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uni, a dairy fairy and japanese magazines

Well Uni started on Monday and I am in the midst of getting back into the hang of doing my readings, taking notes and trying my hardest not to fall asleep in class and trying not to strangle a certain professor and making some new friends.

Due to some staffing changes at work I am now back in the dairy and freezer where I belong playing the role of a “dairy fairy”. I was trained at my previous supermarket in the dairy but then due to a staffing change I was jolted out of the dairy and into grocery before getting a spot as a meat packer which I quite enjoyed. However when I got my job with the company I am with now, they only had night fill roles open so that is what I took and since then I have been moonlighting as a dairy fairy when they have needed me but alas I have always had to hand my “wings” back after a couple of hours but not any longer! Nothing like lifting milk-crates and filling the ice-fridge to give the arms a work-out 🙂 Yay for the Dairy.

A while ago I mentioned getting some Japanese patchwork and quilting magazines out of the quilt guild’s library, well I scanned them in the other week and uploaded them to Flickr last night so for your inspiration goodness I share with you 🙂

The first set come from a magazine called Patchwork Club. Click on any of the photos to be taken to it’s gallery where there are more scans.

pc46_11 pc46_15 pc46_01 pc46_02

The next set come from Patchwork Quilt Tsushin, again click on any of the photos to be taken to it’s gallery to see the other scans, these come from seven different editions.

PQT122_10a PQT122_12 PQT113_6 PQT113_2

Hope you enjoying looking at the pages I have selected as much as I do 🙂

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Total Bargain

For all things that come to an end, something else begins, well that was my reasoning in arguing for the Christmas Tree to stay up till I went back to uni. Well actually it was that Mum and I would be away for the twelve days of Christmas and we wanted to be able to enjoy the tree 🙂 Yep I go back to uni in 17hrs so the tree was taken down today. Even though I had rigged up a watering system for it this year to ensure it stayed green for as long as possible, it died quite a few days ago. Almost everyday Pabbi would whinge and whine asking if the tree would be taken down today, the answer was always just a couple of more days. The living room now has a bare patch and the curtains lack decoration now as well. Oh well, Christmas always comes around soon enough.

Whilst on my lunch break yesterday I spent a delightful time at the clearance racks in Myer and I walked out with a pair of stone coloured Italian cotton Country Road pants (which means I now have 3 pairs of gorgeous CR styled pants) and a gorgeous emerald green silk v-neck top. Which I wore of course when I went out last night to farewell my night fill manager, who at the tender age of 20!! is going to be trading manager (i.e. 3rd in charge) of the Bi-Lo store at Airlie Beach. He’ll be a store manager in ten years or so probably.

Whilst looking on the racks I also saw this gorgeous pleated silk Country Road balloon skirt which I tried on and loved except it had this one problem, I didn’t like the balloon look, which Mum tells me was high fashion in 1957 and that people would add netting so that they would balloon up even more.My plan was/is to unpick the skirt from the lining and kill that balloon look and hem the bottom so it would just be a straight pleated skirt but I am slightly sort of starting to like the mini balloon. Who knows?

Mum and I went back this morning to look at the balloon skirt which I did pick up and I managed to get another Country Road skirt which will be nice for uni and a pair of cropped JAG jeans also perfect for days at Uni when jeans would just be death due to the heat 🙂

Grand total for 1 top (AU$99.95), 2 pants (AU$99.95 & AU$189) and 2 skirts (AU$229 & AU$ 139) at RRP AU$756.90.

Price I paid after staff discount and two stages of clearance? AU$267.27

Total bargain, I say 🙂

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More Layouts from Tasmania

Well Uni starts back on Monday and I am doing five subjects this semester instead of the usual four to gain an extra major so I won’t be creating as much. I am thinking at the moment to designate each interest a week so in that week any free time I have, I will spend doing X. That is the plan… but here are some layouts I did the other day from our trip to Tasmania. Click on the photos to be taken to a larger image and their notes. 🙂
Yacht Race Richmond Bridestowe Lavender

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An Afternoon at the Queensland Art Gallery

This past Sunday, Mum and I went into the Queensland Art Gallery to look at a couple of exhibitions, one that had it’s last day on Sunday and the other two had opened the day before and oh it was such a wonderful jaunt.The first was “Made for this World”, contemporary art & the places we build, which was an exhibition aimed to encourage children to look twice at the places around them, it had some great activities to do including making bridges or whatever structure you wished from short flexible bamboo skewers and masking tape using bridge drawings by Cai Guo Qiang as ideas. Another activity was to go dotty in Yayoi Kusama’s “The obliteration room 2002”, which has an online version here. The last hand-ons activity was Icelander Olafur Eliasson’s “The cubic structural evolution project 2004”, which invited patrons to build buildings out of white Lego pieces to be placed in a constantly evolving city (photo below).

The cubic structural evolution project

The other two we went to see were Margaret Preston: Art and Life, which is an extraordinary exhibit of her paintings, monotypes and prints as well as photos and objects from her life. This exhibit is a traveling one organised by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, so if happens to visit a town near you, I strongly urge you to visit. The actual website of the exhibition is here.

The other was Grace Cossington Smith: A Retrospective Exhibition, which is also a traveling exhibition but organised by the National Gallery of Australia, the tour website is here and features an exhaustive online catalog of her work. We didn’t spend as much time in this one as we did in the Margaret Preston one but it was equally as amazing, I really liked how in comparision to Preston who I felt emphasised the structure of the flowers and buildings in her work, Cossington Smith emphasised the colours that she saw that made up her subjects not always the colours that we would see in a scene. Quite an enjoyable afternoon, which we finished off with a browse of the Art Gallery Shop 🙂

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Helen’s Best Ever Biscuits

Last night I figuratively let down the hair after work and had one hell of a night out with one of my best friends, lots of talk, lots of vodka fire-engines, lots of dancing, lots of laughs and a cute boy or two. Total blast of a night and I got to wear a gorgeous skirt I picked up yesterday from Myer for $18 reduced from $60! score!
I made the best biscuits I have ever made and/or eaten the other day, a variation of a family staple called Apricot Wheat-germ Biscuits, these I think shall be called Sultana Hazelnut Biscuits.20060218_7833

Ingredients:
1.5 cups soft brown sugar
250g softened cooking margarine
2 eggs
dollop of vanilla
1 cup cornflakes
1 cup coconut
3/4 cup sultanas
1 cup hazelnut meal
1.75 cups whole-meal plain flour
3tsp baking powder

Method:
Preheat oven to 160°C and grease biscuit trays. Cream together margarine and sugar, add in eggs. All in together this fine weather mix in the rest of the ingredients, adding a bit of milk if mixture is too dry or some more flour if mixture is too moist.
Roll into balls and flatten lightly and cook in oven till when a finger pressed lightly into a biscuit does not leave a mark. Makes plenty.

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You Gotta Love This Girl

Tracy is well I don’t really know what words to use to describe her other than she is an incredible person. We met on 2peas a couple of years ago, I was a wee girl a couple months shy of my 18th birthday, she was a Garden Girl (one of those women on 2peas who you aww over) and well the rest is history, we’ve emailed each other, cheered each other on and given no barriers held advice when needed, she is a pretty cool lady and I am glad to know her 🙂

So, imagine my delight this afternoon when I came back from celebrating my Grandfather’s 86th Birthday to an email showing me this 🙂 Then to add to all my proudness of what she is achieving, she has a paper line coming out with A2Z Essentials which is about to be released at a trade show that starts today/tomorrow 🙂 Called Harmony 🙂 – Go Tracy 🙂
Helen by tracy