I love the little bursts of inspiration and motivation that come with the purchase of new art supplies. This week I bought a new set of pencils and gouache paints and a tiny paintbrush and they're pretty much all I want to play with right now.

Some friends of mine got married at the start of the year and asked me to write out their vows for them and turn them into something fun (obviously the brief for this project was very broad!) and I thought I'd treat myself to some new materials for the occasion. I'm not far from finishing it and then posting it off to them - I might share some pictures of the final product.



It has been really lovely to work with a fun, messy, tactile, sensory medium. Even the smell of the paint and pencils makes me want to make things. Creating exclusively on my computer isn't always very inspiring, albeit less messy.



The pencils I bought are Koh-I-Noor Progressos (a brand I'd never heard of) which are woodless. I tried them out at my local bookshop (it has an upstairs section dedicated to art supplies) and the pigments were so bright and applied really well. I have an old set of Derwents that look really dull on paper and the texture is kind of waxy. I asked the lady at the store if she knew whether or not pencils could fade with age or if the conditions they're kept in affected them and she looked at me like "lady, you have had way too much time to think about your pencils".



The paints are just a cheap Reeves gouache set. Gouaches have such great pigment and coverage and a little goes a long way. I eyed off the fancy $7 a tube gouache paints, but decided that a whole set for just under double that price was a lot more reasonable.


+ A page from the baby journal I've been working on.

Have you acquired any fun new materials of late?

...in March


C and I took a drive (we're trying to visit some of the outlying towns nearby every few weeks) to Devonport to go to the beach and noticed these cute/creepy giant straw people on the side of the road.



Atticus spent a lot of time curled up looking cute and hanging out in the nursery.


I bought some cute baby clothes from Etsy.


I bought a lot of pretty coloured wool for felt making.



I added some pages to the baby journal I've been working on including some mix cds - I hope he doesn't think our music taste is lame!


The slightly cooler weather meant snugglier kitties.


Element Eden sent me a little knitting pack for their Knit Off - now I just need to learn how to knit!

Watching... Twin Peaks, though I've kind of petered out halfway through the second season. I'm just not feeling it, though I loved the first season. I need to see it out though for the closure, although I've heard there's a big cliff hanger ending - definitely going on the 'to do before baby' list. Also; Please Like Me, The Checkout & Shaun Micallef's Mad As Hell (all Australian ABC shows). So looking forward to the return of Game of Thrones after this weekend.
Listening... Elliot Smith, Feist, The Head and the Heart & The Mountain Goats. Really craving some new music - will have to check up on some of the recommendations from this post.
Reading... Some cute (new to me) blogs: Bret & Nancye and Coos & Ahhs.
Making... messes with new paints and pencils, felt balls, collages, cookies.
Looking forward to... all of the pregnancy classes that will occupy my time in April.

In April I'd like to: Relax, learn to knit, be creative, go opshopping and read a book or two (oh, maternity leave I love thee!).

I thought that having been properly dressed to go out twice in a week warranted an additional bump photo for this week. This is the ultimate department store outfit - jumper from Coles, shirt from Target and skirt from Target. I wish I had more vintage clothes that lent themselves to pregnancy wear, but a couple of basic things from department stores have been seeing me through.

My sister called today and gave me the play-by-play about the birth of her baby this week. It didn't sound so bad! After several days of contractions, no sleep and having to have her waters broken, the actual birth sounded okay. Just prior to the phone call, C had a moment where he was like "how are we supposed to take care of this tiny, fragile thing?! How are we meant to know what to do?! OMG! What have we done?!" (mostly in jest) which made me laugh.

