Painting

I started this picture last year.

And then got too blaaah to add more to it.

It is a canvas that I added words to with cheap sticky letters (from the Cheap Shop) and then painted over.

The letters are going to be turquoise (in the same way that the canvas is "orange". (It is reds and pinks and yellows and golds!*). Getting there...

There are some shapes in the blanks spots - map of Australia, butterfly, heart, bow, flowers - that will be highlighted. Maybe even gold leafed. I will see what it needs when I get to it.

I also painted up a star that S4 made years ago and which has been stuck out in the garden since forever. Time for a change...

You can see where the turquoise and orange thing is heading with the background paintings. I didn't do them. The face is a print that S4 got from his father as an 18th birthday present (apparently he has (umm had) the original at his place until S4 "got his own place" or some such...). It looks like my tall fiddle playing mate Andrew Clermont. 

And the RH painting is by an Iranian refugee who sells his work on The Esplanade Sunday Market. It is fabulous, I love the perspective, the painting within a painting.     

There is a glimpse of the cream/gold painting that I did on 10/10/10 with 3 sets of ten hearts, three Xs, 10/10/10 etc. It is a bit obscure I think. Last time someone looked at it I had to explain it and I shouldn't have to do that with paintings...

* I discovered 7 different tubes and jars of golds - not counting the box of gold leaf - when I consolidated my paints...

Pantry cupboard

Green inside the doors, and red door knobs. Might just sand it back a bit and leave it at this.

I found this lovely flower illustration on http://cargocollective.com/brittanyburton and am (probably) going to decoupage it on the inside of the doors cos the colours are SOOO pretty! Having fun cutting them out at least...

My place

I haven't been as chirpy as I want. Nor as chirpy as I have been pretending to be, neither.

The last few days I have crashed late afternoon and slept right through (fibbing a bit there - waking up around 8pm to do the drug thing, and the other drug thing - email!) and then sleeping through till the kookaburras start yodelling outside at dawn.

Back to St Vincent's on Thursday for the post-op check-up. I don't think I am tired cos of anything sinister, it is just that I was expecting miracles and that might take a few more weeks. It is only 5 weeks since surgery so p'raps I am still also recovering from all that anaesthetic stuff, etc. Not to mention a long time not being anywhere near 100%...

I have got PAGES of lists of things I really MUST do around my home. Poor neglected place. There are spiders fighting other spiders for space in the layers of dust. You get the idea...

On the Australia Day weekend (AD is January 26th for those of you who can't rattle off the national days of other countries...) Newstead Live! happens again. Lovely music!!!
The Beez - from Berlin - are the headline (international) act again. And again, they are staying with me. Hooray! They are all so lovely, though I was fucked totally last time with all the late night dinners we had in the week leading up to the Festival cos they arrived 5 days ahead of time. Not that I minded, it really was such fun.

BUT I WOULD LIKE TO DO SOMETHING MORE TO THE HOUSE BEFORE THEY GET HERE!!!!


This is what the pantry looked like before I got flooded. TWICE. Once 12 months ago today, and then again in February. So all the water came in through the damp-course (haha) and flooded the floor. And then a million bush rats and mice moved in to keep warm and dry.

Back in June S4, his darling Clancye and their mate Isaac came up and spent a few days moving everything out of the pantry, and S4 and I went shopping for all sorts of lovely paint, plaster, big wide pine boards, cans of expanding gap-filling foam, etc etc to be able to make the pantry vermin proof.
S4 used a big can of the sticky scary alien gap-filling stuff but there are still some gaps in the rammed earth walls that have to be mudded up. He also added a couple of ceiling beams to add false ceiling over (under) what is already there so we can add another layer of insulation to make it REALLY cold in there. On 40* days (like last week) it is only ever about 18* anyway. We still have to add the plaster. And paint it. After I mud up those gaps...

So - this is what my pantry contents still look like. Piled all over the kitchen table, under it, and in a couple of other temporary cupboards I bought at the Tip Shop (for $15...).

Poor old sink cupboard from the Tip Shop with more groceries etc stuffed uncomfortably into it. And still with the old sink intact but with a great lump of melamine on top of it so I can use it as  a proper bench. Temporarily...                                                                 

And I wanted to rip up all this revolting crappy not-enough-cement-in-the-concrete floor and lay more bricks like in the bathroom area.  And to add a couple of courses of bricks as a base under the Rayburn so it is up to the height of the one I grew up with. And because it isn't impressive enough without it's majestic four ovens. So it needs a plinth.      

But that isn't one of the things on my list(s).          

