Recollect: In the city

Here are the rest of the buildings that caught my eye at the Powerhouse Museum's Recollect: Models exhibition last weekend:

Metropolitan Water Sewerage and Drainage Board building: a lovely wooden model of the building, which is still standing (there's a great Flickr album of how it looks now)

Own house, Trier Center by Walter Burley and Marion Mahony Griffin.

This particularly interested me as I recently read a book on their work and lives which covered this estate, and the house was never built because they moved to Australia to work on their winning design for Canberra.

The House of Tomorrow, by Robyn Boyd.

(Which I've always thought would make an excellent dolls' house design)

And, finally, Le Corbusier's Villa Shodhan

If you're in Sydney any time before February 1 next year, I recommend popping in to the Powerhouse Museum to see the exhibition for yourself.

I've been a bit sidetracked from blogging today

Because I made this.

Recollect: Home

Apart from the farm buildings on display, the Powerhouse Museum had a Walther & Stevenson doll's house in the their Recollect: Models exhibition.

 (Although as far as I could see, there were no contents.)

 There were, however, pine cone trees

and super-giant-sized light switches on the side. 

I swear I blogged about the house ages ago when it first arrived at the museum, but damned if I can find it. Instead, I found this awesome blog post from The Powerhouse Museum with great pictures, including ones of the original owner as a child with the house. Enjoy!

Recollect: life on the farm

(A post for Rebecca, who is our Walther & Stevenson expert...)

 The first exhibition Jennifer and I visited while I was in Sydney on Sunday was the Powerhouse Museum's Recollect: Models 02 (I was concerned that there was a first exhibition of models that I had missed, but was told that it was really Recollect 02: Models. The Recollect series is a chance to bring things out of storage in themed collections)

Yesterday's post was just a taster: I plan to share more in-depth photos and information on what was displayed over the next few days. First up are a lovely collection of Walther & Stevenson toy farm buildings, designed to go with the Britains farm animals and accessories...

Front,

 back

 and side.

 There were outbuildings,

 the ubiquitous windmill,

and other farm components..

(To see images of the original catalogues, visit Rebecca's blog.)

My accidentally green-themed weekend might accidentally make you a little green with envy...

I went to Sydney. My Co-Editor and I had an editorial catchup at the cafe of The Powerhouse Museum (please note how well her knitting, the magazine and my lunch coordinated with each other...)

 Why the Powerhouse? Well, they have this exhibition on....

 (While we were there we also ducked into the King's Cinema to watch some of Cinefix's 8-Bit cinema

 and checked out the pieces on display in the Interface exhibition...)

 Then we headed downtown to the Museum of Sydney, where we found more:

 and more miniature buildings on display.

This morning I attended my first AMEA committee meeting before heading back to Canberra with friend Celia, via Berrima

 And Eling Forest Winery.

Friday night's frightening find

WARNING! This post depicts images and video footage of a dollhouse and inhabitants being harmed.

I was in town this afternoon at a presentation which finished just after 4 pm so I decided it was the perfect excuse to have a crack at this whole late night shopping thing I have heard about.

First stop was at one of my favourite haunts, the FlipSide sale bins. Where I unexpectedly spotted something miniature-related:

( and quite unsettling).

I left it where it was, but couldn't resist checking out the band on my return home. If you like horror movies, you might enjoy the video of the house and inhabitants being destroyed...

Thursday twilight: tiny things

It's been a very long time since I've visited the Typo factory outlet store (I didn't see much point after they said they were stopping the green boxes, and then once I started catching the bus it just seemed all too difficult to get there). But this afternoon after work a series of coincidences meant that a friend and I who were heading to an opening happened to give another friend a lift to her car, which just happened to be parked at the Canberra Outlet Centre. And since we were running early, it seemed silly not to just pop in and see what was there...

What was there was a green box table! And a shop assistant who made it very clear, in several ways, that UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES were customers allowed into the green boxes. So we had to content ourselves with scratching around what they already had out on the table (not much) and what else they had on sale.

What else they had were miniatures. The packing crate and the pallet set seemed outrageously expensive at $5 each (compared to what we used to pay for stuff there) but the miniature cardboard stag head made up for it ($2: it's missing its nose, can't you see?)

It's good to see Typo continue to offer miniature options. I kid myself that my (fairly) constant banging on about using their goods for miniature scenes might have something to do with it, but somehow I doubt it.

I'm intrigued to find out if the miniature stag head  comes in any other patterns. I was told it was new, but it appears to be so new that it's not even hit their website yet. Luckily, I have an afternoon meeting in town tomorrow and might just need to pop into the retail Typo store on the way home and see what the story is...

 But Typo wasn't the point of the evening. We were off to the Tuggeranong Arts Centre for the opening of the exhibition Little Things: an exploration of miniatures, kawaii, and all things tiny.

 Alas, the artist's idea of miniatures and my idea of miniatures didn't quite gel...

But they were well-executed works and my friend and I enjoyed catching up on a Thursday night over a glass of bubbles each and starting to make our plans for 2015.

A night on the tiles

Tonight I finally FINALLY got back to that bathroom idea I started working on in September (and not working on later in September, and again in October).

During that time I'd occasionally pondered on how best to set the mosaic tiles out in lines on the wall without it being a permanent thing. And tonight I worked it out: use the metal IKEA notice board I picked up from an op shop back in 2007 as the wall where the tiles are.

And so I tested the theory:

 and tested the theory again (after dropping the bath and breaking off a tap).

And, by Jove, I think I'm on to something!

(Of course now I have the problem that, because the tiles aren't stuck down, they're prone to moving when I bump them...)

A souvenir succulent

My friend and colleague returned from a week working in Melbourne with a wee gifty for me:

I had fun getting it home on the bus this evening (and got some strange looks), and now I have to decide it it's going to live here:

 or here:

(plus how not to kill it...)

A slothful Sunday...

I slept in late (who could blame me, with my lovely new bedding?),

 made a delicious brunch,

 then spent the rest of the day luxuriating on my newly-upholstered sofa bed.

It's going to be very hard packing up and returning to reality...

School dinners

It's been too long since I visited Margell, and since I'm not planning to roam very far, I made sure I stopped in at the markets on the way to stock up with the essentials.

Hope your weekend is as relaxing as I plan for mine to be!