Matching Pegs

It has been some time since my last post, as I have been pretty sad all week.

On Tuesday I took part in a very painful family meeting at the hospital, about the health of my twin brother. Julian is still, after 9 months, not really improving.  None of us know where things are heading, but slowly our hopes and his future are being crushed under a terrible illness and the hospital’s mismanagement of his treatment.

As always, eventually I turned to creating something, to help me feel more positive, in this case, a spot of mending.

Michaela has this little outfit – a singlet and skorts (skirt/shorts) which she managed to get permanent paint onto (at kinder).  I ruined it further, in my attempts to get the paint out – you can see where I have removed more than the paint, in the photo above.  This is actually the underside of the skirt (which sits over the shorts) and you can see the circle of stitches from the patch I have already applied, to hide the damage.

I thought that three circles of a coordinating print would be more interesting than one, and I am very pleased with the result.  If only everything was as easy to mend.

Do you bother trying to mend clothes like this, or just move on?

For the last two weekends we have had nothing but childrens parties, all of which have been lovely.  I have made several different gifts, but finished them all at the last minute, so I don’t have much to show you.  For the lovely Miss Elena, I embellished a lavender coloured tee with the letter “e” similar to Michaela’s one above, which I have made since.  I think Michaela must have just slept in it when I took this photo, I really should have ironed it for the blog shot.  I simply needle-turned the M in place on a tee from Target.

I did actually manage to get a photo of Master Mason’s Robot Apron, before it was wrapped.  It was the second present I have made featuring the lovely Robot fabric I picked up at Candleberry Country in Yarragon, on our trip to Loch for the quilt hanging, a few weekends back.

I have been on the lookout for a feature fabric for boys presents, so I bought a whole metre of it.  I rarely buy that much of anything.  I wish I knew more about this fabric, it looks Japanese, but there is no information on the selvage, and I could not find it online in my rudimentary search for “robot fabric”.

Speaking of boys………………….

I never thought I would be a party to this.  Not only did I allow it – I cut it!

This was for a “silly hair day” at school, and we cut the mohawk on the condition that it was temporary.  Funny part is that we had the date for the “silly hair day” wrong – it’s next month!  Rory is going to keep it until Friday, which is school photo day – there is no way he is having it in his school photo.  He wants to keep it until he can show his mate Hayden, who is away in Queensland.

There are so many things I love about Christmas time (carols and ice-cream-plum-pudding especially) but it is also a very difficult time of year for many people.

I am one of those people this year.

My family (of origin) are all a little fragile and heart sick.  My twin brother has been ill since the beginning of June, and spent the bulk of these months in the psych hospital.  Over this time he has been discharged several times, each time too early, and has ended up back there again – usually after going missing because he is confused and ill.  Late last night he was readmitted to hospital, after another period where we were wondering where he was and if he was safe.  He is very, very sick.  We have all lost our faith in the system’s ability to get him well.

His continuing illness is all down to hospital mismanagement, as we know that he can be well on the right level of medication.  If the hospital hold him long enough to get him to the right level, he willingly continues to take his medication and look after himself.  He does not have the skills to do so when they release him early.  We have been extremely lucky that he has not lost his life during one of the periods where he has been missing.  He is confused enough to walk in front of traffic, and in yesterday’s heat (39 degrees C – 102 degrees F) dehydration could have taken him.

I will pull myself together tomorrow, and enjoy my children, enjoying Christmas day, but it will not be the same.  There will be someone missing from our Christmas table, who has missed all the family events in the last half a year.

2010 is going to be a fabulous year, mostly because it will not be 2009.  I am looking forward to new creative challenges – I have plans!  I am generally an optimistic person, and I will regain my optimism.  There are lots of things I am really thankful for, and things are going really well in our nuclear family – it is just hard to enjoy them as much when someone you love is suffering.

So, with the knowledge that Christmas is a very hard time in many families, and the festivity can feel like salt in raw wounds, I wish you peace for Christmas.

