Dollies and a Booby

I think the thing I like most about blogging - other than the chance to get my writing out of my head and into a space where someone else might read it - is the opportunity it gives me to communicate with people I would otherwise be isolated from. My sister is in that category - if it wasn't for blogging, we would not know each other in the way we do now.

Another person I am very grateful to have met through blogging is Farida from Saints and Spinners. Although we have never met in person (and most likely never will, living on opposite sides of the world) I count Farida among my dearest friends. I have been fascinated by my glimpses into her life, from the first time I stumbled across her blog and was captivated by the image of her daughter dancing with the dust fairies, through the gradual expansion of her storytelling business, to her recent successful venture into the world of doll making.

You can see Farida's dolls at her etsy store: Alkelda

So far, Farida has been concentrating on nature dolls and elementals. A collection of saints is also planned and I can't wait to see what she comes up with! They are sweetly detailed little creations, just right to hold in your hand or inspire you from windowsill or tabletop - and I am lucky enough to own two of them.

It all started when Farida mentioned - possibly as a joke - making a doll to represent the heroine from The Seven Ravens fairytale. I immediately started thinking how I could a) coerce her into making this dream come true and b) make it mine! (My favourite long-term writing project - and the one I am most determined to finally finish one day - is turning the Seven Ravens into a novel.)

Thinking back, I remembered Farida once expressing a wish for a Blue-footed Booby puppet, and so a trade was proposed and accepted.

Here she is - my lovely Seven Ravens girl. She sits atop my computer monitor and nags me ceaselessly, as all good muses should. Her cloak is embroidered with the sun, the moon, a sprinkle of stars and a track of raven footprints. She is independent, impatient, anxious about her siblings, and in her minds-eye, already far from home having marvellous adventures. I love her!

Seven Ravens Girl

Seeking her brothers,
she has crossed oceans to be
my inspiration.

Then, when Farida opened her etsy store, I went window shopping, knowing that I could not afford to indulge myself by buying dolls, no matter how beautifully made. I fell in love with one, in particular.

Dressed in cobalt blue, with embroidered dragonflies skimming her skirt, standing tall and elegant with her staff topped with delicate blooms in blue and pink... I immediately wrote to Farida, intending only to express my sincere admiration for her creation (and my intention of 'stealing' her dragonfly embroidery design). In an incredibly act of friendship and generosity, Farida decided I should have her, and now she stands beside Seven Ravens' girl, as my totem of love, hope and courage! Sweet Borage is cosy and stay-by-my-side, ready to light my way through the darkness with her starflowers, and inspire my dreams with her flitting dragonflies.

Borage: Starflower, Herb of Courage

A kindred spirit
one mother to another
lighting the darkness.

It has taken me many weeks to finally, publicly acknowledge these lovely creations - partly I wanted to keep them to myself and enjoy their company, partly I was waiting for sunshine so I could photograph them as they deserved, and mostly, I was waiting until I FINALLY finished my part of the bargain. With two small boys constantly demanding my attention, it seemed to take forever. I have been stitching seated on a toddler-sized wooden chair in the playroom, I have been stitching out in the grass watching the acrobatics, I have been stitching under pine trees (and lost my needle).

Starting with nothing but a blank sheet of paper, a bag of felt and fabric scraps and a lot of imagination, I amazed myself by creating a blue-footed booby that I am actually really happy with! (Wombat loved it too, so I am crafting a second one for him - he was really disappointed that I wouldn't let him play with the first one!) I would love to share it with you, but I want it to be a surprise for Farida when she opens the box...

Oh, all right - just a sneak peek then!



Although I would dearly love to follow Farida's example and begin my own etsy store, I have way too many irons in the fire and could not justify the neglect of my children which would necessarily follow me indulging my obsession with making things. I have no self-control when it comes to such matters... and so I live vicariously, enjoying her adventures, and counting myself incredibly lucky to be gifted with such companions on life's journey :D

Pay it forward

I will make a handmade gift for the first 3 interested people who comment on this post. I have 365 days to do it in...

What it will be and when it will arrive is a total surprise!

The catch is that you must participate as well: you must have a blog and before you leave your comment here, write up a pay it forward post on your blog to keep the fun going.
(just cut and paste this one if you like!)

