a half hours drive south from here. The tutor was Suzy Brown, a.k.a. Woolwench . She is an amazing art yarn spinner, who lives in The Netherlands. She is a kiwi however, from Hawkes' Bay, so kind of the opposite of me!

Suzy and Tracy have their thinking faces on...

The workshop was held in Tracy Whites' Studio and shop in Woodville. I learned at least 5 other spinning techniques and Suzy helped me with some trouble shooting of one of my yarns as well. It was lovely to meet her face to face, as we had already messaged each other through her blog.
 I had a go at a Majacraft prototype carder, that we had to test, as well as using a blending board for the first time.

One of my fellow students trying hard to not control the yarn.

Tracy had some delicious fibres for us to play with, and I brought some of my own as well.

Suzy made us spin our first crazy multi-fibre batt with our eyes closed! This was to stop us controlling the fibre going into the wheel, because when you have spun for a while, spinners' hands want to make the thread fine and even. Art yarn can be bulky and full of irregularities.

Of course some of the fibre got so bulky, it wouldn't go through the hole, and there was some swearing in the room! Unfortunately not everyone had a wheel that could accommodate bulky bits.

Thanks to my new flyer and large bobbins I was fine with that.

It was a really good exercise.

A fine combed merino and silk mixture from the blending board.

At home I spun up my fine combed merino and oodles of silk rolags from the blending board, I managed to make 3 of those rolags. The thread I made was fine and even, because I wanted it to go a long way. I could use it by itself or as a wrapping yarn or as a plying yarn.
Who knows.
I'll show the other yarns I made in another post soon.

My favourite elmtree .

I drive by this marvelous elmtree every day I go to work.
 It is massive!
And has the perfect shape.
Oh I love it!

Free free!

This winter an escaped cockateel has been circling our street. The neighbours across the street have 1 too, in a cage on their porch. They screeched to each other often and the free one would circle their house.
Until one afternoon the cage door came unstuck, and our neighbours' bird joined the free bird.
We haven't seen either of them since...

A Dainty Drawing with a Slightly Significant Connection.

Greetings by E.K.Robison.

A wee while ago I went op(portunity)-shopping, as I do.

That day I found sweet, lolly coloured items, in pinks, light blues and bright yellows.  A 70's bedsheet in pink pop-art flowers, I am sure you'll remember the kind!

 A vintage souvenir tablecloth from Australia, and an old tea-towel with yellow roses and smothered in a white crocheted edge.

Sweet thrifting finds!

Tiny childrens' books with animal pictures, an old print of a church, a chinese good luck rabbit, crumpled embroidered linen with little flowers.

A vintage japanese eggcup and tiny glass buttons in blue and white. 

And amongst all the 20cent junk in the bin that gets emptied each night into the rubbish skip, a sweet little drawing done in waterpaints and pencil. I thought it charming and instinctively pulled it out from amongst the plastic bowls, broken vases and ripped books.

I took the little treasures home and had a good look at them with a cup of tea.

I used to put my little girls' hair up like this too.

The little face was painted so simply, but very effectively. 

I could see the brushstrokes in the waterpaint.

There was a bit of dried up plastic sticky tape attaching the circular drawing to the bottom page. It had left a yucky bright red mark on the paper unfortunately. On the paper attached was written "Get Well Soon", the signature on the drawing was E.K. Robison 59. And on the back it said in the same handwriting: "original of one of my cards worked for reproduction E " I was getting curious. Cards? She/He produced greeting cards?
So I googled it. "postcards E.K.Robison". Hmmm can't find the name on the page, but I'm in the national library archives of NZ. Was the artist a NZer?
Just the name in google search then: right, some auction houses, an Australian art auction house has sold 8 works , there is 1 photo, and the painting is a similar style of a maori boy, also circular.
Well it is looking promising.
Another work is dated 1918. So the artist has been doing this for a while .

E.K.Robison signature.

I search for the name again in the National library of New Zealand.
It comes up under a heading of various artists collection: Robison, Edith Kathleen 1879-1986.
Aha, a lady artist and goodness me, she lived to the ripe old age of 107 years !
The heading underneath says:  Bendall, Edith Kathleen  1879-1986.
That must be the same lady, but perhaps her maiden name?
Yes, a description of the drawing in the collection follows and is credited to Robison, E.K.
I click on the names record.
A list of references comes up, also 3 mentioning Katherine Mansfield, one of NZ's most loved short story writers. I click on 1 of those, and I find out Mansfield wrote Miss Bendall a letter. It's in a collection in the national library. Cool.
 However this doesn't tell me more about the lady artist.

