Sunday 8 January 2012

Creative Time

Cabin Fever
So it is early January, it should be really hot and the cicadas should be screeching up a din but it is still cold and raining!  When will Global Warming reach New Zealand???!  I feel so cooped up and I grow weary of movies and indoor projects.  I need a little sun to warm my internal solar panels.  Seems the chooks too, have given up on scratching for a living.  They sleep continuously inside their warm and cosy den, not even venturing out when fed.  Who would blame them??
Found these cool old pics of some chooks, which remind me a bit
of our little gals, Spence is a little like these ones.

Liz is a little like these birds.  I think her previous name, before
we adopted her, was Ginge, as in Ginger.
Not much been happening in our backyard on account of the Big Wet.  If the rain lets up for a couple of minutes, we scoot outdoors to collect any produce, mostly berries, pole beans, zuchini, cauliflower and apple cucumbers.  The excitement of picking the first ripe hothouse grown tomatoes is one of the only highlights in this gloomy gardening weather.  On Thursday, I packed up my gardening gear and set off for a friend's garden.  We did some collective co-operative work in her vegetable garden (she has 12 hectares, so her veggie garden is nearly the total size of my entire garden!  The weather was overcast and it drizzled a little but all in all, a lovely day to work on someone else's space.  Afterwards, she gave me a Bowen Therapy and I gave her a back massage with hot rock therapy using the rocks we collected from her stream (we discovered they did not hold the heat very well - black, dense rocks work well, not porous ones).

Strawberries, blackberries and yummy berries.

Homegrown salad - lettuce, zuchini, cucumber, borage and
 nasturtium flowers.
Upcycling
My daughter reinvented her father's old shirt which had been spoilt with a few splodges of splashed bleach (not sure how that happened).  I helped her cut off the neck binding and cut the long arms off short.  Then she took a little bleach in a cup and painted designs onto the shirt......... voila!  When her father opened up his present, he had not a clue that it was his old shirt and he was ever so chuffed with his new up-cycled t.shirt!
An indoor project - upcycling an old t-shirt

The back of the personalised t-shirt made especially for Mike 

Making and Creating
My son and his friend are going flatting this year.  They are skateboard enthusiasts and so put their heads and hands together to make this nifty little skateboard rack for their flat.  Quite ingeniously crafted out of scrap wood they found in his garage.

The skateboard rack holds 4 skateboards without taking up too much
floor space.
My daughter also crafted this unique little bracelet out of cotton thread and fimo (oven-hardened clay).  It is thrilling to see our children embracing the art of making and creating.
A bracelet handcrafted by my daughter for her friend for Christmas
Shayni also made this unique Maori-inspired stretcher
earring for Cam
My son also tie-dyed a t.shirt for his father, so Mike sports some rather trendy shirts at the moment!
Mike posing for a photo to display his new tie-dyed
t.shirt that Cam made and knee stool for gardening,
which Shayni made for him.





















So all in all, it's been a time of making and creating, with my children hopping on board for the ride and creating some awesome stuff themselves.  It's wonderful when they feel inspired to be creative, rather than being stuck in front of a screen!  Hallelujah!


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