From time to time when visiting Sharon we delve into her books to look at different kinds of samplers and the map samplers always stand out as being interesting and I thought that the caravaning holiday that I went on in may seemed like a good opportunity to try a map.
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 In 2005 I made a Crazy Quilted Brides Maid Dress for my friends wedding….
My friend has recently uploaded some of the more amuzing Photos from the wedding day.
and you have the opportunity to submit any captions that come to your mind as you view the photos…..enjoy!
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 The last time I posted I was about to head off on holiday and I had a lovely week away, the image is me enjoying Fairy Floss at Berry Market.
When I got home I was somewhat distracted and it has taken me a while to get back into the routine of stitching and blogging…some of what I have been up to will be revealed as I get back to blogging my sampler which I have now begun to update.
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These are our 2009 Painted Easter Eggs (prior years eggs can be seen here.)
This year I painted my egg into a Kokeshi Doll, I had the idea last year when I visited the Cowera Japanese Garden and saw there display of Kokeshi Dolls and thought how well there simple shapes would fit around an egg.
Eggs are a unique shape and over the years that we have been painting eggs it has been interesting to see how the egg shape can be used, it makes some things are really difficult to represent other things fit quite naturally onto the egg shape.
This year my sister also thought of an idea that fitted naturally onto the egg, she is reading the Cadfael novels by Ellis Peters which inspired her to paint her egg as a monk complete with tonsured head and I love his little sandled feet.
 
 The egg shape also fitted my niece’s idea, when she was young I made her cups of tea in a miniature china tea set (cup is about 1 1/2 inches high), when I bought the miniature tea set she was unable to say cuppa and would ask me if she could have a Pucka tea, she has fond memories of those occassions and wanted to make her egg into a Pucka Tea Cup…As I said the egg shape was suitable for making a cup but it was not so easy to achieve because it required sawing the egg in half across the weakest area of the shell, I broke a few eggs trying and in the end we used one that I repaired with paper machae and then reinforced around the rim with finger nail Acrylic, I also used the finger nail Acrylic to attach the wire handle, the saurcer is made from cardboard.
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Tonight I have a few quite moments after a very hectic month, an old friend has been in town and when my daughter got a new bed, a king single to replace a single bed it meant that I had to reorganize her room to fit it in my friend helped and once we were started on cleaning and reorganizing we started on the rest of the house, it has taken a lot of time but has been well worth the effort and I am feeling more organized than I have for many years and now with a clean more organized house I am ready to enjoy easter and have the eggs blown and undercoated ready to paint tomorrow…click her for posts about our painted easter eggs.
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 A Friends sister has horses that are stabled just a few minutes drive away and today we went out to there and collected bags of her stable sweepings to put on my garden.
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Today was ‘Second Hand Sunday’ in Canberra…A day when if you have anything to give away you register your address with a brief description of what you have and then today you put it out on the roadside curb…The list is put up on the website, I checked the list for my local area on last night and one of them had 300 bricks…I need more bricks for what I want to do in the garden so I had myself up early this morning and around at the address early enough to be first in and I got the bricks…I went back a couple of hours later and we moved 3 1/2 boot loads…they need cleaning but the mortar is soft and chips of easily.
 
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 Another beautiful, not to hot, not to cool day perfect for working in the garden and this morning we finished cementing the path and started washing bricks to build a garden wall around the edges.
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After a few steamy hot days we have had a cool change, perfect for working outdoors and my nephew came over to help me…Originally the garden was joined to the castle wall but I have had a change of plan, firstly I thought that a buttress would be cute, then I decided to put a moat between the garden and the castle wall with the buttress as one end and then thinking that it would be nice to have a seat beside the moat, thinking small scale secret fairy garden…
…so over the last few months I have broken out a portion of the garden wall to make a path in and excavated the area, I had wanted to be able to walk down into the area but sometimes sense prevails and a lake in the area after a thunder storm suggested that I should build the level up so that water will drain out of the area…umm that meant larger amounts of concrete than I am able to mix which has stalled progress for some time…then in comes my nephew asking if I had any jobs that he could earn some extra pocket money, he is strong enough to mix the cement by the wheel barrow full which he did while I spread and smoothed it.
After a few hours I was exhausted but I am thrilled with how much we got done and he is coming back tomorrow morning to finish the path.
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For the last 2 years I have resolved to blog regularly ALL Year and have successfully kept that resolution…I thought about making the same resolution for this year but really I think that my blogging has become enough of a good habit that I don’t need the resolution to continue regular blogging…So what to resolve to do, I have had lots of thoughts of grand things that I would love to achieve but I think that a resolution has to be doable, if it has any chance of being kept, so I thought a bit more about the more modest things that I would like to achieve, amongst them is a project that is well started but untouched for more than a year, I do think that it is time it was finished and I hereby resolve to FINISH my Crazy Quilted Box Top before the end of 2009.
My Garden has provided me a lovely new years day treat with this, the first of my Lilies to blossom.
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