Wallpaper willpower

Anyone who's been reading this blog for a while (*waves at the readers who have bumped into me IRL recently*) knows that, for the last couple of years, September 1st has marked the beginning of the Seven Things challenge.

This year I'm not doing it (officially) and Taph's not doing it (officially). But, as we said when we met at the movies on Friday night, that doesn't mean the habit hasn't stuck like some Pavlovian reflex (I have to add: we were knitting Time Thief Watch Caps. Something we haven't done for far too long: both the knitting and the Time Thief Watch Caps)

Realising that a film crew will be descending on The Room of Shame in just over a month's time, I've decided some serious work is need to turn it into a Room of Pride. To deal with the horror of facing the whole room at once, I've decided to deal with one thing each day. This morning before work I decided my stack of Urbis and Wallpaper back issues should be moved into my design/ workroom (which is crying out for a set of these to store them rather than having them stacked on the floor under the desk...)

All well and good. Except the Librarian in me is having difficultly dealing with the fact I have Urbis back to issue one and Wallpaper only back to issue 50. I'm so very tempted to trawl eBay for the missing 50 issues to add to the collection but I'm standing strong.

For now...

Bye bye Bradley

I had no idea in November last year when I booked my ticket to the September 5th performance of Sydney Dance Company's Sid's Waltzing Masquerade that I would be attending the last performance of one of my favorite dancers. It was a moving night and I feel very fortunate to have witnessed it (and from a seat five rows from the front...)

The most important thing

And I forgot to mention it!

My new push mower (courtesy of Taph and Vinnies Phillip)?It's black and white (of course)...

Barking up the right tree

One of the issues with being a cultural transplant is the gaping holes in your knowledge about your adopted country (even if you have lived there for over a decade). I've chosen stringybark as my natural object for The Big Very Important (Scary) Final Brief and my preliminary thoughts on how I could use it has made me realise how little I know about tradition Aboriginal crafts. Maori crafts? Easy peasy: I'm thinking ketes, pois, piupius...So when I stumbled across a couple of cheap but very relevant books at Book Lore this afternoon they just had to come home with me so I can read up on bark painting and rope making and other interesting (and hopefully useful) things...(The fact the spines were black and white had absolutely nothing to do with my choice. Honest!)

Odd going ons at ANU

Had you been up and awake at quarter to midnight last night, and had you happened to have been strolling through the campus at ANU you might have seen a rather odd sight.

Two shadowy figures were seen transferring goods in black bags from one car to the other. Then one of them took a push mower from the other and started mowing the grass outside the R.G. Menzies Library...

(I had to test that it worked, didn't I?)

Alphabet soup Friday

A is for Agee Pyrex: my third lot in the same pattern (dammit, definitely a collection then). Casserole dish (without lid, alas): $5 Vinnies Dickson. I actually picked it up on Monday but haven't got around to photographing it until now... B is for the book I requested from the Library to do some research into just what I've got myself into. I have a DVD on request too and plan to track down the magazines next time I'm in the correct library... C is for car. I picked Miss Daisy up on the way home tonight. Yippee!

D is for daisies (or sad lack thereof). Luckily I had a few spare large sized daisies in reserve (and have ordered more)E is for equation: Taph and I are doing a swap tonight. Apparently one Sunbeam Mixmaster, a Clarice Cliff book and half a bag of aluminium cans is equal to a Flymo push mower, a pair of Doc Martens and a load of frozen tomato soup (although that last lot's not coming tonight)

F is for films. We're seeing two tonight. If we can keep awake...

OK, OK. I was wrong and you were right

Well it would appear from your comments and emails that saying "not at the moment' to The Collectors is akin to asking the Queen if she'd mind rescheduling her garden party because I have something else arranged for that day. I have also been set straight about just how privileged one is to be invited to sit on the big red couch in Tasmania...

So, Big Very Important (Scary) Final Brief or not I emailed them today and they and their cameras are coming to visit The Room of Shame (hopefully much tidied) next month.

Happy now?

