Building a garden

The hubby and I are not gardeners. Ironic really, because he worked as a gardener for five years. For most of the time we've been in this house water restrictions applied, and any garden that was, soon became wasn't. With our long-planned renovations steaming ahead, the garden is starting to get a little more attention.

Our renovations all seem to be of the domino variety - when we do this, then we can do that, after which we can get that done. When the first domino requires massive effort (and/or cost) to get done, everything goes on hold. The front garden was waiting on the deck, the deck was waiting on ... well, I'm not sure what the deck was waiting on. Thanks to our wonderful neighbour (aka the Energiser Bunny on Steroids) the decks (yes, two) are now complete.

The lower deck requires steps - one on the side (right hand side of the photo) and three on the front (left hand side of the photo), but otherwise it's now complete. This means I know where the paths needs to go in the garden, so I know where I can plant stuff.

Yesterday and today I cleared, weeded, levelled and weed-matted the garden from the deck to the fence. I bought plants for hedging row for the path and a couple of fillers.The section of garden in the foreground of the photo above is planted and coming along so-so. I'm hoping for a growth spurt in everything in spring. The rest of the front garden is either bare dirt or weeds, with just a couple of 'stayers' (plants that I intend to keep).

While clearing I found three pots of orchids, which I placed (very carefully) at the base on a tree about 18 months ago. I have since completely forgotten about them; absolutely ignored them. They were from my nana's collection, so I was very pleased to re-discover them today and to discover that they appear to be alive. I have repotted them in hanging baskets on the fence. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they die of shock from being tended to. One of them had nearly no potting mix/dirt in the pot at all. Although, it actually looks the healthiest of the lot.

Tomorrow I will dig holes and plant out today's purchases. The day after I will start to spread mulch over the area that I've now weed matted. I'm not sure how long this 'creative spurt' will last. The next section of the garden requires a fair bit of muscle power - moving some gravel and dirt, an old concrete tub and the like. It may have to wait until Muscles has a day off ;-)

The current view from our deck. Starting to look like a real garden.

No creative journal entry today. The challenge was to take a five minute walk and create something with what you find in the area. I haven't taken any walks today. Maybe tomorrow I'll take a five minute walk from the garage to the garden with a bucket of mulch.

Creativity Journal - Day 3 (Paper)

Make something out of paper, but don't use scissors or glue or draw on it. What now? (And no, you don't have to know origami to do this.)

I was a little perplexed how to go about today's challenge. I haven't mentioned it yet, but one of my rules is that creations are not to create clutter. I don't want to end up with a bunch of things I have no use for just so I can say I was creative.

I could think of lots of things to make from paper without using scissors or glue or drawing. But to make something that also related to words or fabric AND was useful or wanted? The brain cells had to work a little harder.

For my words project I have an embossed bookmark. The card was a strip left over from scrap booking, so technically, I didn't use scissors for this project. Although writing is a form of drawing, I have chosen to believe that by not using a traditional drawing implement, I have fulfilled the spirit of the challenge. (My creativity, my rules.)

The bookmark is for my happiness journal. Some time ago I watched Shawn Achor on TED talking about the 'happiness advantage'. His research, based on chemical analysis and brain functions, indicates that being happy leads to success, rather than the common perception that success leads to happiness.Something he mentioned made perfect sense to me. The goal posts of success are constantly moving. If we set success as graduating, once we achieve that, we set a new mark in the sand - get a job, then, get a promotion, then ... and on it goes.

At the end of his talk, Shawn talked about a 21day challenge. The challenge is quite simple - perform five simple tasks every day for 21 days to improve your happiness. The five simple tasks really help you focus on perception of reality; changing your view from negative to positive. Those five tasks are: exercise, meditate, let someone in your network know you value them (and why), record three things (different every day) that you're thankful for, and journal about one positive thing that happened during day. If you watch Shawn's video, he explains the rationale for each.

As I mentioned when I started this creativity project, I'm not real good at day-to-day routine. I started the 21-day challenge several times. I did end up completing 21 consecutive days. Since then my journaling has been a little sporadic (although not as sporadic as my exercising). I do think it's a good idea to 'count your blessings, name them one by one'. I think we too often see the negative and we are quite surprised 'by what the Lord has done' when we stop and think about it.

Moving on to my fabric challenge. Work with paper using a fabric theme. Hmmmm. Although it sounds contradictory, this set me less challenges than working with words. I put an old needle in the sewing machine, took a piece of scrap book paper, folded it, sewed it and hey, presto, a pocket for paper off-cuts from my current scrap booking endeavours.

