JOURNAL
documenting
&
discovering joyful things
Nesting, locally
I came across this wonderful letterpress Illustrated A to Z of Melbourne today, by Benjamin Puckering, and couldn't resist buying it for the baby.
As Baby B grows up, so many of these items will become familiar symbols of home to our little one. Like, "T is for tram" and "V is for Victoria State Library" and "F is for Flinders Street Station." Isn't it adorable?
(I took the photo on the right on Instagram a couple of weeks back. When I saw Benjamin's design I had a "Woah!" moment. It's even the same number.)
Free stuff to make your blog pretty
Guess what I discovered yesterday? FREE creative digital design downloads! But for a short time only. The lovely folks at Creative Market are just starting up and, while they get ready to launch, they are offering some wonderful freebies to give early adopters a taste of what's to come.
Here are some favourites I've already downloaded:
A set of vintage-style hang-tags
Beautiful herringbone patterns
Chalkboard-style icons
Snippets from a 1912 French text book on geometry
I think this is a super smart marketing idea, kind of like the digital version of those little tasters they give you in gelati shops that sucker you in to buying the three-scoop cup when you weren't even hungry. I'm fairly certain creativemarket.com has won a future customer in moi.
Also, I need to extend a big thanks to Nicole Balch of Making it Lovely for alerting me to this great opportunity.
Time travel in Melbourne
Do you ever get that prickly feeling, when walking through the old parts of your town, that time is not linear? That it somehow overlaps?
As I took my dog Oliver for a walk on the weekend, I had in my head an Australian novel The Getting of Wisdom*, which was written a little over a century ago and set in East Melbourne, through which I happened to be walking that morning.
Looking around, I realised I was seeing many of the same buildings, tramlines and gardens that first caught the eye of the book’s scrappy 12-year-old heroine, Laura Tweedle Rambotham, when she arrived in Melbourne from her ‘up country’ home to attend a prestigious ladies’ college*.
Here I tied Oliver to the same cast-iron lamp-post that Laura (or at least the book’s author) would have passed. There, the same historic Exhibition Buildings, set amid beautiful gardens. Overhead, a century-old criss-cross of tram-wires, decorating old colonial buildings and terrace houses like spiders’ webs over paintings.
Laura’s world and my world have combined, despite the passing of 100 years. And yet in my world, rising up and around and permeating Laura’s world, stand monuments that would be unrecognisable and unfathomable to her: skyscrapers, cars, new trams on much-used lines, and modern buildings interspersed amid the old.
This is what I mean by time overlapping. I do not believe the present or future ever really replace the past. Instead, they are simply another layer on the old. Time is a collage.
And I thought to myself: if you look closely enough at the geographical contours of my city, at the odd and ancient tree that has survived, even at the cultural traits that we carry as a people; you’ll find that in this world sit also the worlds of not just centuries but millennia of Australians who lived here before me, going back more than 40,000 years.
It was quite the philosophical walk with the dog.
*The Getting of Wisdom was written by Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson, under the pseudonym Henry Handel Richardson. It is the story of a square peg of a teenaged girl trying desperately to fit into a round hole, with often funny and sometimes heartbreaking results.
*The fictitious Laura attended the factual and still prestigious Presbyterian Ladies’ College, Melbourne, which opened in 1858. Sadly, the original school building (see above) did not survive the years.
The historical photograph of the Presbyterian Ladies College was taken in 1905 and is classified for copyright under public domain.
Dear baby, you cheeky monkey
Dear baby,
Last night you battered me from the inside with your sweet kicks and wiggles while I sat on the couch and tried to read my new book. Boy do you love playtime, already.
Your father rested his Sunday-stubble cheek against my belly and spoke, just to you. "Hello baby," he said. "It's your dad. I love you."
You stopped kicking. Maybe you were listening?
Your father rubbed my belly, right where you had last kicked. It's the closest he can come to cuddling you, for now. There'll be plenty of real cuddles to come, we can both promise you.
Then he cupped his hands around his mouth and spoke again into my belly. "Baby, this is your father," he said in a funny, deep voice. "If you love me, give me a sign."
Nothing. You were resolutely still. More than you'd been all day, in fact.
