With Spring awakening here in Australia, I'm looking forward to the butterflies, roses and new life happening.
I had some fun decorating the lid of this pretty yellow box which I am using to store cut out butterflies ready for some projects...
Here's a close up of the lid. I used script paper, a label and a gorgeous image of Maude Feely with an embroidered rose embellishment.
Fascinated by butterflies, I picked up this vintage preserved butterfly under glass...
Speaking of butterflies, here's an unusual one! My kitten, Jasper, was a great model for me, and I used Photoshop to give him fairy wings.
He's grown up so quickly - here he is as a small kitten with gorgeous blue eyes, with his cute cheeky brother. So hard to choose!
I was won over by his pretty face!
He was a rescue kitten - he's still in his cage here, too young to leave his mum yet.
At 10 weeks old, he quickly settled in to his new home. He loves to sleep next to my computer as I work.
He now has yellow eyes - a pity to lose those sweet blue eyes, but he is still gorgeous. Now 10 months old, he's been a great photography inspiration for me...
Of course, he loves lace and fabrics, and always chooses to park himself in the middle of whatever I am doing!
A couple of months ago I attended a Doll and Bear Show in Wyong. I was stunned at the artistry of many of the 'reborn' dolls there. I had a cuddle with one of them... so sweet!
You'd easily be tricked into thinking it was a real baby!!!
A paddock full of lambs attracted my attention on a trip to Oberon. I only had my phone as a camera...
The drought is awful, and everywhere farmers are hand feeding and desperate for rain. This looks green after a shower, but there's not much to graze on. And this is usually pretty good land...
Lastly, here's a sweet mother and baby encounter on a trip to Pebbly Beach in the Murramarang National Park...
I'm joining Wen at AppleApricot for Simply Neutrals # 48. Join us there for a feast of neutral beauty... Wishing you a Happy Spring or Fall, wherever you are.
Hello friends, Today I'm presenting some pictures of a special rose named in honour of the William Morris, whose art I have long admired.
I'm sure you'll recognise many of his designs...
William Morris (1834–1896) was the 19th century's most celebrated designer, famous for his wallpapers and textile patterns. His wife Jane (Burdett) embodied the Pre-Raphaelite ideal of beauty. She was a model and muse for him, and also for Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
I love this quote of his...
'Speak not, move not, but listen, the sky is full of gold. No ripple on the river, no stir in field or fold, All gleams but naught doth glisten, but the far-off unseen sea. Forget days past, heart broken, put all memory by! No grief on the green hillside, no pity in the sky, Joy that may not be spoken fills mead and flower and tree.' William Morris
I'm sure he would have loved this rose named after him.
Here's the first bud of Spring. As the rose matures, it gets much bigger and fills out with densely packed petals, then it softens in colour as it ages. I love it at each stage.
The rose has a beautiful scent to match.
I found this lovely pale pink cloudy vase below at a market, and it's perfect for this rose. The scrapbook paper background reflects a similar style rose, and a vintage baby dress with rosebuds next to a lacy deep pink evening dress made a lovely foreground in the golden early morning sunlight.
In the picture below, one of my cushions had a similar rose featured on it, and this made an interesting background against op-shop dresses in shades of pink to match.
I added some texture layers in Photoshop to make this dreamy image below.
Hello friends, In my previous post, I started to describe my process for making my new blog header (version 2 is below), but I wandered off the track a bit to tell you the story of the background - a texture from the wall of the Yarralumla Shearing Shed stands in Canberra, Australia. My new blog header is a celebration of things I make and love... collages, fairies, old books, vintage laces, luggage, cabinet cards and ephemera. The second version here was too large, so I had to cut down its depth while trying to simplify the clutter a little. (I get inspired and want to include everything!)
Below is one of my collages made for a friend's wedding anniversary.
Some velvet forget-me-nots...
Some old letters I have collected and tied with seam binding ribbon...
Embroidered flowers from an old linen table cloth...
A metal heart which I covered with scrapbooking paper...
A gorgeous vintage bridal or bridesmaid's headdress from Lakeside Vintage in Burrill Lake...
A vintage hat or head piece...
My vintage Fairy book with a vintage card tucked inside...
Hello my friends, You'll need a good cuppa for this one, it's a rambling yarn! I've been working for a while on creating a new blog header for this blog. I took photos of various vintage elements I thought I might use, then extracted some from their backgrounds so I could use them in a digital collage. I did a few versions. The one below was too busy and cluttered (yes, that's me!).
I started with a base image of a shearing shed - the Yarralumla Woolshed, Canberra, where I used to go bush dancing in the 80's and 90's and later singing for the dances. In the pictures below I'm singing at this woolshed for a bush dance (the waltzes) while holding baby Breandan in late 2002 - that made it very hard to breathe properly to sing!!! The band (part of The Canberra Ceili Band) is in front of some of the old shearing stalls, and the sheep would be pushed through the openings behind us after being shorn, down a chute to wait under the shed to be herded back to paddocks or into trucks. It still reeks of sheep and lanolin, but being a country girl, that brings back good memories for me. See those boards behind us - that's where I found the background texture.
Here's the background texture...
I'll digress now to show you this magnificent shearing shed and tell you some of its amazing history... The magnificently large woolshed was constructed in 1904 for the landowner, Frederick Campbell, who ran a sheep farm there on 8 000 acres, called 'Yarralumla'. He had bought the Yarralumla property in 1881, and completed his mansion in 1891. He had been using an older woolshed previously. The Yarralumla Woolshed is such an iconic building for the middle of Australia's capital city, not far from the Governor General's Lodge - which was originally the homestead owned by Campbell. On his father's death, Campbell owned 39 000 acres of prime land in the Australian Capital Territory - including Belconnen and Yarralumla. His grandfather had owned Duntroon, built in 1833, the oldest surviving building in the ACT and Blundell's Farmhouse, built in 1860. Here's the outside of the woolshed... It's since been made accessible for disabled people as it's used by the community for various functions. I took these photos on a sentimental visit in 2017.
