Vertical Garden.

A friend of mine lives in an old home with an interesting design feature in her garden. The neighbours erected a huge concrete wall right on the dividing boundary, so with a stroke of genius and a very special gardener, a vertical wall of Australian Native plants was constructed. The trough at the bottom holds the water that is drawn up to the top of the wall and released to slowly trickle through the plants and keep the garden watered. It has lights down in the water to illuminate it all at night, and the whole garden is spectacular. What a wonderful way to disguise an ugly concrete wall.

Lurking in the Vegetable garden

 It was only because the cauliflowers needed watering that I spotted this little beauty. The leaves had wilted and fallen back to reveal the head inside.

These sprouts look bigger in the photo than they are in reality. They are actually about half the size of a golf ball, so a way to go yet.

More Coffee Brewing.

 I'm not sure that these images will have any further use, but it was fun playing around with a lighthouse picture that I took last month. They have all been 'brewed' in Percolator, then further manipulated in Photoshop. I think that the one above has the most potential for future use.

Having More Fun.

       This picture above is my hexagon quilt See Here put through an iPad App called Percolate.

Here I've selected various circles of pattern from the design above, enlarged, copied and pasted.
                                              This could be called Many Worlds I think.

Amazing what you can do with Gauze.

 Here I've coloured the gauze digitally and over laid it onto various backgrounds that suggest oceans.

                                                      I see the gauze as foam on the water.

This one is over a previous work of mine done with silk paints on thin bars of silk wrapped around cardboard. I like the changing colours under the gauze as well as the slightly different colours of the gauze itself.

Still Playing with Gauze.

 Here is a thoroughly distorted piece of gauze, or so you would think.  However I went on to remove even more threads to give a much more open look.

Here is the printers tray with the cyanotype butterflies again, over laid with some very distressed gauze then the colours are inverted. Printers Tray

Gauze Playing

 I thought that I might have a play with a piece of gauze, manipulating the threads and distorting it.

The same photo inverted in Photoshop so that I can obtain a grid of black lines for the next step.

 

 Here I have used a photo of a glorious sunset seen from a plane window and I have laid the distorted gauze grid onto that.

Here I've enlarged the gauze quite a lot before overlaying it onto the sunset. The idea has potential I think.

Beautiful Banksia.

This spectacular banksia was growing in a plantation of mixed native species, but I'm sure that it is not native to this North Eastern part of Victoria.

Bush Sunrise.

A beautiful sunrise in the Strathbogie Ranges in Victoria. Actually it wasn't quite as spectacular as the photo shows.  I used the sunset setting on my camera for the first time and I think it enhanced the colours somewhat.

Kindness to Trees.

 Obviously someone took great pains to preserve the roots of this ancient Morton bay Fig tree when they put in a new fence.

                 Unfortunately at first glance it does rather resemble some sort of dead animal!

Who Knew.

We had an enormous tree fern growing right up against a window that over the years had

managed to grow right up over the roof line. Not only was it blocking the light from the room behind the window, but the hot summer sun routinely burnt off all the fronds that were so high up.

 

 We were aware that you could make these ferns shorter by cutting off the top and replanting it, so this week we took courage in both hands and chopped the trunk in half, discarding the lower half.

What a surprise, the cross section of the trunk showed this amazing pattern, not really symmetrical but almost. I do hope that the replanted top of the fern grows again, so far so good!

Top all Finished!

 The quilt top is done, albeit with a few minor problems like running out of the blue fabric and having to make a few odd joins. I don't think that it will be noticeable once it is quilted.

A few of the hexagons don't quite meet properly in the middle either, but I don't think that anyone is ever going to be bothered, except perhaps me!

Black and White.

The Queenscliff High Light, also variously known as the Black Lighthouse, Fort Queenscliff Lighthouse or Shortland Bluff Light, stands in the grounds of Fort Queenscliff in Queenscliff, Victoria, Australia. It is one of three black lighthouses in the world, and the only one in the Southern Hemisphere. Together with the nearby white Queenscliff Low Light, it was built in 1862 to replace the former sandstone lighthouse of 1843 on the same site which was underpowered and deteriorating.^[1]
The lightsource is located 40 metres above sea level (focal plane). Depending on the tower's bearing it emits either a fixed light or an occulting signal with an interval of 15 seconds. The black lighthouse is one of four in Queenscliff that are used as a leading line to guide ships through the notoriously dangerous mouth of Port Phillip Bay.^[2]

The first navigation aid at Point Lonsdale was a signal station erected in 1852. In 1856 a red pillar beacon was built. In 1863 the original Queenscliff Low Light, a prefabricated wooden structure, was re-erected at Point Lonsdale and painted with distinctive black and red bands. It used a temporary light until a permanent light was lit in 1867. It was replaced by the current concrete tower in 1902, with the wooden tower dismantled and cut up for firewood in 1912.

All text from Wikipedia.

Queenscliff Victoria, the Historic Pier.

 'Splitting' the bay beach in two is the historic Queenscliff Pier, opened in 1879 and used for a variety of purposes, including the unloading of cargo (smaller ships), housing the local lifeboat and passenger ships/ferries. It was closed in 1936 and is now primarily used for fishing, although the beautiful old wooden passenger waiting room is occasionally converted into a 'fine-dining experience' as part of the local Seafood Festival'

 Showing the passenger waiting room and the shed on the left that housed the old wooden life boats.
They were launched down a ramp that opened to the sea out through the double doors facing the sea.

                                                 The wonderful old wooden waiting room.

It's Growing!

The quilt top is growing quite fast as I had already joined all the patterned pieces when I started it in 2009. It's only going to be a single bed size, so I guess I'm a little over half way there. It's fun to place the kaleidoscope panels, trying to vary the colours and patterns, but a bit tricky to line up the centres and side seams properly.

Galahs.

 These little foot prints on the beach were obviously made by webbed feet, so they couldn't possibly belong to these birds below that I saw in the grass up beyond the tide line.

     I've never seen Galahs on the beach before, in fact I've never seen them on the coast at all.

 They were very busy eating something, and since they are parrots I guess it must be seeds of some sort.

After they had flown away I couldn't even see what seeds they were harvesting. A lovely sight to see!

Another Foodie One.

This was the delicious entrée that was served at a recent lunch that I was invited to. It was quite enough on it's own for the meal, but it was only the starter. Very tasty!