floating world

some podcast links for textile nerds

• This week's edition of By Design had a great piece at the end on the place of kimono in modern Japan. You can listen here.
• India Flint was interviewed on Artworks about her natural dyeing practice. I have her book Eco Colour (thanks, Kath!) and it is so beautiful and inspiring. Well worth a listen (here).
• And on Life Matters this morning there was feature on guerilla knitting and an interview with Magda Sayeg of Knitta Please, who is in Australia as part of the Soft Sculpture exhibition at the NGA. The idea of knit graffitti is so appealing. She's in Sydney next week, so hopefully there will be some springing up around here.
• Another textile exhibition that just opened is of Silk Ikats at the AGNSW, and it looks amazing - such incredible colours and patterns, especially as they are yarn dyed rather than printed. I am going to brave a trip to the gallery with Ali (he's usually good, but unpredictable) to see them. There was a feature on this exhibition on Artworks, too (here).

I guess I have just outed myself as an AM radio listener. I think these podcasts are only up for a couple of weeks after the program airs, so check them out soon if you're interested.

white linen dress

It's the dead of winter here. Cold and wet and grey. But a lot of my favourite sewing blogs are from the other hemisphere and so I keep reading about beach trips and ice cream and cute summer dresses. There were a couple of white sundresses that I particularly liked - this one and and this one. And then I went to the Remnant Warehouse sale, after a tip-off from Bianca, and found some beautiful soft white linen, which was too hard to resist. So, it is all the internet's fault that I am making deeply unseasonal clothing instead of practical winter wear.

The pattern is New Look 6775, again, but instead of gathering the front I made an inverted pleat. And altered the front yoke piece to make two overlapping front pieces with a button. The pockets on the front are from the pattern, but it's the first time I've ever made something with pockets, and they make me very happy. I think that, like the first version of this dress I made, this will be perfect for pottering around with Ali when the weather warms up. Luckily Sydney winters are short, so when the sun comes out I will be all ready.

spangly dress

It's hard to sew practical things. There's a MOUNTAIN of mending in the study that's been waiting forever, and a couple of pairs of jeans that need hemming and I should really make Ali some corduroy pants. So what have I been making? Dresses. This is the first one, I finished it at the craft day.

Not that I really need a metallic shift dress.

But it is kind of cute.

(The pattern is New Look 6775 (same as this one) and the fabric is a fabulous silk metal blend I bought at Tessuti at the start of the year. It looks gold in some light and silver in others.)

this slice is nice

This is a slice my grandmother used to make. I regularly came home from school to find a batch in the kitchen, in a recycled ice cream container. Nanna did everything in a hurry, so her slices were usually hacked into slightly wonky parallelograms rather than perfect squares, but they always tasted fantastic. I hadn't eaten this for years and had never made it before, but it suddenly popped into my head last week so I dug the recipe out.

It the complete antithesis of low-fat cooking, which I hadn't quite realised until I made it myself. But it is delicious and easy to make, and harks back to the good old days before we learned about cholesterol and had to stop eating butter and condensed milk with gay abandon. Anyway, consider yourself (and your arteries) warned.

Nanna's Lemon Slice

1 packet Morning Coffee biscuits, broken into crumbs
1 tin sweetened condensed milk
1.5 cups dessicated coconut
200g butter

Lemon juice
Icing sugar

Melt the butter in a saucepan. Add the condensed milk and mix together. Remove from heat and stir in the coconut and crushed biscuits. Spoon the mixture into a brownie tin lined with baking paper, press it down with a spoon and refrigerate to set. (It should be about 2cm thick, but slightly more or less is no problem)

While slice is cooling, mix about 1 cup of icing sugar with enough lemon juice to make a thick paste. Spread it over the top of the slice, and return to the fridge.

Enjoy!

a long time coming

One of the great things about this website is that I can keep track of what I've been doing and working on for the past few years. The downside, of course, is that I can see exactly how long things have been hanging around. The poster on the left is a hiragana chart I bought at Design Festa in, um, November 2004. The Trellick Tower picture on the right is a tea towel I've had since November 2006.