The back door - this is where we entered on bush dance nights. In Summer we would gather outside in the cool evening to chat and rest after the strenuous dances. In Winter, we huddled together and kept dancing to keep warm - the poor musicians froze!!!
Here's the ramp for herding sheep in to be shorn. There are sheep pens underneath too.
Here's Terry McGee inspecting his old stamping ground... He played Irish flute in many bands between 1970 and the 1990's for many of the bush dances here. Funds were raised for Canberra Stereo Public Radio (later ArtSound FM), a community radio station dedicated to folk, jazz, poetry and radio drama. Some of the bands include Colonial Experience, Dancereye, The Perfect Cure and The Canberra Ceili Band. Sometimes there would be 500 people at the dances!
Inside, the sheep stalls and pens are intact, though the machinery has been removed.
Below is the new dance floor. The old one was getting dangerous, and the whole shed would rock for some of the dances! You can see the doors to each shearer's sheep pen, and the boarded up chutes for the finished sheep to slide down to the pens underneath. Poor creatures!
I tried to find pictures of dancers at the woolshed, and these pics were all I could find. They are from The Monaro Folk Society's webpages.
I found many articles about the woolshed on Trove, ( The National Library of Australia's search engine of books, images, historic newspapers, maps, music and archives), including one from The Age, July 1904 when the woolshed was just finished. Fred Campbell (the Yarralumla property owner) was the President of the Queanbeyan Hospital, and he offered his new shearing shed as a venue for a Winter Ball as a source of fund-raising for the hospital. I've included excerpts from the article below, which paint a wonderful picture of this community event. A large table was set up for a midnight supper, and the women would have baked their best cakes to bring for it, being a fund-raiser. This is the official first dance at the new Yarralumla Woolshed! (They were a regular event at his old shed after the shearing, as I found in Trove.)
The Queanbeyan observer also reported the event, giving more detail about the shearing shed's working life:
The Yarralumla Woolshed in 1925, with its Shearers and Rouseabouts Quarters and kitchen.
Photo from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yarralumla,_Australian_Capital_Territory
Below are some interesting historical images taken from The Yaralumla Woolshed Management Plan 2014:
The wool, from merinos of Boonooke and Wanganella extraction, became one of the most valuable in the State, according to Campbell's obituary in The Tumut and Adelong Times (NSW), 28 August 1928, p 1.
Campbell had his three-storey mansion completed in 1891, attached to the older elegant, Georgian-style homestead, the main parts of which were erected from local stone in the 1830s. You can see the original older homestead behind the mansion below.
The Commonwealth Government bought Yarralumla from Campbell in 1913, and the land and homes of all who would be in the way of the new capital of Australia - Canberra. I can't help feeling sorry for Fred Campbell, who borrowed money to build this dream home for his growing family, developing his sheep farm extensively, building the biggest and best woolshed in the district, on this beautiful land by a major river. The Canberra Times reported in 2013, 'One hundred years ago this week, Frederick Campbell (1846-1928), the squire of Yarralumla, was overwhelmed with emotion as he said goodbye.' Campbell's vacated home was used as a temporary residence for the Governor-General of Australia. Another three-storey block was erected behind the existing one and a new entrance portal was constructed on the southern frontage. A stable block was constructed to the west of the structure and cottages built for staff. Since the 1920s the building has been extended and refurbished several more times; but the basic structure of the 1891 house can still be seen clearly when viewed from the south. I prefer the old homestead, seen on the right in the photo below.
Government House as viewed from the front in 1927.
Attribution: By Unknown - www.nla.gov.au (National Library of Australia), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9948277
Government House as viewed from the left side in 1927
Attribution: By Unknown - www.nla.gov.au (National Library of Australia), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9948261
Government House, Canberra, commonly known as Yarralumla, is the official residence of the Governor-General of Australia.
The following picture is the current Government House with its official frontage added on later:
Photo by Figgles1 - https://www.flickr.com/photos/figgles1/11997054613/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30959583
The Yarralumla Woolshed was hired out for local sheepfarmers to continue using until 1964. At its peak, an average of 20 000 sheep from the local region were shorn each year, going through 15 shearing stands in the shed. The last shearing season was 1964. In its 60 years, the shed has seen one and a half million sheep shorn! Another article from Trove describes the last shearing...
The Canberra Times (ACT : 1926 - 1995) Friday 20 November 1964 p 9
It's really weird when you find an article on trove written by a friend, and your name appears in it... As I was searching Trove I found Bob Hefner's article about Bushdancing in Canberra in 1989, and I found myself in history! Even weirder when I had changed my name by Deed Poll from Cathy Moran to Jesse Rowan since then!
If you'd like to hear us, I've put together a short video of the Canberra Ceili Band back in 2002 playing for a Ceili dance at the National Folk Festival, Canberra.
You can read more about the history of the Yarralumla Woolshed from these references I used:
It may not be pc to include Rolf Harris after what has come out about him, but he did a good job of this Australian shearing song, and explains it well. The old pictures are very evocative - you can get the whole Australian shearing experience here!
That was a major digression from my original topic of creating a new blog header, but I found it fascinating to read up on the history of the area and the Yarralumla Woolshed - since I lived only a kilometre away, in one of the original old worker's cottages from when Canberra was first being built, and I went to so many wonderful bush dances there.
I'll show you more about my blog header next post!
