Gratitude-for things that cheer.

I have had a crook shoulder and neck for a few weeks -not enough to seriously debilitate, but I haven't been doing all the usual stuff. The weed onslaught has had to stop and there has been no spreading of mulch.

The garden flowers on, in beautiful profusion.

I can still drop in to the occasional op shop, you understand, in search of a little prettiness. I found this candle holder and candle and I really like it. At Christmas time, with a red or gold candle, it will look great with the rest of my angel collection. I have a collection of angels who play musical instruments -and these each have one.


And I found some chincherinchees in the local shop and I actually bought them for myself and put them in this lovely old depression glass vase. With the morning sun coming in the dining room window, I think they look very pretty.

The "sea lavender" is in flower.

Apart from that, I have been doing some cooking- trying to break out from a self imposed rut and make some new dishes for a new season. I hadn't made lasagne for ages so I made a big dish this week, and I tried out a new pizza stone with my bread-maker pizza dough.

I have been helping out with my little community choir -we are having a concert soon and I am helping with ticket sales. If you are in Perth and you would like to go, just drop me a line...we have two concerts in November -on the 5th and 13th in the afternoons -and one is north of the river and one is south. We will be singing some lovely music -there are quite a few John Rutter pieces.

And there has been some reading -because other things seem to aggravate the shoulder. I am gradually improving, and hope normal service will be resumed shortly!

The value of nothing

There is water in the river at New Norcia!

We were in the Benedictine town of New Norcia last weekend, taking part in a retreat lead by members of the Christian Meditation Community of Western Australia. It was a lovely quiet and restful time.

When we were able to take a break, we enjoyed the sights of the town we know so well, shown in its green and fruitful best after a reasonably good winter.

There was water in the river!!!

Lovely to be able to be there and enjoy the renewal of the earth and our souls. The olive trees are just budding.

Olive trees in bud. New Norcia's olive oil won major awards last year.

There is something very grounding in spending a couple of days in the farming belt -it reminds us city folk of how much the basis of our society depends on a healthy earth, and decent returns for farmers. Spending time in prayer reminds us of the big issues of life and death, and what is really important.

This coffee table in my lounge room is being decorated by an op shop find -a lovely lacy table topper- and a bowl of home grown musky roses.

Since I got home, I have been reading this book, which I found in my local library, called "The Value Of Nothing" in which Raj Patel makes some very interesting points which are very thought provoking. If you are in WA too, you will be able to ask your library to get an inter-library loan so that you can read it too. If you aren't here, it is available world wide in book stores. Easy to read and I recommend you do.

This is a quote about the book:

“With great lucidity and confidence in a dazzling array of fields, Patel reveals how we inflate the cost of things we can (and often should) live without, while assigning absolutely no value to the resources we all need to survive. This is a deeply thought-provoking book about the dramatic changes we must make to save the planet from financial madness – argued with so much humour and humanity that the enormous tasks ahead feel both doable and desirable. This is Raj Patel’s great gift: he makes even the most radical ideas seem not only reasonable, but inevitable. A brilliant book.”—Naomi Klein, author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine

http://www.blackincbooks.com/books/value-nothing

I am writing this post as the Debt Crisis seems to lurch into another worrying phase. The ABC news has just now quoted an expert who is predicting Australia will be in recession in a year or so. To those of us who are trying to live simply, we look with concern for the people who get crunched when the big corporates and nations stuff things up.

• Why haven't we been told of the things Raj writes in his book -about how, if we factored in the real cost to the earth and its people of a typical fast food hamburger, it would actually cost $200?

• Why aren't we more concerned about the fate of the poor workers who labour to provide us with cheap consumer goods?
  

• Why aren't we aware of how much the trade in rare earths which are mined in the Congo, and used to make components in mobile phones, has fueled the violence there over recent years?
  

• Why hasn't any news outlet I have found in Australia reported the protests of these people in Wall Street for the past 9 days?

