garden update

such beautiful things are unfolding in the garden at the moment. Even though we are in the throes of a 'thousand year drought' and only allowed to water every three days the succulents, natives and bromeliads are laughing.

And that's your blooming lot.

cow neck

I've been thinking over the last few days about something to post for this month's Whiplash comp. The 'alt craft' theme is tricky because really what qualifies as alternative these days when you can buy 'Ugly Dolls' in K Mart and fab eyeball marbles in a gift shop in Snape in the uk and then you pop over to Walberswick for some hag stones...(sorry, can't stop going on about my holiday).

So yeh, the boundaries are pretty blurred and for me the word 'alternative' was forever tainted in the early eighties when a bloke i shared a house with liked to refer to his trendy New Wave mates as 'my alternative friends'. I used to imagine they were his spare set in case the original ones couldn't come out to play.

But i have decided to post something and as this is the only thing i've made this month, this is it.


Thanks to the girls for letting me plunder their toy boxes and now the question is not whether it's alternative but whether it's craft. And as there's no 'Silly Idea' category and no skill involved this is entered in the design section.

high heel hell

Having your chillun both at full-time school is a bit like being back at school yourself. All those hundreds of other parents to negotiate means there are the same gossips and bullies and cool crowd that you're never quite part of as there were at high school. Sometimes it freaks me out to be honest, although one on one, they're all good folk so on Friday night we fronted up for the School Dance.

The theme 'Op Shop Glam' was great. Normally i don't like theme parties but this one was made for me - well, apart from the glam bit. I already had plenty of op shop frocks to choose from though and bought a pair of platform boots from St Vinnies for a buck. I hadn't worn this dress since before i had kids.



















It was a lot of fun, the band was great and the sea of froufy taffeta frocks was a sight to behold.

My feet took four days to recover - now i know why the boots were in St Vinnies.

recuerdos

Great Yarmouth is one of the Great Bastions of Tack in the uk. A seaside town with a bingo hall on the pier, a never ending mall of tacky souvenir shops down the middle and dozens of money-sucking games parlours all along the sea front. We were agog at the wonder of it.




























So now we have this Great Box of 'funny teeth' to remind us of all the fantastic things we saw and did in England.


In the north of Spain, though, it was different, i couldn't find any of the great kitch junk that fills the souvenir shops of Madrid. Eventually i realised why there were no 3D flamenco postcards or fans or fake castanets - the Basque don't consider themselves to be Spanish.














Unfortunately the basque souvenirs were a bit ordinary but these chocolate sardines cheered me up. And finally, at the airport duty free as we left, i found this fab bum-pouring bull bottle which - even better - is full of sangria.