Here are the ornaments that celebrate my peg matching habits.  I separated the mini-pegs into colours, but if you look closely, each bauble also contains a singular gold peg.  A bit of contrast never goes astray.

As I type, there is a mammoth game of Monopoly continuing, and some wonderful Christmas Carols playing.  They are very groovy Christmas Carols from New Orleans, the Album is called , “Crescent City Christmas, by Lars Edegran and His Santa Claus Revelers” we break this out every year and it is the best Christmas Album around – so there.

In case you think I am the only creative one in the family, I thought I would share some of Luke’s recent creativity.

When the kids and I took a break in the Monopoly proceedings yesterday, we were all greeted with a plate that looked like this.  The kids really liked the boogers coming out of the carrot noses, while I was just repulsed by the idea.

This was the creative way Luke dressed Michaela this morning – I think she looks like a rainbow had a party in her chest of drawers, but she is very happy indeed, and insisted I take a photo.  Perhaps I can convince her to put on plain skirt, to tone it down before we appear in public.

What great Christmas Albums are you listening too?

It has been a while since I posted.

Long term, things in my family (see last post) are looking more positive than they were, but the current situation has changed very little.  In general, the sadness I feel is taking it’s toll, particularly creatively.  I have been taking my time to set up my new sewing area, and have been feeding off the creativity of others, spending lots of time blog surfing.

Overall this “therapy” has been slowing working its magic, and I am started to get ideas again – starting to get that urge to make something.

I have been really enjoying our new house, the space is such a luxury.  At the almost-a-month-mark, we are almost all unpacked, (3.5 boxes left I think).  As I type this, I can hear Kookaburras laughing, which is magic, a real balm for the soul.  The older I get, the more I believe that it is the little things that make life worth living.  Sitting in the sunshine with a good friend, and a lovely cup of tea is a wonderful dose of healing, far better than buying stuff, even red shoes.

This week I have been enjoying the beautiful flowers (above) from a lovely friend (They opened Carolyn, and they are beautiful) and every time I look at them I am reminded of her visit.  I wish I could share the fragrance.

Due to the hot weather, I have had our puppy Lotta clipped.  I asked the groomer (would that be he right word?) to clip her close all over, because there are a lot of nasty little weeds in the garden, that we are gradually tackling, but they have been getting caught in Lotta’s fur, especially her tail.  I think she looks like a completely different breed of dog now (the most recent view of her with her hair is here at the bottom of the post).  She reminds me of the fox terrier crosses I had growing up, especially my lovely “Silky”.

Lastly I thought I would share a site (The Visual Aid Shop) I found last night via Print and Pattern, it has a whole library of excellent posters designed by graphic designers on all sorts of things.  If you look at the Print and Pattern post here, you can see a pretty good selection.  I think they would make cool Christmas presents for the graphically discerning.

What simple pleasure is your therapy?

The first Tuesday in November is Melbourne Cup Day, and a public holiday here in metropolitan Melbourne.  “The race that stops a nation” is culturally a pretty big deal here.  Usually we have, or attend a BBQ, and have a sweep with the horses that are running.  We always stop to watch the actual race, after all it only takes a few minutes to be run.  This year was the first I remember where we didn’t watch the race at all.  We were busy working on setting up the house.

I was altering some curtains, and Luke was busy hanging a new curtain track – one that would actually enable the curtains to be drawn all the way back from off the windows.

This meant that I had to split them up the middle, and eak out enough seam allowance to finish them neatly.  My as yet unfinished cutting table was very handy.

We were both using it – the window in question is at the end of the table.

The day we moved in, we tried to open the curtains, and the old track fell down.  It was only as wide as the window, enclosed in a pelmet, and opened in one direction.  This meant that almost half of the window was obscured, even when the curtain was “open”.

After putting each 4 pronged curtain hook into 2 or 3 of the little pockets each, the curtain had a lot more width, but was still full enough to look OK.  We felt that the sacrifice of the pelmet was worth it to let in much more light (into my lovely sewing area).