Her scribble on the back making me curious.

I go back to google search and find a mention of 2 more artworks in an exhibition write-up from 1908.

But no more photos, so I search google images 

Hmmm, that's a lot of pictures of Katherine Mansfield. Weird.

But that picture on the 3d row is not Katherine, maybe Edith?

I click and get to the wikipedia page of Francess Hodgkins, a prestigious and influential landscape and still life painter.
On the third paragraph it says -"among her pupils was Edith Kathleen Bendall, lover of Katherine Mansfield".
What??!!

A sweet maori boy, sold at an auction.

 I don't know that much about Katherine Mansfield: wonderful NZ writer, had a tumultuous love life, lived overseas a lot, and died young from tuberculosis. I did know she was bi-sexual, it must have been difficult at the time when one was expected to marry and you couldn't even vote as a woman yet.

But now I am learning fast.

Photo from auction catalogue.

During my later detective work I have since found out, that they were involved during 1906-1908, when EKB (as Mansfield called her in her diaries) would have been 26 or 27 years old. Mrs. Edith Robison has never admitted there was a lesbian relationship between them, but they did have plans to produce childrens' books together, Edith doing the artwork and Katherine the storywriting. However this never came to pass.

Auction catalogue photo, by E.K.Robison

And I am sorry about that. Because looking at these gorgeous artworks (that I have found on the international art centre auction site) I am sure their books would have been a huge success.

I feel very lucky to have found this raggedy piece of paper with that sweet dainty drawing on it.
I will find a frame for it, for it is my little connection to New Zealand Art History.
And I just managed to save it from the rubbish bin, for the price of 20 cents!

Auction catalogue photo, by E.K. Robison.

Making Felt Handpuppets.

50 cent soft toys, ready for making into fingerpuppets.

Lately I have been buying little soft toys, cutting open the bottoms, and sewing in a finger of a winter glove, to create finger puppets for the kids at school. I have made the class a little theatre out of a large cardboard box, and gave them my first 20 minute performance of "the 3 little pigs and the wolf". I actually wrote a script for it. 

Most of the children had never seen a puppet performance, and were speechless when the puppets asked them questions. The children (7 yr olds) looked at each other, and then a few answered the puppets' question. ( yes, thats' a lovely house build of straw...) But by the end of the story they were happily helping the wolf blow down the the piglets house, and shouting at the pigs that the wolf was coming down the chimney! (you can't do that with t.v.!)
Now they can use the puppets on rainy lunch days, and make up their own stories. It is excellent for the shy kids and those with language problems, because they have to follow sentence and story structure, and their speech has to make sense. It also takes planning and cooperation with the other kids. And of course if you are introverted, well, it isn't you who is speaking, it is another character altogether, so you can make it say whatever you want.

The teacher was very pleased with me!

When I was a child in The Netherlands, I remember many happy rainy afternoons at friends' places, playing with puppets and a little wooden theatre with curtains, and sometimes we used a small lamp covered with a scarf for special effects. We'd spent hours to get our story together, and then we would perform it for our friends in our group, while someones' nice mum would get us lemonade and biscuits.
Those puppets were the plastic head variety.
I remember that after a while, your fingers would hurt from the rough opening, and the cloth bodies were always too big for little childrens' hands, the fabric would have to be folded in your palm so that your opposite fingers could reach the puppets' hands.
And I never understood why there was a priest or pastor character. What could you do with him in a story with princesses and bad wizards and treasures and suchlike?

The kind of hand-puppets I used to play with.

Primary school children in The Netherlands didn't go to school on Wednesday afternoons. I don't know if they still do now. You got to play with your friends in your neighbourhood all afternoon, and on rainy days you were allowed to watch a little t.v. , when they would show childrens' shows. One of the shows in the very early 70's was a puppet show called "Rikki en Slingertje". It was about the magical adventures of a boy and his very cheeky monkey. The theatre itself was in the city of Haarlem, very close to where my great-aunt and great-uncle lived. They were childless and my brothers and I stayed with them very often in the school holidays to be spoiled. One day my younger brother and I were allowed to be at 1 of the performances in theatre "Merlijn".
 Very exciting when you are 6! It seemed fantastical and colourful in my memory, since our t.v. was black and white. No doubt it was all simple puppets and cardboard props.

Stage 1 basic shape

So of course this post leads up to something, and that is my own felted puppets. Above the wet-felted basic shapes, they are slightly smaller than my own hands, which are petit, but I can get in them . Two fingers fit in the "neck".

Stage 2 profile

The rest of the puppet is build up with uncarded coloured wool, needle-felted around the neck. The facial features are added on and needled into shape.

