Watercolour lessons

I've picked up watercolour painting (again) as a new hobby, but this time I'm doing it properly and actually having lessons. A teacher was recommended to me by a friend, and I'm finding it really interesting and so much easier than trying to figure it out by myself! The teacher is very experienced and has seen every student disaster ever made, and has a clear way of explaining things that makes sense to me. So I potter through the online lessons at my own pace, then post pictures of what I've done and get some feedback from the teacher, which is always helpful, and go onto the next one.

One of the best things is that she is very insistent on using good materials - just one brush, but make it a good one, just three colours but a proper brand, not reams of paper just a couple of sheets of the nice stuff - and it has made a huge difference. And I LOVE the paper, it is beautiful, I just like patting it. 

It is an absolute beginners course so we do a lot of exercises and little paintings to try and grasp the basics. I am not very good. But that's OK. I have figured out that I like watercolours because of the hard edge, where it hits dry paper. It is hard to explain but there is a line there that makes me happy. I am not so keen on the general wishy washy ness of watercolour but I think you might have to understand all those concepts to take it any further. I didn't like most of the quilting I did for the first ten years either :) Here are gum leaves. Something there are plenty of on my everlasting walks. 

It has been a treat to have something to look forward to in the evenings and the weekends. This weekend was cold and rainy, not that we can go anywhere anyway. I can't see this lockdown ending on Thursday as planned, there are just too many cases about, and NSW is an absolute basket case and just down the road. I am mostly happy - going to work and sitting behind my perspex screen - but we are all getting a bit sick of it.

Making Music with My Friends

Another solids quilt! This is the little flying geese on an angle blocks. Not much to say about it really, what you see is what you get. I like the orange. All colours were completely random!

Nothing much to say about the quilting either, I did a design that following the line of the blocks but I'm not sure about the quantities of unquilted space. It is definitely enough quilting to hold it together, but this might have worked better with an allover design. Or maybe not....

I did the quilting a couple of weeks ago but it took me a while to get around to sewing the binding down. And now my sewing machine is trapped in the repair shop! I took it in for a service a couple of weeks ago and the technician was in Queensland and unable to get back ... but I dropped it off anyway thinking it would be four weeks instead of the usual two, and now we've gone into lockdown so who knows when I will be reunited with my favourite object! I do have another one of course but it's not as good. 

But I will not despair, I have another hobby now. Which I am terrible at, but will pick up the courage to show you photos before too long....

The days blur

Still in lockdown, still meandering through the days ... I do some work, and some washing, and go for nice walks. Remote learning for school starts properly today, which is not thrilling number two, and uni lectures have gone on-line reasonably smoothly, allowing for a few technical hitches. You would think that engineering lecturers would have a handle on technology, but apparently not. Social life is down, internet use is up, crafting is encouraged, family interaction is avoided and we are all trying not to doom-scroll. But failing, especially now NZ is a shit-show as well. This is going to take MONTHS. Here is a picture of an empty golf course on one of the many walks.

And our cleaner can't come, which is a first world problem if I ever heard one, but this is something I have always felt extremely grateful for, and the house is looking a little frayed around the edges. I did my bathroom and decided to give it an absolutely thorough going over - our cleaner is really good but we don't pay her scrubbing-the-light-fittings-with-a-toothbrush money. That is the kind of thing you have to do yourself. 

So I did, the ceilings, walls, pipe fittings, exhaust fan, corners of the shower screen ... it took hours but was very satisfying. Although I did realise what a dodgy job the bathroom guys did - I mentioned that the ceiling went mouldy and flaked in about a year. Well, I sugar soaped my re-paint job and it looks brand new after three years. It's not that hard! Every fitting that's attached to the wall wobbles, the pipe covers are coming away, the blue dye is ingrained into the back of the toilet ... perhaps we shouldn't have gone with the cheapest quote.

So the state of my bathroom is the most exciting thing to report this week. My husband had a birthday with basically no presents and no fancy dinner although the takeaway was delicious.  Parliament is back this week so I have to show my face at work and literally show my face, they are doing temperature checks at the door. What a world.

Lockdown....

Canberra's luck has finally run out, and after a year of no cases there are enough festy bastards to put the entire city into lockdown. Well, there was originally only one of course, but he was a socially active young man who went to enough places to panic the authorities! So they slammed us into lockdown, more cases popped up, we're holed up for at least three weeks, and on it goes.... this happened Thursday afternoon and I was taking an extra day off to have a long weekend at the beach and it totally crossed my mind to leave work early and hightail it down the hill to the coast! But I didn't, because it would have been an asshole move, which was right in hindsight because all of NSW has since locked down as well, but I was very much looking forward to it, and now I'm grumpy. 

