Sunnymeade Garden 2.

A corner of the Persian Garden.

Sunnymeade Garden.

The Egyptian garden, just heady with the perfume of the huge lilies.

The walled garden, usually a mass of roses in Spring.

The sunken 'hot' garden'

I have just had a few days away, and one of the reasons was to visit this wonderful garden called Sunnymeade. It's in the north east of Victoria and is the concept and work of one extraordinary young man. He does everything, from the design, the planting, the stonework, the propogating, the shaping, trimming, weeding and just everything, the only help he receives is from his parents.

I have visited this garden on many occassions, but never in the Summer before. It's usually been too dry for the garden to warrant being open to the public at this time of the year, but the rains have been excellent and the garden is just bursting with colour and perfume.

I thought that I'd share a few glimpses of Sunnymeade with you.

The garden is designed with many different 'rooms', and here are 3 of them.

Now that's a potato.

Look what I found in our potato patch!

South American Machine Embroidered Souveniers.

I will keep this little change purse though, it might just come in handy one day.

While doing a spot of tidying up and throwing out I came across these machine embroidered pot holders that I bought somewhere in South America. Whilst the designs are fun, the fabric is very shiny synthetic and totally unsuited for picking up hot pots and pans. I decided to keep the designs on the computer for future reference and to throw out the originals.

I'm not sure where this is going, or if indeed it's going anywhere! Time will tell.

I was going to hand stitch on this piece of fabric, but after having sorted out the threads, I decided I would do a bit of background stitching by machine first.

Using up the Dyes.

The greens all look off in this picture, but they do in fact tone together quite well.
Do you see the little owl at the bottom right of this piece?

Rather than waste the left over dyes, I over-dyed bits and pieces of already decorated fabric. Bits from screen printing classes and so on. Some of the results have great potential I think, like this one.

More Dyeing.

I'm always too impatient to see the results, so leaving the covered bundles batching in the sun for 4 - 5 hours is hard. Must get on and do something else while I wait.

I don't think that I've got the bands tight enough, but we'll see!

All tied up and ready for some carefully placed dye.

Some of the dyed fabrics have possibilities, but a lot are very uninspiring. I think I'll over-dye the boring ones, being a bit more careful about colour placement and fabric manipulation.

First project for the New Year.

Batching the dyes in warm sunshine.

Dyeing in my laundry, no studio unfortunately.

None of these fabrics are quite right. I feel a dyeing session coming on!

Starting the research and ideas for a new project.