Category Archives: Neighbourhood pleasures

May 12, 2014 · 10:41 am

These are a few of my favourite trees

The ‘Beloved tree’ banners are out in the neighbourhood.  A bunch of us put up the first couple, and I pedalled around attaching the rest on Mother’s Day.  This one is on a massive ironbark.

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It stands beside the tram bridge in Goodwood.

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This one is dwarfed by a huge E Camaldulensis in a park beside Brownhill Creek.

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This trunk has survived a lot of depredations, whether human, animal or insect.

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I’ve tried to capture a sense of its canopy…

 

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But it is hard to show all there is to see when you stand beneath its curved limbs and beside that massive trunk.  Needless to say it isn’t all about what you can see, in any case.

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This is the place where lorikeets sometimes nest.  I’ve seen them wiggling their way in through the hole they have nibbled out of the pace where a branch used to be, as well as flying out at speed like small, feathered, green comets.

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This next tree is an E Sideroxylon. It stands outside the Le Cornu warehouse on Leader St.

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I used to be able to reach its lowest leaves, but the chainsaws took off the lower limbs some time back.  It is still magnificent.

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The light wasn’t great for it, but since there is at least one appreciator of industrial buildings reading, here is a shot of the background. I oriented my banner toward pedestrians.

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Next, one of the largest E Cinereas in the neighbourhood, standing outside what seems to be a disused office in Leader St.  Perhaps people work there but are not interested in the garden!

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It has suffered the chainsaw too, losing a truly huge bough.
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Still glorious.

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Still vast.

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Finally, my old friend on the corner of Laught and East Sts.  I thought this was an E Scoparia at first, but while the leaves give amazing colour, the bark produces a different result than other E Scoparias I’ve dyed with.  Name, uncertain. Beauty, obvious.

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This time I was spared conversation with the tree hater who lives opposite this tree and can only see it as a source of litter.  I was on the bike, so picked up a bagful of fallen dried leaves.  When I have more carrying capacity I take fallen twigs and whatever bark or wood is lying beneath it in hopes of mollifying the tree hater. 

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Fabulous.  I must say that visiting all these beloved trees and wrapping my arms around each one… I did feel like a tree hugger.  And proud!

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April 16, 2014 · 1:06 pm

Craftivist pennants and another handspun hat

There have been some small moments of crafty completion in the recent period of day job overwork. The ‘thanks for cycling!’ bunting, which had been ripped down, was replaced after mending by a group of friends one sunny afternoon.

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Proper attention was paid to all its hanging particulars by willing fingers….

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And there has been still another Turn A Square made from the remainder of a skein of luscious handspun yarn.  Here it is, modelled by a particularly willing bowl.

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The distinctive crown shaping of this pattern is so simple, yet so effective. 

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Upcoming public holidays may prove more viable crafting time than recent weeks have done… and I am looking forward to it!  I have plans!

 

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March 31, 2014 · 3:48 pm

Things learned 3

Have I made it sound as though there was no real making at Second Skin, and it was all about the thinking?  Well, I was surprised by how pleasurable hand stitching and the odd spot of thinking were, but of course, there was making.

It began with string. This was part of an extremely cunning method of having all your measurements to hand without any numbers attached to them.  Hand twined string is further evidence of human genius, from my point of view.  I first learned how to make it from a basket weaver and was delighted and intrigued from that point forward.  Usually I make it from daylily leaves.  But this application of it struck me as further genius.  I know I always hate the part of pattern using where I have to compare my measurements to those contemplated by the pattern drafter.  Let me tell you, “The Vogue Body” and the one I am getting around in have little in common!  So many women’s feelings about clothing are really just feelings about our own bodies in the context of an environment where very few of us have the idealised shape and there is a lot of unwanted critique of female bodies.  What genius to sidestep a large part of that drama and along with it, simplify the process of design.  My string is made from tired old cotton that didn’t improve in some dye bath or other, but there were glorious examples of silk string, beautifully crafted by my fellow workshop participants.