What's been happening round here since I last blogged*

(A dot point post)

* I received an email from someone wanting to use a photo I took of Good Living Growers' Market in a book about the very urban renewal project our class went to a talk about two weeks ago. Very weird synergy.
* A Terence Conran book I didn't even know existed until I found it (and bought it) during a preliminary search of resources for my Designers in context class arrived.I inhaled it (both literally and figuratively) while I waited for my bus and spent a happy few minutes mulling over the fact it was fully tax deductible...
* I spent yesterday (of course) at Craft ACT: envelope stuffing in the morning and attending our Ruth Lane-Poole symposium at CMAG in the afternoon (with time out to cut up pears and arrange crackers, cheese and biscuits on plates for the afternoon tea.)

OK, I lie slightly. I also found time to take photos of the inside of one of the doors in the CMAG women's toilets (as you do): it had got me thinking about ways to combine the two components of The Big Very Important (Scary) Final Brief:* Back upstairs at Craft ACT, more photos of one of the works for our upcoming Unravel exhibition which gave me even more food for thought...(If you've not already worked it out I'm exploring ways that my stringybark can be transformed into some kind of woven object (like a kete), fabric or rope: I suspect there is a large amount of research into traditional Aboriginal use of stringybark in my near future...)

* I spent yesterday evening reading a Library book which was due back yesterday. And drinking wine. From a cask.

* At 6am this morning I was rummaging round the Dyson website and preparing a presentation for tonight's class.

* To add excitement to my workday (spent in spreadsheet hell), I finally received a call from The Collectors, asking if I could be available for filming (see the owner of the CMAG exhibitor before me's clip here) A free trip to Tasmania? Errr... Can we talk again next year when life isn't quite so frantic and I don't have a Big Very Important (Scary) Final Brief?

* Tonight's class was spent looking at lots of designers' websites (there is some utter dross out there) and watching the Freestyle DVD. I was going to link to my blog post about seeing Freestyle in Melbourne but it would seem that nightclubbing, drinking, op shopping, buying stationery (and learning to use predictive text) was far more interesting that some boring design exhibition)

* At breaktime I was sidetracked from the coffee drinking and chatting by an exhibition by Mirree Louise Bayliss in our cafe. And, serendipitously, more inspiration for The Big Very Important (Scary) Final Brief:(Is it just me who thinks that picture looks like a plan of Canberra?)(images courtesy of the website as I'd left my camera in the classroom. Artworks by Mirree, a Contemporary Aboriginal Artist from Wiradjuri country in NSW. Visit her on Facebook or visit her website.)
* And then I got a lift home, wrote this post and will soon collapse into bed.

The End

(*Was it only yesterday morning?)

Do you see what I see?

(aka Things I noticed while at class last night)

Look! A bird!And a fish!(Complete with trailing poo...)

This thingy looked like a funny cartoon character. I gave him eyes and teeth and called him Mr Sprocket (don't ask why, OK?): And this thingy looked like a robot face when the light hit it just right:

Mr Sprocket got added to over the course of the evening:

And when I packed his bits away I made another fish with the sketch and another bit of printer intestine:
Meanwhile I started experimenting with my natural object (a pile of eucalyptus bark) by soaking it in a jar of hot water to see how malleable it became. After trialing a bit of bending I got a piece that looked like a number 9. So I added a 7 and an 8 (which somehow turned into another robot) and got this:Which turned into this: And then I went home.

Work in progress

Starting work on the first stage of The Big Very Important (Scary) Final Brief:

Before: during: (I detect a theme here)

And after:

Shoulda, woulda, coulda Sunday

Yesterday I shoulda slept in. But I got up early and headed to Trash and Treasure with friend Tania.

Where I bought a Sunbeam Mixmaster for $30 to "use in my class project". Woulda been better to not try and pretend as I knew from the moment I first clutched if to my beating heart that there was no way in hell I was going to be pulling it apart.I coulda then gone home and cleaned the house. Instead Tania and I went to Spill the Beans cafe for their two-for-one breakfast special. We're not planning on going back. Want to know a couple of reasons why? Their breakfasts are too big (seriously: who expects to find FOUR eggs on the Eggs Benedict?!) and, when we got to the counter we were asked what we had so they could add up the bill ("Nothing!" I tried saying but, oddly, they didn't believe me). Finally, when I commented that I liked the waitress's headband (a vintage tape measure she'd wrapped several times) she witheringly informed me it was a tape measure. Sure, whatever...

