Addendum to previous post

Dress photos! As promised :)

So this is how many photos of the divine Miss SP turn out: As a blur moving rapidly out of shot.

But when she can be persuaded to stay still for a nano-second or two, she's super-cute. Suuu. Puur. Cute.  Excuse the top under the dress. It was a little nippy here today. 

I wondered how short the dress was going to end up on my little miss, but it's just about perfect.

And I tied the straps at the back, which works very well for now.

Could be a dress for a first birthday party, which is sneaking up on this Mama much faster than I'd have ever imagined!

Upcycling nostalgia.

[This is my addition to the Weekend Rewind at 'And then there were four' for the 19th of August, 2011. I found it hard to choose a post this time, because I try to recycle/upcycle things quite often and blog about it from time to time, talking about everything from baby dresses, to floor joists, to pavers!

Click here to see some of the other things I've tried to reuse.

Click here to see how this little dress ended up on my girl.]

When I was a teenager I used to wear this cami. I'd never wear something that exposed my stomach like that now, and, in fact, I rarely wore it back then. To be truthful, even if I did want to wear it now I doubt I could get it on: I'm still breastfeeding SP and, well, you know the rest... But I've never been able to get rid of this little top because I loved the fabric too much. It's a crinkled sheer white silk printed with pink and blue roses: lovely!

It even has a fine edging of lace around the top.


So I was feeling creative today (you must catch those bursts of creativity and hold them tight to your chest in your hands) and I realised this top was just a tube with straps. It doesn't have so much as a dart to shape it. I washed it and smoothed it flat and left it to dry while I cut out a lining from some cream-coloured poly I found in my fabric stash. I sewed the poly into a similarly sized tube and sewed it inside.


Then I got shirring, and you know how I like shirring! My machine cooperated and I didn't need to re-thread it or tighten any screws even once! With my old cami I've made SP a pixie dress. I left the straps attached and long, and the dress can be used as a top as she grows.


Tomorrow I'll see if SP will stand still long enough for me to take a picture of her in it.


Happy weekend crafting, everybody xx

Contemplating carrots

We pulled up some carrots today, planted months and months ago in pots with our Kaffir lime and Tahitian lime trees.


Lots of colours: purple, white, a variety of oranges.


The artist in me (currently near dormant) couldn't resist arranging them into a painter's palette.


SP thinks they might be tasty, although I'm not sure if she means the carrots or the potting mix, which she has taken a disturbing liking to.

A whole lotta hole.

Sorry about the title. I don't know what came over me....

Super quickie today. I really should be rushing through the shower while SP is sleeping.

Renovations have begun! Or, rather, demolitions. Something to do with checking the foundations for the draftsman or something something (I am a gardener, not a builder). Anyway, there is now a large chunk of the back porch missing, and a hole big enough to fall into if you are not careful. I don't have a picture to put up to show you the scale of it, as Father-In-Law (FIL) is in them and I'm not sure of his views re: face all over the Internet, but you get the idea in any case.

So there you have it, first official renovation photos!

Wow, this came around rather quickly. And SP has woken up, missed my chance for a child-free shower, oops!

Mid-Summer Happy Snapping

Some pretties for the day; lots of flowers out there in the heat.

Amish Paste tomato flowers are almost abstract.


Lebanese eggplants in lavender and mauve.


I've even seen a few little spotted predatory helpers, although they are very hard to photograph in situ.


The pea straw mulch sprouted, and I let the pretty little nitrogen-fixers be to do their vital works.


The corn is flowering too. I am a little bit concerned: I have only seen one female miniature cob in the whole patch! Should there be more by now, if the male flowers are all waving in the air above? Am I getting only one cob out of nearly 40 plants?


And lastly, the roses well into their second flush, golden-lit by the western sun (shame about the stobie pole, but unavoidable.)

Encroaching on the nature strip

Why stick to gardening within your fence line? When I was planting my little lavender hedge, I couldn't help noticing how bare and drab it was on the verge. Most of it is compacted dolomite, which suppresses even the most tenacious of weeds, although someone at some point has planted a few daisies down the driveway end.


Over the last week, I got stuck into the beginnings of a verge-makeover. I have begun immediately adjacent to our fence by removing the dolomite, and adding a home-made mix of coir peat (dead-cheap), compost, a dash of manure and sand. This shot is from a halfway point, when the dolomite is gone but the new 'soil' only partially added. In a couple of weeks, once it's all settled in, and once this horrendous heat has subsided, I'm going to plant clumping native grasses by each post (perhaps Poa poiformis, Coastal Tussock Grass) and something small and creeping and grey-leaved in between (but what? A trip to the State Flora Nursery is in order!)


SP was fascinated by the coir peat, helping it to break apart in the water, my little gardener!

Next up will be greening the little bit of ground by the road. I'd like to put in mostly small indigenous plants (current daisies excepted, they may stay), something for the birds and the butterflies: grevillias, goodenias, correas (correas! Yay!), eremophilas, grasses...
I have to check with the council first, but I can't imagine they'd have a problem with what I would like to do.

What we are eating (2)

So it seems all I had to do was post pictures of unripe tomatoes and they would become ripe!
We've picked delicious Wild Sweeties (the ultimate bite-sized snack for SP), tart Tigerellas, and sweet Black Russians.


Tigerella left, Black Russians right, Wild Sweeties much too small to bother cutting in half and eaten too quickly for extra photos anyway. All three are a goer for next year.


We are up to our eyeballs in zucchinis and have begun passing them on to other people when possible.


Every few days now we're also picking butter beans, squash, fancy capsicums (the little brown 'chocolate' capsicums are cute and nice, but perhaps a little too finicky to bother with next year, bit of a pain to deseed for eating.)


Overall, the vegie garden is looking quite lush, but, of course, is using masses of water despite my best efforts at trekking all the rinse water from the washing machine up to it (and 'effort' is the appropriate word here. Never let it be said that gardening is easy work). I am very much looking forward to getting in a water tank soon, and I have capitulated and agreed to get a plastic one even though they're quite ugly compared with a traditional colorbond tank (plastic means we can get a bigger one and it can be dug partially into the ground, something you can't do with a traditional tank).


The next few days are predicted to be 39 degrees, 42, then 41. We will be languishing inside in the air conditioning and only venturing out in the morning and evening to keep things alive as best we can.