You cheeky little monkey. We laughed. Oh baby, you're not even born yet and you're making us laugh. I can't wait to meet you!
Love, your mama
Favourite things - love is all you need
Better late than never, in honour of Mr B's and my first anniversary two weeks ago, this post is all about love, love, love. Because, dear friend, love comes in all shapes and sizes. Ain't it grand?
1. Streethearts
Good street art just melts this heart of mine. I adore the creativity, vulnerability and generosity of street artists, and I know I've gone on about this on my blog many times before. So you can imagine how wide my smile was when I came across this collection of "dead hearts" by bicycle-loving, anti-asphalt Canadian artist Roadsworth.
2. Love notes
Danni of Oh, Hello Friend (one of my favourite blogs) made this book of notes, inspired by The Jolly Postman, a while back for her husband when he was having a tough week at work. She said there were about eight to nine notes in the book, with one even hidden in a tiny capsule. One day, I will do the same for someone I love. Isn't it adorable?
3. Wooden tiebreakers
Whenever you disagree with your lover, just flip for the right to be right! This is genius. "Relationship management in a tin," says distributor Greer Chicago. Found, as so many good things are, on Happiness Is.
4. Pop-up book proposal
When NYC student Chris decided to propose to his girlfriend Julia, he teamed up with paper artist Jackie Huang to make a pop-up book filled with moments from their relationship in which he would 'pop' the question. More from the book on Jackie's blog here. I have always loved pop-up books. In fact I think I want to be a paper artist when I grow up.
(ps. Julia said yes.)
5. The glow
I can't wait to experience this kind of love in just a few short months. This image is from The Glow, a site that calls itself "a glimpse into the world of inspiring and fashionable moms" and features gorgeous photography of mothers and their children. I don't expect to be either inspiring or fashionable, but I'm really looking forward to becoming a mum.
Something I remembered this morning
That time when I was 16 and I saw a rainbow end at the bottom of the horse paddock so I ran down to see if there was a pot of gold. There was: the pure gold of looking up to see a magical band of colours begin just out of reach of my outstretched fingertips, curving up, up into the unending sky.
I danced under the end of the rainbow and my brother's friend, still at the top of the hill, said it looked like I was dancing inside all the colour.
I don't know
This is the top comment on the YouTube video of Irish singer-songwriter Lisa Hannigan's sweet track I Don't Know. Scrolling down, others say things like "LOL that's how I got here too" and "omg!!! the same thing happened."
I guess there's a lesson in here on picking song titles that are also good search terms (and possibly on concentrating more on grammar and spelling in school. ARGH, Naomi, you did NOT just type that! Chill, word Nazi, chill.)
Continuing on...
Me? I'm simply in love with Hannigan's uncomplicated yet heartfelt love song, and the blue-and-white paper cutout garden she creates as she sings. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSaPbVjcrp4] Elsewhere: I'm also blogging on English Muse today, sending out the first of a weekly series of 'antipodean dispatches' on travel, books and whimsy. Do drop by and tell me what you think... here.
Picnic at Hanging Rock
I now live not far from Hanging Rock, the setting of one of Australian literature's great, unsolved mysteries Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay, as well as Peter Weir's haunting film adaptation from 1975.
Mr B grew up attending family picnics and horse races on this ancient site. His father's regular joke was to yell "I found them!" whenever he spotted three old ladies together (read the book to find out why this is funny).
I'm talking about Picnic at Hanging Rock on the English Muse today. I'll be blogging there every Tuesday evening from now on, so please pop by to say hello, and let me know what else you'd like to see on my guest posts.
Sing so that the kids will know
When a horrific abuse of human rights left 81 people dead after a fire broke out in an overcrowded prison in Santiago, Chile in 2010, musician Nano Stern wrote a song about it. Why?
"We have to sing about it, we have to make it into popular culture, we have to sing so that the kids will know what happened and will not be immune to such horrible things," he told Dumbo Feather magazine. More here:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDoSzcbVseQ]
In the wake of that Kony video (putting aside your thoughts on the activities of the charity behind it), what's your take on using the arts and popular culture for social education and to inspire change?