Installing the butler's sink I have sitting out in Outer Bungolia is on the list. Which means building a stand for it. And doing some plumbing, but that is OK cos most of it is sitting waiting from the temporary laundry trough that is still where I wash dishes. (Right photo below)                                                                                                                   

In the Library I want to consolidate all the bookcases (there are a couple more on that mauve wall at the far end, and a big one to the left of the doorway, as well as another on the east wall (about over my right shoulder from where I am taking this photo). And there are three more cases in Outer Bungolia which really should be in the Library so that all the books that are stacked two deep on some of the shelves can be allocated a proper home. And I want to add strips of timber between each to join them, and then paint them.                                                                                               

But that isn't on The Current List either.                                                            

                                                              

Both the floor in the kitchen and these bookcases are all on The Next List...                     

The bathroom is on This List. All of it. I haven't got a photo of it, but I think there is one on my website. Shall have a hunt for it and add the link to it if/when I find it.                        

It is ghastly.       Functional but still in the realms of "Bush Humpy".                                 

Not "primitive" - it isn't that good...      I shall spare you. For the time being...      

                                                                                         

The ABC Radio have just put out a warning for extremely high winds in a cool change that is hurtling up from the south west of the State:

"Issued at 9:45 pm EDT on Tuesday 10 January 2012.

Weather Situation

An active cold front approaching southwestern Victoria tonight will move rapidly eastwards across the State overnight and Wednesday morning.

Damaging winds averaging 50 to 60 km/h with peak gusts around 95 km/h are forecast for the South West, Central, West and South Gippsland and East Gippsland forecast districts and over parts of the North Central and North East forecast districts. Coastal and exposed elevated areas are the most likely regions to be affected.

The State Emergency Service advises that people should:

• Move vehicles under cover or away from trees.
• Secure or put away loose items around your house, yard and balcony.
• Keep clear of fallen power lines."



The tree feller fellows

.
Poor Just as well I had this 'heaving' tree cut down in Dec 2010. It was really close to the house (just to the left of the photo) and I was always concerned each time I came home after a bit of a breeze that it would be lying down on my home (and then I wouldn't have to do anything about the pantry or kitchen. Hmmm... Lovely old tree is still cut in lumps waiting to be stacked. Should add that to the Next List... We (we is not the real we cos I only paid and pointed etc, didn;t actually do anything lumberjackly) left one piece bench height - I might add a basin on top of it for the bathroom. Cos there isn't a basin in the bathroom yet. I could figure out some way of making a hole for the drain-pipe stuff. And some cute dish for a basin. I bought glass drilling bits at Aldi a few months ago just so I can make a plug-hole in something basin-like.  Ignore the 'poor' under the tree photo - it was the start of a sentence and attached itself there and I don't know how to remove it without removing the tree photo. If I can live with it then so can you.    

Doesn't my home look lovely!

PS. And I am going to give the blog a New Year freshen up sometime soon, too.

Balcony decking and house history

When I bought my home nine years ago it was really a BIG MESS.
The Draughtsman who came to look at the place prior to drawing up plans for renovations got out of his car and just said "Bloody hell! Get a bulldozer in"!!!!!

It didn't have any of this turquoise weatherboard upstairs, nor lovely wide veranda. Instead, there was a slopy (and sloppy!) roof made from bits of corrugated iron the bloke (who started building this.
In 1967...) had scavenged from the tip.
And bush poles holding up a veranda that was head height - for him, head-bashing height for me - and only about a metre deep.

Holding up the iron roof were a couple of rafters that were each made of two shorter beams just nailed together. So a bit saggy.
And then no ceiling, just silver insulating foil that was orange from the smoke from his pot-belly stove.
That didn't have a chimney...
The room below was 16' x 32', with brick floors. Mostly.
There were some patches of dirt...
Probably for his 11 dogs to dig in...

The rest of the house was 32' wide and 40' long.
It is built of a mixture of mud bricks and rammed earth for the walls. And gaps, The bloke was not very tall, so instead of buying a ladder he left gaps between the tops of the walls and the roof...
There were four small rooms, each 10' square, along the south side (which is the cold side of the house in Australia, like the north side of a house in the Northern Hemisphere) - a laundry, bathroom, junk room, and pantry.

The house is an Alistair Knox design - famous for wonderful mud brick house solar passive designs that were ahead of their time in the 1960s. More information is here and here on this amazing man and his designs.
However - HOWEVER!!!! - the builder of mine was not really a builder. He started, as I said, in 1967 - I found receipts - and in 2002 it was still far from finished! (Not just receipts, but all sorts of stuff - all his bills, wedding TELEGRAMS and cards, piles of newspapers, junk, crap and all sorts of shit. And that was just for starters...)

