stitchings

I've been stitching away when ever I can find the time on a few brooches for the Mapua Makers Market. I have a large pile of doilies and other linen squirreled away, and the time had come to so something with some of the scruffier pieces. So have started on stitching some pieces into wee brooches. I forgot I had a felted mustard jumper in the cupboard, it goes well with the flowers.

I'm also still making my "End of the Line" brooches from the London Underground tea towel.  These are actually quite dainty, the photos are not to scale!

 

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I settled on my crafty biz name of Mahana Redlegs - upcycling as fast as I can, and have started a Facebook page devoted to all things crafty. If you pop over and like my Facebook page I'll enter you in the giveaway on it.

Also I'm thinking about how I'm going to set up my table etc for the market. The other day I found some small cards in the op shop for 50 cents. They are an Endless Landscape or Mryiorama puzzle with "exactly" 1,686,553,615,927,922,354,187,720 possible combinations from the 24 cards! Instead of working this out I punched a hole in each and attached some twine to make tags. Cute eh! I've also being making somethings with old tennis racquets which I''ll share another day (or you could just look at my Facebook page if you can't stand the suspense).

** please ignore the maligned photos, I give up on Blogger some days!

lazy Sunday afternoon

Here's my Mother's Day posy handpicked and arranged by L. It's been a bit of a lazy Sunday, we did a spot of pruning with my new telescopic loppers, and that's been about as productive as it got. Afternoon tea was at a local cafe, but as I forgot my camera and phone there are no pics of muffins or coffee or the sea, you will just have to imagine them! It's nice to be much more relaxed than this time last year, when we were in the throes of open homes and stress.

I don't seem to have been taking many photos of anything other than sunrises lately.  Just about every morning there's one that looks different so I'm often on the lawn in my pajamas! I do zoom in quite a bit, as we are some distance from the sea.

On May the 6th we had a "super" moon, which according to the experts was 14 per cent bigger and 30 per cent brighter than other full moons of 2012. I was lucky enough to be outside as it rose over the hills, and quickly grabbed my camera. It certainly looked large and when rising was an amazing orange colour.

We live very close to a road, there is just a lawn and a low hedge between us and the road. Thankfully its a country road so there is not much traffic, in the weekends there seem to be more cyclists than cars. Across the road the hillside drops away, which gives us the feeling of being perched on top of the hill. Yesterday the light was skimming over the grass and paddocks so I clicked there as well.

 

We were in fact watching the fog over Nelson, and hoping it was going to move so the hubby could fly home! He did get home after about an hours delay, which has to be the best Mother's Day present I could ask for.

upcycling as fast as I can

In readiness for the Mapua Makers Market (which I am helping organise) I need to make some things (funny that!) and thought I needed to give myself a crafty biz name. I do have a felt shop, but have never sold anything on it, or actually tried very hard, but the name is naff, and I no longer want to use it. So, I had to come up with another name. I already have the email address for mahana red which I like, but can't use as it's the name of an apple variety, and I'm not wanting to get into any copyright issues. Unlike poor Kylie of 3 Sheets fame, who has had to change her name due to some woman in the states threatening to sue her. I digress, back to my name - I tried mahana reddish out, but nah, thought about mahana redhead, but I'm such a faded redhead now I'd feel a fraud. So I think mahana redlegs is the one, mainly because I like the byline/motto that goes with it "upcycling as fast as a I can". Gosh, I think I'd better slap a copyright on that, cos I don't want anyone pinching it!

So what am I going to have on my table at MMM? Good question, as this is my first "craft" market I'm a little bit green to say the least, and all of a sudden 1.8 metres of table seems like a lot! So I have a lot of cards that I've sold before, and my woolly jumper birds, the chooks I've shown here , plus tuis, owls and fantasy birds (which I must take some good photos of!). Then there are my "end of the line" brooches made from a London Underground tea towel, which I've also shared here.

That's the woolly side of my making, the other half is more wooden. I collect alot of driftwood. Not any old driftwood, but wood that was used on land to make things before it ended up in the sea. My most precious bits are ones which have paint on them, none of which I've made anything out of yet! One day ..... I have however (to appease the hubby who is horrified about the growing piles of wood in the shed) started to use some of my wood. The first things I made were embroidered wooden hearts which can be wall hung or propped as shown above. Being an artist I also want to paint on wood, like I've done before and thought I'd blogged about, but alas not - instead there is a photo on my facebook page here, in case you are interested!

So, finally after lot of umming and ahhing some wood was chosen, a piece of steel was found, holes were drilled, gesso was applied, paint was painted and voila! A painted, wooden "thing" - not sure that I can call it a painting or a sculpture..... I can tell you it represents the land and sea, summer and winter, female and male - all very yinny and yanggy. As to whether it has any appeal to the discerning public, only time will tell.

On the home front, we are all excited to have the hubby home tomorrow morning after another two week stint in India. Since he has been gone autumn has really arrived, and it's actually been raining. He's missed lots of gorgeous sunrises like this one!

autumnal bunting

Wow! we have had such a great response to the Mapua Makers Market - the applications for tables are flowing in. Its amazing what can happen after putting the word out on facebook. So I've been busy writing emails and dropping our wee postcards all over town. I have a feeling it's going to be a cracker of a wee craft market!

I've been making bunting to decorate the hall with. It was so much fun plus I didn't have to buy anything, somehow I already "owned" a heap of 1970s table mats and napkins. Not sure where they all came from - probably from the free bin or when there was a fill-a-bag deal on at the op shops! See I knew I'd need them - eventually. So I've made two long strings of the larger flags, and now using the smaller pieces (not wanting to waste anything) and some other pieces to make some with smaller flags.

I like how the bunting matches the autumn colour in the garden.

Speaking of autumn, things are starting to get cooler - there was a fine dusting of snow of the Western Ranges the other morning, we are having a fire every night now and I think the first frost must be close. The days, are still glorious.

My boy grabbed the camera yesterday morning and took this photo of the sunrise making the walls glow.

I think he might have his mum's artistic eye! That blob thing is a Gum Emperor Moth cocoon. They take about 9 months to hatch, one day in spring we will hear a strange chewing noise and out the moth will pop. Apparently the longest one "recorded" as staying in its cocoon is 10 years! As a former entomology student (yes it was 100 years ago) I find this impossible to believe. As I tell my kids you can't believe everything you read on Wikipedia.