2022 and start of 2023 Update

Hello! I know it's been a while, but don't worry, I never intended to abandon this blog. It's just that, well, life got in the way for a while. So if you'll indulge me, I'll do a little update on the arts, crafts, garden, hobbies, and all the other random stuff that this blog covers. Then hopefully I'll do some expanded posts on a few different topics soon.

2022 was a bit of a topsy-turvy year for me. "Strange" is the word I've heard most when people were describing their year, and I'd have to agree.

Me

I was diagnosed with several 'new' chronic illnesses. I was already pretty sure I had most of them for a while, so there weren't any big surprises, but it was nice to have the diagnosis confirmed. I was then able to start sorting out the best treatments, etc. This kept me busy with appointments, new doctors, new medications, etc. 

 

Videos

My style and sewing Youtube channel has been continuing. In the beginning I was hoping to make a video once a fortnight, but in 2022 it ended up being once a month, on average. I'm still very happy with that, because along the way I've learned many new video-making skills, and it's been a lot of fun. My channel is here if you haven't heard about it yet and you're interested. 

 

Arts

2022 was a topsy-turvy year with art, too. In the first half of the year, my Collective and I staged 3 exhibitions. (That's a lot!) Then we took a long break. I didn't do any art for a long time -- I guess I was burnt out. Around July I slowly started doing some art journalling and started a junk journal. I wanted to ease back into things by doing something very low-key and low-energy friendly. In December and early January we had 2 exhibitions scheduled, so towards the end of the year I started to ramp things up a bit and make sure I did everything I wanted to for those. Plus, I made a real-proper website for my real-proper artist stuff. It lists all my past/current/upcoming exhibitions, projects I'm working on, etc. It's not quite finished yet, but if you'd like to see it, here it is.

Crafts

Arguably, a lot of my real-proper art has some definite crafty elements to it, as you can see above. Unfortunately though, I didn't do much crafting just for myself in 2022. I did start a new tablet weaving, but the tension was wonky and it was a bit of a mess. Husband promised that he would make some improvements to the weaving loom he made last year. After some delays, that was done last week and I started a new weaving. (Yay!) It's going to be a bracelet, but I'll probably end up with 2 or 3 as the base threads have to be at least as long as the loom, so I may as well make as many bracelets as will fit on.

Garden

The Spring/Summer of 2022 here in Australia has been such a strange one. It rained a looooot more than normal in Spring, and some days were cold enough to still be Winter! Many of my plants were confused and didn't know whether to grow or not, so things got off to a slow start. I did buy quite a lot of new plants, but I'll introduce them in a separate post.

Note: this isn't at my house but a spot nearby.

 

Home

I did a huge project in June to tidy up my Hobby Room / Studio. It was for a studio tidying challenge online ... and I won the challenge! I put it mainly down to stubborn persistence, and remembering to take 'before' and 'after' photos. Perhaps the 'after' photos don't look that much different, but to me it's a huge change. I was never a minimalist ... I think I'm firmly in the pro-Cluttercore camp. :)

  Thanks for reading, happy 2023, and look forward to more posts soon! (Soon-ish?) :)

A Freezer Full of Plums

Welcome to my annual fruit tree harvest report! The title of this post pretty much says it all, but I'll add some more details, as much as for my own future reference as for anything else. This was the second year of doing my 'meshless' fruit growing method. I've decided it's actually a thing and not just laziness!

The first to ripen was the cherry tree, around mid-November. The tree has grown strongly in the last year and I'm very pleased with it. The harvest was bigger than ever before. I'm pretty sure I took a photo of the fruit but I can't find it now. When I say "bigger than ever before", it was about 3 handfuls. I picked them while still underripe and laid them on a tray for a few days to ripen. We ate them with dessert for two nights in a row and then they were all gone. We only lost a few to birds.

The next to ripen was the apricot tree, around mid-December. The harvest was smaller than last year, about twice what you see in the basket in the photo (below). I stewed them and it came out to slightly less than one takeaway container full. I was lucky enough to be able to visit Mum at Christmas, and gave her a small, precious containerful.