It even looks good closed (although much harder to photograph with the low light cast by the ugly lights).

Now I just have to finish painting the top of my cutting table – I have only done one side-so that I can start creating again.

The first craft I did at the new house was not what I was expecting.  On the first day we moved in, Rory ran straight through this sliding, fly-wire screen door.  Unlike the glass doors, it had nothing across the middle to draw the eye and indicate it’s presence.  He thought the door was open.  After Luke reattached the wire, here was my quick remedy.  I wove some embroidery floss throught the screen with a thick blunt needle.  Oh, and Rory was fine, just a little embarrassed.

We have made it to the other side of the move!  We are still feeling a little chaotic, but the space is pure heaven.  The garden is much more native than our previous one, as we are surrounded by gum trees (eucalypts).  There is plenty of scope to put in ground-covers, shrubs and flowers.

The kids are loving having their own bedrooms – this is the one that Amelia chose, which is actually the smallest, she fell in love with the paint colour.  I think it is a little strong, but it does go well with her quilt and fairy wall hanging.

Some areas of our home are looking more set up than others – there are still lots of boxes everywhere – but it is so lovely to finally be able to display some things that have never seen he light of day.  This is a quiet corner of the lounge room that we are going to use when we want to get away from the hubbub to do some work on the laptop, or some quiet writing.

The lounge room also boasts the ugliest lights ever, strung low enough that several members of the extended family are going to have to wear hardhats to enter the room.  See those little specks of light on the ceiling? They are being thrown by the lovely mosaic bowl in the previous photo, which I was given by a dear friend for my last birthday (thank-you Leigh).  We are now calling it the reverse disco ball.

You can see it here with some beautiful roses that my Mum bought from her garden this weekend.  I believe they are “Henri Matisse” Roses.

Our new home is a symphony of those 80’s colours – pale apricot and mission brown, with quite a bit of woodwork thrown in.  Even the ceilings and doors are painted pale apricot -the same strength as the walls.

The meals area is the only living area in the house with a slightly different colour – a feature wall of textured dusky pink.  It is kind of growing on me, but Luke doesn’t think much of it.  It sure makes a nice backdrop to the beautiful flowers that our friends Rowena and Mark gave us to celebrate moving into our new house (thanks guys).

On Friday we were reunited with Lotta, who spent the week at my Mum and Dad’s while we moved.  She is also loving the new space, and we are all happy to be together again.

I will be back to show you more as the house is unpacked.  Hopefully I will have a sewing area to show you soon, once we have created a cutting table – we have great plans that involve 2 kitchen cabinets from IKEA and a door.  Stay tuned.

The Matching Pegs family is officially on the move.

I am about to pack my beloved imac into a box, and tonight we will be sleeping on mattresses on the floor.  Tomorrow night we will be sleeping in our new home.

Telstra does not fill me with confidence regarding our new internet connection – so I am not sure when I will be back .  See you on the other side

Packing continues apace in the Matching Pegs household.  Excitement is rising, and not enough sleep is being had.  As a break from excavating (and sorting) through the pile of paperwork by the phone (you know that pile that always builds up – notices from school, clippings from the paper, etc.) I have jumped on the computer to share a photo or two.

A little while ago, an old school friend had twins – a little boy Benjamin and a little girl Elizabeth.  Here is the tiny present I popped in the mail a little while ago.  I had a lot of fun selecting some of my favorite fabrics to embellish these two little tee’s.  I figured that the slightly matching clothes would not bother newborns the way it bothers older kids, (take it from me, it does when you are part of a boy/girl twin set).

Just because I need a little more of a dose of adorable (packing is so blah) here is a photo of Michaela from about 6 weeks ago, when I finally found some of those shaped head towels with the little elastic loop to twist the end through.  I have been wanting them for after swimming lesson, and we found some in really nice colours.

Now back to packing, which should really be called sorting, purging, discovering, organising, squashing, wrapping, cleaning and boxing!

Moving next Tuesday!