some recent stitches and pics

I'm behind yet again with posting. They say the world is paved with good intentions, and I have surely contributed my share!

About 3 weeks of my time was taken up recently  emptying rooms and cupboards to have carpets replaced with floating flooring - lots and lots of books and, no surprise, a lot of craft gear. It was a  very exhausting process, but I am happy with the result.
I've made several journal covers, a couple as a result of teaching to local groups. These are great to try out emroidery stitches on my machine. I seem not to be trying too many though as I have found a couple that I really like and I keep on using them...

These were small notebooks. The other was an A4 cover to showcase a small piece of natural hand dyed bamboo given to me by a friend. The plants used were gum (eucalyptus) leaves, and I did a little hand and machine embroidery on them.

The colour in the picture of the front is truer than front and back picture below

I also have a much larger dyed piece to work with, but that is going to take some thought.

Whilst recovering from moving stuff and watching Commonwealth Games I have been doing a bit of cross stitch on a small sample piece I bought a while back in Stockholm. I'll take a photo when it is finished. At the moment I am doing some fairly intense quilting on a quilt. I'm not fast, and have done about 24 hours so far, on possibly a third.  The picture for that will have to wait.

When I need a break I escape to the garden for a while. One day I spotted a small narrow upright type of toadstool. The next day when I looked I saw a flower there.

 

 

 Closer inspection showed that it was the toadstool which had opened up and split, but so evenly it looked like petals on a flower - so much so, that when we tried to identify the toadstool using a photograph on Google, it only came up with flowers.
A couple of weeks later in the same spot was this

The weather lately has been so warm, and it is currently so hot that it is breaking records for April. We have had lots of big bright blue skies with some fascinating cloud formations (unfortunately not rain clouds though - we all have our hopes set on tomorrow's forecast for some rain).

 

 

 

 

I tried to capture the shiny silvery leaves on this eucalypt at Meadows the other day. I wasn't very successful, but it looked so spectacular with the sun shining on them and another bright blue sky behind.

 

Here is a little show of my back yard wildlife.
When I moved craft books onto the back patio area while the flooring was done, next day I discovered this cheeky (and quite chubby) gecko on the top of a book...

Another day I looked up from the outdoor table and spotted a couple of cheeky little rats on the rail of the back fence and going back and forth into a native hibiscus. This is one of them - look for the black beady eyes in the middle of the picture.

After they scampered off somewhere I discovered what they had been doing - stripping the bark from the hibiscus, I guess for a nest.

 

Another day I came across 2 small wasp nests. They looked rather like round small pine tree nuts, until I disturbed them and wasps emerged from the different little sectors

This one is hanging from the one little stalk under a bird's nest fern leaf.

That's it for now. Next I'll put up some photos I took of the spectacular Parade of Light during our recent Fringe Festival.