Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not. Ralph Waldo Emerson
These are the people, things and places I love, in no particular order. The Husband feels he should appear first, bah, humbug…
Friends
Sarah, Ruth and Julia. Friends since 1978
Julia dishes the dirt at my wedding. Why did I invite her…? Oh yeah, she’s my oldest friend.
Ruth and Nik’s wedding day
Jen’s pre-wedding portrait. She looks gorgeous!
Animals
The Girls. Three Australorps and three Isa Browns.
Ewenice and Ewedora with their boys Rambert, Ramsey and Lambo
Quilts
My heirloom quilt. English paper piecing. Many thousands of hexagons, each sewn by hand, and then quilted by hand. Nearly a year of work.
Anna’s Garden. A quilt/playmat for my great-niece.
One of my favourites. It’s called Desert Spring. A man’s quilt.
Made for an avid Swans supporter
A tui for Anne. Not a quilt, a wall hanging, for a Kiwi friend who was homesick in Canada.
My Husband
The Art of Nature
The big old pear tree at the bottom of my paddock in Dorrigo, backed by
early morning mist and lit by the rising sun.
The colours don’t look quite real, but actually they’re even stronger and brighter than this.
I love the way the feathery cane flowers are echoed by the flames above them
A deep, intensely blue summer sky, heaped with
crisp, solid-looking white clouds. I’ll give that a thumbs up!
Rain’s on the way, but first, here’s the pot of gold. If you look carefully,
you can just see a faint second bow at the extreme left.
Pyrography: drawing with fire. A superheated wire is used to draw on wood, using stronger or lighter pressure and different angles to achieve different effects. The spoons make good gifts, and the designs, being burned, are non-toxic and don’t come off. You CAN cook with them, but most people don’t!
Please may I have some more?
The sadly now-rare spotted quoll
Chloe the golden lab, a gift for Donna, her owner
Rowing boat Lily at rest
A honeybee at the heart of the sunflower
talltalesfromchiconia 
What a lovely wee blog! I love the spoons above, but as a half-kiwi, I’m even more drawn in by the tui wall hanging – did you make this, it is stunning. I miss waking up with the song of a tui, sigh. Cockatoos just don’t cut it 😉
Thank you for visiting and replying. Yes, I made the tui hanging for my Kiwi friend Ann, who was missing the sounds of home when she lived in Vancouver. We get some butcher birds in Mackay, which is a lovely sound to wake up to. My vegie garden is going to have to wait till after the Wet, and will all be in raised beds to keep its feet out of the water. What I’m currently working on is my tropical garden, which is just for pretty, coolness and a place to sit. My worm farm has been up and running for about 4 months now, and is working well – plenty of worm tea for the dwarf fruit trees. I don’t think I’ll be going for the community garden option; I think I want to be able to cast an eye over what’s growing and what’s invading more often than a remote plot would allow. So I just have to get creative and find a way to make things fit. My main problem is that I’m still trying to work out what will grow here! Kate
Ah, ok. What to grow… well pretty much anything except stone fruits I think! I’m only a beginner, but have grown celery, silverbeet, spinach, carrots (purple and orange), beetroots, parsley, dill, tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, lemonbalm, corn, calendula, nasturtiums, leeks, chives, pumpkin (jap is best for tropics as far as I’ve seen), butternut squash (the rats found it and ate the whole lot, the skin is much thinner and they can get to the seeds), garlic (partial success, possibly due to too much shade), eggplant (fruits prolifically), courgettes, bananas, pawpaws. I’ve read of people growing vanilla and pepper as well. I’d recommend cherry tomatoes for hardiness, or get some good fruit fly control. I hope that gives you some ideas 🙂
Oh thank you! My capsicums are flourishing, so’s the silverbeet and spinach, the tomatoes were hopeless (I put them in too late to get established before it started to get really hot), my herbs are doing really well, the rocket bolted about a week after I put it in, my lemon balm is amazing. I don’t think peas or beans do that well here unless grown in the winter; peas like it nice and cold when they start off, same with broad beans. My stevia did really well, and is now setting seed, so there’ll be a few more plants of that next year. I’d love to grow pumpkins and courgettes and eggplant, but I simply don’t have the space at the moment. I love the idea of growing my own vanilla – it’s a climber, isn’t it, so maybe I could grow it up the posts of the pergola. I really appreciate your help…
Your heirloom quilt is just fabulous… what an artist you are!
Wow, thank you! There’s a lot of work, a lot of memories and a lot of good stuff sewn into it, and I wouldn’t part with it for any money. I would like to make another one day, but it’s such a big commitment of time.
What a great idea, I need to revise my About Me. Desert Spring quilt would be one of my favorites too.
Hi there! I’m glad you like the idea; pictures can be so much more descriptive than just words in this context.