At This Moment

I am joining Ali Edwards and many others... responding to a journalling prompt about “Currently,” “Around Here,” or “Right Now”.....

I am amazed at how quickly this year is going! We are well into spring already!  I have to really think carefully when I work out what the date is – and a couple of days ago I saw a reference to it being only 100 days until Christmas!!!  We are still having cool nights but the days are often warm enough for a T-shirt, and occasionally the evenings stay warm as well.  It is mid-afternoon and the distant hills are various shades of light grey with the smoke from back-burning hanging around.  The pergola with the grape vine is almost half green already with new shoots – and with the many dangling plumes of fat buds waiting to sprout into flowers.  And we seem to be home ground for about 15 or so magpies – they are everywhere (particularly the areas where new mulch has been spread) and their warbling is delightful!

I am looking forward to going to Mudgee in October for a friend’s wedding, and stopping off at the Hunter too.  And later in the month we will be having visitors from the UK, my cousin and her husband – it will be great to see them again.

I am so proud of our eldest grand-child – she received five awards at the Presentation Assembly last Friday – I do wish I could have been there to see it!  But there will undoubtedly be other chances… she is doing so well at High School.

I wonder how our eldest son will go this summer: he is looking for work, and has a much better chance of getting some now that things are picking up ready for summer.  But he is also looking much more seriously at what he wants to do in the long term.

I am surprised how much bouncier Mollie (our 14 year old Border Collie) is now that she is having the new medicine: it’s like HRT for older incontinent bitches.  We had her clipped and washed this week as well – her body is a lot greyer, but her face and feet are still black and white.

I went up to Ellenborough today, to deliver the canopy from the back of the HiLux now that the tray has been fitted for our younger son.  Good to see the cabin at Ewetopia is almost finished – the new railings around the balcony are almost complete.  It’s still a stepladder for access, but I managed it quite easily.  I hope we can stay there over Christmas – it will be good to be around early in the morning so the kids can open their stockings at the right time!

I am excited at our long term plans to move to further north, nearer to our two daughters and their families (I feel I should add D.V. here).  Today we were talking about the sort of duplex we would like to build, and how to make them just right for older people, and even allowing for wheel chairs and mobility scooters!  It was exciting thinking about the kitchen, and the layout, and the front porch and sun verandah….

I do hope that the auction on Saturday for the house over the road goes off without a hitch.  It would be so good to have a new family living there…..

I am looking forward to helping at Taree Mainly Music each week next term: it will be good to be involved again.

I am still concerned about the results of the mammogram I had a couple of days ago: I will feel so much better when I get the formal acknowledgement from the doctor… assuming it is all clear….

I am conscious that as we get older health concerns are becoming more of a reality.  We are currently praying for a couple of friends having chemotherapy, and their families and friends.

I am going to find it a lot easier to get into the daily exercise routine now that the mornings warm up a lot more quickly.  I’ve finally lost the extra weight I gained over winter…… as long as I stop buying the new yummy bread from Coles!

Hobbies more recently.....

In my fifties

Floral Art – Gael and I went to Floral Art classes once a week for about 5 years: Katrina and Marilyn came some of the time too.  It was an ideal activity – even though we were all busy with BCMA things – it was so relaxing to focus on the arrangement and then take it home afterwards!  Our teacher was so good at guiding and  encouraging us: we even did a demonstration one year at the Royal Easter Show!  As a result I did the church flowers once a term for quite a few years, arrangements for Emmaus Weekends and also helped with a number of wedding arrangements.

A groups of us who had become friends through the BCMA held our first meeting of ‘Serendipity’ on November 23^rd 1998. Then we met every Monday morning in term time: a number of us wanted to learn different crafts and each of us had a skill which we passed on to the others – it was great fun and we also raised money for Bear Cottage.  We dabbled in mosaics, cross-stitch, French-knot embroidery, ribbon embroidery, candle-wicking, folk art, decoupage and patchwork.  As a result of trying the folk art with Marilyn, I agreed to go with Gael to classes at Edgeworth David Hardware shop in September 1999.

Folk Art – I continued doing the classes for the next five or so years (Gael gave up after a term!): Jenny was such an excellent teacher and I really enjoyed her classes….. I was able to try lots of different styles of painting with Jenny’s patient help.  As well as paints, brushes and pattern books the Folk Art section of the shop also stocked decoupage papers, and we learnt how to include that into our painted articles: and I also found out how to do decoupage with good quality paper serviettes.

Patchwork and quilting – I did a course in machine quilting; experimented with a number of different blocks and made a quilt-as-you-go flying goose quilt.  In May 2003, I stayed with my parents in Frome as Mum recovered from a broken hip: during that time I used Mum’s little Husqvarna sewing machine and made a quilt for her to go with the cushions that were on the settee in their living room: it had hearts appliqued onto diagonal squares.

Photography – Vern bought a digital Kodak camera on one of his trips in 2000, but it only worked for a  couple of years.  I bought my first digital camera, an Olympus, duty free on my way to the UK in April 2003.   Before that I enjoyed taking photos, but with the instant feedback of a digital camera it was much more fun – and much easier to go on taking photos until you had a reasonable shot!  That was, as long as you weren’t trying to capture a special moment with one of the grand-children.  Although they caught on pretty quickly to the fact that the photo showed up on the back of the camera – so after a ‘big smile’ they’d say “show me, show me”!  Compare that with my parents’ reaction – Dad had been a very keen photographer since his late teens, but had slowed down considerably before digital cameras… when I showed him the image on the camera screen of him and my mum taken a few moments before, his comment was ‘Don’t believe it!”.

