high up in the trees

Looking back, moving forward.

Pausing near to the end of January, I am ready for all that comes this February.

From January, with all love and light and laziness…

{Up above.}

{The beginnings of a mixed berry pie.}

{Admiring the graphics of Olle Eksell.}

{Apricots from the one tree.}

January reads, continued…
Mulliner Nights, P. G. Wodehouse
Passing On, Penelope Lively
In the Wake, Per Petterson

From long ago... I have been leafing through old photographs, looking back, and I have found all is balanced.

(Are you ready to help Louise and I install our cabinet this coming weekend? I do hope so. In the meantime, please explore (if you haven’t already) Book by its cover and All Species, All The Time. Happy discoveries to you.)

(Happy to see & hear so, Sabine. Your beautiful family photographs prompted a little digging of my own.)

Quickly, quickly, a long weekend looms large.

{Especially for you, Small Collection is now available.}

Another Friday in the bag, and time enough to let you know that Small Collection can now be found for sale both here (AUD) and here (US). The Friday before a long weekend can oft have a quickly, quickly feel and today is proving no different; several Thelma’s felt pins have been sent on their express post way for a magazine photo shoot. An eleventh hour request for autumnal colours luckily was easy to fill. Fingers crossed they’ll feature. Tomorrow the smell of neighbouring barbecues will tickle my nose and taunt my stomach. Tomorrow is Australia Day, a day a whole heap of folk spend with tongs in hand.

Mail of the brilliant kind, to Louise and I, arrived to cap off a week that seemed to disappear before it found its legs. From Elizabeth (blue poppy) came a handmade card and a photograph of her beloved dogs in the snow (who I admire so often), and from Frips (frips mailart) came a host of paper ephemera so magnificent it made my heart flip to the left and then to the right. Thank you both so much.

{From Frips, an envelope to tickle Louise's fancy.}

{Seeking a little shade underneath a tall tree, one very warm morning.}

Happy weekend to one and all.

Something from Monday, something for Tuesday.

A Monday not spent by the computer.
The start of a new week falls on soggy heels. It’s been raining of late and the garden has been drinking it in. The herbs are standing tall as a result and the bird-feeder holds a pool of brown water. Inside, wet washing hangs and I have many things to do, what better reason could there be for tinkering on the computer, eyes forward?

A new project, inspired in part by Camilla’s Organized Collection and my willingness to play along, has resulted in another zine tumbling off the photocopier this weekend. Small Collection is a sixteen-page zine that features many of the new collages you have been seeing here and on flickr of late. Hand-stitched spine in coloured threads by Louise, this zine also includes a few rogue collage elements too.

Should the clouds clear, I’ll post a few photos. Until then, here’s a collage not featured in the zine for it came into being after the photocopier spat out the various colour and black & white pages.

{There is always room enough for you.}

Tuesday, early evening and by the computer.
Today, for all steps forward I seem to have gone in the other direction. Camera chips are proving bothersome (eating files, most mysterious, most frustrating), cats are mewing and circling my legs, and I had such high hopes of listing this zine on our shop and etsy store. It seems not to be. Here, until I do, are a few photos of the zine which survived the technical munching.

{Small Collection, a new zine in the bag.}

Shh, my very own Ark is taking shape.

{The happiest and saddest of times all rolled into one. (Click to see a whole lot larger.)}

I have white paint on my hands, left and right, and I am painting, with Louise, twenty-one small to large wooden animal silhouettes. Painting each animal front, side and back is proving fiddly, a little messy and enjoyably repetitive. I am free to let my mind wander as I tackle the narrow gap between the squirrel's back and her fluffy tail in fixed position. I can think of everything and nothing all at the one time. I can think solely of what I am doing… brush in, stroke, stroke, stoke, repeat. I think of what lies ahead, be it a patchy aardvark in need of a second coat or a task that needs attending to tomorrow. The cats lie around us and the whole day stretches before us.

Here is a small peek at what I mean.

