More From The Clean Up

I haven't looked at these in ages. I did quite a few portraits on my dad's old Nikon F2 and developed them myself in the darkroom. These are three of my favourites.

New Shoes

A completely lovely and unexpected gift of Chie Mihara shoes from my super boyfriend.

I Heart Firenze

I'm dying to get knitting. Since my classes finished, I want to try out all these things now that I'm not so intensely focused on technique and keeping all my documentation in order. But with my day job just getting busier and busier until the December 24th and more and more social things popping up, I'm settled on the fact that I'm only going to get bits and pieces done here and there. But one thing I have started to do is tidy up, and of course, you can't just tidy up, you have to look at everything and then get sidetracked, and then look at something else and then reminisce. And that's how I came upon these:

Click on the map to see the path to the apartment!

A letter from my mum's old friend telling me how to find my apartment on my very first trip to Italy and a very well worn map of Florence.

And funny this, after I was just looking at Garance Dore's pics of Giovanni, I was thinking I'm way overdue on my plan to get to Italy at least every five years. Hmmm, maybe I've just started a ball rolling...

Weather Report

After an almost sweltering day in Melbourne, five minutes of rain, thunder

and hailstones as big as peas.

It is CANON, SUBLIME, It is a MODE has himself!

That's an English translation comment that reader 'Luna' left on Garance Dore's site about her photographs of this accessories designer Giovanni. I'm pretty sure that I agree with her as I'm impressed. I know there's a lot of great street style blogs out there, but for me Garance Dore is a daily source of inspiration in so many ways. If you haven't already seen the images, I'll leave the pleasure to you to click on the link above.

Morran

Oh I love Camilla Engman's dog (and her work is pretty cool too).

Take a Bow

I was in for some low intensity knitting today. It was my first real day off in so many months (or should I say years?) of the four days work - two days study - one day of homework routine and I had had a sleepless night before; I was so excited about knitting, the future and life in general that I kept getting good ideas and turning on the light and writing them down. When I finally fell asleep and early morning came, I was awoken by strange men talking outside and drilling right near my head. As a result I didn't feel like doing anything too taxing today so I made a small bunch of bows:

I kind of like them but will probably turn them into other things.

He Has The Wardrobe

I started looking at men's collections towards the end of semester for a change of perspective and I realised that men's clothing is just as nice as women's. Take this Burberry Prorsum SS09 collection for example. Why don't more men in Melbourne dress like this? I would wear any of these pieces, but when the key words in the runway review are Derek Jarman / English seaside garden / melancholy / moss / peat / bark / stone / pewter you can bet that I'm already sold.

And as for these hats at Lanvin SS09, all I can say is that I want them all!

Ahhhhh

Folio done, dusted and handed in.

Now....

Red

Give me red hair any day.

Tilda Swinton

Alice Burdeu

Model for Tim Ryan

Nicole Kidman (as a redhead), photo by Annie Liebovitz

Judy Davis (trust me, her hair is red)

Karen Elson photo by Tim Walker

One Quarter

This is one quarter of my little family unit.

He spends ages looking at himself in the mirror. I wonder what he thinks about.

Houses: No 1

I am obsessed with houses. I'm not a serious architectural junkie, I just like certain houses for the way they make me feel. These are some of my favourites that I walk past often:

I believe the people from this house rescue animals from bad situations. There are usually a lot of animals and birds roaming around their garden, but I think most of them had gone to bed when I took this photograph.

Damn you car, you're ruining my picture

Must learn how to photoshop cars out of house photos

This house was love at first sight. It captures the Australian urban dream for me, sitting there glinting away in the sun. The colours were beautiful and there were so many delicate and interesting touches that you can't really see here. It was hard to take a good photo because of all the cars.

Decision Time

A final play with some of the pieces I'm submitting before I finalise things on the weekend.

Warm Woodblocks

Another thing to add to my 'saving up for' list is this beautiful and enormous book by artist Cressida Campbell. I love her imagery and her palette and I especially like how the woodblock medium seems to impart a warmth to the work.

Thinking about woodblocks reminded me of a work trip I took in 2007 for my day job. I was shown through a huge textile mill. It was so huge it took the whole day and every moment I was sucking in as much information as I possibly could. The highlight for me was this printing section (knitting was poorly represented here!) where they had brought neglected and unused woodblocks from England to Asia where it was possible, due to the lower manufacturing cost to continue on with the woodblock printing tradition. I almost died when I saw the fabric. Some repeats were so complex and had so many colours that even with several people working they could only turn out a few metres a day.

Antique woodblocks stored on the shelving at right

Working on the fabric

Finishing by hand

I left that day feeling so uplifted that woodblock printed fabric was not seeing that bright light at the end of the tunnel!

Three Top Melbourne Shops

Prior to machine knitting, I came from the world of hand knitting shops; cosy places, stocked full of colour blocked yarns and with nice, helpful ladies. So you can imagine my initial horror when I saw that these were going to be my new suppliers:

Supplier No. 1 - has very good prices, stocks linen, cashmere, possum yarns.





Supplier No. 2 (this is the fancy one) - has reliable stock of Italian spun yarn



And then there is Supplier No.3 - Great bargains to be had here (if you dare go in).

But it must be said, machine knitting yarn is not the easiest thing to get your hands on when you are a small home knitter, so I am eternally grateful for (and now fond of) these places.