So I really got a bargain - the Draughtsman was right - it really was a bulldozer renovation. I paid land value for the whole kit and caboodle, so got what I paid for...

We took 10 or 12 tip truck loads of rubbish to the tip, as well as having a huge bonfire, that burnt for 2 weeks. We SHOVELLED dirt out of the place.
S4 used to say "This house has nothing but potential" and "This is the only house where you wipe your feet as you leave".

The floor is red bricks laid directly onto sand. In some places he added builder's plastic down first, in others - zilch!
And in other areas there were large areas of dirt he hadn't got around to bricking.
The floor along the western end is mushy concrete, where he didn't add enough cement to the mix, so it is all flaking and dusty.
The floor in the laundry and junk room we ripped up and laid more bricks.
The bathroom floor was mostly easy - it had proper leveller under the vinyl. But only sand

under the leveller... So that came up, too and we laid bricks there, too.
The pantry floor had a great pit in the centre of it, and a hole to the outside world at the bottom of the wall. And holes in the ceiling. I think his idea was to fill the pit with water (and breed mosquitoes) and use it as a cool room. We filled the pit and the wall hole in. And laid more bricks.
He had a generator (which he took with him) and the front door was piled to the ceiling with blown up appliances.

All of which just needed a replacement fuse. He didn't know about $4 fuses, and went out and spent $$$ on another microwave/toaster/TV/whatever. The wiring was also bits he seemed to have scavenged from the tip. Short lengths of electric wire joined, not with proper little box joiners (cos they cost $$$), but with plumbers tape...

You are all probably crying now, so I wont dwell any more on what was!!!! Now, there is an upstairs with French doors facing South, East and North with little balconies

out of each, over the veranda roof.

Ever since I ran out of money back in 2004, and then got sick in 2005 (so no money AND no energy), nothing much more has been done to the house after the initial reno frenzy.
A few months ago, The Sweetheart and I decked the North and South balconies - the East one was done years ago. And we were so clever and worked so well together and it all is such a lovely feeling to be able to walk out onto the balcony instead of balancing on the joists!The upstairs is 16' x 32' - like the downstairs. It

is now my studio - at the North end, and my bedroom at the South, looking out to thousands of acres of State Forest. I only have 5 acres, but the Forest backs right onto my fence so I may as well have a Million Wild Acres!!!


The top photos are the South balcony, and these ones down here are the North balcony. You can see the roof to the rest of the house is higher than the veranda.
This is because there is also a mezzanine - The Shelf which runs along the south side and east-ish side of the big room. The living area has lovely almost double story space, and has wonderful acoustics. Not to mention a great balcony rail to hang quilts over.  You may be able to just catch a glimpse on the right of the bottom quilt photo of one of the big posts holding up the roof. They came from Victoria Dock in Melbourne and are over 100 years old.

Here is a bit of rock art S4 did - lots of lovely sandstone around here, just waiting to be used. Lots of rock walls in kit form...









And this is some of the lovely wattle that flowers through most of winter. There are four or five different ones around here which start flowering in June and carry on right through to September. Lovely splash of gold amongst the green of winter.

Gardening

It is such a battle to get anything to grow around here. I am right on the edge of the alluvial gold mining area (from the 1850s) - just a couple of kilometres away are deep shaft mines.
In the alluvial mining areas where the gold was close to the surface the easiest way to get to it was to wash all the dirt away and pick up the shiny leftovers.
Consequently, I have very little top soil.
Even after 160 years...

When I bought this place there was a LOT of rubbish around - we took 8 or 10 big tip-truck loads to the tip, and had a great bonfire that burned for weeks, and there are still some mounds that need setting fire to when (if) it rains again.

There were lots of falling down, white ant ridden goat sheds and the dirt from them was pushed into a mound to rot down, along with some other compostables.
After 7 years it is getting good enough to do things with. It is still pretty sandy but my neighbours have offered me their alpaca poo which will be yummy garden tucker!

The last few weeks I have been gardening.
The top photo is a long shot of the garden, with The Chook Palace in the background. It was once a wonderful, functioning Chook Palace until the little bastard delinquent youths across the road kicked down the walls (they also stole thousands $$$ of my stuff before being caught (and then getting only a slap because they were children, and their mother saying it was my 'fault for leaving windows open'... at least they don't come around any more).
I am slowly rebuilding The Chook Palace, Smellie 4 came up a few weeks ago when we did the fencing, and did some more on it. Have to get industrious tho because my Nearly Cousin Neighbour is soon giving me some of her spare chooks. Mud brick building is hard work and no fun on my own.

There are two rows of potatoes. I planted them in trenches and have been mounding up the soil around them as they grow so they will have more spuds. I planted corn in between those rows the other day.