I should mention the nectarine tree. It was having an 'off year' (apparently that's a thing). It produced many blossoms, but only two fruit grew from them. Then they were ruined while still only half-grown by the storms we had in December. The weather bureau reported widespread Brown Rot alerts to fruit farmers at that time -- it never occurred to me before that they apply to backyard single-tree gardeners like myself, too!

Last but certainly not least were the plums. They were still too small and hard to be affected by the brown rot, and we had a bumper harvest! despite my severe pruning of the tree last year to prevent it from producing too much. It seems that backfired, hm.

Harvesting fruit is fun -- looking amongst the leaves and selecting the ripest ones, feeling them still warm from the sun, placing them in the basket.

Despite my best efforts, some were eaten by birds. This photo (below) represents probably half of what was lost, but rest assured, it was only a small portion of the total produce! Towards the end, some dropped naturally as well, as I ran out of energy and skipped a couple of days of harvesting and processing.

I made sure to pick up all the dropped and bird-ravaged plums, as if left they might sprout into baby plum saplings. As nice as that sounds, I've learned from experience that it's not such a good thing -- they grow too close to the parent tree, so they need to be dug up (not to mention it makes mowing very difficult) and I never had a single one transfer to a pot successfully. And besides, I already get more plums than I can handle, even with just one tree!

I decided to process all the plums by stewing, bagging and freezing them. I didn't have the energy to make jam, and besides it's too hot in Summer! I can always defrost some and turn them into jam later if I want. I picked enough each day to fill the slow cooker, washed them and cooked them on High for about 2 hours.

I let them cool for a bit, then used the highly sophisticated method of fishing through them with a spoon to remove the stones. Each batch yielded about 3 sandwich-bag-sized bags, and there were 9 batches so that makes.... a lot of plums! Once frozen, they filled up about half the freezer (it needs defrosting, I know!). Once I'm able to visit my family again, they'll be sharing in the bounty. Sometimes when I open the freezer door, I think: if anyone else looked in here, they'd think I was a prepping vampire!

I guess there will be a post on plum recipes coming up soon?

What I've Been Doing Lately

I've never been one to apologise for not posting for a long time, but gosh, it's been ages, hasn't it? With everything that's been happening in 2020, I'm sure you can't blame me. Whether I post once a week or once a quarter, I'm always intending to keep on blogging.

I thought I'd kick things off with a little wrapup of what I've been doing these last few months:

An exhibition!
I was lucky enough to be chosen once again to hold an exhibition at NOIR Darkroom, called Before(During)After. It was originally supposed to be in April, but was postponed a couple of times due to the pandemic and the gallery not being able to open. The gallery allowed me to change the theme, which I did to something more current. It explores how my art has changed during the pandemic and my uncertainty about what the future holds (for my art, but in general, too). There's a digital gallery on NOIR Darkroom's website which has photos and also an artist talk I did. I managed to talk for quite a long time for someone so shy!

Art! and a Conscript!
More specifically art-wise, I've been working on a series I call my Codex Pages. They're inspired by the Voynich Manuscript, a medieval book written in a mystery language that no-one can decipher, with strange illustrations. I've been fascinated with it for years. I finally had the idea of trying to make my own version. I created my own constructed script (conscript) for it. I always find this a lot of fun. I say 'always' when I've only created one before, but you get the idea! I'm hoping to write a post on this in more detail in the future.

These ones aren't finished yet:

Building a City!
Not a real one -- I was furnished with a game called Cities Skylines. It's like SimCity if you've heard of that (but better, by all accounts). My city just hit 80,000 inhabitants, and is called Lavender Town. I know! But it's not named after the location in the Nintendo game, but the pre-made map I chose in the beginning, which was called Lavender Lake. It's just the kind of game I like, and I've been spending a lot of time playing it lately. Here are a couple of screenshots.

Reading!
I was in a reading slump for several months, from about May to the start of December. I was given some ebooks to review, and of course whenever you're obligated to read something, it's no longer fun, so even though the books were good, I found it a little bit excruciating to get through them. (I still have 3 to go, oops!)