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Then there was the infinity scarf.  I made two, because when I modelled a plain cream version for my daughter she liked it so much I stitched all evening to hem hers and bundled it next day along with the frocks… and promptly forgot to take a picture.  Mine, of course, still needs one hem!  But it has been touched by indigo as well as leafy goodness of other kinds:

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I like it very much!  I’d better finish the hem…

We had the good luck to be at Beautiful Silks in the aftermath of workshops on Indigo.  The bag below has also been dipped…  India said that this style of bag revels in the name tsunobukuro (I hope I have that right), which evidently translates as ‘horn bag’, because, of course, it has horns, which you tie together to create a handle.  Japanese design is so often beautifully economical–I did not fully grasp the geometry of this bag, but made it anyway and finished it a few nights ago.

I am not sure I can explain the feeling I have about ‘hornbag’ as an Australian…  and perhaps people who haven’t encountered Kath and Kim won’t be able to understand even if I try to explain this Australian phenomenon.  Those want to try could start with Wikiquote’s take on it.  I won’t trouble you with a critique of Kath and Kim right now, after all, we’re talking about things learned and things made!  Anyone in Melbourne could still take advantage of the fermentation indigo vats at afternoon sessions using them at Beautiful Silks.  The vats were set up when master indigo dyer Aboubakar Fofana was there recently.  Our getting to use them was an unexpected bonus.

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And finally, there was a dress.  It features E Crenulata leaves, happily found in a park near where I was staying.  India said: ‘everything will be beautiful in the end.  And if it isn’t beautiful, it isn’t the end.’  I think this is a beautiful piece of fabric, and I learned a lot from turning it into a dress.  Partly because of my feelings on the subject of myself in a dress, and partly because of the inevitable features of a first attempt (in my case), I think this isn’t finished.  Or perhaps it is finished, but I haven’t found its true owner yet.  But I am still glad to have made it and learned from it.  That’s enough for me.

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My eyes popped out when I saw the number of hits on this blog for today, (it’s usually a friendly but low traffic part of the glorious online universe) and then I realised there was a link in from India’s blog.  Thanks for stopping by if that is what brought you here.  If it wasn’t, and this workshop sounds like it’s for you, India Flint is running this workshop in Victoria later in the year, and there may still be places if that sounds like the holiday for you!

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March 19, 2014 · 4:19 pm

Drive-by dyeing and mending

On my bike ride home from work (about a 40 minute ride), I pass just one Eucalyptus Cinerea. Well, there are two, but one is inside someone’s front garden.  A person has to have some boundaries!  The street tree had dropped a small branch.

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I decided I’d better collect it.  Usually I carry a calico bag in my bike pannier for such contingencies, but this was what I found when I scrabbled about in the bottom of my pannier on the day, so in went all the stray leaves I could find.

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This tree has had to contend with a lot.  It has had a  very strange pruning job designed to protect the electrical wires that now pass through its branches.  The pruning took out a lot of the canopy, but the tree is still standing.  For this, I am grateful.

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Recent events have caused me to reflect on the way I think about trees on my regular routes… like old acquaintances.  I think about them as I pass, the way I think of people when I pass near their homes without visiting.  I notice what happens to them.  I check them over when I have the chance.  I remember how they were when they were younger, or before that accident befell them.  It’s not entirely unlike the way I notice people I don’t know well, but see out and about in the neighbourhood regularly.

Further along, I saw that my “thanks for cycling” bunting had been ripped and some of it was lying on the ground.  Soon it was in my other pannier headed for the mending pile.

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A few days later, the E Cinerea made it into the dye pot and produced its usual dependable flamelike orange.  I also collected some ironbark leaves that had fallen in the parklands near where we had exercise class.  Once the E Cinerea was all but exhausted I reused that dyebath with the ironbark leaves, thinking I would save water and energy, but clearly this was not E Sideroxylon–it produced that sad, damp little pile of fawn alpaca on the right.