I was wandering around following links from here and there when I ended up at Beyond Pink and Blue. I noticed there was still an opening in her 'pay it forward' game, so I left a comment, and now it is my turn to play!

I am having fun with the craftiness at the moment, and have plenty of photos to share, but I will put them in another post so as to leave this one uncluttered. I wonder if anyone is out there??? First in first served, and anyone is welcome to play, whether you are family, a rare and regular commenter, a lurker, or just someone passing by on the great rabbit trail of blog-links :D

Unplug your kids - curly

This week's Unplug your Kids project theme was "curly". Wombat and I borrowed an idea I had seen on My Montessori Journey for Christmas Tree Spirals and made it our own.

We didn't have any green plates, but we did have a paper plate that Wombat had covered during our painting fun a few days ago.

(We had been painting our salt dough christmas ornaments using a mix of flour, water, glitter and watercolour paint. I buy my Stockmar Watercolour paint from Spiral Garden. How appropriate! LOL!)

This is what we started with. *Note - when drawing the spiral on the back of the plate, don't run the lines too close together! I made that mistake with the second plate - the one where you can see the spiral - and it just didn't work out as nice. Also, note that the top side of the plate - the side you put food on - will be the underside of the spiral. I hadn't realised this, but as you will see, it worked out for the best...

Don't you love the Cars collection watching the work? The wooden tea box is our crayon storage.

After cutting along the spiral lines, turn the plate over and glue small pompoms or other decorations along the outside. Wombat found that he didn't quite have the cutting skills needed to follow the spiral lines, and that the pompoms needed patience to get them to stick properly, so at about this point he wandered off to fill his various trucks up with baby pompoms... I finished the sticky bits, and then looked around for something to hang it with.

Earlier in the day, Wombat had gotten into a big box full of packing peanuts. In an attempt to prevent them being spread all over the floor (yeah, right...) I handed Wombat a big blunt darning needle and some wool, showing him how to thread them. He hadn't been particularly interested in that activity either, but I did have a short strand lying around afterwards. I added a few more packing peanuts, poked a hole in the centre of the plate and voila! A very curly spiral Christmas bell (hanging here in front of my home made nativity scene)!



Lest you think I was disappointed in Wombat's lack of interest, I wasn't - because as an unexpected benefit I found that Munchkin LOVED it. He sat underneath and watched it spinning in absolute fascination. Even Wombat stopped loading his trucks to watch for a while. It does make a great mobile...


And it turned out that the painted surface being on the inside of the bell was a good idea too! The pompoms provided enough interest on the top surface, and here is a Munchkin-eye-view of the painted surface underneath.

Thanks to Unplug Your Kids and My Montessori Journey for the inspiration. If you are not familiar with these blogs, check them out! HEAPS of great activities and ideas for kids. Most are a little too advanced for Wombat, but I am reading and learning lots!

Bilby has strange tastes!

It's 4:30 in the morning, and here I am, suddenly woken up with a desperate need to eat a bowl of fresh pawpaw, dried fig and icecream... no - it's not a flavour combination I would particularly recommend! but it does give me an excuse to sit here and write an entry.

I consider myself very lucky that I don't really get morning sickness. I feel nauseous most of the time, but I don't go that extra step and vomit. When I was pregnant with Wombat, it only ever happened when I brushed my teeth. This time, it has only happened once... but Wombat is making it up for it.

Ever since I weaned him, my routine has been to give him a bottle of milk, lying in bed with him, to settle him to sleep. This happens after both lunch and dinner. Lately, he has been climbing into bed very happily, guzzling his milk as normal (I keep him sitting up until it's finished), then giving a couple of little coughs and WHAMMO... up it all comes again, bringing most of his food with it. It distresses him a little - especially if blanky gets caught in the melee - but once I've taken his ukky pyjamas off, he is perfectly happy to bounce around cheerfully with Yeti while I clean up and change his sheets... again....

