Barbie’s wardrobe has increased dramatically (here she is in her ballgown – tutorial here, and there are a few more Barbie clothes tutorials on that site too).

The house we are renting sold just before Christmas (after many, many people coming through…I can vent about that now LOL). Fortunately, we can stay put.

We’ve played hard – I’m not sure if Finn came off 2nd best…

or the wall…

The ribbon wands were a hit with our kids and their cousins (you can find a great tutorial here). There were also numerous pairs of boxer shorts for all the boys.

We’ve also celebrated a birthday.

Currently it is pouring down here, and I’m wondering if my darling husband will make it home as some of the roads are flooded. It’s a bit of Dejavu – just a couple of weeks earlier a year ago, we were trying to move from the Sunshine Coast to the Fraser Coast and couldn’t get through due to the Bruce Highway being cut at Gympie and the Mary River flooding Maryborough.

The kids are going crazy after all the rain, but there are some that are really enjoying the wet weather…

I do enjoy his or her croaking.

And s/he’s quite amusing to watch. Our little friend has been sitting outside our bedroom window – with another friend out the front of the lounge room window.

And as they say, it’s lovely weather for ducks (I’ve blogged about the ducks before). They were on the other side of the road and the video wasn’t so good (and I wasn’t going out in the driving rain to take one).

I hope it’s been a great year for my readers so far, and I look forward to a new and hopefully more interesting and consistent year with my blogging this year.

I confess to having mixed feelings for Barbie as a healthy role model for girls, but Ruby’s been given them a few times and she loves them. I followed these tutorials and patterns. I think I’m going to try drafting a couple of my own things as well.

I’m sure I’m not the only one to feel conflicted about their daughter and Barbie…?

I’m also making some singlet tops (that actually cover me) for the gym. My old ones are starting to look a little worse for wear.

I’m using the Ottobre Creative Workshop ladies t shirt pattern – this has been used time and time again for different things since I’ve bought it. I’m just using up Cotton/lycra knits from the stash – I just love being able to go and grab stuff from the stash to sew something. There’s not much on offer in the way of knits either here in Hervey Bay, so it’s lucky I have a good stash (that’s my excuse for my healthy collection of fabrics anyhow).

The gingerbread mixture is in the fridge getting firm to be rolled out. This is a tradition that has been going on for at least 5, possibly more years. We make these little trees all together and give them to teachers and our classmates at school and kindy. I’ve been remaniscing about last Christmas while measuring and pouring…we didn’t even know we’d be leaving our dear friends and family in the Sunshine Coast when we were doing our preparations last year.

I’m sewing a music bag for Gannon’s motorbike loving teacher we’ve come to love in the year we’ve gotten to know him. And I’m about to scrounge about the stash to find some fabric for a lavender eye pillow for Ruby’s teacher’s aide.

Oh, to be more organised!

More creative spaces here.

Do you know the sound I’m talking about? The film Latana features this sound regularly in the background. It actually made me quite homesick when I saw it again on video when I’d moved interstate and heard the sound.

If you haven’t seen the film, you should seek it out – it’s an amazing Aussie film.

It’s a sound that you don’t generally  here up on the Fraser Coast where I’ve lived for most of the last year – nor for the last 9 years before that since moving to the Sunshine Coast in Queensland. I guess the bush and the insects are mostly different (especially as we’ve lived right on the coast the last 10 years – most of the trees nearby are mangroves, not gums). I grew up in a little country town 3 hours south of Sydney, amongst Eucalypts and banskias. Flies were the main pest. Here we deal with wretched biting little midgies and sometimes mozzies. Maybe the summer sounds were different down South if you lived on the coast.

The sounds of summer here…I’m not sure I can tell you yet. I know when we first moved here (just after the big QLD floods), the green frogs were deafening. The cane toads slowly overtook the frogs after the rain stopped – I wonder if the same happened in the Sunshine Coast? The toads hum was a regular sound of summer when we lived in Caloundra and Buderim.

What are the sounds of summer where you live?

****I don’t know what happened to my original post!

It’s a stinker of a day here – humid, with the threat of rain not faraway (a welcome threat, mind you). I’ve got a birthday present to make for a little girl who turned  1 recently – the daughter of one of my oldest and dearest friends. I’m making this light little top in voile, with a matching pair of bloomers. Both patterns from Ottobre mag.