So here are photos of me going for walks. Different walks, same top, same hat. This is the first lockdown we've had, and it's reasonably strict - only allowed to leave the house for essential supplies, healthcare, essential work and one hour of exercise ... schools are closed for a few days while they sort themselves out, and university is all on-line. My husband and I are mildly essential, but are working from home for now, until the point at which we have to go in. 

My life is so quiet that it's not really making much difference, and the washing is up to date for the first time in months. Canberra is about one third fully vaccinated with another third or so having had one dose, so should be sorted soon! Or not, oh well. The wattle are very beautiful at the moment, it must be early spring. Still frosts though, and I've only pruned half the roses...

The archive clothes bag

Number two child is very keen on op-shopping (as we would call it) or thrifting (as the young people call it) for clothes, and knows all the best places to go around town. He and his friends also do clothes swaps, so there is a constant stream of - shall we call it eclectic? - fashion flowing through the house. Of course his 'retro' is my 'five minutes ago' or 'I still wear that' which leads to some conversations where my eyebrows are up around my hairline at what is considered cool. And bless their hearts they aren't burdened by notions of different clothing for different genders, or for different occasions. If it's good to wear it's good to wear and off they go.

So this is why I found myself darning a hole in a jumper the other day - not normally something I would ever bother doing. But it turns out this op shop find was 100% wool from Bolivia (and it looks hand-knitted and possibly hand-dyed) so I put some ancient skills to use, found some not-at-all-matching wool and mended the hole. I think the last time I darned anything was for my Brownie needlework badge, and I don't think I would have passed if they had been assessing me on the bolivian jumper. But it will stop it unravelling for this winter at least.

We were talking about paisley vests, and I mentioned the one I made and wore to death in 1990, and said "I think I still have it, in the archive clothes bags" and of course number two's ears pricked up .. the what? Where? Can I see? So I dragged the bags down, but explained that it wasn't because they were good clothes, it was because they were sentimental. And I made most of them (badly), and they were mostly loved to death ... but we had a happy half hour going through them all. 

I was "this is the dress I wore the night I met your father", "this is the skirt that my flatmate's grandmother wore in the 1960s and gave it to me and I wore it for the entirety of 1991", "this is the dress I wore to my engagement party.... the jacket I wore to graduation ... the cotton dress I lived in in 1992 ... the law school ball of 1993 .... the high commission ball of 1997" etc. Interspersed with "I looked SUPER HOT" and "I thought I was the ducks nuts in this, jesus christ, what was I thinking" and eye-rolling from the child.

Anyway, he rather liked the beige polyester pant suit I wore to several weddings in 1996 and the green velvet lined hooded jacket from several parties in 1993. Which he then wore to school ....

Getting a bit of culture

On the weekend I went to the National Gallery to see the exhibition Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to now, which I very much enjoyed. I hadn't realised they were doing it in two parts - I missed part one so just went and saw part two. I'm not sure how they divided up the parts - it might be that this was the latter half of the century, although to be honest I doubt it was done by anything so literal. It was probably thematic :)

However they picked the works, they were great - some very strange, some very beautiful and a wonderful mix of traditional painting, fibre work, ceramics, installations, drawings and sculpture. I thought it was fabulous and there was hardly anyone around midday on Sunday.

I loved this. Those figures are life size, to give you a sense of scale. It is made from sisal and hemp and appears to be knitted, or knotted, or woven in parts. It was made in 1972 and the artist said she uses these materials because it is 'more human than marble or wood. To me it looks more like flesh.' Good point, slightly crazy artist lady (Ewa Pachucka, jesus wept you'd think in an exhibition actually called 'Know My Name' I would call the artist by her NAME and not refer to her as slightly crazy artist lady). It was both intriguing and disturbing and I wanted to know how she did it but had to put my hands behind my back and not touch.

And in more culture we went to number two's performance of Pride and Prejudice. It was a cracker - great adaptation with lots of movement and some really good performances from the cast. Here he is as Mr Collins attempting to propose to Lizzie Bennett. Having them all so young made it different - very plausible but his Mr Collins was a different type of obnoxious to the usual. Still hideous, but you hoped that he would grow out of it...

A pussy-bow shirt

As threatened, I did make the big boofy bow version of the McCalls shirt, in a random polyester from the cupboard (it had been in there for a while - originally bought for a dress but just too floaty and sheer). Here is a terrible photo of me wearing it. 

The photo was so terrible I took another one of it on the hangar after washing. I did bigger cuffs this time, which I like, and brought the front up again so it's not showing the entirety of my underwear. The dot is very red, although it looks a bit orange in photos.

You can see how sheer it is! Nothing a black camisole can't fix, and it's still so cold around here that another layer is welcome. Back to Parliament sitting this week, although they are minimising both the politicians and the staff in the building. I'm still in here, and it is both busy and strangely quiet....