Stage 2 face on

Stage 3 profile

I added more colour, wrinkles, got the nose down to size, then the eyes, very important for a puppet. Eyes connect the audience to the character. Eyelids were added, then facial hair with angora curls, including eyebrows, moustache and (real) goatie beard.
 I tried to keep the face in neutral emotion.

A large turban was twisted and needle-felted into place. I added lichens that had fallen out of the tree outside, by covering them with very thin wisps of wool, and needle-felting them into place.

stage 3 face on.

My Wily Wizard from the Woods, still needs some hands. But I love him already!

Laundry, Linens and Lengths of thread.

A small skein of my yarn in purples and glimmery gold.

My love of making yarns is continuing un-abated. The little hank above was for my daughter, who needed a present for someone.

Completely unique, un-repeatable yarn in different shades of purples and hot pink, with shiny metallic gold threads thrown in for a bit of sparkle.

Delicious bumps and wrappings.

Plenty of coils and bumpy wrappings in the plying process, for texture. All in all about 100 grams worth.

From small shower to new laundry.

The Man of the House is steadily carrying on with home improvements. This was the shower next to our bedroom. A tight squeeze to shower in, cold and cramped, with only the open window for damp extraction. Not so pleasant on winter mornings. We used it for a good long while.

 And who thought carpet on the floor was a good idea... never, never!

We now have, of course, a luxurious bathroom, made by the afore mentioned Man, and this cupboard-like space has been earmarked for a new laundry. 

It will be compact and hidden behind louvre doors, but handy to the Washer Woman. She will come by frequently and check upon the state of the washing-cycle, and stir the soaking bucket containing vintage linens. 

She will not be able to forget that a load is in the machine and surprise herself 2 days later after looking for a "lost" garment. 

Nor will she have to troops down two stories in the rain with an umbrella, to unload her dryer, and wonder how she will get her warm fluffies back up to the house without them being rained on. 

And venturing at night, into the always damp, cellar-like space below the house, turning on-on-oonnn---on the fluorescent tubes, and seeing yet another monstrous spider scuttle away, it will indeed be a thing of the past for the Washer Woman.

Never again will she have to worry about the run-off rainwater from the hill side, gently meandering underneath her lovely, and expensive, German precision machine. Should she click the on-button, while her feet are standing in the puddle also...? Hmmm, how thick are her rubber soles...

Soon there will be easy-to-clean tiles on floor and walls, and sun in the afternoon!

Oh to look forward to such simple joys!

gipboard, plumbery, paint & power.

Another two things have been fixed also in our house; new electric switch boards have been installed, since the old ones were so old we were unable to find new fuses for them that would fit. That was expensive, but we knew it had to be done when we moved into this house.

The other thing was getting rid of the Humongous hot water cylinder (280 liters that needed to be kept to temperature every day!) and having an instant hot water gas unit installed.

It works wonderfully, and we are now on mains pressure too, which makes each shower utter Bliss! The first power and gas bill showed we had already saved $50 the first month! So this energy change will pay for itself before long.

A bonus for the Woman of the House was a big empty cupboard, where the big cylinder had been, and is now perfect for storing spare pillows, blankets and duvets, and the vacuum cleaner too, especially since the Man of the House installed extra shelves and a clean lick of paint.

This house is slowly starting to come together and work smoothly.

Fabricabrac market in Wellington, april 2013.

Having had another Fabricabrac sale in Wellington in April this year, I managed to make some more pocketmoney and get rid of another fat basket of vintage fabrics and tablecloths.

These photos were taken at the end of the morning when it went quieter.

The vintage button ladies' stall.

 Although I drooled over the buttonladies' treasures, I managed to resist, and only bought $2 worth of silk organza scraps, intended for a small nuno-felting project.

Treasure Hunt Showcase ;

Buckles, ric-rac, bias binding, earrings and a sweet birdie.

 Another pleasant morning of my last school holidays was spent finding little bits and pieces. I loved the scrap of upholstery linen with the very "Kath Kidston" -like flowers print.
Perhaps I shall make myself a new handbag in the near future.

$1 worth of vintage fabric pieces, cotton reels and pincushion.

A plastic baggie full of scraps, I could not resist... And I already have 5 of those chinese pincushions in the brightest coloured satins, such a cheerful collection. And if you try to sew with recycled fabrics, you should also use re-cycled thread, I feel.

Green glass necklace and flower-ring.

The felted hairclip I made many years ago, and I wear it often, but I found a glass necklace in the same green, and a cute flower ring as well.

Accessories well matched.
Oh I do like to fossick for treasures!