Finish it off Friday: freestyle

 It's a long weekend here: and today's Australia Day/Invasion Day.

So I decided this morning to dub today's Finish it off Friday 'freestyle', meaning I could do whatever I want as long as something got finished. 

By the time I hit my studio (I needed to have a slow start to the day and a nice brunch before I considered work: toasted bagel with scrambled eggs loaded with cheese, spinach, mushroom and red capsicum, if you're interested) that idea had morphed again into 'as long as it was Australian themed'.

Because the first container I opened from my Finish it off Friday shelf (yes, I now have a whole section in the cubby above my work table for projects needing to be finished) included some stitching that's been languishing since... hmm... just after I arrived in Australia back in 1996.

(There would be a lovely photo of it here, but I've spent the last day fighting to convince Instagram to post, and it would seem that in the process I've lost some pictures I took :-/)

Instead, here's the finished result: 

One Sydney Opera House cushion based on a pattern in Jenny Kee's book Jenny Kee needlepoint: stitched circa 1997-98 (I know this as I pulled the book off my book shelf and it's labeled as hitting the collection in November 1997.)

From there I dived into both my paper and electronic stash, and ended the day with this:

On the left, a stash of Australian magazines, made quickly and easily from paper stash of magazine covers glued to cardboard.

On the right, a collection of 'Sydney Deco Moderne' magazines created from screenshots I shamelessly stole from Barocky Chocky's Instagram feed back in 2021 and finally unearthed from electronic stash:

(Sadly, there appears to be no such magazine in real life...)

And at the bottom, a work in progress (that I suspect is doomed to fail): creating a miniature version of Trevor Dickinson's Greetings from Canberra book with readable pages:

What you're not seeing is the heap of paper hitting the recycling bin: particularly magazine and book covers that I've kept for years that aren't in scale.

I call that a successful day's work.