This started to become regular - every other day after either lunch or dinner, and on rare occasions, after both! I was beginning to think I shouldn't feel so complacent about my own strong stomach :P

At first I blamed teething, then a stomach bug, because we both came down with a good case of the flu which kept us feeling rotten for two weeks (Yeti got sick as soon as Wombat and I started to feel better). Now I have decided - who cares what's causing it! It HAS to stop, immediately! The last thing a pregnant woman wants is to spend her naptimes scraping off curdled milk and doing (even more) loads of washing. So I sat down and had a talk with Wombat, just as I did before weaning him, and we have changed the routine.

Now, he has his warm milk cuddled up in Mummy's bed before he goes potty, so he has plenty of time to sit and let it digest properly - and an excuse to make Mummy read to him for an extra hour before bedtime (which he loves). When we finally get into his bed and he realises there is not going to be any more bottle, we are still having a bit of a whinge and a cry, but by that stage he is so tired that he generally zonks out mid-complaint. Fingers crossed, it is working so far!

Christmas is sneaking up very fast now. I bought Wombat a fantastic advent calendar - it is like a metal tray with a wooden frame, and the frame is made of little boxes. The tray has the stable painted on it with Bethlehem in the distance, and the 24 boxes contain all the characters - as little magnets! There are sheep, cows, donkeys, camels, stars, angels, wise men, Mary, Joseph and of course, baby Jesus. Wombat really adores it! In the beginning it was a bit of a battle to stop him trying to bring out all the pieces at once, but he has really gotten the idea of just opening one box every night. If he wants to play with it during the day, he can rearrange the scene (using the characters he has so far) in endless recombinations, telling little stories about them. The sheep have a tendency to want to fly with the stars, the cows like looking out the windows of the stable, and the wise men have to ride ON their camels instead of standing beside them... it's great fun watching his imagination emerge - I just can't wait until I can understand all of the narrative that accompanies it!

Today we finally put up our Christmas tree. It's not exactly a work of art :P We still like having a fresh tree, but we didn't feel like paying for a cut one and we couldn't finda good potted one this year. We have several from previous years growing out in the garden, and Yeti had plans for drilling holes in a post and inserting branches to 'make' one. Meanwhile, Wombat decided he wanted to walk the paths of my sadly neglected and overgrown garden, which necessitated me trimming back the Juniper tree. I looked at the pile of branches in the wheelbarrow, filled a bucket with rocks and soil, stuck in the branches and voila - instant Christmas tree. It leaves a little to be desired, but Wombat had a brilliant time telling me where all the decorations should hang, and that matters more than having a magnificent display!

Speaking of magnificent displays (or not), I spent today's (vomit-free) naptime baking my first ever gingerbread house. In tomorrow's naptime - though I guess it's today now - I get to build and decorate the house! Wish me luck! I only just had enough dough to make the house so the roof might be a bit thin, but so far it's been lots of fun! I'll post pics when it's finished.

Now it is quarter past five, and I can hear Wombat starting to toss and turn. He often crawls into bed with me at this time of morning, so I had better sneak back in and get some sleep while I can...

PS. The weather has been absolutely incredible - the wettest December we have ever had - it's raining almost every day. We have had about 5 days of sun this whole summer, and I have to tell you, a Wombat gets a bit stir-crazy when you keep him inside too much! I will write more on the ominous silences, and even worse, the "Oh dear, Oh dear, Oh dear, Oh dears" some other day... In the meantime, here is a preview to stir your imagination (and this was one of the easier ones to clean up!)

Beaded Medicine Bag and a dose of self pity

I haven't finished any new projects this week. I have been working with a new material, and it is very difficult to sew. I shall show the results when I get something I am happy with.

In the meantime, here is one of my favourite items, finished a few years ago: a beaded medicine or amulet bag.


It is just the right size to store a small keepsake - I use mine to hold a little turquoise stone given to me by a friend, which has the word 'SUCCESS' carved into it.


It is relatively simple to make. I love beadweaving and made several of these bags (the others were all given away as gifts) a few years ago. Unfortunately, beadweaving is not a craft I can practice with Wombat around... one bump and beads go everywhere!


I love the colours of this bag - a mix of my favourite blues and greens, with accent beads of peacock irridescence on a purple base. The bag hangs on the wall in front of me, and it makes me happy to look at it.



I've just wasted more time than I can possibly afford searching the net for a tutorial to link to - it would have been quicker to write one myself, but now I am out of time.