And I was excited the other day when rummaging through my fabric stash, to find these (and other) little beauties. They’re from Heather Ross’s 1st Far Far Away collection. I bought some and loved it so much I ordered a heap more – which arrived when the weather turned cooler. So it sat in a box untouched (Shame!) for probably a couple of years. I washed it up yesterday and revelled in it’s beautiful muted colourings flapping in the breeze.

I’m also searching for some rocker or biker fabric for a teacher’s present…

Go here for more creative spaces.

(doing that again tommorrow for the last time…the big days are this weekend). Hopefully the sewing’s all done for that too!

I’ve also added a couple of extra rehersals for the last couple of weeks for violin practise for Gannon. Fortunately, they were in the morning before school so we haven’t had any clashes. The Christmas carol concert was over tonight for our little violinist, though I’m sure I’ll here many more carols from my carol loving children.

Last weekend was the Parish Christmas Fair.  Hoho. The kids had a lot of fun. Gannon has decided he wants to be baptised, so we’ve spent a fair bit of time at church lately. He’s got a number of meetings after mass.

I did managed to get  a little sewing done for me.

This little dress was super duper easy – start to finish in about an hour including cutting out. It’s Patty Young’s (Modkid) Penelope pattern. It’s 3 pieces – front, back and neckline. The sleeves are not seperate, so it’s really just joining 3 pieces of fabric. I had wondered how it would look on, but I got a compliment on it when I wore it out this morning and my husband thinks it’s ok too (he’s not backward when it comes to opinions on my clothing). I was just getting sick of wearing the same things all the time and had to make something different. It cost me under $5 to make (flower fabric bought in Spotlight ages ago on sale – $2/m).

Hopefully I’ll have some interesting Christmas blogging happening soon!

Ruby’s ballet school has it’s end of year concert in just over a week, and there are chiffon scarfs to be overlocked, straps to be taken up…every other day the list gets added to!

I’m also planning a couple of cute things with this fabric. Co-incidentally, it’s a kinda chiffon as well.

And I’ve spent a frustratingly huge amount of  “free time” (otherwise generally known as sewing time) this week trying to fix my computer that got a naster “blaster worm” virus. Ugh, like I don’t have better things to do with my time!

For more creative spaces, visit here.

This fabric jumped out at me when I was trying to decide which one to start with to make some nappy covers. Seems the multinationals are following us trend setting modern cloth nappy users – have you seen the latest ad?

Plenty of cutting out for me today! And I’m staring to think about my Christmas sewing list.

Visit here for more creative spaces.

I’m making a little dress for a little Miss. I’m hoping it’ll be well recieved – though I hear she’s going through a bit of an identity (and thus a favourite colour) crisis.  I’ve never finished hems this way, so it’ll be interesting to see how well it works.

I’m also working on these to finally put some nappies in my store.

Creative spaces can be found here.

These are the shoes that I wore when taking my kids to school this morning.  Yes, one is black and one is brown. Yes, they are 2 completely different styles of sandal type shoes. Yes, I was very tired and rushing out the door this morning. I only realised my mistake when I was almost at the door of the prep class.

Note to self. When tired and in a rush – make sure you check that everything matches!

Hello there my lovely blog readers. I know I’ve been absent for a while. I was exhausted for the first few weeks after we got back. We had a great time, with lots of adventures. But relaxing generally, it was not! The overnight flight home and the adjustments to time differences (both while away and back home again) also contributed to being worn out. But it was certainly an amazing experience!

After getting back from such a time, the rhythms of daily life seem to somehow not be so interesting and I have really struggled as to where I should start! However, this weekend has been jam packed with parties (which is the reason I am so tired!) and I am starting to get some interesting photographic evidence (see exhibit 1) so I have no excuse not to plunge back in.

We had great fun at a Halloween party last night. I didn’t get any photos – but I do intend to before we dress up tonight to visit the neighbours. I’m not sure if we’ll have much luck in this neighbourhood, but the kids are determined. We have done a little decoration to the house -

a spooky Halloween web in the window,

and Gannon has made some ghosts to put out the front. He’s decided to make skeletons when we get home from school.

I have been doing some sewing…I finally got around to finishing those trainer undies I started before we went away. Maybe I might even get time this afternoon to list them.

And so my friends, I have broken the blog posting drought. Let’s hope I can get back into the groove again!