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I have come to regard this as a sign: The orange leaves in the picture below are the E Cinerea leaves, which have gone from silver-grey-green to orange in the dyebath.  The ironbark leaves, on the other hand, have remained a robustly green shade even after cooking.

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And, I’ve mended the bunting ready to hang it again on a suitable occasion…

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March 2, 2014 · 1:08 pm

Thanks for cycling! The bunting.

There is a new segment of cycleway near our place that has been one of the upsides of living beside a major engineering project for most of the last 2 years.  It seems only right to celebrate.  The new segment isn’t terribly long, but is one of those little pieces of path that make a big difference to a cyclist.

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I started out with some bike themed fabric.  It was originally intended as a shirt for a small bike loving friend… but he grew quickly into quite a large, keen cyclist and my sewing queue moves slowly sometimes.  Some of the fabric became a bag and the rest was sitting there ready to go.  I decided in the end that worrying about aligning the grain was beside the point for bunting, so relentlessly pieced leftovers together until there was just about nothing left.

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Then I moved over into some purple fabric.  It dates back over fifteen years to when there was a shop nearby that sold offcuts from sheet and quilt manufacturing.  I made all kinds of things from those offcuts!  This came in one of the odd shapes that I am sure could be explained by someone who had been to the factory: a square with three squared off corners and one rounded corner.  Soon it was all triangles, some constructed from two smaller triangles.  On went the lettering.

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Some more of my vintage bias binding was pressed into action, and pretty soon…

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Last night a friend was visiting and she was keen on hanging it, so we had bunting hanging before dinner.
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Hopefully it will cheer up weary cyclists (and energetic ones) as they pass.
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February 22, 2014 · 9:54 pm

Where do I find the time?

I was at a wonderful birthday picnic today, celebrating my friends turning 7 and 40, respectively.  There was all kinds of interesting chat, of course, and in the midst of it another friend who reads this blog was marvelling at the way things seem to happen at my place, to judge by the blog.  I had to break the news that I write posts at all kinds of odd times and that their sequence isn’t always entirely mapping the way things happen at my place, and that I auto scheduled posts to load every two days while I was on holidays…  I guess I think the way that things really do happen is not quite such a good story!

But just in case…   here’s the story of my Saturday.  We were up early to go to an exercise class.  I was ready in plenty of time so went outside, removed the sock yarn from its eucalypt dye bath, put it to soak in rainwater and hung the soy-soaked-indigo-dyed sock yarn up to dry.  Then there was exercise, a ‘coffee’ (I don’t drink coffee so for me it was yoghurt and hot chocolate).  I knit a few rows on my sock.

Then there was grocery shopping and visiting an upholsterer who had calico flour sacks and hessian sugar sacks on the wall that had come out of old chairs he was refurbishing (I like him already).  Then preparing food and gifts and off to the picnic.  I knit more on my sock there.  Another friend was appliqueing on a pair of jeans which were her gift.  Then home.  Cleaning up and a short pause.  So many ideas in my head! I have a couple of hours to do what I like and so… I have samples of two trees collected yesterday.

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Dealing with them requires two empty dye pots but my two are full.

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They are the ones the sock yarn came out of at breakfast time. I empty, rinse and refill them. One with my friend’s street tree in case it might be E Nicholii (I live in hope, but not much!!)

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The other with leaves from a tree that has intrigued me every time I’ve driven to her house–but yesterday it was in flower and I was running early, so I stopped. Put the heat on them. While dealing with that I’ve remembered the sock yarn.  That bucket isn’t very clean, is it?  Better keep rinsing.

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Thank goodness we’ve had rain and the whole place is on rainwater at last. Must deal with the sealing fail on my dye jars.  That requires another free dye pot I don’t have.  Next.

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I decide to try to identify the eucalypt. Oh, remember to rinse the sock yarn.

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Uploading photos for this post takes a while, so I set about turning saved cardboard into tags to clean it off the desk.

