sore hand = frustration

On Thursday 20th June, I had a skin cancer burnt off my right hand. On Sunday the 23rd, I woke up to find my hand had blown up to twice its size, bit like a latex glove really, and a very nasty infection had set in, so off to the Doctor I went. Lots of antibiotics and daily dressings later, my hand has gone back to its natural size and I almost have full use of it.....except for washing dishes.....that's going to take a lot more time !!!!!

It's extremely frustrating when you lose the use of your predominant hand and have to have your meals cut up for you and can't do much of anything, including stitching !!!

However, if that's the worst thing that happens to me, I'm doing OK....... I've promised myself I'll have a needle & thread in my hand sooner rather than later !!

I'm not going to show you what's under the bandage because it's pretty yukky, but you get the picture....pardon the pun!!

And here's my hand today........definitely coming good...

emails

I'm playing with the settings on my blog and this is a test run. If you get this post in your in-box (and this will only apply to a few people), will you please let me know......thanks 

Rain = boots

It's been raining in Brisbane the last couple of days so I bought some gumboots....cute aren't they?

For some reason they remind me of Emma, my great niece....maybe 'cos she's cute too.....

This is Emma....not the best photo....it was taken at our family Xmas party last December....I think her cousin is putting sunscreen on her !! She has an older brother and a twin brother & they're all gorgeous kids.....

and pages I've made

This is the page I made for Maya in India.....her topic is "Tea". I had a piece of cotton with teacups & teapots printed on it, so I embroidered around them with metallic thread.....my least favoured thread.....and embellished with beads, silk ribbon & sequins. I printed the tea labels onto fabric and stitched them on. Edged in hand dyed cotton lace.

This is the page I made for Helen in South Africa....her topic is "Don't worry...she said.."

this is hand dyed linen overlaid with organza and machine stitched. The sun is recycled silk and the saying is printed onto silk and attached. The page is edged in variegated machine thread.

postcards

I'm in a postcard and ATC birthday swap group with other members of Stitchin' Fingers.....
Luckily I was up to date with my postcards and ATC's before my hand went mad.......these are some of those I've made ready to post later in the year. 

and some book pages.............
I'm involved in a fabric book page swap with 8 other girls. We're all members of Stitchin' Fingers and we've nominated our own topic for the swap. Mine is "Travel". Each page is 8" x 8" and we include a little pocket on the back with information about how we've made the page, i.e. fabric used, threads etc.

 I received this one from Frances from Queensland.

this is the back of the page. It's handmade silk paper with photos printed on fabric.
Frances does beautiful silk paper.

This is the front of the page. 

 I received this page from Susie in the USA. It's cotton fabric printed with all sorts of travel mementoes and Susie has embellished it beautifully.

This is the back. 

end of the month

Almost the end of the first half of the year already, time really does fly. We've been in Brisbane for the last few weeks helping our daughter move house......big task & that's all I'm saying about that !!
I've been a bit frustrated also as I had yet another skin cancer burnt off. This time on my right hand and it got infected and became quite nasty. My hand swelled up to twice its size and became completely immobile and was very sore. Lots of antibiotics and dressings later, I can finally use it but in a restricted mode. I think I was more annoyed I couldn't do any stitching, didn't care about cooking and dishes, that was the benefit of it....hopefully in another few days I'll have complete use back.
We did do a trip to the botanical gardens in Brisbane.... I'm used to the more English style of garden down south so it was nice to see different plants....not a lot of flowers being winter I suppose, but lots of greenery.
Thought I'd show you some photos of a beautiful national park we visited in NSW before we arrived in Queensland. Australia has some magnificent national parks, this one's Kwiamba and the rock formations were awesome.

Pilliga

We spent a couple of days at the Pilliga Bore Baths. This is a free camp just outside the township of Pilliga, and I use the word "township" loosely, it maybe has a few houses, a cafe & not much else. The artesian water is warm and is piped directly into the pool and is beautiful to sit in and relax, some believe it has healing properties for arthritis and aching limbs, but I just enjoy the warm relaxing feeling.
From here, we went for a drive to Burren Junction some 40 klms away. My Mum's brother and his wife were the licencees for the NSW Railway Refreshment Rooms from the 50's/60's until they closed down in 1979 and I was curious to find out some history. My Aunt & Uncle have both died, I didn't know them because we lived so far away from them, but the fact I was so close to the place they'd lived for so long, was a bit of a drawcard. I managed to talk to an old timer who knew him very well and found out some information....he showed me the first house they'd lived in before they moved to railway accomodation. It was nice to have some form of connection. The Refreshment rooms have long been pulled down but we did some scavenging around the area and found some broken pieces of china with the NSW railways stamp on them. Burren Junction is a very dilapadated place now with probably about 100 people living there, some of them seasonal due to grain or cotton production.

Today (2nd June) is only the second day we've had rain, much needed by the farmers now sowing the grain crops. But it didn't deter us, the weather might have been damp, but not cold.

Pelicans were always on the lookout for fish in the lagoon in the next padddock.

The lagoon at sunset......beautiful, isn't it?

This is the pool

We didn't bother putting out the awning as we only were there a couple of days. Those dark clouds in the background disappeared during the day as the breeze picked up and dried out the ground.

Tottenham.

Tottenham is another small town surrounded by farmland. Not much here, but the caravan park was in a very pretty setting and was exceptionally clean and offered very good value....$16 p.n. or pay for 3 nights and stay for 4, so we decided to stay and catch up on the domestics. I have to confess I'm addicted to an Australian television series on Sunday nights called "A Place to Call Home". Its only a short series, and as luck would have it, it was on the night we decided to stay at Tottenham.......what a coincidence !!!!
Caught up on the washing & boring stuff and I also caught up on some embroidery. I'm a member of an internet stitching site and within that, a member of 3 different swap groups......a birthday fabric postcard group, a birthday ATC ( Artist Trading Cards) group and a fabric book page group.....so I had 5 ATC's to make to complete the year and a book page for the month of May. I finished all those and posted off the book page to a girl in India, so I felt quite content that for once I was in front!!!
I'll post photos of them when the recipients let me know they've received them.
We also did our usual walk around the town....we've been very lucky with the weather, we've had beautiful days, some cold nights and except for one day, no rain at all.

I liked these mosaic seats and wall art depicting the lifestyle of Tottenham. Very clever & cute.

When we were driving to Pilliga, we passed through the townships of Warren & Coonamble. While Warren is a decent sized town, Coonamble is not a place I need to go back to. Most of the main street shops are empty and the town looks like it is slowly dying.
Just before we arrived in Warren, we passed by the biggest cotton production I've seen. It was massive, not just the enormous paddocks, but the whole industry. There are hundreds of thousands of acres out here in central west NSW devoted to cotton production and when the cotton season is over, any one who sows wheat, immediately launches into sowing and planting the seeds. I guess if you have the land & both crops, you'd never have a break!!!

Apparently this year hasn't been a bumper cotton crop but because there is a new and faster way of picking & baling the cotton, the gins can't keep up with the processing and so some limits have been introduced on a rotation basis. And there are thousands of bales sitting in paddocks.

Cruising down the road we saw a sign pointing to a side road with a "Utes in the Paddock" billboard. Intrigued we set off to see what it was all about. As the photos below show, there are numerous Holden utes turned into works of art by some if the country's best artists.
The owners of the property went on a trip to USA and were impressed by the memorabilia displayed on Route 66 and the amount of tourists stopping to see it, so they thought about how they could get people to visit the central west and what better way than the iconic Aussie ute, absolutely necessary on any farm. And this is the result of their efforts.

Aussie sense of humour at its best !!