"The protest dubbed Occupy Wall Street kicked off September 17, targeting corporate greed and political influence, the government bailouts for banks during the 2008 financial crisis, capital punishment, and a litany of other grievances."

The title of the book comes from a quote by Oscar Wilde who described people who 'knew the price of everything and the value of nothing" .

I am heartened by what the author describes as grass roots movements of people around the world, often the poorest of the poor, who are taking back some of the political power and rights which our current system has stripped away.

Living simply is not just a lifestyle choice -it may be the only choice for the planet.

Recycling, producing not consuming, and other lifestyle choices

Over at Down to Earth, Rhonda has got us all talking yet again about reusing and recycling.

I thought I would not just talk about ideas for recycling, but in fact the whole idea of producing not consuming -of living a more creative, productive life. It is an important part of being able to recycle -because we need active and shiny creative minds to be able to think of new ways of doing things with stuff other people would throw out. You need to practice making things to have the confidence to try something a bit out of the norm.

I found this very helpful book in the library recently -art of the Rochdale's Succesful Quilting Library- it encourages a novice like me to have a go at all kinds of interesting techniques built by others who were creative and willing to try something new.


I found this beautiful silver urn in an op shop recently. I was overjoyed as I have been on the lookout for this shape for over six months. I never dreamed it would be in such good condition.

The grey foliage I have in the urn is quite a showy feature of my lounge room at the moment, but so simple!

I guess someone threw this urn out to the charity which runs the op shop. Perhaps they couldn't be bothered cleaning the silver. I am so glad I have it -it is a thing of joy. I intend to change the display in it regularly -flowers or shiny glass balls or whatever I can find as I 'shop at home" for displays which keep me entertained as I decorate our little house.

This crumb quilt is made of scraps and orphan blocks left over from another quilt. So this is another way of recycling and re-using things.

I enjoyed making it, and learned a lot from it.

I call it "Think Outside the Box".


This quilt is back on my design wall. I am auditioning that green as a potential border, and slicing other blocks to see what I can make which is more interesting as a setting.


Finally, a picture of a whole bowl full of roses from the climber on the back fence. After years of doing nothing but grow leaves it is in flower at last. I wish you could smell the delightfully musky fragrance - it is so strong I can smell the perfume whilst I sit in my chair nearby.

I hope you feel inspired to be creative around your place -and to find new ways of using what you already have.

Spring pretties

We have had the most perfect entrance to spring this year, with a good winter rainfall followed by a pattern of sunshine and showers. The days are gradually warming up, and the garden is calling out for action.

I am afraid things got a bit overgrown during the winter, but nearly every Saturday for over a month my DH and I have been toiling away bringing things back from the brink.

This morning there was so much loveliness to see, and so many perfumes to smell, as I brushed past the peppery geraniums, the astringent lavender and the musky tansy. I absolutely adore perfumed foliage!

The front garden has a nice mix of plants which give generously of their flowers, and some newish fruit trees which are settling in well.



It being such a wonderful spring day I had to bring some flowers into the house!
Nasturtiums grow like weeds around here. I bought a packet of seeds once, and they now come up all over the place!

Simple pleasure of a glass vase and a few geraniums and pelargoniums and lavender.


And here is the reminder of what kind of gardening we have yet to do....a huge bag of lupin mulch to protect the veggies as the weather warms up, plus we need to feed the fruit trees and mulch them, and weed the back yard, and give the roses a bit of attention and ...and....good thing there is a lot of spring left yet!

A Series of Firsts and Scraps

My "living simply" quilt is now hanging up.

I started this quilt to practice a number of new techniques:

• first 'crumb' scrappy blocks. I discovered how much fun these are, and what a great way to use up little bits of fabric which are too small for incorporation in other projects. Many sewers like to use little scraps to start a line of sewing -to make sure that the threads are not tangled at the back and so on. These crumbs can be used therefore as 'leaders/enders" of lines of blocks which are being sewn together which makes it possible to be creating lots of these without really noticing. My next crumbs will be grouped, I think, according to colour just to see how that goes.
  
