The Next Stage

Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Party Night...

DD2 has been planning her 30th birthday celebrations for most of the last year and last Saturday night was the culmination of all that planning...the party!

It was held in a private function area upstairs in The Iceworks in Paddington. ( the site was originally the Ithaca Iceworks...a company that sold blocks of ice to householders who only had ice chests to keep food cold in the days before everyone had refrigerators...it also sold other products such as 'party ice' etc.) Ithaca Iceworks relocated and the site became this popular nightspot.

DD2 looked stunning in her beautiful frock which featured a tulle skirt...some photos of the night...

As guests arrived, they were asked to write a message to the birthday girl on a little blackboard and then a friend of DD2, Tim, took a photo...

This couple (Pamela and Garry) remember DD2's birth very well! They are the godparents of DD1 and had come to dinner on September 19, 1984, to help celebrate DD1's 3rd birthday...they left about 10.30pm. They were very surprised when my then husband rang them at 7 the next morning to tell them I had given birth to our second daughter at 3.20am...lol! Yep! No signs of an impending birth that night and besides my due date was 3 weeks away!

One of the cakes...

The other cake...

Cutting the cake...well getting ready to cut the cake! Lol

She was pleased with her gift from DH and I...she has loved pink since she was a little girl!

Her BF made a lovely speech about my daughter and he also thanked DH and I in that speech for the DVD of photos that I had made...he had never seen early photos of her, so that's been remedied now.
Some of the photos and other scanned items...
Just home from hospital...

My friend Pamela with DD2...DD2 was 1!

I still have that dress that she is wearing in the previous photo :-/ I took that little dress and some other baby garments to DD2's 30th birthday!

These items were only worn by DD2...they were no 'hand me downs from DD1.

Some of my favourite photos were scanned and burned to the DVD...

I also surprised DD2 and her BF by scanning other mementos from her childhood...
A drawing of Holly, the family cat ...DD2 drew this for me when she was about 10...

I also found an old exercise book from when she was in Year 2...
I scanned some pages for the DVD...some of her school mates were at the party...

And a note that she left under the windscreen wiper of my car when we were dealing with her 'teen years'...

Her family pet name is Demphy, as her big sister (3 years old) couldn't say 'Jennifer'...she said 'Demphaner, which eventually became 'Demphy' and then Demph!

Saturday, September 20, 2014

Feline Friday...

Even though it's Saturday here, I'm linking up for Feline Friday on the Sarah Did It blog.

http://sarahdidit.blogspot.com.au

Eduardo: It's okay Grandma, I'm just checking whether these blankets you've been making out of those squares that people give you, will be warm enough for those needy people you keep talking about...

Now I really need you to be quiet so I can check them out properly....

A week or so later:

She's moved all those blankets...my nice bed has gone! :-(

Wait a minute...that's Grandma's knitting bag...hmm she's left that lovely colourful ball of wool just sitting on top....

And there's that stick thing that she pokes the wool with....

Now how hard is it to crochet, I wonder? I could make my own blankie couldn't I?

(Eduardo was a good boy; he just patted the ball of yarn, and then curled up on my knitting bag and went to sleep)

Friday, September 19, 2014

FNSI...

This month I certainly had an evening of variety...
Firstly, I finished neatening off any ends in some blankets I had made from squares that various people had donated to K4BN. Then I did my version of yarn bombing to get some photos of the 7 blankets. Instead of using our modular lounge, this time I used the railings on the side veranda to arrange the items for the 'photo shoot'.
Looking to the left...

Looking back from the front steps...

Some people who make squares for the group, use it as an opportunity to try out new designs... these look so good placed in amongst the plain squares, and make rather special looking blankets...

The white central bit was the original square and I just crocheted a few more rounds to make the square larger...

I took the next photo to show off that lovely square...and then saw, despite checking each blanket twice, that there was still an end not woven in!

Last night I also finished off the fringe and sewed on the label of the throw that I have made DD2 for her birthday...

I also started a new knitting project...I cast on the 241 stitches and worked the first row...no photos as it doesn't look interesting yet :-)
At the end of the evening I worked on one of my EPP projects...sewing in the squares with a new Christmas fabric that I bought recently to try using a cream and gold fabric for the centres rather that the white and silver that I usually use...

Filling in the centres on a Christmas runner...