My friend Emilie started a Youtube channel a few months ago: Teacher Emilie in the Dining Room Library. She reads illustrated childrens books -- like an online storytime! It's kept me from having to admit that I read absolutely nothing in that time, if you believe that books usually for toddlers count! She often has wise comments to add as well. I recommend it.

I discovered The Story Graph a few weeks ago, and that's what really got me out of my reading slump. It's a reading community like Goodreads (but better, I daresay), with stats and graphs of books you've read. It aims to develop a really accurate and satisfying recommendations system. It's still in beta at the moment so you need to sign up to see everything, but for me it's definitely worth it so far. Reading challenges launched a few weeks ago, and members (including myself!) are enthusiastically creating and signing up for challenges.

Music!
Late last year I started a project to replicate my itunes library in Spotify. I ran into some hiccups at first which I won't go into (nothing to do with Spotify) but I've had lots of time to work on it while lurking in my cocoon this year. I'm working by artist and I've just finished the Gs, plus Eurovision working backwards from the present to 2004 so far. All the while I'm discovering new artists and songs. Who knew there was so much music in the world?
(The title of this playlist comes from a private joke of mine.)

Gardening!
Even through Winter there's usually something to do in the garden, but now that Spring (early Summer really) is here, it's all stations go! I'm barely keeping on top of the weeding, let alone planting new plants and re-potting old ones. But it's honest work and it makes me happy.

Well, that's about all I can think of for now. Hopefully I'll see you again soon!

Hello Winter! (My Garden)

Winter is definitely here in Australia. Admittedly, it's not as severe as in many parts of the world, but we do get frosts in the southern part of the country that can damage or even kill plants, and it snows in the mountains.

Here's the first good fog of the year:

I thought I may as well continue with the garden theme, as a surprising amount happens in the garden in Winter. The grass grows (and weeds, too!). Some plants, like succulents, still grow, just more slowly. The winter oranges are nearly ready to pick.

One day this area will be a rockery:

I hope everyone is staying safe, and staying warm or cool, depending on where you are.

101 Things in 1,001 Days #2 : One Year To Go

I've just realised that I only have 1 year left to go in my second 101 Things in 1,001 Days project! A year seems like a long time but hardly any time at all, simultaneously. I don't know about you, but when I'm in this situation, it's tempting to start thinking about all the things I won't have time for, so I thought I'd have a look at some things I can/will do in the next year.

#10 Create a Pleasing Garden
This plan is going very well, thanks to some planning, hard work and visits by various tradesmen. I have a general plan for the garden overall, and more detailed plans for some areas. As the weather is cooling down now, it's too late to plant any new plants, so I can focus on helping the ones I've already planted through the Winter, and installing some other stuff that you normally find in a nice garden. Husband and I have discussed the kind of outdoor furniture we want so we can actually spend time in the garden next Spring.

A 'before' shot!
#56 go overseas
This is (hopefully) happening! Husband, my Mum and I are going to Europe for a month at the end of this year, if everything goes according to plan. It's been 10 years since I last went overseas; here's a picture of that:

#69 Make Cheese
I'm completely obsessed with dairy products lately, for some reason, and I've already been experimenting with making yoghurt and some strained yoghurt variants (blog post coming soon!). Actual cheese is a lot more complicated, but I'm feeling an urge to give it a go.

#36 Do The Sketchbook Project
This is a new project. I swapped out an item I didn't want to do anymore and replaced it with this one. Sometimes that happens when new things crop up or I just lose motivation to do something I originally put on the list. The Sketchbook Project is an organisation in the U.S. that has a library of artist books. For a fee, you can purchase a book, fill it, and then send it back to them, where it will be held in the library forever. Many of them have been digitised and you can view them online. It's a rabbit hole that can amuse you for hours on end.

#38 Finish Duplicating my Blog
My poor blog has been through a lot in the 15+ years it's been around. A couple of years ago I started a project to transfer all of the posts from LiveJournal to Blogger. Halfway through that, the photo hosting site I was using decided to start charging an exhorbitant fee for their services. I wouldn't have minded if it was reasonable, but it wasn't. I downloaded all of my photos from that site (15 years' worth!) and re-uploaded them to Blogger. That took a really long time, too. I only have one thing left to do, and that's post a re-direct notice to my original blog so people know that it's not actually dead.


