Geometry + colour

I've been painting triangles. Scenes, events, glimpsed through thick-paned, antique windows. I'm not exactly sure what I'll make of them, yet. Perhaps I'll create prints: a set of postcards, maybe? Or some note cards?

ΔΔ Wet autumn watercolour, gouache and pen-and-ink on paper

ΔΔ Passing parade watercolour, gouache and pen-and-ink on paper

ΔΔ School fete watercolour, gouache and pen-and-ink on paper

ΔΔ Toy store watercolour, gouache and pen-and-ink on paper

ΔΔ Brush-fire watercolour, gouache and pen-and-ink on paper

You make my heart sing

I feel a bit sheepish admitting this in public, but Mr B is a huge country and western music fan. I know! Right?! Anyway he is, and I might not love his music but I do love Mr B. So I decided to write some tongue-in-cheek snippets of lyrics from three of his favourites (Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton and Elvis Presley) onto these heart biscuits, then packed him off to work this morning with a very pink box of Valentine’s Day biscuits under his arm.

What I wrote:

“know when to hold ‘em” (uhuh Kenny) “love me tender” (thanks, Elvis) “all decked up like a cowgirl’s dream” (ah, Dolly: Mr B in cowboy boots? The mind boggles!) “don’t take your love to town” (this is good advice Kenny) “I will always love you” (awww, Dolly!)

Actually the point of this post is to give a bit of a shout-out to the Melbourne-based company that made the biscuits, Blank Goods. Not because they’ve sponsored me or anything (they haven’t) but because they made it SO EASY to personalise this lovely gift. I ordered the biscuits online and in less than a week they arrived, beautifully iced and amazingly unbroken, along with a food pen (!!) with which to write my messages, and all the pretty packaging accoutrements you see in these pictures.

I think food pens might change my life.

Anyway, happy Valentine’s Day for tomorrow, all you lovers. And you too, beautiful strangers.

Valentines for strangers

Under the cover of almost-darkness, the dog and I went for a walk down one of Melbourne’s many laneways last night and left behind some little inspirational love-notes for strangers. Because maybe just maybe, the RIGHT words will be seen by the RIGHT person, just when they need them the most. The neighbour’s cat was less than impressed.

Make this - snail mail concertina pockets

This is a really simple way to create a little concertina of pockets in which to place gifts for pen pals. To make them, you just attach the top of one envelope to the base of another, to create a kind of concertina filled with snail-mail surprises. I first saw it on Pinterest and I THINK the link originally came from Martha Stewart, but I couldn’t find the source when I went looking. Cute, huh?

Numbers

Hello dear stranger! How are you? These joyful Christmas photographs were taken about 18 months ago. Wait. No, they were taken only three weeks ago. How is that even possible?

How was your Christmas (if Christmas is your thing)? Ours was really lovely, full of friends dropping by and delicious food and very excited children and at least one new tradition.

How was your New Year (if you mark your days by the Gregorian Calendar)? Ours was… actually, we were all in bed before the New Year clicked over. I heard the fireworks, though. And they sounded pretty impressive.

A month ago I took a little break from this blog to catch up on some writing and painting and other life tasks that were building up in the spare-room cupboard of my mind (turns out there’s a fine line between clutter and hoarding, even when it comes to internal to-do lists).

Somewhat predictably, I failed to complete everything on the list. But here’s what I have managed to do since we were all last here:

1 Christmas done and dusted, in a most enjoyable fashion

1/2 a turkey roasted to perfection

28 mail-art letters sent to blog readers

34 replies made to recent mail

5 fruit mince tarts consumed

1 truly adorable letter sent to Father Christmas

3 days spent in Bendigo, pretending be tourists

7 (min) walks of the dog per week (that is a record, post-kids)

15 letters posted regarding a super-secret project for my father’s upcoming birthday (I’d love to say more but he reads this blog. Hi Dad!)