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Miraculously I manage to find some of the lovely pre-used string and thread I’ve been saving… some of it with attached safety pins, and that gets reuse too.  It puits me in mind of clearing out my grandfather’s shed after he died.  String saved for re-use, straightened out nails, screws that have been saved from previous applications…

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Now these tags can join the ones that are already in the drawer made from last year’s calendar.  Out comes my favourite euc book.  If that tree is in the book it is E Stricklandii, which means I probably should have recognised it.  Mmmm.  A friend comes over.  More chat and then my beloved and said friend head off into the shed.  Rinse the sock yarn.  Put sample cards into the dye pots and turn them down.  One looks promising, the other not so much. Back to the computer, to check out my euc.  These leaves are not glossy… and so on….

Some work on another blog post.  Go to the bin to put the cardboard remains in the recycling only to find my beloved has put some greeting cards in there that surely shouldn’t be so readily disposed of… three new postcards created, one card saved for potential use as a stencil (lovely cut out design).  Check out my files for the last time I identified E Stricklandii.  Clearly I did try it out as a dye plant so there will be a comparison… Re-file craft books and fabrics. Check dye pots. Looking good.

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Empty sock yarn rinse water.  Tidy up in the laundy and see those slippers I finished ages ago but haven’t felted.  What the hey?  Put them in the washing machine and get out a timer so I won’t forget they are there (sure sign of overreach but always a good idea with felting).  Put timer in pocket.  Set up India Flint’s suggested fix for hard to seal jars (I think mine suffered from being heated too quickly despite using the lowest heat on the stove, but may as well add insurance).  Now they will be ready when the dye pot comes free.  Or tomorrow, if it comes to that!

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Timer rings.  Check slippers.  Not ready yet.  Go to find traced shape of my friend’s foot.

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Take drum carder and the vacola jars Dad picked up secondhand out to the shed.  Check dye pots. terminate the less interesting dye pot ready for the jars, pour the dyebath into a bucket.  Put the knitting nancy (french knitting kit) I found at an op shop in the box for delivery to friends who might use this, plus things from the picnic that need to go to their place.  Decide to make another dye jar with the pelargonium petals, since the pelargonium has stopped flowering. I must have been so optimistic when I started gathering them in this jar!

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Timer goes.  Slippers look about right. Take them out to cool.

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One slipper pair is perfect.  The other, back in for ten minutes.  Finish sorting out those jars of stuff, steep and store goodness.

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In they go!

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The dried avocado peels from the kitchen finally make it out into dyestuff storage land.

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Slippers come out just after our other dinner guest arrives (with dinner! bless her!)  I shape the slippers over chat with crackers and avocado and cheese.  And put a load of the really dirty dyeing stuff on to wash.  I need to keep an eye on the stuff, steep and store jars during the evening.  I am pronounced a nerd with glee…  After main course, one of our guests says she wants to ask a technical question, which is whether I could draft a pattern from a simple vest she has so that she can make one on a ‘trashed and treasured’ theme… Out comes the recycled tissue paper and we give it a go and find a vest pattern that might help with conceptualising construction.

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Well, it’s bedtime.  After heating extremely slowly (the dye burners win over the gas stove in the kitchen for slowly heating, clearly) my jars are now a little too hot… I turn them down and leave them to the dye pot timer.  Goodnight!

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January 29, 2014 · 8:51 pm

Harvesting the finger limes… with recipes!

We interrupt your regularly scheduled programme of fibre related crafts and natural dyeing for a dessert special.  Not interested?  You are, of course, allowed to leave the kitchen and I hope to see you back soon!

We have a little finger lime tree (Citrus australasica syn. Microcitrus australasica). This is a native plant but it certainly isn’t native to any place near me: it’s a tropical plant.  A friend was growing it in a pot in a seaside location that is windy and cold in winter and it was judged to need rescue by her horticulturally knowledgeable friends, who proposed me as a suitable new host. Colour me flattered by this! We’ve struggled to find it a spot in which it can manage through winter, and this year it behaved less like a deciduous plant through the colder months and we have had a bumper harvest.

