bespoke skeletons

Inspired by Susan

I recieved this very cool ottoman-pouf for christmas made by my incredibly talented/gorgeous friend Susan (who has no blog that I can gratuitiously link to), and it totally inspired me to create this papercut, I have been thinking about it for ages but I have been unsure of the physics of the thing. Finally I just sat down with my peice of paper and cut and cut, and ta da! It looks so simple now it is complete. Thanks Susan, you rule! Thankyou also to this book for all the awesome reference materieal, without which my skeleton wouldn't look quite so good. and thanks to my mum for giving it to me.

happy new year!

wow, 2011 is here and i feel like I didn't really get to know 2010, she just whooshed by so fast. My new year's eve was sedate but so lovely, some great friends of ours came to visit with their gorgeous 4 month old, she was such a joy to have around. we had a power failure at around 10pm, and we sat in the lounge talking with only the beam from a tiny solar LED torch to light the room, it was so cool. here is my latest papercut, I am working on a bigger one and it is coming along sooooo slowly which is why I haven't got much to post here. ta ta!

I have been busy making papercuts....

...but not busy blogging so here are some pics of my latest three creations...

i'm finding it really hard to make blogger insert these pictures predictably, does anyone else get that problem? Anyway, I'm really in love with this little calavera above, he's so cute.

We had such a beautiful christmas with my husbands aunt, very relaxed and mellow, just lots and lots of delicious food and fun for the kids. Magic. My little girl is mesmerised by her favourite present, an amazing pooping penguin - a windup toy that poops out little brown cola treats.... delightful! And, I got a gorgeous book from M: the Black Apple's Paper Doll Primer it's filled with a delicate kind of sweet radness. You can order it from fishpond. I'm dithering about cutting it up and playing with the dolls until they become dog-eared and (inevitably in this house) scribbled on, or leaving them pristine and just looking at them and imagining all the little plays I could put on....I believe dithering is one of my best skills....

I did have awesome pictures of our christmas tree which was - for a gloriously limited time - a giant decorated cactus, but they werre blurry and terrible. It had to come down because it has grown very much and quickly so it is huge and fat on top and skinny and woody at the base... needless to say it got a bit top heavy with all the decs and began to wobble at the slightest bit of breathing nearby. A quick visit to a friend secured us a darling little woolly bush and all went off without a hitch, or a prickle!

new cuts, and holiday thoughts

ahhhhhh! home at last from holidays and free from visitors....its lovely to see family and friends and to catch up but my, I just love being at home with all my lovely things and where my time is my own. I haven't done a papercut for 2 whole weeks and while physically I'm exhausted (holidays with small kids aren't holidays for the parents - did you know that? I never realised until I had one of my own) creatively I'm feeling super refreshed and inspired. I have so many ideas and they are flopping around inside my head like deranged bats - nowhere to go until I get some time!

So, the holiday was great until our two-year-old decided she'd had enough of unfamiliar faces and cracked it at our friend's house while M had only half his hair cut. Couldn't take the car cause then M would be stranded. Couldn't take the train because then it would be at lease an hour till we got back and I was too scared that rabid child would go apeshit the whole way. Suddenly, our lovely and generous friend offered us a lift all ther way back to freo. what an amazing person! we made it safe and sound and in one piece. Thank god for friends!

The day after we arrived home my parents showed up, they spent just under a week with us, and it was a pleasure. they left yesterday, towing the little round-cornered caravan back to margaret river.

Visiting and being visited is great, but like my husbands 80-something year old Nona said when we saw her in perth, "I like to stay at home"...