• first UnRuly letters -I want to use words on the border of a quilt top now in production, but wanted a bit of experience first.
• first UnRuly house -and tree (which I designed myself) -quite happy with the result.

The quilt used my first ever attempt at joining two smaller pieces of batting. I usually buy queen sized pieces and as a result often have some bits left over. I joined two pieces with a zig zag seam and honestly, I don't think you can tell where it is.

The border was a piece of fabric I picked up in an op shop. I thought it was gloriously ugly, but in small amounts it looks great.

I am quite happy with my progress on Free Motion Quilting too, but there is still a long way to go before I am feeling competent about it.

Nevertheless I am pretty happy with this little quilt. Pretty simple, really.

Making the most of what you have got

Recently I heard one of these books being read on the ABC and I thought -gosh, what a quirky, funny idea! Eoin Colfer's fantasy world where fairies are crossed with a James Bond style boy genius criminal -crazy idea.


I mentioned it to my daughter who immediately turned up with a whole stack of them that she had read some time back! Great! Lots of easy escapist reading, which kept me going for a while.

Reading books is a lifetime pursuit for me, but there is always the problem of finding something else to read. I often have a number of books on the go, but don't intend to buy every book I read- apart from everything else, where would I store them all?

There is always the local library, and I often buy books second-hand so that I can enjoy them at a more reasonable cost. However, I also love re-reading books I already own. All the pleasure without the pain of purchase! Some are old favourites and if you were to count the number of times I have read them, the cost per read-through would be quite small.

I am working really hard at avoiding waste at our place. Today I used nearly a litre of beef stock that DH bought for something he made on the weekend -it said "use in three days after opening" -so I turned that into soup with some garden veggies and the left over bits of a garden salad which was also from the weekend, along with some bits and bobs I had stored in the freezer. You know how it is -not enough to make one person a meal, but I hate throwing food out so I put it in a tiny container in the freezer. There was half a serve of carrot and turmeric soup, and a bit of a beef soup I had made some time back.

So I reckon that was pretty much free food -and the best bit is that there is quite a lot left for lunches this week.
My quilting can be an expensive hobby. That is why I have been so happy learning how to make these scrappy blocks and UnRuly letters out of what I have left over from other projects. I completed this quilt top today -and I have to say I am very pleased with it. It was fun to make and cost nothing as previously I would have thrown out pieces like this.


So that is it for this week -learning to make the most of what we have got.

Hope you are the same.

Feel free to leave a comment if you stop by.

Why we have to change

My progress towards a simpler, greener, more eco-friendly lifestyle has many causes. One major cause is a result of reading books about the effects of human induced climate change due to excess consumption.

This report will explain why, as a resident of Western Australia, I take this particularly seriously. It is a report from the Climate Commission pointing out some worrying statistics about how the south west of Western Australia is being significantly impacted by reduced rainfall over the last 40 years along with rises in sea levels and increased ocean temperatures.

Fortunately our rains this winter have been close to normal, but one reasonable winter won't get us out of the difficulties we are facing. Our state government has built two desalination plants to insure our water supply, but desal plants are expensive and energy hungry.

My DH and I are gradually building up our home and lifestyle to reduce our water and energy consumption, and to increase the production of food in our garden. The bathroom renovation is part of our project to reduce our water consumption by putting water efficient appliances in, and renewing our infrastructure of pipes etc to remove the leaks and blockages etc. I have been getting quotes on some major plumbing and tiling which is the next step. Not much has happened, and it has been frustrating, but it must be done as a step towards our goal.

I have also been enjoying a learning new skills, which provide me with entertainment and opportunities for creativity. This week I have been enjoying making these scrap blocks as 'leaders/enders" in another quilt project. They make use of bits of fabric I would normally have thrown out, and are actually great fun. I wanted to practice some skills so that when I use them on the green/blue quilt I will have some idea of what I was doing!

More eco-friendly lifestyle does ask us to change, but there is a lot to enjoy as well.