magnolia

i'm reading 'the elegance of the hedgehog' by muriel barbery at the moment, here is just one quote from the book i related to & am still thinking about.
'those who feel inspired, as i do, by the greatness of small things will pursue them to the very heart of the essential where, cloaked in everyday attire, this greatness will emerge from within a certain ordering of ordinary things and from the certainty that all is as it should be, the conviction that it is fine this way'.
i made this little bundle of spring flowers for a friend of my grandmother's, she is 90 years old so i think & hope it is appropriate for someone of her age.
we have been waiting & anticipating the blossoming of the magnolia flowers, i am sure this is the first in our neighbourhood to show it's face.

sweet winter sweet

o bliss is the scent of winter sweet. this massive keruru was feasting itself on the kowhai tree on our neighbour's property today. i was wondering what it was devouring so hungrily at this time of year, berries or new growth perhaps?

wintery ole days

celeste, eliza & i stayed out at ruby bay again this weekend as tom & louis went to wellington to visit g & geoffery, tom's mum & her husband. we ate lots of yummy food & generally mooched around, although i did manage to put in a bit of effort at one point & went for a walk along pomona road, it is very picturesque with green valleys & vineyards dotting the landscape. on my way i managed to make a little bouquet from what i found growing on the roadside, the banana passionfruit flowers are from a vine which is classified as a noxious weed needless to say i didn't feeling too guilty tugging away at the vines to pick the flowers.

native greens

we had a going away party for the head teacher of te pouahi last night, she is a truly inspirational woman & much respected so she will be greatly missed. i made a few bits & bobs for the venue, in this arrangement the box is covered with bark that was laying around our woodpile & filled with harakeke & manuka. some of the girls made some flax flowers & we shoved them into pots of beech, taken from the mountain of winter trimmings piled up in our garden. i also made these lemon tartlets to take for shared kai, they were supposed to be mini lemon meringue pies but we won't go into that - suffice to say i am a lucky girl to have a granny in town.
i've corrected the spelling mistake & reprinted my business cards, originally i wanted to do them on recycled brown card but there wasn't any in the whole town of nelsonnyjim, in the end i printed them on watercolour paper so each card can be hand painted individually. wallah

frazzled

i have just discovered a spelling mistake on my business card which i have spent every spare moment(& of those there are very few!) designing this week, most unfortunate, infact unbelievable grrrrr. o well it's back to the printers for me asap. i made this vase today with my newly acquired glue gun & some wooden lacquer i found in the nelson intermediate rubbish pile, we were there to take eliza to her after school gym class. the lacquer is stuck onto a cardboard box with a recycled glass jar inside. 10 points to myself for resourcefulness if i do say so myself. the flowers are for a friend of my ma's.

introducing

celeste.
this blog is not going to be about children but i do want to include them occasionally, as of course they are my life. i realised yesterday one of the problems with modern parenting is the lack of independence kids have, which conversely means they are too dependent on their caregiver. so after school yesterday i sent my 2 oldest children eliza & louis to the dairy without me for a dollar mixture each, just like the good old days. it meant they had to cross 4 roads but when i went out to meet them as they wandered back down our street they were glowing with confidence & pleasure as they gobbled their loot & i felt a whole lot less stressed.
this is celeste enjoying her 50c mixture.

a day of gray

until i found these roses.
aarrrgh i'm just longing to get my business up & running...

long weekend

a long heavily raining weekend here in new zealand. we went to st arnaud, which is an hours drive away from nelson - it is such an unspoilt place, the native bush reaches right down to the lake edge & the lake is surrounded by mountains. amazingly not many people seem to know about it or go there, possibly they are put off by the abundance of pesky sandflies in summer?