I started to ride my bike again (and got a flat tyre that I still need to repair, poop!) - and rode every day to Summer school. We bought a baby trailer and have been taking Theo for lots of rides - he likes to watch the scenery. I have so missed riding. I feel more me when I ride a bike.


We moved into our lovely new house (and we're still unpacking) and we're so happy. It's dreamy.


I found this very cute, very tiny letter while I was packing up to move house. I know it came out of a letter I received, if it was from you, thank you!


I unearthed some old photos while I was packing and this one brought back some memories from when I was school president (and blonde! And really short?).


I also found this old photo from when I was about Theo's age with my Mum. I think Theo and I look so alike.


I got Theo's room almost totally unpacked and arranged. I'll take some proper photos once I've hung up all the pictures.



Despite the fact that we already have a couch and a sofa bed, I found this amazing purple couch and two armchairs and had to have them. I feel like it's like they're out of a cartoon.


This little boy had a month full of developments. He's now crawling, can pull himself up from crawling to sitting and can pull himself up to standing in his cot and eats foods by himself. He tried kiwi fruit today and dried apples and dried bananas are BIG favourites.


I made a zine!


Our next door neighbours left this enormous zucchini on our doorstep and I thought I'd put it next to Theo for size.


The cats have really enjoyed our new house so far. We are able to let them all out and they don't wander very far and seem to really enjoy lazing around the garden. Sadly, they are also enjoying catching birds (non-natives, but still sad) - in this photo they are congregating around a tiny dead bird they'd caught - I thought they were just hanging out!


Such a cheerful boy.


...and possibly possessed?


Theo had his first go on a swing and loved it! It's a shame the same can't be said for the beach.


I made my own pizza dough for the first time and it was very edible. Our new kitchen is a lot smaller than our old one, but has lovely stainless steel appliances and good storage and I'm really enjoying cooking in it - my favourite things to cook at the moment are spiced pumpkin cake and pesto polenta with roast vegetables.

Reading | Call The Midwife but I've been craving some good fiction lately.
Watching | Orphan Black is our latest obsession. It's a Canadian show about a girl who sees a girl who looks exactly like her jump in front of a train. I also got really obsessed with a 3-part German miniseries called Generation War - it's not often that you see a WWII drama from the German perspective. I also watched A LOT of tennis - I love watching the Australian Open each year, it feels like it wouldn't be Summer without it. We also started watching a British show called In The Flesh about zombies (usually not my cup of tea) that get rehabilitated and try to assimilate back into society.
Making | Lots of woodcut prints and a zine.
Consuming | Pumpkin cakes, polenta with roast veggies, salads and icy poles.
Listening to | The Hottest 100 on Australia Day (pretty boring), Jurassic 5 & The National.
Looking forward to | My mum visiting tomorrow for a week! I'm hoping we'll be able to take her to Lilydale Falls and go on some pretty walks at Cradle Mountain.
In February | I go back to university to finish my degree!

I'm not typically a big fan of Summer. That is part of why we moved to Tasmania - because we couldn't stand another mid-40 degree Summer in New South Wales. This Summer has included a handful of mid-30 degree days which are very atypical for Tasmania and were pretty uncomfortable especially for my little Winter baby who sleeps best when it is chilly. Complaints aside, there are lots of things to like about Summer here - the longer days (I'll still never get used to the sun setting at 9.30pm!), delicious salads and cold beverages, beach-going weather and those irresistible perfectly warm days when staying inside would be a crime. Here is a list of some things I'd like to do before this season ends.




I actually got to tick one of the items off this list today - we took Theo to the beach for the first time. We went to Devonport Bluff which is a really lovely family place to swim and has a great burger place on the shore. Unfortunately, Theo hated the water and was terrified of the waves, though did enjoy eating a bit of sand. The water was probably a bit cold for him and the sound of the waves was pretty intense - we'll have to take him to the aquatic centre instead I think. Because days warm enough for beach-going are so few and far between here, we'll probably have to wait until next year to try the beach again with him. I am a huge fan of the beach (there is a photo of me, just a little bit older than Theo is now, in a bonnet, on my hands and knees in the water at the beach with a massive grin on my face - apparently I would crawl into the waves, get knocked over, laugh and then get back up and do it again), so I'll be so sad if Theo hates it forever!


