Category Archives: Craft

Hair and coral and brains

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I’m thinking coral, I’m thinking brains. I’m thinking brain-like coral, and coral-like brains.

I’m part of the way through crocheting a brain. The small intestines I crocheted last year looked rather like brains, so now I’ve decided to deliberately make brains. This particular piece is all about the process, not the product. It is so satisfying to go round and round the knitting Nancy producing an endless stream of grey matter. I’m going to give this one to Ben Gelin. Ben Gelin is often to be seen in the Hub cafe here in Bathurst. For some reason, recently, we had a quick chat about brains, and how he’d like a new one, and I secretly decided that my new brain would be for him. Speaking of brains – it may be that I blogged about this not very long ago, and that’s why we were having the conversation and here I am repeating myself. Anyway, the French knitting has moved on, there’s more brain.

Meanwhile, the brain-like corals of the Great Barrier Reef were dealt a new blow by the forces of coal and climate change and all those making money thereby. The new Labor premier of Queensland has announced that dredging the reef for a giant coal port is both “sustainable and responsible”. So the corals will cop it from both the dredging process and, further down the line, from the carbon dioxide pollution created by the burning of the coal exported via the port. This morning I read that giant holes in the ground, thought to be the work of asteroids or aliens, were actually down to a much less exciting phenomenon: methane explosions caused by the warming of permafrost due to climate change. We humans may be smart but somehow we have no brains. We’re trashing our own living room.

As for hair … I went to the hairdresser and got myself a new hairdo. After chemo, it grew back seriously grey and I was dithering about what to do. Go with it, or attempt to re-assemble what I looked like a year ago? In the end I went for re-assemble, because I just wasn’t recognising the person in the mirror and I just didn’t feel ready to go straight from being a teenager to middle aged. Oh well, yes, I was a little older than teenage. I am in fact middle aged and in fact have grey hair. But not now. It’s been nuked. As soon as I did it, I began to regret it. I saw nothing but beautiful women with grey hair. So I am, as Anne Frank once said, a bundle of contradictions.

Snake carver almost meets his maker

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Today is overwhelmingly a marking day. I still haven’t quite finished. The last possible moment is tomorrow morning at 9am so I’m not going too badly (considering it’s not yet 6pm the day before, ahem). In between the marking – all done on the computer these days; my red pens sit idle – I’ve been having a couple of other adventures.

The first was a call-out to have a look at some snakes. They were arranged on the grass verge just outside Vi’s house opposite Centennial Park. As I approached with Bertie, I could see a cluster of people gathered around what looked like a posse of live snakes in the grass. I wondered if Bertie would react to them, but he wasn’t so easily fooled. Instead, he gamboled over to meet the people (Hi! Hi! Hi! Anything to eat?). Leif, who made the snakes, finds smooth slim branches down by the river. They remind him of local snakes. So he takes them home, carving, painting and polishing until they look extremely realistic. They’re all anatomically correct: tiger snakes, red-bellied blacks, eastern browns. I asked him if some of his snakes (he has over 50) could go on show at the 200 Plants and Animals exhibition that I’m helping to organise for BCCAN this year. He said yes, as long as we looked after them.

Vi got to know Leif when he rebuilt the brick wall at the front of her house, which, very early on in the life of Bathurst, was an inn. While he was working on the wall, Leif collapsed. Vi called the ambulance. For a while Leif was completely down for the count. They did CPR on him, pressing down on his ribs.

“I went to the other side,” said Leif, standing there with his snakes at his feet.

“What was it like?” I asked.

“It was light and warm. It wasn’t a tunnel, it was more of a rectangle. Maybe it’s because I watch a lot of TV. It was lovely. Then I heard them say, ‘He’s breathing’ and I woke up. I said, ‘Don’t wake me up, I’m having a nice dream’.”

I’m glad he came round, because his snakes will make an excellent contribution to the exhibition.