27 hours spent on other elements of said super-secret birthday project

8 times Mr B's favourite Elvis record ("Elvis sings Flaming Star”) was played

3 mojitos on a 43-degree day

43 dumplings drizzled with soy sauce

2 visits to the gym

11 hours spent playing tea parties and constructing toy train-sets

11,400 words of my “new motherhood” e-book written

2 illustrations completed for the e-book

136 pages into the book I’m kind-of reading. I’ve really lost steam on this one

1 dear friend giving birth to a beautiful baby girl

90 cups of tea and 30 coffees, down the hatch

How are YOU? How is your summer going? Or your winter, depending on where you are right now? What do you have planned to 2015? Is it too late to talk about plans and resolutions and fresh starts? Does the year feel tired and middle-aged to you already? I hope not.

I haven’t made a New Year’s resolution since I was about 12, but I have made some exciting plans for the year, and I can’t wait to share them with you as we go along. See you tomorrow. It’s good to be back!

Handmade Halloween tea-treats

On the spectrum from trick to treat, I'm hoping these friendly little handmade Halloween tea-spooks definitely fall on the treat side. Next year, maybe I'll get my act together and pair them with some skeleton gingerbread men. Or gingerbread cats. Or something. This year, I packaged them up with yellow craft paper and posted them off to these lovely blog readers.

If you need a last minute, slightly-more-grown-up treat to give to friends, a set of these little guys will take you about five minutes to make.

1. Download the template 2. Print or photocopy it onto thick paper or cardstock 3. Cut out each friend, then attach them to teabags with staples or tape

If you have a bit more time, get fancy with some lovely herbal blends, or even create a teabag of your own with a little ball of loose-leaf tea in a square of muslin, secured with string.

The friendly spooks will reach their arms around the edges of your tea cup while the tea steeps.

Happy Halloween friends!

ps. Christmas tea-friends

What's your soap box topic?

After writing this post about people who are completely passionate about their work, I got to thinking about things that really get me revved up. Things that make me talk like these people talk: on and on and on, because I'm really into what I'm talking about.

And right away one topic came to mind. It's my go-to soap box topic, except I'm not really complaining about anything. It's something that I honestly find MIND-BLOWINGLY FASCINATING and I am always mildly surprised and a little bit sad when I realise nobody else is there with me.

So here it is. Please imagine me talking faster than usual, and gesticulating wildly, letting my tea go cold or my wine get warm. It's possible my eyes are just a little bit cray-cray. If that scares you (erm, why would it?) feel free to click away now…

One day when the kids are all grown up and the mortgages are all paid off (in other words when I'm 90ish), I want to go ahead and undertake a PhD on the origins of religion and mythology. Proper research study, not anecdotal or speculative "the gods were aliens because you can only see the Nazca lines from above" stuff.

Because to my mind there are just too many similarities in the world's spiritual stories for there not to be a REASON. Look at the resurrection themes in the Christian and ancient Egyptian stories. Or the creation texts of the Jews and the Mayans: there's water, separation, a serpent, so many symbolic parallels. Water and a great serpent are at the centre of a number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander stories, too. Now look at the demigods of the ancient Greeks and the Romans: they are the offspring of a human-divine pairing, and they are great and powerful heroes. Now take a look at the story of the Nephilim in Genesis of the Bible/Torah scriptures: they are the offspring of angels and human beings (other translations say "the sons of god and the daughters of men"), and they are known as "the giants and heroes of old."

I get that some of these stories travelled through cultures through wars and along trade routes, which COULD explain story parallels in, for example, the Middle East. But what about South America? Australia? There are SO MANY stories with similarities, all over the world and throughout the ages. Where did they start? Is there truth in any of these? If so, what IS that truth? Who started this millennia-old game of Chinese whispers?

Once upon a time our ancestors didn't worship any gods, and then one day they did. Archaeologists can trace the beginnings of spirituality and religion in our ancestors, through signs of belief in the afterlife. A long time ago when someone died, we left them and walked away. Presumably we grieved because presumably we loved, too, but once a person was dead there was nothing more to be done for them. But then we started burying our dead, and burying them with items of significance. Items to go with them into the afterlife, to ease their passage or make their existence easier once they got there.