{The first animals begin to take shape.}

Wooden animals jigsawed by hand in the dusty toolshed the other day, to be exhibited in a cabinet 2.8 metres in length. As part of Sticky’s Festival of the Photocopier, Louise and I have a cabinet to ourselves to house all our zines to date (and reading these zines will be a host of animals).

(Coming up very soon... 4th - 29th February, Platform, Degraves Street Subway.)

All manner of good things.

Good things arrive by post. It’s true. They really do. Little could make me happier than seeing a parcel with stamps affixed. Parcels, boxes, envelopes and lumpy packages from dear ones I have met through blogging, it never fails to make me smile. Seems only fitting to share the spoils with you as we sit on the green lawn of the Carlton Gardens once more. These past few weeks have been littered with postal delights wedged in alongside bills and pizzeria restaurant flyers offering specials and garlic bread entrées.

Thank you, Eshu (abstract the day), for your hauntingly beautiful pola-diptych postcards and polaroids (one for me and one for l).

Thank you, Alyssa (movingarden), for sending a handsomely coloured Horace to Louise and I (glean further on Louise’s blog). He arrived today cushioned in his white package by a bed of Spanish moss that somehow made it through Australian Customs.

Thank you, Lisa (Lisa’s Musings), for sending to Louise and I two small vessels and two small moleskine notebooks reworked with your brilliant flair.

Thank you, Fliss (udder), for a sizable handful of postcards and a delightful handmade brooch (currently adorning my bag).

Thank you, Frips, for those Beste Wensen voor 2008 postcard wishes. And thank you, Vanessa, for your zine, I am a camera, and other paper ephemera.

Tomorrow I plan upon making a trip to the Post Office to send a few parcels of my own out into the world … a small thank-you for all I have received, a snail mail hello to keep it all circulating and bubbling. Check your letterbox… soon.

In addition, I have been tagged by Danica and Fliss… two different and enjoyable tags.

Here it is, friends, the contents of my bag (today).

What you cannot see in this photo is a scrap of paper used for jotting down random thoughts and lists (now that I have a notebook from Lisa you know just what will be jostling alongside these objects used daily), my keys, several sprigs of sage in flower plucked from the Heide kitchen garden (now in a small bud vase on the windowsill) and a recently used two-for-one movie flyer for 2 Days in Paris. Absent, also, my 2008 diary… it sits by the computer and begs me to use it, but still I refuse.

And, how does my garden grow, Fliss? In short, not like this.

Taken this morning at Heide. Post exploring the exhibitions I can always be found running my hands over the herbs in the nearby kitchen garden. A few neat rows of green tomatoes, corn growing wild and tall, roses long since bloomed alongside herbs I don’t know the names of. This is how I wish my garden grew… a source of nourishment growing wild and tamed just a little, just enough so as to yield a personal harvest.

My garden grows thanks to a great deal of grey water. It grows haywire and it is full of spearmint, common mint, chives, succulents in all shapes and all sizes, calla lilies and violets, and all overseen by a rangy white-flowering hibiscus, a crimson-flowering bottlebrush and an olive tree that is stripped nightly by ringtail possums and daily by birds. It is home to many neighbourhood cats, blackbirds, doves and pigeons, fast hopping sparrows and darting silvereyes, ringtail and brushtail possums, insect life, and sometimes, just sometimes, it is also a shady and ideal spot for Louise and I to loaf and loll about. Elbow room may be scarce, but it is all our very own.

{Want to play along? Please, reveal the contents of your bag and how your garden grows… I’m all aquiver with excitement to see. One or the other or both, it’s up to you.}

Curled around a book.

10am
It’s the start of what promises to be a hot day, an extremely hot day if last nights weather forecast is to prove accurate. 41°C (105.8°F) is predicted. Another hot summer day and I have woken late once again. Summer time has me moving slowly, on the spot it would seem, and I am still, in between daily this and that's, reading, reading, reading, and occasionally heading to the local cinema.