In my sixties

Interior Design – During the year that the house was being built at Wingham my painting, patchwork, wool etc were all stored away—just as well given the humidity of living on the coast at Old Bar.  (I did go to some classes though and learnt to do heat-embossing!)

About the only ‘hobby’ I had was the planning for the new house as we worked out bricks, roofing, tiles, windows, doors, curtains, blinds etc.  I also spent a few months working out the paint colours for the various rooms in our new home, using numerous sample pots testing them on small canvases—one for each room.

Sewing and Knitting—I did a bit of both of these as we settled in to our new house: made a quilt for Owie and also finished off a quilt-as-you-go log cabin pattern quilt for Jake’s cot.  However I had problems with my left eye in 2010 and found it difficult to sew for long periods of time.

Scrap-booking – I had started making Christmas gift tags in December 2004: then when I needed more supplies I went to the scrap-booking shop in Hornsby which offered a course in January: I didn’t have much else planned so I signed up!  (Despite having looked at my daughter’s albums the previous year and commented that this wasn’t something I wanted to do!)

It was so much fun so I did another course in North Turramurra at the Scrapbooking Burrow.  I ended up doing a number of courses there that year and thoroughly enjoyed them.  Looking back at those layouts now I wish I had been more disciplined with myself – I still like the competed ones, but I left a lot without journalling or titles, and now they seem so incomplete!  However during that time our friend Marilyn got married and a group of us made an album which we gave as a surprise present to Marilyn and Murray – and I had been in charge of organising that.  I think that was a good challenge to do because I set myself higher standards – doing it for someone else, and I think I surprised myself at how well it turned out!  (I even did a smaller version for myself using the same photos and similar layouts!)

After we moved to Wingham I was excited to find a scrap-booking shop in Wingham  and another couple of shops in Taree—as well as Spotlight.   Soon afterwards on one of my visits to Sydney I saw Beth’s scrap-booking album and found out she was a demonstrator for Stampin’ Up: I joined up in June 2009 and never regretted it—I found their combination of co-ordinating colours, stamps and punches made it so easy to make layouts that ‘worked’.  I did a few courses at Scrapsidaisy, but I also started having ‘classes’ in my craft room, teaching the basics.   I signed up to Big Picture Classes and found their courses very satisfying, and a great encouragement to develop my own style.

I have found this a very satisfying craft – combining design, journalling/story-telling, texture, colour, and photography – and family history, too.  It worked very well with my eye problems, too, since it doesn’t need you to be constantly focussing at the same object or focal length, so my eyes don’t get too tired.  But I have to confess that I have accumulated quite a lot of supplies…. I console myself that my daughters at least, will benefit eventually!!

Hobbies: When I was Younger

Hobby:  an activity done regularly in one's leisure time for pleasure

As a teenager

Reading – a wide variety of fiction books whenever I had a spare moment: borrowed books from the library at least every week and often every other day.

Knitting – I can’t remember what else I made, but I made a zipped Norwegian style cardigan with the yoke knitted on one long needle, in about three different blues and white.

Sewing – I started making my own clothes when we had to make a skirt and a blouse in Year 8 at High School.  Made lots of gathered skirts and also trousers and an anorak which I wore when we went skiing in Norway.   While I was at university I didn’t have a sewing machine with me but I still made a few dresses, hand-sewing them!

In my twenties

Sewing – in 1965 I made my wedding dress which also had a lace bolero.

 I can’t remember making any dresses when I was in Canberra, but I used to buy 2 cotton knitted tops and convert one to a skirt to give a sort of suit!  I also made a number of trousers and skirts.  In PNG I made quite a lot of A-line shifts which were great to wear in that climate.

In my thirties

Gardening – by the time we moved to Burwood in 1977 I was very interested in planting Australian native plants to encourage more birds into our garden.  We had a vegetable garden in Chadstone, and I planted a few bushes in the front garden there, but in Burwood I put in quite a selection of bushes in the front lawn area – mostly natives – to create a shrubbery which would also give some privacy for the front of the house.

Sewing – I can remember setting up my sewing machine in the air-conditioned lounge room at Burwood so I could make some more maternity tops when I was pregnant with Joe..… and in North Turramurra I had to make a second lot of tops with extra ‘give’ towards the end of my pregnancy  with Deb!

In my forties

Sewing – I did a Knitwit course which I thoroughly enjoyed – it was great to learn how quick and easy it was to use knitted material.  I made lots of trousers, shorts, skirts and tops for myself, and also the children – and for friends as well!

I think it was during this decade that I started patchwork and quilting – by doing the first of a number of courses at the Quilting Bee in Gordon. 

Gardening and garden design – I was very keen on gardening when we were living in North Turramurra and Wahroonga.  I spent hours going through gardening books and magazines looking for suitable plants for our climate and conditions, and I often visited the Australian Native Nursery out at Terrey Hills with lists looking for the plants I had chosen.  I did a course in garden design with Helen Adams at a garden in Lane Cove and redeveloped the back garden at Wahroonga after the micro-climate changed when all the gum trees came down in the storm of 1991.