We shoulda called it a morning, but Tania declared she'd never been to The Canberra Glassworks and wanted to see a couple of the Ranamok finalists and I was intrigued because I'd sold one of the entrants a Fink neck piece on Tuesday. (We liked these ones best)

We woulda been OK except we then had to pop next door to The Old Bus Depot Markets.

I coulda stopped myself buying a button bracelet by Natasha Jude. I tried, by telling myself I could make one but the reply was "yeah, right. Like you'll EVER get round to it!"I shoulda spent the couple of hours I had when I got home cleaning the house. But I blogged instead (while doing washing, at least)

I woulda managed the housework except Cycling S came and picked me up and drove me to Barry by 3 at Pialligo Estate Winery...I coulda just had a coffee but the High Tea (with bubbles and accompaniment by Zoe Barry on the cello) was too good to pass up.

And then I came home and (finally) cleaned the house!

How I spent my Saturday night...

Back at Craft ACT for the third night this week.

It was the Bingo Extravaganza so there was a lot to do. Cleaning and setting up, putting the prizes out,

and setting up for dinner.Barb, the Executive Director, mysteriously disappeared so we had to rope a couple of Bingo-expert Nannas in to help sell the tickets and explain how the game worked:It was a *ahem* full housewith suitably Nanna-esque decor:As the evening progressed the Nannas got naughtier(what a big box she has!)I had no idea why they might have been acting that way...There was true/ false trivia to break up the gamesand very excitedand happywinners.

Where was I while all this was happening? Serving dinner, selling drinks, clearing up dirty plates and glasses, collecting rubbish, loading the dishwasher and rinsing pots. Yep, working in the arts is so glamorous... (But did I have fun? Hell yes!)

I think it's time to go to bed

After spending all day the National Museum Symposium I decided the only thing to do was buy a bottle of wine and a Turkish pizza for dinner, it being Friday and all. So I trotted across the road with my green bag, wallet and keys.

I bought the wine first. Got to the Turkish Pizza place, ordered my pizza and sat down to wait, putting the bag down on the chair next to me. Where it promptly fell to the floor, smashing the bottle, which emptied its contents into my wallet.

So I now have a wallet that smells like the inside of a bar slops bucket. Sigh...

Random stuff

Class last night was a Library orientation session. Hardly exciting blog fodder.

Instead I thought I'd share with you some of the things that have excited me over the past few days (apart from the release of the 2010 IKEA catalogue and all your generous offers to send me one!)

This fabric, discovered when Quilting Mick made some Sunnyboy bags with it: (Check out her giveaway here)

Lark's new op shopping totes (the perfect Christmas gift):Pretty little pins' "Shh!" brooch: perfect to wear when I'm working at the library (in a completely ironic way since we're not allowed to shush patrons any more)

This book, due to be released next week: (Because I've always loved stationery and therefore art made of stationery)

My new Eames House of Cards which arrived yesterday and which I've only been wanting to buy for what seems like forever:(Except I really wanted the black edition which only seems to be available direct from the Eames store with a massive postage charge...)

My newly ordered 2010 diary insert.

The fact that Eric Carle of The Very Hungry Catepillar fame has a blog: And that Canberra Museum and Gallery offered their members free tickets to the Sites of Memory symposium at National Museum tomorrow.

What's not to like when your $30 a year gets you not only lots of great openings with good food and free champagne, access to a lovely quiet space in the middle of town with coffee, tea, biscuits and a big yellow couch to collapse on, but tickets to an $80 symposium?!

Big P, little P, what begins with P?

Prehistoric animals andpachyderms(all by Ben Hubbard. I was almost tempted to buy the elephant stools until I remembered I a) had no room and b) had a car insurance excess in my near future...)

Petite pear parades,petting,playing,and pretending!A patch of pride (to be closely followed by a pile of preparation)and, finally a party (note minor promotion of our page which is my project).