The thing that finally motivated me to frame them was realising last week that it was 2 years since we moved into our house. It has flown by. And so many things that I thought would be fixed or changed within weeks of moving in (purple wall, I'm looking at you) are still there. Anyway, framing and hanging prints seemed like the quickest and easiest thing to tackle from the giant to-do list, so here they are. I bought standard frames, and then had mounts cut to fit - much cheaper than custom framing.

Before Mark & I moved into this house we always rented, and I would quickly personalise our space with temporary things - mobiles, fairy lights, cushion covers - as soon as we moved in. Back then I really looked forward having our own place, so I could paint the walls and install permanent things. But, now we do, making changes seems kind of daunting. Picking wall colours and where to hang the pictures is a big responsibility - it was much easier to use the hooks that were there and fit in with existing colour schemes. And, to be honest, neither of us is terribly handy so it's easier on the weekend to play with Ali and catch up on sleep, rather than embarking on a DIY adventure. But then whenever I do get round to doing something, like making curtains or hanging pictures, I realise that it isn't really that hard at all, and these small changes make the place feel so much more like home.

zines zines zines

I have an ever expanding pile of little zines and booklets on the shelf in my study. There's something about them I find hard to resist - they're small and handcrafted and idiosyncratic. Some of these are from Sticky, some are from a swap Nichola organised last year, and some are from the MCA zine fair a few weeks ago.

The ones that open in a non-standard way are especially pleasing.

(this one is on Alt Printing from Miss Fruitfly, via the swap)

(My brother gave me this one - it's a limited edition on Myna birds, with beautiful delicate pencil sketches. Sadly the artist's name is indecipherable... it looks like Bridget)

This is Museum of Curiosities by Butterfly Rocket and and it's sooo beautiful and detailed - lots of stuck in photos and little envelopes and the like - delightful.

There are zines on every conceivable topic. This is a page of Laundromatic from Shelbyville - it has a lovely mix of illustration, photos and text, and a cool fabric-bound spine. And it's about laundromats.

Other zine links:
- the ever fabulous Mixtape
- Beci Orpin did a very cute cata-zine for her Tiny Mammoth clothing line (the clothes are super cute too). You can even email for a free copy - see here.
- Dudley Redhead makes awesome, old-school photocopied zines. I got the Found in Japan one at the MCA. See some here. 

I know there's lots more, but that's all I can think of right now. Any recommendations?

some very good things from the weekend

• Dinner at Tabou (probably my favourite restaurant in Sydney) with my husband, for no reason at all
• Two Lovers at the Verona and girlie chat (Isabella - yay! Gwyneth - boo!)
• Cooking comfort food for a dinner party on a cold night
• Lily Allen. Love love love her latest album and am driving the rest of the household bonkers by playing it non stop.
• Craft Day. 18 women armed with sewing machines descend on a community centre to gossip and eat chocolate tart. Oh, and do a bit of knitting and sewing too. Lots of fun. 
• Organic grapes. Yum.

watch out, purple wall

Your days are numbered.

excursion

Today the rain stopped for the first time all week. There were mountains of laundry to be done but the sunshine was too hard to resist, so Ali and I went to the botanical gardens instead.

There were bats to see, ibises (ibi?) to chase, puddles to jump in, an ikebana display, a fabulous and previously undiscovered succulent garden, and the sparkling, sparkling harbour. It made me think that Sydney is a pretty good place to live.

raspberry slice

It has been raining all week. And cold, too. I dragged out my northern-hemisphere coats and scarves, and made soup. And I bought the Family Circle Winter Special, after Corrie wrote about it. It's full of recipes for casseroles, and treacle pudding, and other cosy-making food. Like raspberry coconut slice.

It's meant to be strawberry coconut slice, but we never have strawberry jam in the house. I don't even know why they sell strawberry jam, why would you buy strawberry when you can have raspberry? (Homemade is, of course, a different matter).

Anyway, I am not a regular slice-maker, muffins being my quick bake of choice, but this one is easy and delicious. Of course, it contains so much butter and sugar it will probably kill you, but in grim cold weather Death By Slice is not such a bad option.

The same issue has lots of knitting patterns and craft ideas, including the republished pattern for this rib baby jacket. Well worth a look.