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We have dozens of fruit this year instead of the three or four of the last two years. In the past, we would share the small harvest in a single special dish with the tree’s previous host.

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There aren’t a lot of cookbooks with recipes for finger lime on my shelf, so I made some up.  We had ten people for dinner and a very interesting and complex conversation one night and these dishes were so well reviewed I decided to share despite the absence of wool or eucalyptus.  If you have traumatic English boarding school memories of sago (tapioca), avert your eyes now! If, on the other hand, you love bubble tea, I am cooking with the baby sister of those bubbles. These dishes are gluten and dairy free and vegan as well as delicious….

Finger lime sago jelly for 10

Cook 1 cup of sago (seed tapioca, tapioca pearls) in 5 cups of water with 3-4 cardamom pods (to be removed when the cooking part is over).  Cook until the sago is clear.  I prefer to do this by bringing to a boil, stirring vigorously while the heat is on, then turning off the heat and putting the lid on for about 10 minutes.  Repeat 3-4 times.  The sago will absorb a lot of liquid this way with little energy being used and little attention from you.  Then, add the zest and flesh of 8-10 finger limes, juice of 2 lemons, 1 cup of sugar, vanilla and some ground cardamom if you didn’t use the pods.  Now is the time to take them out if you did use them.  Cool, refrigerate.

The flesh of a finger lime is like a mass of tiny spheres of tangy, sour, almost resinous flavour.  I cut the fruit lengthways in quarters to extract the contents with my fingers.  Mixing this with sago is like having the textural experience of sago (which I find sublime) paired with tiny explosions of intense flavour.

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Coconut custard for 10

Heat three 400 ml (13.5 fl oz) cans of light coconut milk–that makes a total of 1200ml (40.5 fl oz) coconut milk–in a saucepan.  Reserve a little to use in the next step.  In a separate bowl, blend the reserved coconut milk, 3 tablespoons of sugar (or stevia), 4 tablespoons of cornflour, ginger and vanilla until smooth.  When the coconut milk is warm but not boiling, remove from the heat.  Stirring vigorously, add the thickening mixture in a stream.  When it is mixed in, return the saucepan to the heat and continue to heat, stirring constantly, until it begins to bubble.  Cool. Serve with your finger lime sago jelly.

I hope some of you are lucky enough to be able to try finger limes!

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January 23, 2014 · 11:30 am

A Community Celebration

As I read The Little Book of Craftivism, ideas kept popping into my head.  This one took a little longer to execute than the mini banners. There is a row of immense, sugar gums (Eucalyptus Cladocalyx) over 100 year old in our neighbourhood which were scheduled to be cut down due to changes in the railway corridor.  Many people in our neighbourhood were part of a campaign to save them.

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We managed to save these trees (albeit very severely pruned) while dozens of others were cut down.  People have been saying to me when they visit the nearby local neighbourhood centre how awful it looks now that all the trees that used to stand between the neighbourhood centre and the railway have been cut down.  They often say how relieved they are that the ones we saved are still there–but they do not realise what went into saving them.  They don’t even know those trees were threatened.  There are still all night works and daytime works and continuing campaigns and about noise going on and many people in the area feel very discouraged living with the aftermath of all the infrastructure works.  So I imagined bunting that read ‘these trees saved by community action’ and a bit of a celebration of our having actually succeeded in this part of what we have tried to do.

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Well, I made the bunting.  And another member of our local group emailed out the most beautiful invitation to come and hang it up and celebrate the continued existence of the sugar gums.  And so a small local celebration, complete with our local MP Steph Key and our local councillor, Jennie Boisvert, who both put considerable effort into supporting our campaign.  I wanted to thank the woman who stared the campaign and was its mainstay, so I made her a little leafy bag.  Here it is filled with rolled up bunting ready to go and celebrate.

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And here we are, after a highly entertaining hanging of the bunting.