Those happy good-times pregnancy hormones have placated my brain and have me convinced that everything will be fine and I'll just feed, soothe and change that little critter and hopefully everything else will work out alright. I wish I could bottle these happy pregnancy hormones and feed them to myself when I need to de-stress sans pregnancy! I do have to admit, there are lots of very irrational, miserable, tantrum-y pregnancy hormones floating around in there too - I don't think I'll bottle those ones (e.g. "why are you crying?" "because I saw a cute ad on TV for a van that delivers gourmet meat to people all around the state and I thought that was so nice and I felt sad for them and I don't know why and I can't get the meat delivered because I'm a vegetarian, maybe I should buy some for the cats, waaaah")

A few months ago I decided I wanted to make a rug out of felt balls for the nursery, after seeing one in a shop window. I researched how to make one and found very few tutorials, as it seemed to be a pretty enormous undertaking that few people had attempted. The rugs in stores all seem to have been either made exclusively by women in small workshops in Nepal, or at the very least, the felt balls were made in Nepal and then fastened together in Australia.



I decided I wanted to make mine from scratch and started rolling felt balls that would eventually be stitched together into a round shape. I knew it would take me a long time, but I figured, what the hey, I'm pregnant and about to finish work, I have loads of time on my hands! Each ball took me about five to ten minutes to roll and I would sit and roll them while I watched a lot of Twin Peaks. It was pretty fun but really gave my hands a work out and all that dish soap made my hands so dry - not to mention - wool roving is not very pleasantly scented! I would lay all of my balls out in front of me and Atticus would sneakily come along and bat them all off the table and onto the floor and then start ripping into them. Cheek! I ended up making one for him to play with.



The wool roving to make the balls was costing me a small fortune (I found some places that sell locally for about $7 for a 100g bag - each bag would make about 20 balls) and when I researched a bit, trying to find competitive prices for the wool roving, I found that buying the wool was more expensive than buying the balls pre-made (from Nepal). Then, when I compared the price of buying the pre-made felt balls with actually buying a rug completely made, well.... buying a rug was less expensive again.



After a few weeks of nightly felt ball rolling, I laid out my balls and saw I had about enough for a 50cm rug (sounds big, looks small). I did some calculations as to how many more I'd need for the 1m rug I was planning and realised I was a bit out of my depth (and would never get enough made before the baby is born!). Wanna see my working out? No? I'll show you anyway!

- Total rug area (100cm in diameter) : π x r2 = π x 50cm2 = 7854cm² (to nearest cm)
- Each individual ball (3cm in diameter) : π x r2 = π x 1.5cm2 = 7cm² (to nearest cm)
- Divide the total rug area by the individual ball area = 1122 balls (approx. not taking into account the small spaces between the balls).

(Take that grade 12 general maths!) 

I realised I could continue to roll my own balls, spending a fortune, buy them pre-made in bulk online (still fairly expensive) or just buy a rug outright.



So, I gave up. This has been a very long post to tell you I didn't make a rug. Haha.

I would really like to buy a rug and I have spotted some 1m rainbow ones on Etsy for around $200 including postage, but I'm hesitant to make such a splurge (even though I know how much time and effort goes into these things and it would totally be worth it!).



At the very least, this was an exercise in the nature of craft - often it is far more expensive and takes a lot more time and effort to make things yourself. Sometimes, those things will be really amazing and worth the time, effort and money and become something that you feel proud of and might one day pass on - and other times the task you've set yourself is too big an undertaking and you should support some crafty Nepalese women instead.

So, what to do with my 150 felt balls? Here are some ideas I toyed with:


1. Felt Craspedia 2. Christmas Wreath 3. Felt Ball Trivet 4. Felted Window Drapes 5. Felt Ball Necklace 6. Felt Ball Mobile

I've been feeling a bit indecisive so I decided to make a garland with them - that way if I somehow come into possession of another 900 balls to make the rug, or think up some other use, I can unthread them and use them again. I just used a large darning needle and some coloured embroidery thread. You can move the balls up and down the thread and there isn't too much movement when they're hung. Here's my garland (using about a third of the balls I made), hung up in a temporary spot:




Please do make me feel better about being a quitter by sharing an anecdote about something you got part way through and never finished! :D

Ps. Every time I see felt balls I think about Bob from Twin Peaks. Creeeepy.