Baby Duck's art show

Every year Baby Duck’s school puts on an art show. It’s very low-key – no champagne opening  night or sales! Just a couple of afternoons after school when you can wander around the school hall and see what the kids have been up to. Each class has a display, but every year until now they’ve been pretty similar. Oh look, kindergarten’s been doing self-portraits. Year 4’s obviously been learning about collage. Display board after display board full of individual drawings/paintings, of little interest unless it’s your child’s work.

I don’t know what happened this year but wow! Somebody lit a bomb under the art show. So much imagination on display! Lots of 3D artworks, lots of different artistic influences, from giant African masks to modern sculpture. It was a real pleasure to walk around and see something new and interesting at every turn.

Baby Duck’s class presented a giant underwater scene.

I heard lots of complaints about the endless balls of crepe paper they put into making this but one proud little duckling couldn’t wait to show it off.

Of course he had to point out which fish he did himself.

Why am I not surprised that his fish is back to front? Always likes to stand out from the crowd, that child.

The brown paper turtle was clever.

And I loved the coral:

One of the year 6 classes made a gorgeous spray-painted tree and hung it with wire-and-bead birds. So pretty and creative:

One of the kindy classes had made monsters out of tissue boxes, where the opening for the tissues was the mouth, rimmed with suitably ferocious teeth. I didn’t take a photo, but they were adorable!

Year 1 also had a bird theme. Not as delicate as Year 6’s, but very cute:

 

And then there were these feathered beauties:

 

It was a great effort. The teachers and kids should be proud of themselves. I know Baby Duck is!

What's on the wall?

Baby Duck says there are too many linktastic posts on my blog lately, and not enough about important things like him. He has kindly given me many helpful suggestions on what I might write about, from his grand scheme to earn Lego by watering the lawns to his marvellous artworks in the school art show.

Since he is one of my main readers, I guess I’ll have to pull my socks up – but not today. More on the art show anon, but today I’m going to show you the evolution of a quilting “artwork”, in the hopes that this will fire my enthusiasm to finish this one off. It’s been hanging on my design wall for about six months now, and though I still like it, I’m getting sick of looking at it! Time for a change.

This started life as a jelly roll, which is a fancy name for a set of forty 2½ inch strips rolled up into a pretty bundle like this:

I spent about three hours in December last year engaged in what is known as a jelly roll race, where you sew the forty strips end to end into one ginormous long strip, and then go through more sewing stages where the strip gets progressively shorter but wider, till you end up with a random-looking quilt top like this:

 

(Sorry if that explanation made no sense. If you’re interested you can see a video with a much more lucid explanation here.)

I decided to use this as the background for a garden of giant flowers. This was the first iteration:

 

Not quite enough flowers, I thought. My garden looked a little lost and spread out. Back to hacking printed flowers and black circles out of fabric, and a little rearrangement:

 

That looked better, so then I put all the stems in:

 

Mind you, none of this is sewn down yet, only glue-basted on (which is a technique I haven’t tried before: so far, so good. Nothing’s fallen off the wall yet!). The plan is to put the three layers of the quilt together and then attach everything as I quilt – save the step of sewing the quilt top first, then quilting later. Genius lazy plan, I hope. We’ll see if it works.

Then I started adding borders, and of course that was where I stopped – because the creative fun was all over. Adding borders and finishing things off is boring, at least for this attention span-challenged quilter.

But now it’s nearly December again (as Christmas-obsessed Baby Duck delights in pointing out) and way past time to get this down off the wall and into the finished pile. It’s so cheerful and fun. Hopefully soon I can show it to you in all its finished glory!

Happiness is ...

Happiness is seeing the first signs of spring.

Of course, I should have posted this about a month ago. The blossoms have all gone now, and spring has well and truly sprung. In fact, it’s having an identity crisis and masquerading as summer, with a forecast high today of 38 (that’s just over 100˚ for all you Fahrenheiters). Ouch. That’s a sweltering summer day.

Nevertheless, we were talking about spring, weren’t we? I love it when the first flowers of spring start to appear.

When I was a kid I had a little ritual. Despite being completely uninterested in gardens any other time of the year, at the beginning of spring I always wandered around the yard looking for new flowers. It was a joy to find those freesias poking through, and to smell their beautiful scent. Some years Mum had jonquils too, or snowdrops, and I would carefully admire and sniff each one (even the ones that had no scent – wouldn’t want them to feel left out!).

 

Not being a gardener, the only pretty flowers in my garden these days are the ones that appear by themselves on trees and shrubs.

But I still like to walk around and admire them all.

Tell me I’m not the only one! Do you have any odd rituals to mark the turning of the seasons?