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I’ve made a tutorial on how to create this kind of lettered bunting, which you can find in the how-to page (link at the top of the blog) or here, if you’d like to try your own.  I already have another plan, personally….

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January 14, 2014 · 9:50 am

More tree loving craftivism

My second ‘banner’ has gone up another neighbourhood tree.  This one is my favourite E Scoparia. It was the first really promising dye eucalypt I discovered.  It used to be home to a pair of piping shrikes, who nested there in their little mud cup for many seasons.  In the last year it has acquired a nesting box and we’ve seen rosellas coming in and out of it.

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This is the tree my friends and I have been mulching and weeding and we have planted in an understory of native ground covers, mostly forms of saltbush, which are now doing really well.  If you have been reading a while you will have seen this tree protected from passing Royal Show foot traffic in earlier posts here and here.  Those images show how much the groundcover project has progressed in the last 18 months or so.  In the beginning, people would remove plant guards, pull out small plants soon after we put them in or just trample young plants by accident.  Not any more.  I think the evidence of care and the success of the surviving understorey plants generates more thoughtful treatment from passersby, and it’s clear that lots of local people now understand that their neighbours are making efforts that are transforming an almost bare patch of hard earth scattered with weeds and rubbish, into something lovely.  I collected the rubbish that had landed under it this morning and maybe that is ebbing a little too.

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So, four of us stood and admired this tree, delectable breakfast smoothies in hand, and tied on this little banner of admiration and appreciation.

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And here’s the full length picture…

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January 12, 2014 · 4:59 pm

Tree loving craftivism

While I was in Melbourne, I found Sarah Corbett’s A Little Book of Craftivism.  Yes, it is literally small, but inspiring out of proportion to its size.  It is about the work of the craftivist collective, together with proposals about how the reader might engage in their own craftivism.

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For those who might be wondering… one definition of craftivism: ‘Craftivism is a way of looking at life where voicing opinions through creativity makes your voice stronger, your compassion deeper & your quest for justice more infinite.’ More at the link.

I loved this little book from the beginning. This is activism of a gentle, slow kind.  It isn’t the only kind of activism the world needs.  But every social movement needs a variety of approaches–I’ve participated in many–and gentle is one of them.  This book is packed with organising wisdom, clear instruction, pictures that inspire and make you wish you had been there and examples of projects from the small to the enormous that offer plenty of scope for DIY.

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For a view of the book and its content, click here.  For a brief review with links to multiple other reviews and ways to purchase online other than through amazon, click here.  To purchase from the craftvist collective itself, click here and check the sidebar.

Did I mention finding this book inspiring?  I think it’s one of the highest compliments that you could pay to a book of its kind to say that I immediately wanted to go out and make some of the projects in this book and could immediately see places that could happen to good effect. Not only that, I tried my ideas out on my nearest and dearest and then created them.  My ‘mini protest banner’ is a little different to the cross stitched versions in the book–but nevertheless the same concept.

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I took:

  • a calico sack from a local business for my banner background (I offered to take the offcast bags from a shop and they accepted)
  • some not-so-glorious leaf print experiments for backing
  • some leaf-printed collars and cuffs for my frame
  • some eucalyptus dyed silk thead and
  • some secondhand bias binding… and…

Before long I had made two banners.  We hung the first one today. One of my friends offered the view that every day was a good day for this kind of event (I guess we’re friends in part because we agree on things like that!) so we had cool drinks of water and cherries and chat and then went out to admire the tree and tie on.  The 6 year old present wants to make more banners, which is additionally promising.

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This banner celebrates a river red gum (E Camaldulensis) that we managed to save from being cut down last year, with help from other local people and our local MP, Steph Key.  It has a legally mandated 3 m exclusion zone around it to protect the root zone, but this is not being observed very well lately and I want the people responsible to know that we care.  I had to measure the tree to be sure I had stitched on enough tape:  3.6 m (11′ 9”) around the trunk, well above the ground.  To give you a sense of its size… and the relative size of the banner (which is in the picture), I give you the full view.

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