I'm Back! (& I'm starting 2008 with an imaginative blog title as you can see!!)

Well despite my best intentions I haven't had a chance to blog since getting back late on Wednesday night. This means this is a bit of a long post as I have received some beautiful postcards and Christmas cards. More to come on my next post.

(Wonderful textural fabric postcard from Jacqueline in the Netherlands)

(Karin Hutchinson's beautiful Christmas card)

(Lovely beaded Christmas card from Danielle & Stephanie)

We had a lovely family type Christmas and holiday in Perth and Josh, my 19 year old son and myself, drove back on Wednesday. Unfortunately (major understatement) parts of Western Australia have had terrible bush fires again and one of them was in a National Park that we would normally drive through to get back to Kalgoorlie. The road was closed as a result but due to some sort of error some trucks were allowed through last weekend and a number were caught in the fire. The road has been closed ever since and as Kalgoorlie is quite isolated and is basically serviced by only a couple of major roads we had to take a very long detour to get home. A normal trip takes us about 7 hours but it was 14 hours this time (we did however get to see parts of our state that I have never seen before!!). Anyway we are home and trying to cope with extremely hot summer temperatures!

As I anticipated I was not productive at all while I was away but I have come back very motivated and keen to get into some projects. The only thing I took with me to work on was a mini abstract art quilt that is based on some of my rusted fabric. I am doing lots of random hand quilting on it and it was very relaxing as I didn't have to concentrate too hard.


I did a bit of shopping while I was away - couldn't let the opportunity to get some new decorator napkins (serviettes) and fabric slip by, could I??? These are the napkins - I showed a lot of restraint considering how many beautiful ones there are out there!

And these are the fabrics I bought - I have nothing in mind for them - just couldn't resist the colours and patterns (although the two heavy weight ones would make great totes). Aren't they beautiful? They all look much much better in real life - especially the lightweight Indian ones that have lovely delicate gold bits that just don't show up in the scan.

And some more beautiful fabric postcards -

(Ruth Kelly's gorgeous Pattern Fabric Postcard)

(Ruth Kelly's ethereal Fragments Fabric Postcard)

Now to go make some art to share before I go back to work on Monday!