Are you any good at origami? What's the best thing you've ever folded?

Of mice and men

It's a beautiful winter's day, but the sun hasn't quite made it my living room. In the meantime, I'm using the mouse with my left hand so I can wrap my right around the tea cup and warm it up. it's strange how un-co that is. Strange because at work I always use my mouse left handed. It drives IT up the wall. But I always know when someone else has used my machine, because they never, ever return the mouse to the left.

When mice first started to become "normal", you couldn't set the speed the thing moved or reacted. I was having difficulty controlling it (bizarre thought now) and one piece of advice I read was to use it with your non-dominate hand. After a while I could use it equally comfortably with either hand. I made a decision to use it left-handed at work and right-handed at home to spread the strain. Eventual carpel tunnel in both wrists instead of one, anyone? Hubby is a leftie, so he gets to use the mouse with his non-dominate hand at home.

One other advantage of left-handed mouse use is that it's easier to keep things central and reachable. With the mouse of the right, you have to cross over the number keypad to reach it. On my smaller desk, I find I keep shoving the keyboard to the left, off centre, to have room for the mouse. With the mouse on the left, the main section of the keyboard is centred on the desk.

Our main home mouse (we have a number of computers; more computers than people actually) is symmetrical. I know you can get lovely ergonomic mice, but have you noticed they are for righties? I've avoided them because there is a leftie in the house and because of my mouse-ambidexterity. So, if this mouse is completely symetrical, and I'm used to using a mouse left-handed for five or six hours a day, why does it feel so awkward to use it left-handed?

Bit of a moot point now. My tea is drunk, my cup is cold and I can move the mouse back to 'where it belongs'.

Creativity Journal - Day 2 (Favourite Animal)

What's your favourite animal? Use it as your inspiration today.

My favourite animal is a difficult one. I love my cat, I like other people's cat, but cat's are also one of the most destructive creature in the Australian landscape, so I wouldn't say cats are my favourite animal. Today's efforts will represent two favourites. Firstly, my play with words:

For my fabric play I continue to work on the heirloom embroideries. The current piece is a large doily (yesterday's flowers) and two smaller doilies. The smaller ones are already stitched; the larger one is in progress. In addition to the flowers, each doily has a blue bird. Today's TV project is finish the remaining blue bird. I love birds, all birds. There is such diversity. Australian birds are colourful, tuneful, intelligent. Not always all in one bird, the poor ol' raven is not colourful or tuneful, but they are incredibly intelligent.

The darker two (to the right) were already completed. These are on the smaller two doilies.
The bird to the left is on the larger doily and is today's fabric fun.

My little blue bird of creativity.

What's your favourite animal?Why?

Creativity Journal - Day 1 (Start Small)

The first step is the hardest, so start small today and make something that fits in the palm of your hand using only the materials in your immediate environment.

Today I have gone out of my way to be creative with words, but I have also been creative with fabric (and scrap-booking). One advantage of not working for someone else at the moment is the time to complete projects. Even without the journal I have been reasonably creative.

My fabric creativity is an ongoing project. Some time ago my dad's sister gave me some embroidery panels that belonged to her mother or her aunt. Some are started, but none are finished. I rediscovered them just recently and currently keep one next to my armchair to work on while watching TV. I'm not really very good at embroidery, but I'm improving.

My creativity with words was inspired by a trip into the CBD today. I dislike the City. I always feel rushed and pressured. Visiting during Friday lunch time in the school holidays probably wasn't a great idea.

This was my initial idea. It is the palm of my hand (an outline, on paper, not my actual palm). The idea was for it to represent city blocks, but I kinda forgot to allow the streets to have any width.

As I was playing with this, lines from one of my favourite poems came to mind.

I am sitting in my dingy little office, where a stingy
Ray of sunlight struggles feebly down between the houses tall,
And the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city
Through the open window floating, spreads its foulness over all.

And in place of lowing cattle, I can hear the fiendish rattle
Of the tramways and the 'buses making hurry down the street,
And the language uninviting of the gutter children fighting,
Comes fitfully and faintly through the ceaseless tramp of feet. 

And the hurrying people daunt me, and their pallid faces haunt me
As they shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste,
With their eager eyes and greedy, and their stunted forms and weedy,
For townsfolk have no time to grow, they have no time to waste.

