How to create lace motifs — Knitty: Summer 2009.

Wow, this article might possibly change my knitting life!

Photograph by Ravi.
I feel sad that cake shop is over.
I feel happy we had a cake shop.
Our cake is sweet forever.
Cake shop was our home.
Our home is everywhere.
My love to Milkface.

Benben(my canary) and I are currently housesitting in an apartment in Newtown. Ben was disgusted when he woke on the first day to see a view of the city and he declared it to be the most disgusting thing he had ever seen. I moved him to the other window, and he was pleased with the view of the trees. He thinks he can see in the window of our house in the suburbs, and that he can see Snuffy dog(who is being well loved, do not fret). I like the proximity to friends, but I do not like living alone and I miss being on the ground! I’m using this time to prepare for the Tiny Stadiums Festival, which will be in Erskinville. I’m working with Hiromi and Kimiyo Tango and also with Vanessa, and I’m not sure how much I’m allowed to divulge, cus it is a lovely secret(there are some bits I’m not allowed to even tell Vanessa), but it’s going to be awesome and dreamy and a little piece of our collective brains!

For the first time in several years, I actually participated in the western celebration that is New Years Eve. I went out, like a good young person, partied and danced, drank quite a bit, swum in the ocean and had 4 outfit changes at the Gabbathon beach party. I did not take any photos because sometimes, methinks, life is for living, not documenting. This is a lovely feeling indeed.
It took me a couple of days to recover, but the evening began by traversing to Rah rah and Shelagh’s house in Marrickville where they made us all delicious pies, using Rah’s pie maker, and we left the house at about 11pm. In retrospect, this was a bit silly, but alas, time is constantly changing, is it not? We caught a bus to central, where we met Truly and Matt, who we did not yet know, but we all caught taxis to where we could catch yet another bus to the top secret location. It took us rather a long time to get there, but we got off the bus just before midnight and were trekking through the suburbs, laden down with our gear when we heard fireworks. It was a little bit Tomorrow when the war began, but quite cheery nonetheless. We trekked along the beach for ages, climbed up what seemed to be a cliff and found our people. We set up a little home base with all of our stuff and danced and swum and intoxicated and had an ever so lovely time. My favourite thing about dark outside parties is how people you know can be there for ages but you wont see them for a few hours, so you keep getting nice surprises through the evening. It was so lovely floating about and though it was weird when the sun rose, which is when I cannot sleep I find that I always can, that we still had to go home. And sleep.

Please to be excusing my poor english language useage. I am slightly intoxicated again. I am nervous about the wait for uni results, which we don’t find out til the 21st.

It’s the end of the year again. Though I do believe that we can and do change our lives with every decision and every thought, the fact that tomorrow is the last day of the year is a hopeful one. I’m excited about BEACH PARTY(yeah yeah), housesitting for Miss Jane next year(yay yay), and doing/learning fun things with my NDS little loady card. My current project is making a skin which is fun and cute. I am scared of finding out what my future holds on the 21st Jan, when uni results come out, but I suppose it will be a relief to find out if the answer is yes or no, or CANBERRA(eeep, I’d probably rather not)… Oh yeah, check out to the lower left hand side, you can listen to some select, handpicked tunes and have an imaginary miss helen tea party(byo tea).

Having resurrected this poor little confused blob of php, I have found that I’ve lost a lot of entries. This makes me a sad panda, but I’m too tired to go through things to find them.
In the meantime, please enjoy this video of a glitter ball.

I forgot to post this here on account of experiencing “health issues”, but I had some work in an exhibition called “Don’t Shop”, which is a little knitted bakery, called “Le Petite Bakery”. Pronounce it in your broadest australian accent for optimum effect.
It was in the window of “Don’t Look” Gallery, which is at 141 New Canterbury Road, Dulwich Hill. It was a really awesome exhibition with works by other people, who are largely zine related. I have a series of 1 page zines available which are like 20c each and are of the personal genre.

Edit: This just in. The cakes installation lives on! They’re starring in a new exhibition at Don’t Look which is a tribute to corner shops!

Just letting people know that I’m going to try and put a little effort into cataloguing zines that I read and how people can get in touch with the makers and get their own copies over on the flick here. I’ve only done 5 so far, but I’ve got several stacks hanging around and plenty of holiday time to do it!
Brought to you by wealthy patron of the arts, Birdie Roo the blythe doll.

Check it out!

After spending the day at the MCA zine fair(which was incredibly fun), I’m feeling a lot of love towards the world, so I thought I’d use that love to update this thingie and spread some love.

Here are just a couple:

Iron Deficient Chef: Sydney Vegan DIY cooking show(don’t know if they’d consider themselves DIY, but they do, and they’ve got skills!) of amazingness. Suzy has been such an hero to me, with her friendly and positive manner. It’s so genuine and inspiring and every time I watch an episode, I want to go out and make the world a bit better and hopefully in turn inspire others like this show does me(and I’m not even vegan!).

Emily Hasselhoof. I had the privelidge of eating dumplings with this babe, but I just wanted to say, her art is inspiring and her work ethic is also. And she is a babe, which is irrelevant but I cannot not mention this.

Flaps These are 2 really awesome ladies who make zines. Their dry, dry sense of humour is like the most amazing thing in the world. I was really happy when I found out that Flaps was actually a reference to female genitalia!

Vanessa Berry. For so many reasons, her writing, her existance, everythiiiing. Her cooking! The fact that for my birthday she included in my gift a handmade booklet of meal tickets, for special meals prepared by her!

World is good, even when times are bad. Or times are good even when world is bad? I have no idea, but hopefully you get the smell of my cooking. xoxo

Sometimes my life feels like I’m in that episode of the Mighty Boosh “Power of the Crimp” when the Flighty Zeus keep popping up. Sorry for the teenaged cryptic blah blah howevs, I am greatly looking forward to next week, a week of respite and lovliness and making sense again. But as long as I can occasionally grab a few minutes of rolling on the grass like a dog with an itchy back(!!), I’ll make it through.

Plus with the assistance of plenty of Max Brenner visits, life will be peachy in the face of ominous metaphoric clouds. Life is full of canaries and black rabbits and angry little dogs. Of incredibly sweet new friends and loyal and beautiful old ones.

On Friday we launched the exhibition “Words Nerds and other cataastrophes” which was curated by the lovely Chris Tamm and today I facilitated some workshops at the zine masterclass at the MCA. It was weird. Now I have big last week of school including 500000 assignments, 3 of which are relevant to design.

On Tuesday, my teacher asked if I had heard of the MCA and I was all “Heard of it? I’m giving a talk there in May!”.
Zine masterclass
And look at the list of hot babes I will be speaking with.
On Wednesday, my voice teacher made me cry, and I wish I had gotten the chance to namedrop this engagement before the waterworks burst forth from my ducts.

Big head, little head
Originally uploaded by spycore

teeheehee. My dog is tiny! Giant rabbit is giant!

1. Tomorrow Vanessa ships off to Germany to be a writer in residence and I painted this for her to take with!
2. This chicken kept escaping from the yard, which set me off on a meat eating crisis( documented here in comic form).
3. Tutored a knitting class with some really awesome kids at the Penrith Regional Gallery and we made these little knitted aliens after being inspired by the current exhibition(which is awesome: check it out, it’s well worth the time to get out of Sydney, and the god awful heat of the hellish western suburbs, it’s such an amazing exhibition, and the gardens are soooo amazing).
4. Realised that I am on the verge of having a bear collection. Great.
5. Finished comic rehab. Realised that I’m better than I give myself credit for.
6. Grew these flowers from seed! It was so satisfying!