#39 finish Konmariing my emails
When I first started this project a few years ago, I had over 5,000 emails. I created a series of sub-folders for emails that need actioning, to read, links to online shops, courses, etc. Every day (or 5 times a week at least), I worked to reduce it and now there are around 100 emails. I can't seem to reduce it any more though, no matter how hard I try. I've unsubcribed to countless newsletters but I still receive 10-20 emails a day. I really want to try and find a solution so I can end this project, but I have a sinking feeling that it will be ongoing. Perhaps it's more realistic to find a way to minimalise the amount of time/work I spend on it.


#87 Sew 5 Garments
For some reason I've been intensely into sewing in just the last week or so, after a slump of many years. I made a face mask as my first, 'ease in' project, and I'm currently working on a skirt. This is the fabric I'm using. Again, a blog post is forthcoming!

#74-#78 Various Reading Goals
The obsession I had with reading for the last few months has abated a bit, but I still think I can tick off a few things. One of my goals was to read 5 books from LibraryThing's top 106 unread books list (based on the tags people use in their catalogues). I've read 2 already so I'm well on the way.
Another goal was to re-read the Harry Potter series; I don't feel like it right now but as the weather starts to cool into Autumn, it might return.
I decided a few years ago to re-read Dickens' A Christmas Carol every Christmas, just because it's a good reminder to be nice to people, and it only takes a couple of hours.

These are the books I had earmarked for my most
recent reading challenge -- I read less than half!

#62 Make 12 New Recipes from my Cookbooks
I have a tendency to go straight to the internet when I need a recipe or to check how to make something. Between us though, Husband and I have over 100 cookbooks, and we've moved them to a special bookcase near the kitchen, so it would be a shame not to use them! I've already made 2, so I have a bit of a way to go, but I love food and cooking so it seems reasonable. (Actually, I made lemon juice cheese from my cheese-making book a few weeks ago, so if that counts, it's 3.)


#101 write a New 101 List
There's almost no doubt that I'll be doing a third 101 Things in 1,001 Days, so this one goes without saying.

My Fruit Harvest 2019/2020

As you may know, I have in my garden a nectarine, an apricot and a plum tree. They were planted by the previous owners and were already raring to go when we moved in. Little known fact: I found out from old photos on a real estate website that there was originally an above-ground swimming pool in that spot, but for some reason they removed it and planted the fruit trees instead. Life is all about compromise, I guess.

Anyway.

We also have a cherry tree that we planted ourselves a couple of years ago, which makes 4 stone fruit trees. A mini orchard! This year I was determined to try and take advantage of the abundance of fruits that suddenly appear all at once. I wanted to be prepared, and waste as little as possible. I think I did okay, mostly. I was still recovering from my surgery, so I couldn't go full-scale canning factory or anything like that. I also tried a little experiment. I didn't want to cover the trees in mesh sheets or bags because they're a pain and also damage the branches. They're hard to put on, hard to take off, and you have to climb up underneath them to pick the fruit. Besides, birds can get to them anyway from underneath or if any fruits are too close to the mesh and they can stick their little stickybeaks in enough to reach them.

I decided to pick the fruits while they were still slightly underripe, hoping that birds wouldn't yet find them appetising, and let them ripen indoors. I wasn't even sure if they would ripen like that, to be honest. First to fruit, at the end of November, was the cherry tree. I'm guessing it's so early because the fruits are very small compared to the others? This was our entire harvest:

I'm very pleased because there was more fruit than last year, and the tree itself has also grown a lot. The fruit ripened up nicely and we had it for dessert one night with some ice cream.

As for the other trees, last year at pruning time I pruned them quite severely, especially the plum tree. (It had really gotten out of hand. So sick of plums.) I wanted to make sure that a) there weren't too many fruits for me to handle and b) there weren't any fruits growing too high for me to reach. I can't remember where I read this, but it's good advice because mucking around with a stepladder in the garden is a bit awkward!

