Cards Anyone?

 I have had good fun making cards for the past week or so. It is still being creative but not overly so and it has kept me in the studio most days. It has helped that there are 52 CDs of all of Beethoven's works to listen too as well, while the weather has not been condusive to being outside for gardening.
We are also being faced with having to attend Flinders Hospital more often than we would like and that takes a lot of time and energy. Especially as the parking there is horrendous and you don't know beforehand whether there is a space available.

 If you are lucky to get a space in the car park, you hang onto it for the number of appointments you have to keep which can be hours apart. So sitting and waiting in air-conditioning and observing the sick and their carers is becoming another interest....The other fascinating but irritating aspect of Flinders Hospital is, that no-one seems to communicate with anyone, be they specialist or pharmacist or nurse. So a whole day was spent wasted just to see two specialists and a nurse....
Our prolonged winter is proving a challenge and while all the plants have responded very well to the wet and the cold , it means the weeding is getting far behind. I had another photo here of the Bluebells in the front garden but it has disappeared .....a pity the bluebells won't as they will be problematical the way they spread....

Well, here we are, I managed to insert the photo in the right place after all.....
The Tawney frogmouth is still sitting on his nest and his wife is sleeping in the pepper tree by the chook yard ... the Greenies are building a nest on the patio in the Glory vine right by our door....

Verses from the Book of Job

It suddenly occurred to me that I had not done a blog about my "Book of Job" verses.
I have been reading Rowena  Loverance's book on Christian Art. She writes eloquently about this subject and has wonderful illustrations to back up what she is writing about.
There is a wonderful photo of a linocut by the Australian artist Eric Thake so her choices of art for this book are very wide ranging in both times and artists.
So Rowena inspired me to make a book about the verses in the book of Job.

I have always admired the illuminated scripts of the monks who would have sat in cold monastic spaces, on hard wooden seats, concentrating on doing the lettering in gold and vibrant pigments,
creating books for the Church in the Middle ages.
So I have tried to make the first letter of the verse look more important than the rest of my writing.

The verses I chose are worded in beautiful old English and they are so poetic and inspiring that they are inclined to make one feel humbled.
Who indeed are we? who can command the eagle to fly or anchor leviathan, that great sea creature we all admire and stand in awe of....
the description of the horse in all its glorious strength and beauty and its courageous facing of the enemy in days when it was asked to carry its soldier into battles in olden days, is stirring and humbling....when you think what enormous effect the horse had still, in the First World War,

only just 100 years ago and how many died in the service of mankind. It makes you want to weep. We used horses in the 1960ies for mustering sheep and cattle on the steep hills of  Hughes Park and they gave of their very best carting us up and down incredibly steep slopes.
Racing over stony ground to head a freshly shorn mob of wethers, bucking and kicking their way to a fresh paddock. Or galloping madly after a steer unwilling to go through the gate into the yard. The horses were shod every six to eight weeks

by our local blacksmith,  a short but wiry man who lived in Auburn. To start with I used to lead our horses over to the homestead blacksmith shop with its coal fired forge and all the tools of the trade hung in neat rows. Or is that my imagination that it was neat and not hung with dust of ages and cobwebs thick in the corners...
later the boys would be roped in and lead their pony as well.....
The cover of the book is fairisle knitting with  a mix of fine yarns and a card this time as the carriage of my electronic machine was sick and ill and away in a place to be repaired.....

After SALA

 This is not going to be much of a blog as I could not seem to find the photos I wanted to add. Is it me or is it the laptop.....
It can be very frustrating to have ones' routine of setting these blogs in motion, altered to such an extend you can't find the photos easily,let alone choose the ones you want .
Enough already......
Our SALA month is now well and truly over and I find myself making small things at present.

 The above are two artist diaries with covers.
The one on the left is a fairisle design and knitted on my brother 860 knitting machine. It sold during SALA but the person has not yet picked it up.
The one on the right I finished this morning. It is knit-woven, the background yarn is a mix of fine cotton yarns and the weaving in yarn was fine ribbon.
I also did a batch of greeting cards yesterday, the painting was done in acrylic on a separate paper

 and then attached to the black card. I am quite pleased with them and my friends and family can look forward to getting them for birthdays or just as an "Hello".....
The two manikins each wear knit-woven kimonos with matching hats. I had hoped some fond grandmother or auntie might have bought these for a favored child but no one did and so they will stand in the studio to cheer me up on lackluster days.......