So that's how I spent my evening...no TV watching this month while I crafted, I magnanimously allowed DH to use the large screen telly in the loungeroom to watch some footy game...Cowboys and Roosters or something like that! lol. He didn't seem to yell at the TV as much this time, so those men in the pink shirts and short black shorts obviously didn't annoy him this time :-/.
If you like to check out what others did with their time during FNSI, go over to Wendy's blog and use the links in the sign up post...will you also join us next month perhaps?

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Hexies' Link up....

Once again I'm linking up with Sarah's blog where each month she invites other bloggers to 'show and tell' their paper piecing projects, which includes EPP hexies of course!
Regular readers would know that I started a decluttering challenge where I've been discovering kits and patterns that have been sitting idle.
The other day though, I thought of something which I knew was in the built in wardrobe in bedroom#2. I hadn't given this item a thought for a few years now...and I also thought that this item would be something I could write about for this link up. Especially since my long hexie Christmas runner and my Liberty print hexagon cushion have not progressed very much in this last month. :-(
So without further ado...the item...

Not very interesting, just a cardboard box...so what's inside?

Yes some hexies! Now I did not make these...no cutting out of fabric and paper, no stitching over the card/paper, none of that! About 5 years ago I saw this lot on Ebay; the description by the seller suggested that there were 900 hexagons in this lot. On the spur of the moment, I placed a bid...and in a few days, those hexies were mine. They arrived in an old shirt box which sort of fell to pieces...so I found another box for them. I did try to count them a few times but stopped after about 500... :-/
This had obviously been a long term project for someone...a real labour of love perhaps as they were so neatly stitched over light card ??The card pieces are a real piece of history too...

I recognised cigarette cartons (in the 50s and 60s my dad used to buy his ciggies by the carton!) and biscuit packets, Bic biros carton and lots of other packaging from those decades...
The fabrics are varied...probably a lot of dress fabrics as patchwork cottons were hard to come by in Australia for many years. There are however, a lot of lovely pure cottons including some homespuns, as well as the expected poly cottons.

A closer look in the box...

Now that I've rediscovered these, I'm quite excited about how I can use them...shame I don't have any grandchildren as it would be a great sorting activity for them putting the hexies into groups. I think I did start that a while ago and found that of each different fabric there were plenty of the same to make 'flowers' for a Grandma's Garden design. Or maybe a diamond shaped motif...or a star...or just a random mosaic???
Oh and most importantly...this box of hexies is staying here at my place...no decluttering purge for them! lol

30 years of hairstyles!!!

I've mentioned in previous posts that for quite a while (since the beginning of July) I have been gradually sorting through family photos to come up with a collection of photos of DD2 ready to be displayed at her 30th birthday party. At first the sorting and looking through boxes and albums was just worked on occasionally, but when september 1 rolled round it was time to pick up the pace a bit as her party is the 20th.

The venue for her party has a plasma screen TV in place but only plays DVDs, so plugging in a USB was not an option. My memories of using programs at work to burn/copy CDs and DVDs was always a 'hit and miss' affair and I faced the task with a bit of trepidation. But it turns out the the option of burning a DVD is inbuilt in the computer so it was just a matter of placing the blank disc in the little 'drawer' and following the prompts that came up on the screen. And it gets even better...I was worried that if I didn't animate the 148 photos in some way ???? that when the DVD was played it would just be stuck on one photo...I whispered that because it does sound pretty stupid! lol. When we played the DVD in our system, it not only moved through all the photos but it moved them across the screen, while another photo rolled into view...all sorts of effects just happening! We could also click an icon on the screen and the photos would mass together in a grid formation...so Plan B of taking a USB with the scanned images on it to the local Harvey Norman store to get them to make the DVD wasn't necessary.

One thing that seemed to stand out was our changing hairstyles...this is what I mean...

Just a few hours old here...we thought that we might have a little redhead...

Then after a while little miss was bald...

And when her hair grew it was blonde like her big sister and father...

Ah hem...my hair is interesting????

Then the curls started to grow...(and I must have wanted curls too...oh dear 1980's 'Big Hair styles')

Here's a photo with her grandma and you can see those ringlets...

Those ringlets looked cute tied up in bunches...

But by the time DD2 was 4, the curls had gone...

Sometimes her hair was tied up, as in this photo taken at a Sunday School Christmas service...DD2 was a galah in the Christmas play...(that's me in the check shirt; all the mums dressed up as farm hands for the Christmas play)