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Then more marking, interspersed with attempts to make decorative cupcake toppers out of fondant icing for my Afternoon Teal on Saturday. I can see why people do whole TAFE courses to get these skills. My teal “ribbons” look disgusting. They’re lumpy and very unribbon-like. They look like a child’s efforts with Play Doh. I feel better about my fondant ovaries. I was able to use a cookie-cutter to get the basic oval shape; then it was just a matter of using food colouring marker pens (yes! there is such a thing!) to draw on the details. It’ll be interesting to see people actually eating them.

In search of brain relief

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Brain beanie/candypop creations/Etsy

I’m tired of being led by the nose by my brain. I think we’re going off in one direction, only to find we’re actually going in another, or around in circles. Or I’ll be somewhere and find that my brain has wandered off without me.

Meanwhile, and quite possibly related, my sleep patterns have gone down the toilet. I’m not getting enough when it’s dark, so I sleep for odd stretches in broad daylight.

I just read on Twitter that the human brain runs on about 12 watts. I think mine’s working on about 3 watts, but those three watts are doing enough to cause trouble. I can feel the brain cells jiggling; whether this jiggling is productive or not, I can’t yet tell.

For better or worse, today my brain has been exercised by the following:

      • A video about how to make fondant icing for cupcakes. This relates to a fundraising Afternoon Teal I’ll be hosting in February.
      • The Planning and Assessment Commission’s approval of a dirty great open cut coal mine on the Liverpool Plains, some of the most productive farming land in the country. This mine will dig up to 10 million tonnes of coal a year for 30 years. This is deeply crazy stuff. To have any hope of heading off a disastrous rise in temperature, we need to keep remaining fossil fuels in the ground. But the PAC’s report simply weighs up pros and cons as if half a century of climate science simply didn’t exist.
      • Interesting information, over a lunchtime chat, about some taxidermied local animals up at the big old Catholic school on the hill behind our place. The stuffed animals have been looking out of their glass cabinets at generations of uniformed schoolboys coming and going. I’m wondering if it might be possible to give these creatures a weekend outing, to participate in an exhibition of 200 plants and animals that I’m plotting …
      • A car that has a yarnbomb-style all-over coat made by near neighbour Steph Luke. When I took the wigs and hat she’d loaned me to get through last year’s chemo baldness, I found her in the middle of crocheting some additional touches. There are certain plans for this car. Stay tuned.
      • How to attach ring pulls to a sheet of translucent perspex for the coming Waste to Art exhibition. Answer: little clear hooks. There’ll be a mass of these on the translucent sheet representing carbon dioxide molecules in the atmosphere.

 

Mt Panorama ring pull

I’m still off coffee, by the way. But lots of tea. A friend suggested today that I stop drinking caffeinated tea if I want to get any sleep. This thought makes me want to curl up and not bother to go on. So probably not a great idea right now.

Craftivist frenzy

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I’m in a craftivist frenzy. Craftivism is a blend of craft and activism. When you put them together you get people like the Knitting Nannas who are campaigning against coal seam gas (aka fracking). After an interval of a couple of years, I’m back on the 1970s ring-pulls. These were ripped from beer and soft drink cans to disappear in to the grass to cut bare feet at barbecues. These days ring-pulls are of a gentler design, and mostly stay put on the can. Mount Panorama, home to wild beer-drinking car-race fans for generations, is still studded with the old style ring-pulls. I pick up a few just about every time I walk up there with Bertie, the black Labrador. It was gorgeous up there tonight. The air was particularly soft; there was a gentle breeze; and the last golden rays were picking out the shapes of the town below. I should have been lapping up the view or looking up into the trees at the crimson and eastern rosellas, but I was scanning the dirt at my feet. The pickings are best after a heavy rain. They get washed out like specks of gold. They go into my pocket, and when I get home, into a jar. I got three in my haul this evening; one had lost its tail. And now I’m mulling over how I’ll use them in this year’s Waste 2 Art exhibition up at the Flannery Centre.