And today planted out boysenberries and strawberries, 4 artichoke plants and transplanted some sunflowers I started from seed.

Lots of sugar cane mulch and some good soakings, and hopefully they will survive the heat wave. I did all this at the crack of dawn, and then came in to the radio telling me that it is going to hit 40* in a couple of days. Bugger. (That is about 105*F).

My most successful plantings are in four concrete well rings (the circles that line wells to stop the walls falling in) along the front of the house, and lots of pots:
Herbs, snow peas, lettuces, mint, strawberries, cucumbers, flowers...


And tomatoes from seed in toilet roll tubes. The kindest way to sprout seeds because the roots are undisturbed when you pot them up. These are only ten days old. You are meant to plant tomatoes on Melbourne Cup Day but there is still a danger of frosts after this (tho not now with this heat wave I suspect). Actually not all tomatoes I now remember - there are are chillies and capsicums sprouting here too.


The Sweetheart and I finally put a gate across the front gateposts - The Mighty Erections.


Screwing in the bottom peg that the gate swings on - hard work just to scratch a little hole so the peg could be turned! You can see what the soil is like - not much growing here.



And clever Trevor slithered under the gate as soon as it was hung... Never mind, another load of gravel on the driveway will fix that problem. So long as it also keeps kangaroos out of the garden. That will be the biggest battle. Just keep sprinkling blood and bone around - they don't like the smell too much apparently.




These Mighty Erections were a dead tree overhanging the house when I bought it. We planted them at the front with the help of a bobcat and anxious sweat.

Even if there isn't much rainfall, and even less soil I do like my home!

Today I am creative...

Today I would like to make bread. But if I make bread I have to fire up my wonderful old four oven Rayburn wood stove (that also heats my bath water) so I can cook. I don't have any sort of instant cooking facilities. Not even a microwave. My Best Sister Noela gave me the dear old (60+ years old) Rayburn as a house-warming present when I bought this house.
A literal and figurative house-warming present.
It is wonderful for winter with the old iron kettle singing and lovely cooking smells of soups, stews, bread and cakes. And all at once!

I am working on a Bush Fire Quilt. I started it a few weeks ago in a working bee with Nada who owns the quilt shop in Sunbury. There were a few donated Cobblestone Blocks and I made more. It isn't at all large (yet...?), the blocks are 6" finished so this is only 3'6" x 4'. I don't know whether to make more blocks or to add some different borders.
I had meningitis at Christmas 2005 and since then my brain doesn't always work how and when it should. I can't think what to do with this. I used random 2½" squares and scrap blues and reds for the cobblestones. I used to make a quilt in a blink and this is brick wall so very frustrating. I have had a meningitis week and feeling very blaaah.

This is one quilt I made before my brain went silly. It was a community project, a quilt for the new extension and renovation at Castlemaine Library. I thought if we got something that was about 3' x 4' we would be able to hang it on a small patch of wall.
I had 25 women helping, only one of whom had ever made a quilt before, some had never even threaded a needle.
I handed out 8" pieces of black homespun, and explained a few techniques for making "a bit of a book shelf" - applique, photo transfer, embroidery etc etc. Judging by how terrified some of the participants looked I only gave them a small slice of the shelf, if they looked more confident they got maybe a 10" or 12" piece.
And then I sent them home.
They kept coming back for more and when I had 21 metres of "shelf" I had to tell them to stop!!! We wouldn't have had a wall in the Library big enough to hang it on! The Library Quilt ended up 1.9m x 3m. There are pictures of it's gestation here.

I made a quilt for my nephew, Frosty. Ages ago - another pre-brain fade quilt.
The material I used for this Stack and Whack design is shown in the label (below). I loved the way this turned out - not all girly for a gorgeous boy. Frosty is now studying aeronautical engineering - at Uni four days a week and flying high on the fifth. A wonderful life, he was born to fly!

I made a salad of vine ripened tomatoes all juicy and smellsome, basil freshly picked from my garden, and slices of brie, all dribbled over with thick balsamic and left to steep for a couple of hours.
Served in a Woods Ware Jasmine bowl and eaten with one of my great grandmother's forks.

I think every so often I shall give you a glimpse of my home.
The house is mud brick and rammed earth with red bricks on the floor downstairs (you can see the floor in the photos of my meals). There are lots of old posts which came from Victoria Dock holding up the roof. My home is also called Banaghaisge - I had lots of adventures and interesting experiences before I got to own this place - my first ever house! It was a wreck when I found it, no power, truckloads of rubbish to be carted away, holes in the floors and roof... There is still lots that needs to be done but it feels like a peaceful haven now.
This is the front door.
Come in!