WHY? Why did we start believing in life beyond the material? What happened? Did it happen in just one place and then word spread, or did it happen everywhere all at once and then the different peoples and cultures developed their own stories in isolation from one another? Was it an actual god? Many gods? A spectacular and/or catastrophic natural event? Heck, let's indulge all the theories for a minute. Did aliens teach us how to build the pyramids? Were the "heroes of old" actually just another race that existed parallel to us, like the neanderthals (who, btw, also believed in an afterlife)?

Mind blown, right? Right?

Oi. WAKE UP!

So that's my little soap box rant and probably you won't be that into it and to your face I'll say "that's cool" but in my head I'll be thinking WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE REST OF THE WORLD? WHY DON'T THEY GET HOW AMAZING THIS IS?

Deep breaths.

And now I want to know: what's YOUR soap box topic? What gets you REALLY excited, as in, almost as excited as the mystery of the origins of myth? I promise to listen. I do. I really want to know. Go!

Creative life

How do you keep track of your creative life?

Recently I drew this mind-mappy flow-charty thing to try to figure out, for myself, how all my various fun and creative projects relate to and support one another.

Here's what I learned about my creative life from creating this map:

1. Writing a novel was not the pinnacle of my creative writing activities, but a catalyst for more

2. The people in blogging communities are awesome and so are those in snail-mail communities

3. All my disparate projects don't seem so disparate after all. They work together in a funny kind of way

4. Having kids doesn't mean you have to give up on doing the creative things you love. In many cases, it can inspire you

And it's that last one I want to talk about. Last week a friend (Hi Bec!) said the NICEST thing to me. She said she wanted to have children one day but that she had always feared that prioritising her children might mean having to give up on doing the things she loved. But that knowing me and reading my blog had given her the confidence that the two didn't have to drive one another away. Isn't that wonderful?

I'm the first to admit that I really struggle to find the time to follow my passions. Hey, there are three good reasons why my next novel is still only a third of the way through after ALL THESE YEARS, that the magazine I've mentioned here hasn't launched yet, that I take literally months to write and send the letters I promise to send, and that my blog posting is intermittent at best. Two of those reasons are sleeping upstairs right now and will do so for an undetermined length of time (could be I only have five minutes of blog-writing time left); and the other reason is my actual, you know, paid job. But…

Despite the perpetually time-poor state that comes with being a parent of small children, I make it a priority to work on my creative joys. They're just not the TOP priority. I don't achieve the way I used to, or hit goals the way I used to, but I do give myself permission to chip away at these activities, purely for the love of doing them.

And now Madeleine is entering an age in which she notices these things. She loves to watch me drawing and painting my "mail art," and often I'll go to her for inspiration on what to draw (if you're noticing a lot of horses and tea pots in my post pictures lately, that's why). I want my children to grow up understanding the value of work and responsibility; but also to feel like it's good to have interests and passions, and that they can follow them as far as they want to take them.

I think that's a good thing to teach, isn't it? I hope it is.

Transformation stories

We had a picture book when I was growing up that told creation stories from Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander peoples. I don't know which nation the stories came from - or maybe they came from many nations - but I loved the stories. They had been illustrated by children and the stories were all about explaining how the world came to be. Stories like "How the echidna got his spikes," and "How the emu lost his flight."

At the same time, we had a Little Golden Book that told the story of The Three Sisters. If you live in New South Wales you probably know this one. The story according to my Little Golden Book went that there were three sisters and one day, the youngest sister dropped a stone over a cliff by accident, which woke and angered an evil bunyip. Their father, a witch doctor, couldn't reach the sisters in time to save them. Instead, he pointed a magic bone at his daughters and turned them into stone, so the bunyip couldn't harm them. To escape the bunyip he then turned himself into a lyre bird. But in the process he dropped the magic bone. To this day, you will see the lyre bird searching through the underbrush in that bush to try and find the bone to turn himself back into a man, and turn his daughters back into girls.

The little girl Naomi was powerfully influenced by these transformation and creation stories. I was fascinated by the idea that something that seemed "ordinary" to me actually had a back story and had experienced grand adventures and great metamorphoses to get to where they were today. It made them the very antithesis of "ordinary." I used to entertain the fantasy that I had once been someone - or even something - else, but that after my transformation into a little girl, I had experienced an amnesia and had lost the true history of me.