"Clancy of the Overflow", by Banjo Patterson

My idea was to take a map of the CBD, create an outline of the blocks, superimpose the words over the city blocks, remove the lines. That is, have the words of the entire poem make up the city blocks. I hit a couple of snags:

• The map of the CBD is always shown on an angle. The streets run almost 45° to the edge of a page.
• The CBD is not actually a pure grid. There's lots of little bumps and alley ways.
• A map the size of my palm requires a very fine pen and steady writing hand .
• I figured the easiest way would be to print the map and then overlay a blank sheet to write on. I don't have a light box, and I can't find my handy-dandy piece of picture frame glass that I usually use.

I copied the CBD from Google; drew the blocks using the Draw facility in MS Word. I rotated my new very plain map and used MSWord to add the poem. It's not quite the end result I wanted. I think, ideally, this sort of image is best created with a larger map. After the words are added by hand, the whole image can be scaled down.

STILL, the purpose of the exercise is creativity. To do something creative, to think differently to the routine of humdrum daily life. This is not something I would have thought of doing of my own inspiration.

What fits in the palm of your hand?

Creativity Journal

Some months ago we were visiting with a friend, when she mentioned she was struggling with her lack of creativity. She is a creative person (as I believe we all are), but she wasn't being creative in her day-to-day life. She was struggling to find time, motivation and inspiration. Later in the same week, the Teen and I were doing a bit of window shopping and happened into a book store. (Some of sort of magnetic field around book stores that we don't quite understand). We found a book. (Actually, we found lots of books, but that's another story.) This book was on sale and the perfect "thanks for being a great hostess" gift.



The book is called "365: A Daily Creativity Journal: Make Something Every Day and Change Your Life!" by Noah Scalin. After some introduction to the concept, Noah gives a 'starting point' for being creative each day. Day One says "The first step is the hardest, so start small today and make something that fits in the palm of your hand using only the materials in your immediate environment." There is space on each day to record what you created.

After a couple of days, it became clear to the Teen and I that we both needed this book. But, alas, the book store had no more copies :-( We can get it online, but we're still trying to get it locally. In the meantime, I have bought an e-book. No recording facility in the journal itself. The reality is, I'm highly unlikely to use it anyway.

I am going to give the 365 days a go. They may not be 365 consecutive days, but we'll see how we go. (My track record at maintaining any project is pretty dismal. I can't even take vitamins every day of the week.)

One of the suggestions that Noah makes is to choose a theme and/or medium. I'm a sewer/quilter, so fabric is an obvious medium. But then I wondered, is it too obvious? Should I stretch myself in some other way? I'm still undecided, so I may use two ideas, because I'm keen to explore some creativity with words. Some days I may use both fabric and words, some days I may do just one. My creativity, my rules.

Versatile fruit bread

A couple of weeks ago I made a date loaf. It got rave reviews on the recipe site, but I wasn't impressed by it. On a scale of 'sponge to mud' cake, I like my date loaf up near the mud cake end. This version was too close to the sponge cake end.

Last week I made banana bread. Every one really enjoyed the recipe. The texture of the bread was far more like the texture I'm looking for in a date loaf. Instead of trying another recipe, I thought perhaps I could just substitute dates for bananas. It turned out okay. A little too sweet with the dates, and perhaps a little short on full date flavour.

The original recipe and the date option.

Ingredients - Banana Bread
3 or 4 ripe bananas, mashed. According to one site this is about a cup of banana.
80g (1/3 cup) of melted butter
3/4 cup sugar. Original recipe was for 1 cup. Even 3/4s was on the sweet side.
1 egg, beaten
1 tsp vanilla (I only ever use beans or bean paste)
1 tsp baking soda
pinch of salt
1.5 cups of plain flour
 Ingredients - Date Loaf
As above except:
1.5 cups of cut dates soaked in 1 cup of boiling water. Next time I will put the soaked dates through the blender, which may help to 'spread' the flavour a little.
1/2 cup of sugar. This still way sweeter than necessary. Next time I will use only 1/4 cup.

Method - either
Preheat oven to 175°C (350°F).
Stir butter into fruit.
Stir in sugar, egg and vanilla.
Sprinkle salt and baking soda over the mix and stir in.
Stir in flour.
All stirring with a wooden spoon; no need for 'lectric. Pour into greased loaf pan. Bake for 1 hour. In my small oven, after about 40 minutes I need to cover with foil to prevent the top from burning.
Eat lots of it. Good warm straight out of the oven. Good the next day with butter on it.