Today C and I went to a house inspection for a rental we're interested in. We've been in our current house for about a year and we love it but we're having some problems with our landlord and figured maybe moving on when our lease is up might be best. The house we looked at was amazing and much bigger and atop a hill with amazing views of the city (makes riding my bike down the hill lots of fun, but going up not so much). An extra bedroom, a dishwasher, sky lights, a bath and lots of extra room would certainly be appreciated and the outside is cute as a button. We're going to apply for it tomorrow. My fingers and toes are crossed but if we don't get it and we have to stay here it certainly won't be the end of the world. After the inspection we rode around the city a little and visited C's parents then played on some gym equipment in the park. It was so much fun and I nearly injured myself a million times.



Pretend my hair isn't in my face in all of these pictures, k?

Please forgive my iPhone photos again - I have hidden my camera battery charger in a really great hiding spot. Who knows when or where I'll find it!

+ Details: Bike: Sydney Vintage Bikes + Dress/Stockings/Belt/Shirt: various clothes stores + Hair bow: Manzanita + Shoes: Vivienne Westwood & Melissa

We held our picnic at the house where I grew up in Stroud, NSW; about an hour North of Newcastle and three hours North of Sydney. The house was bought by my grandfather (Boompa) in the late eighties after he won the lottery and was used as a bit of a holiday house.



In its original state the house would probably have been somewhere near a hundred years old - it used to have an indoor rockgarden, orange and khaki striped 70s carpet, indoor trees that supported the roof, horse hair textured plaster, a rock wall, bats living in the walls and seemed to have been renovated (badly but creatively) by the residents who lived there each decade.




My Boompa passed away the year I was born and my mum bought the property from my Nanna. For about a decade, my mum and her ex partner renovated most of the house and added a bit more practicality. My mum calls it Ramshackle - that's kind of the essence of the place. I'd like to get my mum to list it on Air B'n'b - I think it would be a fun place for people to stay for a weekend.




Theres a story about my little sister asking my mum why she was stuffing sheets in the holes in the walls and my mum replied "to keep the draughts out". Several years later my sister asked my mum why she had lied to her, after she found at that giraffes don't live in Australia.


All of the pom poms you see in these photos were made by my Nanna and her sister. Something like 200 pom poms!



It was a great, colourful place to grow up - we had chickens, a dam, a huge garden, a giant tree house, an array of wildlife and could go exploring in the bush. As I got older it felt so far removed from everything and so isolated, but I can appreciate that more now.



It's hard to remain objective about a place that feels like such a part of you. Sometimes it's been hard to even find it beautiful and not just a whole bunch of hard work, but the longer I spend away from it, the more I miss it. When C and I were planning, it never crossed our minds that we would have our picnic anywhere else.






My sister pegged up a bunch of photos of the house over the sixteen years we lived there, which hung in the hallway for people to look at. So many changes!



On the day we were lucky(?) enough to have one of the resident pythons come out and say hello. I didn't get to see it and thought people we joking when they said they'd seen a snake. These pythons were a very present part of my growing up here - always popping up in unexpected places (curled up on my mum's pillow on her bed catching the afternoon rays of sun, sitting comfortably with a chicken in its belly in the chicken coop or finding two pythons snuggled up under the hot water system in our bathroom!). Have I frightened you? Not to worry, not poisonous and these ones were pretty tame.





I'm so grateful that Justin captured so many beautiful parts of this place.

Hot chocolate at Milkbar before work.


This is Ivy and Spawn. They sit at our front door. Spawn used to be our doorstop before he had a tragic accident resulting in his decapitation. Ivy used to live in an antique store until my friend Michael knocked her off the shelf and she too was decapitated (and we had to pay for her) and she came to live with Spawn, where they guard the front door, both with their detached heads balancing precariously on their necks. C thinks that they look like an odd married couple (like us).


I really like displaying things on clip boards.


C making sandwiches in our kitchen. We bought a dozen kiwi fruits for $1.60 to try making kiwi fruit jam this week.


Some bunting my mum made for our picnic, now on the end of our (new) bed.


I cleaned the bathroom cupboard for the first time since I haphazardly threw everything in there when we moved in. I thought it was a milestone worth photographing.


In drawing class we had to attempt a bunch of Fluxus scores and then write some of our own for our classmates. I picked "create a drawing with your foot" out of the hat. It was a challenge I probably won't attempt again. I am a bit obsessed with Fluxus scores right now though.


C wanted me to get a photo of our cats looking like they were reading Tom Cox's books about cats. They didn't really seem that interested.


Most nights C and I have been going for walks up the hill and admiring the view. Photos of city lights at night never capture how pretty they look.


Miscellanea on our fridge.

