I like the traditional quilt block Moon over mountain and I'm thinking of making a quilt out of them.  The top is a scan of the mini painting I did last night and the bottom is that same painting inverted in photoshop.  Day and Night.

Riscy is out painting the hallway and our bedroom.  I'm in the computer room browsing the internet and procrastinating from preparing my lecture notes (still).

Scratching around for things to blog about, I scanned in a crappy little painting I did and converted it to grey scale.

Today has seen Riscy and I trudging on with our painting.  I also decided that we needed to replace the icky old curtains in our bedroom.  So I spent a considerable amount of time scouting around the Valley looking at curtains.  In the end I went with a roman blind from Freedom and some eyelet tab curtains from Target.  I'm hoping it will work out ok.

I stink of turpentine so I really need to get off this computer and out of these clothes. Cheerio.

Got a new do.

With subtle red blocks and layers all the way up.    My hair is normally curly(ish), but today I have 'hairdresser hair' and must record it 'cause it is the last time it will look this good.

This is my 'hello boys' look LOL.  One armed self portraiture has its moments. 

And this is my normal self sporting unruly eyebrows and a goofy look on my face.

Do you like that fabric I draped it over my shoulder? (to get some contrast for the hair).  It is a length of metal and silk fabric which I bought from Beautiful Silks last year and I wear it as a wrap.  The warp is the silk and the weft is the metal.  It's my favouirite piece of fabric :-)

We got another privacy pattern envelope in the mail today.... our phone bill :-)  I love the colour of this one.  The long smudge in the white band sort of reminds me of the low marshy vegetation on the islands we kayaked around in April, the islands with the enormous herds of feral goats.

I got somewhere with the laundry room last night.  I have cleared a tiny space for myself.   I have even washed and ripped about 10m of fabric - which will translate to roughly 40 nice sized pieces of fabric for me to work with. Yeah!  

Thanks to Lisa S. for the encouraging words.... I can't imagine trying to dye in North American winters, it really does put my grumbling into perspective.  I have a committee meeting tonight, but I hope to get something started afterwards.

Also.  Riscy has fiddled with the settings on my blog to help me control spam.  It now automatically closes comments on old posts (which are the ones the spambots target).  I will continue to manually filter all comments, I'm just hoping there will be less of the crappy spambot ones to trudge through.

I seem to be on an unplanned break in creativity which has resulted in me not posting recently.  I've been puzzled about it, worried about it and now I'm working through it ;-)

It all comes back to the fact that I desperately need to dye some fabric.  As you know, I can no longer dye in my kitchen and my alternative dye location isn't attractive to me at the moment as it is too cold.

Given that I am desperate for fabric, I need a solution.  And I think it will be our laundry. It is a small space with lots of left over clutter, dust and tools from our renovations.  I will have to sort it out tonight.  Otherwise I'm going to flip out.

For some reason, knitting or spinning isn't happening at the moment either.  Perhaps having no big piles of laundry to fold or washing up to be done has cause a big shift in my desire to do stuff or perhaps it is the weather - dunno.

In addition to the creative deficit, I am trying to get my lecture notes together for the teaching stint next week.  There is a lot of work yet to be done and none of it is particularly fun.

Ok that whinge is over.  I can get back to normal now.

 
I have been cleaning.  My workroom is nearly there, nearly ready to be used again.  Still to come is the ruthless magazine cull.  I no longer need any quilting magazines, out they go.

I also do not need to keep every single smear of 'art' or half executed ideas.  Out they go too.  A clean sweep and a new focus.

I want my mind and my workroom to be clear and ready to start the next piece in the batch of five.  Loy Yang.  It will be a large quilt, 1.5 to 2m in width.  I know I mentioned that this piece will be colour colour colour. I've changed my mind.  I want to dye some dirty yellows and dirty reds and dirty greens, I think that I need to work in those colours at the moment, don't know why.

And, just because I know you have been anticipating news re: New Laundry Regime.  It is a winner!!!   Put a load in the machine in the morning, dryer at lunch and fold in the evening.  How simple can you get!!!  And there is NO stress, none.  I'm a moron for not thinking this up earlier.  

Just in case you think that I'm some sort of housework robot (HA!) and Riscy is just sittn' back enjoying the ride, I'd like to acknowledge that he has done the huge bulk of everything for the last 6 years and I am attempting to wrestle back a bit of my share LOL.

Detail of a crumpled tissue.  I'm keen not to spend the next two hours shading this drawing, so it will stay as it is.

We are having some lovely rain. Good soaking rain.  It has been a dry winter so a wet weekend is very welcome.  It could also mean that snow is falling somewhere higher than here and Riscy and I can go skiing some weekend soon.

Yesterday I purchased a whole new wardrobe for work.  I have decided to give up buying expensive clothes which I could never get to look coordinated anyway.  I've established myself an informal uniform of black pants and polo shirts with long sleeved t-shirts underneath for winter.  I am out in the field a lot and the rest of the time I am working with other engineers and technical people so this is a practical and logical clothing direction for me :-) 

I also went through all my clothes and shoes and have two garbage bags full to donate to Vinnies.  It is very liberating!  In the sorting I found two pairs of pants which I have never worn, I think they need hemming.

In other things domestic.  Since I now have the kitchen effortlessly under control thanks to my revolutionary dishwasher,  I will now implement new laundry reigme:  A load a day keeps the blues away.  Each morning I plan to put a load in the machine, throw in the dryer at lunchtime and fold in the evening.

Oh yeah, the cocktail party went well.  I managed to restrain myself around the tequila and even drank two bottles of water so I didn't even have a baby hangover this morning.  I told you I've matured!

 I have finished the first quilt top for my batch of five.  Just in the nick of time too.  I was getting REALLY sick of this girl (and I bet you are too LOL).  I plan to put her out of my mind until the other four are finished.

Things might slow down here for a couple of days.  I've been so tired this week, I think I need to rejuvenate a bit... get my workroom back in order, read a bit, work on our house and do some socialising and dye up some fabric.

We are going to a 'cocktail' party on the weekend.  I suspect it wont be the classy kind :-p  Riscy and I met at the end of a 'cocktail' party at university; where the cocktails were mixed in big plastic bins, the engineering building  was trashed (they let us use the staff room!!?!), someone peed on our Thermodynamics lecturer's door and nude law students tried to crash in on our fun.  Ahem. 

This weekend, we have been asked to bring a bottle of tequila... and we all know what happened last time I got into that particular poison.  I saw a brown dog with a parot in its mouth!  But really, I'm more mature now... 4 weeks on.

By the by.  The 2006 Melbourne International Arts Festival has been launched.  Riscy and I plan to be there for at least one weekend.  We'll have to pore over the program to work out 'what and when'.  It's like opening a box of chocolates :-)