And not to get too philosophical on a Tuesday morning but I feel like I have been transforming and recreating myself ever since. There are the obvious metamorphoses: the transformation from girl into woman (that one took a lot longer than I had anticipated); the transformation from Independent Adult into Mother. Sometimes when I reconnect with friends I knew in school or university, it hits home how much I have changed in other ways. We still connect on many levels but many of our interests, our core beliefs, have parted ways. My friends will pull out the old music that we used to love, the books we used to read, the shows we used to watch, and be surprised that they no longer hold special meaning for me. They'll remain loyal vegetarians while I now order the beef carpaccio. They'll worship a god I no longer believe exists. They'll breed horses while I couldn't imagine life lived away from the city.

It all comes back to the "back-story" of those childhood creation tales. I don't think I'm a different or new person to the one I was back then. I'm just wearing new layers. The echidna was still the echidna before he had spikes. I had straight hair my whole life but since Harry was born it's gone curly. I'm still me, just a curly-haired version of me. And I'm sure I'll undergo more transformations, in every corner of my life. Things would get a little boring if we stayed the same all the time, don't you think? Maybe you'll bump into me in a decade or so and I'll be living the vegan lifestyle on a farm somewhere. Which isn't actually so far from where I started, to be honest. But that's another story for another day.

What about you? Have you undergone any radical transformations? Do you feel like the same person you were back then?

A little while ago I wrote about the hours I would spend on the floor of our family room, writing stories and creating "books." This is the only surviving story I have from those days and, not surprisingly, it is one of creation and transformation. Let's hope my spelling has transformed for the better since then.

Spring fever links

We've made it. The beginning of spring. Warmer days, bluer skies, flowers, hay-fever. Yesterday we took a drive through the countryside and solid banks of flowering wattle lined the road, thick with sunshine. We took Harry and Madeleine to a playground that was bisected by a creek: fast-flowing melted snow smoothed the pebbles where brave, blue-toed children splashed and played.

Last week when the days began to warm up I opened up the doors front and back to let the clean breeze flow through and blow away some of that winter dust and germs and stuffy, toasty air that has been circulating our rooms for months. And then the urge to spring-clean took me and I really put my elbows into cleaning out... the bathroom cabinet. Well, you've got to start somewhere.

I'm ambivalent about the start of spring. This year we've had an actual winter which makes the changing season kind of lovely and new and refreshing and welcome. On the other hand, spring does tend to be a dress rehearsal for summer, and SUMMER means sunburn and sweat and sleeplessness and sand-flies. I'm trying to be more positive about the hot weather this year and I love a family day at the beach as much as the next person, but... no, give me my words in a cold cloud when I step outside of a morning, and I'm a happy little rugged-up camper.

What is your favourite season? Does spring make you happy? This year, I'm going to stop buying trouble fearing summer and embrace spring fever in the moment. Will you join me? Here are some ways to do it.

Create water colour paints out of flowers

Plant something. Even a tiny pot plant. This city garden takes my breath away. What an oasis for every season!

Make a summer delicious. Spicy watermelon, mint and lime granita, anyone?

Spring clean your life. Lila over at Little Wolff is offering this ebook free if you subscribe to her newsletter

Face your creative fears

Colour code something, for no other reason than to celebrate colour. These colour-coded photographs are will inspire you

Hidden messages. Embrace your childhood, write a secret message. A letter in lemon juice, a fortune cookie, a code. Or, even better, a message hidden in jewellery

Make some crepe paper butterflies for your next party

Save your pennies, in a jar, for something special. Remember the movie "Up"? The penny jar savings "for Peru"? And how beautiful it is when the curmudgeonly old man experiences a springtime-like renaissance as a thousand balloons lift his house up, up, up, and away! Did you love that moment? I did, I loved that whole movie. And now THIS. This series of photographs is just glorious

Two words that make me think summer might not be at all bad after all: water trampoline