Today I'm trying to put off starting an essay that is due tomorrow. I've been having a hard time keeping up with things lately and I think I'm going to be a bad student and hand it in a day or two late. I also have to get up for work at 4am tomorrow morning for stocktake. Despite the early start, I kind of love doing the six-monthly 5am stocktake. Basically every one who works in the whole store meets at 5am and we do a stocktake of the entire store in three hours. I don't really know what about that sounds fun, but I always enjoy it - running around counting stock and writing stock counts on the plastic price strips with a greasy eyeliner pencil! I'm going to weed our garden a bit then start this stupid essay. I think I might have a nap, then stay up all night, as opposed to getting up at 4am. Let's see how that goes, ha.

So, food!

We picked a bunch of recipes we wanted to have at the picnic before we flew up to Newcastle and printed them out. Some of them were too complex to make multiple batches of, so we narrowed it down to the recipes that were the easiest and tastiest. Did I do test runs of all the recipes before we made them for the picnic? ...uh, let's pretend I did! Thankfully they were all delicious! I also made a mega batch of my favourite Vegan Crimson Velveteen Cupcakes. I felt badly that this was the only vegan item we made, but they are super good so I hope that made up for it (sorry to our one vegan guest!).

We did the official getting married part on the Friday with the picnic on the Sunday. We bought all of the ingredients for cooking on Friday night and then drove back to Stroud. I think we may have even started cooking when we got back that night. We saved the receipts from buying the food and our recipe print-outs for our picnic scrapbook. We ate greasy takeaway Indian food on a picnic bench on a dark median strip near the supermarket on the night we got married. I don't know about you, but I find this detail highly amusing. Now, on to the real food!




Some of the pies we made were based on these recipes: Mixed Berry Pie, Mocha Mousse Tart, Sweet Potato Pie (I could eat this one for every meal for the rest of my life!) and some we just winged it including lemon curd pies and apple, pear and berry crumble top pies. Thankfully in line with being good at every single thing ever (physics, gardening, sewing, building, maths, singing, writing, chemistry, etc), my mum is an excellent cook!

My mum bought pretty paper cups and plates (um, $80 worth!) for the little people attending and collected glass bottles for the drinks. I found a big stash of vintage handkerchiefs at the markets in Evandale a few months ago and we made bunting to hang above the food using tiny pegs. The big B&C wooden letters were from Cotton On years ago. All of the crockery belongs to my mum (if you're reading this Mum, I hope you've written it down as my inheritance?).

I almost wish that we had some photos of the food preparation stages but I know that I was a (not very) hot mess and hadn't brushed my hair for a week before the picnic and the place was in a total state. Like I said, having to work so hard for it made the whole day feel like we'd earned it!



A few weeks before the picnic, C and I put together a playlist of songs that meant something to each of us. Thankfully we have very similar taste in music. I designed and printed out a bunch of covers onto card stock and bought a big spool of cds and my sister sat for a whole day burning the discs and taping the cases together. The cds sat on the food table in a vintage flour canister and each guest took a cd to play on the way home. Want a copy for yourself? :)

The 'tables' the food sat on were actually old doors that my mum had in the back shed and that we painted purple and sat on trestles. Now you might think - Cute! What a good idea! How rustic! But it was a total afterthought that we had to resort to after realising that my step father had accidentally cut up the trestle tables we were going to use (to make The Moon, which I'll share details of in another post). We got the doors out of the shed on the afternoon of the day before, painted them super quickly and set them up. When I started putting the plates of food out the next morning the paint was still tacky! Desperation breeds resourcefulness!



My mum has an amazing collection of vintage crockery. I'm talking a hundred pastel coloured vintage plates and gorgeous tea cups, saucers, bowls, serving platters and the like. This was certainly a weight off my shoulders in terms of finding serving ware that I liked.





The cake was made by C's brother's lovely wife Melissa. It was so adorable. I'm sad I only got one slice! It was her first foray into wedding cake baking and I think she did an amazing job. Cat cake toppers with intertwining tails - I think she knows me better than I know myself!




I asked my little sister to make cake pops for the occasion. She had never made them before and she trialled a batch a few days before the picnic and seemed traumatised by the experience. Thankfully she made another batch for us and they were really awesome - I think she's found her new calling. They were the first item on the food table to be completely gobbled up (by the children of course).



I also made a batch of about 200 frittata tarts a few days before the picnic. We make these at home all the time and they are super cheap and easy to make and keep for a couple of days in the fridge. These are vegetable, semi-dried tomato and fetta flavoured and the crust is made with pita bread.

C and I were saying as we went through these photos that when we made all of this food we felt like we never wanted to see another pie in our lives but looking at it now I wish I'd sampled everything!
Next post I'll show you some more photos of the location and decor.

All photos by the amazing Justin Aaron Photography.