I’m thinking I’ll use the ring-pulls to represent carbon dioxide. It’s carbon dioxide that causes the fizz when a can of soft drink is opened; it’s carbon dioxide that’s emitted when the oil is burned up in those giant V8 engines. And, like the ring pulls of the 1960s and 70s, it hangs around. Some of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere over the last two centuries will stay there for thousands of years. Last year was planet earth’s hottest year since we started keeping records; this year is quite likely to be hotter still. So, how do I get my ring-pull collection into a piece of climate change craftivism? Mulling, mulling.

Just a few beers on a hot day. Pic from our local paper, The Western Advocate. Getty Images/Mark Kolbe

 

 

This year marks the two hundredth year since Governor Lachlan Macquarie pitched a tent beside the Wambool River while his aide, Captain Henry Antill, declared the place a delightful spot for a town. The bicentenary of white settlement (the river is now known as the Macquarie) will be celebrated in a number of ways, including the naming of 200 “living legends” about town, and the dressing up of 200 cardboard cutouts to represent pioneers and other worthies. In the midst of all this celebration of Important Persons, I feel the need to honour the place itself – this place, as it was and is, with its particular plants and animals and bodies of water and layers of rock. It’s threatened and extinct natives, as well as the newly-arrived sheep and cows, pet dogs and cats. Birds. Insects. All these creatures, barely noticed, with whom we’ve been living. Yesterday, at the first BCCAN meeting for the year, I said I wanted us to collect 200 pictures (photographs, drawings, paintings, specimens) of different local plants and animals and display them somewhere. Big job. Need a committee. See? Frenzy.

Bathurst, 1815, showing British flag and Governor Lachlan Macquarie’s tent. State Library, NSW.

 

Snow and other stories

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Tiny snowman, Mt Canobolas, July 2014.

Tiny snowman, Mt Canobolas, July 2014.

This morning at ten to six, Mum left town on the Bathurst Bullet. Because I came home and went back to bed, this feels like yesterday, or some other dreamy incident in the past. She was here for a week, and Steve was away at the ranger conference, so it was just Mum and me 24/7. It was one long pot of tea, really, and the telling and re-telling of stories, some with striking variations depending on point of view, some with suspicious holes in them, some we’d be proud to announce to the world, others – the juiciest, of course – that mostly live in the dark. And others not mentioned. Thought, maybe, but not given voice.

We were carless for the duration, so a lot of this was conducted at or near the kitchen table. We spent the last two days working on a scrapbook called A Day in the Snow, Now and Then. The pictures were assembled according to the following themes:

  • Cars arrive in snowy territory.
  • A snow ball fight.
  • The making of a snowman.
  • Putting the snowman on the bonnet of the car.
  • Seeing how long the snowman would last before melting/sliding off.

The Now photos were taken on July 7 this year at Mount Canobolas near Orange; the Thens were taken in the winter of 1972 near Thredbo. Everyone’s laughing, smiling, having fun in the snow. All sorts of other stuff was happening on both occasions. For example, in July I was in the middle of chemo so my head was bald. But you can’t see that in the photos because it’s beanie weather and everyone’s wearing beanies. My little nephew was in a bad mood from his epilepsy drugs (or just a common-or-garden bad mood, who knows) but you’d never know from the pictures how much he had to be cajoled to look at the camera. The photo of Dad back in 1972 shows him breathing out misty vapour; warm air from his lungs condensing in the freezing air of the Snowy Mountains. It adds wonderfully to the “it’s cold” effect. Only it’s not what it seems. “That’s cigarette smoke,” says Mum, giving me a new way of seeing an old photo. And other stuff. Layers and layers and layers of other stuff. But the fact is that we did all do those things on those particular days, and the photos are there to show for it. We all saw snow, had a snowball fight, built a snowman … and everyone had a different day in the snow.