As I mentioned before, I figured the thing about mesh-less growing (I'm just gonna call it that) is to pick the fruits while they're slightly underripe. Even on the same tree, the fruits ripen at different times. To do this right, I needed to check them every day. I have to admit, I was better at this some days than others!

Next up was the apricot tree. The fruits are ready to pick just before New Year's. The harvest was smallish -- enough to be able to eat them all fresh without them going off or being thoroughly sick of the sight of them. This photo represents about half of the total. I only lost one or two to birds.

The plum tree started yielding around mid-January. There were a lot, and they ripened progressively over the course of about two weeks. They're too tart to eat raw (for my tastes anyway) so I stewed them in batches. (I stewed them rather than made jam because, I have to admit, I couldn't be bothered with sterilising jars, etc, in the hot weather.) I ate some with yoghurt for breakfast, and froze the rest for later.

I was surprised to find I lost less than I thought I would. There were many completely ripe fruits that were still intact. I guess the birds find them too tart, too! A few had dropped on the ground. In all, I'd say I lost about one-sixth of the total.

Finally, the nectarine tree gave it up around the last week of January through to first week of February. These are the ones to wait for -- huge, juicy, sweet and delicious. Good to eat raw or cooked.

There was a pretty big harvest and I felt like I was constantly tending to it and coming up with ways to use the fruits. Even still, I got a bit behind and the fruits ripened faster than I could pick and process them. We ate many raw for breakfast, and I stewed a lot more for either eating straight away or freezing. Husband even added one to a veggie stir fry that he made and it was yummy. I got bored with straight stewing them, so I made chutney from a recipe in the Country Women's Preserves cookbook. It was freakin' delicious.

There was only a small amount (fruit sure shrinks a lot when you cook it for ages!) so I split it up into several tiny containers and popped them in the freezer. Now the only thing left to do is prune them. As I've read, I should prune straight after harvesting instead of in winter (the traditional time) if I want the trees to stay small and not produce too many fruits.

That was my fruit tree harvesting journey for this year. This long and detailed post was mainly a reminder for myself for the future. If you've read this far, thanks!

My January

January has been a typical one, weather-wise -- days of searing heat mixed with stormy downpours and sticky humidity. I was still recovering from my surgery, but got the go-ahead to resume normal activities in the third week of the month. I still find myself very tired though, and I find I need to either have a nap mid-afternoon, or go to bed very early. In some ways it's like being a two-year-old!


What I've been harvesting ...
The plums were ready to harvest this month. The harvest was about half what it was last year -- but I wasn't complaining. There were just too many for us to handle. This year, there was enough to fill about 4-5 plastic takeaway boxes once stewed. I just didn't have the energy to go to the bother of making jam (sterilising jars, etc) so I stewed them, packed them into boxes and stored them in the freezer.

Aside from that, most of my time in the garden has been employed in watering the plants, trying to keep them alive in the heat.

What I've been painting ...
I painted a landscape for a bushfire fundraiser exhibition/auction. This photo shows it still in progress. It's a bit different to my normal style: I was trying to be more realistic and make something that someone might want to buy.

What I've been journalling ...
I decided to do Rainbowholic's New Year 2020 Kawaii Journalling challenge. I've done 3 so far, not including the intro/title page. Here is my first page:

What I've been doing ...
I went for a walk in the park.

What I've been eating ...
After a trip to the dentist I went to a place I remembered from where I used to work over 10 years ago, which sold delicious French baguettes. It was still there! Emmenthal cheese, salami, whole gherkins and mustard -- just how I like it!

What I've been playing ...
Husband and I played Tsuro: Phoenix Rising, a variation on the popular Tsuro game. I think I enjoyed it even more than the original. I won't write any more now; I'm planning a full post in the near future.

What I've been reading ...
I've joined two readathons this year already! The first was Bout of Books, which went for a week. I managed to finish 4 books, one of which I'd had on my Currently Reading list for a year. That felt good. Currently I'm doing Pondathon, which is a story-based, co-operative reading challenge organised by CW from The Quiet Pond blog. Readers earn points for every page they read, and they affect the outcome of the story as its revealed over the 6 weeks of the challenge. There are cute characters, stamps to collect and, of course, books to read! Here's my character card with my first stamp: