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| Sunrise over the Tawharanui Penisula |
I’m not sure how it works, but there seem to be times of
calm and then nexii (hopefully that is the plural of nexus) of events in life.
For us, this last month or so has been a swirl of energy and change. Now we are
starting to settle into the future with optimism and plans a-plenty.
We are now officially ‘childless’ – empty nesters - or at least, they are all at University or in
work and will only arrive back home when it suits them. I am told that the
theory of children leaving home is not much more than a myth in practice. Any advice please?
New Job.
I have already talked about the new job, and so far, so good
with this!
New house.
Once we gave up looking for a house, deciding that it was
too difficult to find a single property which ticked enough of our boxes, one
simply dropped on our lap. Within three weeks we were moving in, and now we can
begin the process of making the changes which, if it all works out, will
gradually allow Brian his dream of being off grid and growing at least some of
our food. Stage 1 (a small step) – the wormery and a compost bin will be
delivered this week. We are used to having chickens, but decided to give them
to the neighbours rather than move them here, however we quickly found that we
couldn’t stand the thought of the kitchen scraps going in the waste. The
wormery will eat up pretty much all of our waste food and provide us with both liquid fertiliser
and compost. I have also been improving my chainsaw skills, Brian keeps
whizzing round on his new toy, the ride on mower, and I bought two machetes
today to begin cutting a few paths into the 5 hectares of bush! In essence the
house has been designed as a passive house, and has the bones for becoming a
great eco-house. This will be mostly Brian’s project as he is the engineer, though we have been
jointly interested in the ideas for a long time.
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| Home for the Midgelow-Marsdens |
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| View to the beach |
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| The lovely, and not at all shy, NZ kingfisher |
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| Local beach with fabulous dunes and clear seas. |
New Studio
A big draw to this house was the barn. Giving me space to
develop a studio for myself and maybe for classes. At the moment I have simply
placed boxes around tables, run an extension lead in and put the sewing machine
out. It will serve! It was christened last week when a couple of friends came
over and we stitched for the morning.
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| Studio? Well a barn with boxes at the moment! |
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| Ruth and Marj - talking or sewing? |
New Project
One of my aims this year was to enter the World of WearableArt (WOW). I have made odd
muttering noises about doing this since moving to New Zealand, but the incredibly
high standard of entries and the over the top nature of the wearable art has so
far made me delay any entry. This year I had some ideas developed, building on
my ‘Change’ sculpture from the Kaipara Sculpture Park. Then the house move
happened and I had thought that I would put off entering once again. However,
yesterday I decided to make my attempt at entering WOW my inaugural work for
the new studio, before getting to grips with an exhibition for the Knitting and
Stitching Show in October.
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| Bit of an idea for the WOW piece |
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| Going to use these lush stainless steel fabrics for the piece |
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| End of day one, seeing how the fabric might behave in 3D |
Don’t forget to check
out my teaching dates around NZ, Australia and the UK in 2016. My outing to Koala Conventions (24 June to 5 July) still has spaces, if you want to go, get in touch with Wendy soon. It will be a great group of like-minded creative embroiderers, have a go at any of these courses there:
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| Golden Romance -silk fibres, paper, gilding and stitching |
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| Miao Folded Thread booklets |
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| The Crown Jewels gone mad - have fun with Angelina fibres |
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| Time for tea - Teabags, gel medium and stitch |
