Cut and Paste! Makes you feel good!

I had a splendid time at Stamp Club yesterday, cutting and pasting! I used an old phrase book (French Idioms) to get mysterious things for all the people on my collages to say. This is an awesome source of unusual phrases - see out old phrase books at the op shop, you'll thank me!















The people are all photocopies from older fashion (and pattern) magazines, some of them German.

The colour all comes from watercolour crayons (the Stampin' Up ones, natch), which are wonderful for laying down colour and blending just as much as you want to.














So I doubt this is leading to anything artistically, but it sure is fun!

The tale of Planty

Jeff gave me an upside down tomato planter for Christmas - we were deciding if it was a novelty, a useful way to grow tomatoes, or a plant torture device. On Boxing Day I bought a little tomato plant and some potting mix, and planted Planty. That's its name, you see.

Planty noticed straight away that he'd been planted upside down, but he didn't complain. By the end of the first day, he'd turned most of his leaves around to face the sun. That splash of red in the photo is a bought tomato in the window. Just to encourage the little guy, you see. He added more leaves, and looked quite content. Then some flowers arrived (and there was much rejoicing) and they were followed by (the botanists amongst you know already) actual tomatoes!

Planty kept growing up and up, and adding new sprays of flowers (about 11 sets of flowers, I have counted - I figure that means around 66 tomatoes).

Today was a special day in Planty's life. He dropped! His top got too heavy to be held up, and he reached the point where, had he been planted in the ground, he would have needed a stake to grow up. But instead he gets to use his height to keep him off the ground. He has about 10 small green tomatoes!

Christmas Cakes

We made some special cakes this Christmas - well, actually, families being busy places, we didn't manage to make the "christmas" cakes until late January. But we were very impressed, and the kids insisted on a blog entry. Catriona and I had enjoyed browsing a recipe magazine, and used the recipe from there. They were nice too!

And here's the original we were copying... that's white chocolate there. Schlurp.

We're off to Brickvention

What's a Brickvention? Just a fantastic Lego exhibition for the public - here's the link. We go every year (it's been on the Australia Day weekend for a few years now). It's wonderful fun, for kids and grownups!

So if you need to know, it's on in Melbourne on 24 January, at 300 Flinders St (12th Floor) - it's easy to find, between Elizabeth St and Queen St.

And today's photos are some of OUR amazing Lego creations - the scene from "Jaws", and the "body building" scene.

The Kids at Jamboree

The kids just came home from the Scout Jamboree in Sydney. We went up to the site on the open day, and have a lovely visit (but gee it was hot!). They looked surprisingly clean and happy. The leaders of the troop (both army men as well as scout leaders) were fond of giving pushups to keep the scouts in line. It was working, they did their chores and joined in all the events.

Eating Well And Cheaply In Sydney

It's easy really. Just find some friends who invite you to stay at their place, then juggle the dates so they coincide with your friends' OWN holiday.

We had the pleasure of "minding" John and Emma's place, along with full "help yourself" rights to the pantry. We didn't overdo it, of course, but one night I DID make bread. And then set the table with marinated feta, a few relishes, a real tomato, and basil from the garden. It looked pretty awesome.

Sadly the bread was pretty much a dud. Didn't rise overnight like it should have - we put it down to dud yeast, and added more very late on in the process. But the other sachets of yeast from the same box seemed fine, so who can tell?

So the NEXT day, I made more bread (with good yeast this time) and what do you think I found to put on it? EGGS, it is! Poached eggs, freshly startled out of John and Emma's own chickens. We were under orders to collect and use the eggs. Jeff found out that if a chook is sitting on the eggs, you have to hose it down to discourage it. So he was on chicken-hosing duty, while I was the main collector. I tried to poach the eggs really nicely (the Short Black Cafe in Camberwell is the best egg-poaching venue I've ever found, so I wanted them to look like that). Not a huge success, but still lovely.

We're back from Sydney!

And when you are on holiday, things that look too expensive normally seem to come out of a different budget ... like this morning tea Jeff and I had at the Guylian cafe in The Rocks.

Sydney was overrun by scouts every day we went in - but no embarrassing meetings with our OWN scouts.




























We went to the Reserve Bank (for a laugh) and saw the Currency Note Museum. I recommend it! You can see the whole 4 minute ad that went to air in 1966, introducing decimal currency. All to the tune of Click Go The Shears, it was a very Aussie, possibly copyright violating, introduction to a whole new way of working with money. More scouts in there with us, but they were all leaders. Somehow they had arranged the Sydney outing so that all the leaders arrived with the kids, set a meeting place, gave the kids checkpoints to visit - and then nicked off and did what they wanted all day. Well, the scout leaders were putting in considerable extra hours at the Jamboree, so I'd say they deserved it.