+ Note sand on face. Delicious!

I thought I'd share some photos from the Tasmanian Creative Arts Summer School exhibition that I participated in. There was such a great variety of art exhibited. I'm kind of thinking of sticking around at uni for just one more Summer school, they're so fun.





Here is my work set up. I collected a couple of hundred shopping lists while working at my old supermarket job and was happy to finally have a use for them. They took me more than an hour to put up, but C thankfully helped me to take them down. I had a little plinth where I sat my zines and I sold most of them and gave a couple away. I loved the work to the left of mine, a guy from my class called Maximilian - it's hard to believe that they're relief prints with such a huge scale.

Below is some of my classmates' work.




Here are some photos from around the exhibition.








These cute little brooches and earrings were made by my friend Holly.

I'm looking forward to semester starting and getting immersed in creative materials again.

Over the past two weeks I've been doing a Summer school unit at my art school. I've been really looking forward to going back to uni to finish my degree - next semester I'll be going three days a week for three hours. Summer school units are great because you can do one whole university unit in two weeks, intensively. Two Summers ago I took a book making unit which I loved (posted about here and here). This Summer I took a subject called 'The New Woodcut'. Our teacher, printmaking artist David Marsden, was a lot of fun and I got a lot out of the unit. I had taken one of his printmaking units in 2012 and this subject was similar but more focused. I didn't really come up with a theme for my work until the end of the first week but had fun playing around in the meantime. Our student contribution for the subject was $100* which I thought was a bit steep at first, but it covered access to the laser cutter in the architecture building which would usually cost at least $100 per hour to use (one of my boards took 76 minutes to cut alone!).




I decided I wanted to make a zine and for it to have a supermarket theme, based around the hundreds of shopping lists I had collected while working at my old job. I wrote 2 dozen haikus based on my experiences working there (I used to write down notes when interesting things happened). I illustrated some of the shopping lists in Photoshop and then printed them out and transferred the images to my MDF blocks and carved them by hand. I found that my carving got a lot better as the class went on - initially I would try to make really big, deep cuts, which ended up being quite messy and imprecise and would slip. I watched a video of American artist Thomas Shahan's process and noticed his really lovely, light, shallow cuts and the way that he holds his tools with two hands - his left low down on the tool to direct it and the right hand high on the tool pushing up and down.





I used the laser to cut a couple of images and the text for the zine - however because they were so intensely detailed, it was very difficult to ink them without ink getting on parts of the boards I didn't want inked. The interference from the ink ended up being something I kind of liked in the end - giving it a smudgey, DIY, ziney style.

I was so happy to make another zine - it has been 4 years since I last made one! I made this one pretty quickly and I'm pretty happy with it but I'm going to keep trying to develop it a bit more before I put them online to sell. If you'd like to buy a copy (should only be a couple of bucks), leave me your email address in a comment and when they're finished I'll let you know :)


+ I used a sewing machine in the textiles studio to sew some colourful binding.


+ Some extra prints that didn't end up in the zine.




+ My work set up for marking. Right at the end I decided to try making a tea towel, which I really liked the idea of, but I think I'd probably screen print if I made some more in the future.


+ These two photos were taken by Linda Riseley.

At the end of the subject we had our work marked and today we had our exhibition with all of the other Summer school units. My uni has some pretty awesome summer school units like furniture making, jewellery, metalwork, painting, textiles, drawing and theatre - which anyone can take (uni students have the fees deferred, but anyone can sign up and pay the course fees). I'll do another post with some pictures of the exhibition.

*NB. For those wondering, the $100 is a consumables fee for materials we use during the course. The actual course fees are something like $500 - $800, but in Australia, most people defer their university education fees and eventually pay them off incrementally (something like 4% of your earnings to begin with) once you start earning over $51,000 dollars a year (which for most people I know, including my mum, they still haven't had to start paying theirs off yet, or pay a very small amount each year with their tax). And of course, if you pass away, your debt is cancelled and doesn't get passed on to anyone. This system means that finances should never be a deterrent for anyone seeking out an education in Australia. I know that without this system, it's very likely I might not have been able to go to university.