This morning, not fully awake, I rolled over to continue reading Per Petterson’s In the Wake as translated by Anne Born. A Norwegian writer, Per Petterson is new to me and I want to read everything he has ever written. I am hooked, a fan already at page 117. I am halfway through this particular book and I do not want to do anything else but read it, in one swoop, uninterrupted.

Reading it, I wish words were my language. I wish I could write just like this, of Arvid as his memories return to him, of the natural world, and with such awareness. I also wish every morning could be spent as such, reading upon waking. Reading slowly and at length before deciding to rise. Rising only because the lure of coffee is strong and not because I need to.

Tomorrow will be the same, but it is realistically the last day of my summer break from routine. Everything around me is slowly resuming. The local café is open once again, yoga classes commence for the year, and I have a new diary for 08 that needs to be opened, finally. Why I use one I’ll never know. I dislike planning things so far in advance, save for the really big things. I prefer a loosely formed timetable that allows me a chance to deviate and peel off path.

{Infront of me. Please, click to see larger... much larger.}

{Up above. Please, click to see larger... much larger.}

A little summer slice for you. See, I haven’t had my nose buried in a book every day. I’ve left these photos large so that those in the northern hemisphere can clamber in and feel the sun on their faces if only for a little while.

(Eunice is currently reading Out Stealing Horses, and I shall follow her lead and read it next.)

** Want to hear what's in my ears? Head here.

Twelve days.

{With a steady focus.}

25.12.07 (scribbled on paper in lieu of a post as I lolled at my parents place)
Underneath the tomato plants growing tall to the sky in the back garden, post Christmas Day feasting, bellies full, Jelly Roll Morton playing on a cd player of old by my Dad’s feet, and a dove in the distance preening its tail feathers whilst perched high on the neighbour’s aerial. An increasingly sunny day, I lay in the shade on the old chaise longue, free of all cares and I read. I read, we ate, Mum read, Dad listened to his Jelly Roll and Stella enjoyed a moment briefly collar free. The tomatoes still green have been drinking in the sun and I am relaxed, tired, happy and contented. The evening stretches before me, and I am barefoot, as always.

04.01.08 (also scribbled on paper in lieu of a post)
Four days into a New Year according to the Gregorian calendar system and it feels sticky and hot and oh! so promising. A pale cherry-red sundress feels like too many layers and the back of my neck longs for a cool breeze. It is 35 degrees Celsius (98 degrees Fahrenheit) and my brown-leafed tomato plant in the back garden, unlike my Mum’s, is suffering terribly. It has also failed to yield any fruit thus far and it shows little sign of doing so. One small cluster of yellow flowers did appear late December giving me cause for hope but they have since packed their bags. It’s looking as though I’ll be purchasing my tomatoes from the local greengrocer instead of ambling out of doors and picking my own.

A New Year celebrated with dear friends and new faces has been and gone as have many languorous afternoons. Green grapes, red grapes, they’ve all been enjoyed, and in a jug of water floats a thin slice of cucumber, a wedge of lime, several roughly chopped lemon wedges, a few ripe strawberries and a handful of mint leaves. Summer so far spent largely indoors and with a book in my hands.

Read (in the glorious long days that stretch between Christmas Day and now)
Mr Palomar, Italo Calvino
All the Names, José Saramago
The Case of the General's Thumb, Andrey Kurkov
The President's Last Love, Andrey Kurkov
Northern Lights (The Golden Compass), Philip Pullman

I am enjoying much lolling and much lying about. I am enjoying being a night owl, sitting outside at dusk, occasional daytrips out of the city, quiet streets. I am looking forward to new things. I’ve made no resolutions for I never do and I am keen to hop back to blogging after my spell away.

Thanks for all the Christmas and New Year cheer sent my way, be it in comments or by snail mail (more on that soon)… I have much to show you but that’ll have to wait.

What I ought to mention though is our SALE at our online store. We are offering 25% off EVERYTHING.

Open now, our sale doors close on the 19th of January. Simply use the code LITTLEWOLF at the point of checkout.