I am getting depressed about my procrastination levels lately, and when I start to feel low, it seems to get worse - I stop doing all the things that make me feel good - like exercising, taking care of myself & dressing warmly, getting my work finished. Instead I sit here and drift the hours away doing nothing - which only makes me feel so much worse. This morning I didn't even make myself a cup of tea.

As the panic builds up in front of this onsite school I must attend, instead of attacking the work and preparing properly, the stress seems to paralyse me. I feel like curling up into a ball & crying (tears are not far below the surface today) or staring at a spot on the wall. I know that all I need to do is shake myself and concentrate on the next task, babystepping myself through to the finish and I don't understand why I keep handicapping myself like this. The stress and depression will build up into despair and I will make myself sick. I know I can't afford to get sick, can't afford to take a break, and that makes the stress worse, so I procrastinate and get no work done - which means all my efforts in getting up so early are for nothing. I should have stayed in bed and rested.

This self-sabotaging funk is what the quote at the top of my sidebar is all about.

What would it matter if blogs went unread, the internet went unsearched, entries went unwritten? I would still be 6 units behind on my property-law study, and I would still have an assignment due tomorrow which hasn't been started - I haven't even opened the reading for it.

I was doing so well, feeling really proud of myself for coping, and now all my priorities have become twisted around again. I had such good intentions this morning but they went nowhere.

Time to start making a brand new ending again, because this road I am paving at the moment sure feels like it's leading me to hell. Does anyone know what I mean?

Knitty Kitty - in crochet!

This week, I have been making kittens. They are adapted from this Knitted Kitty pattern.* I didn't have any knitting needles, so I tried it in crochet, and I think it worked out quite well.



I had planned on sending it to my newborn niece, and then making another one (in a different - non-pink - colour) for Wombat.



The moment I finished & he realised what I had been making, however, little Kitty was firmly adopted.



First, he hunted around and introduced Kitty to all his other cats - the one in his other hand in this picture is a cardboard cutout from a catfood box - one of his favourite 'toys'...



He then sat down and read his cat book to Kitty...



I am nearly finished making another one for my niece... this one will have a jaunty tail, like the original - Wombat's started out with a raised tail but he has been chewing on it ;P He seems to like chewing on wool when he is teething and Kitty's tail is perfect - it is good Tasmanian Merino wool, so I am not complaining.

I do want to experiment a little more - the crochet leaves a few 'holes' where little fingers could pull the stuffing out. I am going to try washing Kitty in hot water and see if I can get her to 'felt' a bit more - I will then be happier making her as a present for babies.

*The pattern is quite simple and good for a child or novice knitter - however there is a small amount of adult language in the instructions, so you might want to visit and write the instructions down when the kids aren't around :)

Handmade Tuesday - crocheted hat

Those who have followed Baby Wombat's adventures from the start will be more than familiar with his crocheted hat. We bought it for him during the closing down sale of a local teddybear store, so there was no chance of replacing it. Wombat LOVED this hat. He always wore it without complaint, it won him many many smiles and compliments - particularly from little old ladies - and it was his faithful companion on all his adventures - warm enough for his first winter, with just enough brim to keep the sun out of his eyes.



But little boys, as we all know, GROW. And crocheted hats unfortunately do not. The sad day came when Wombat's hat would no longer fit. It was summer at the time, and he had plenty of replacement sun hats, so it didn't matter much. Then winter came along and I decided that I would put my limited crocheting skills to the test, and MAKE him a new hat. I studied the construction of the old one, counted all the stitches, and set to work. It took a long time to get the crown right - I had to unravel it about 20 times and start afresh before I was completely satisfied, but finally I worked it out. Once the crown was right, the rest was pretty smooth going - just a case of getting it long enough, and Wombat was reasonably cooperative about trying it on. He did get a little annoyed with me crocheting when I was supposed to be playing with him though - but that is part of my plan to encourage him in independent play. Here is the finished product:



The blue/green shells worked well at first, but started to look a little dull and boring by the time I got to the bottom, so I added in some of Wombat's favourite red. I had made blue and green flowers as well, but ended up discarding them and making two red flowers instead.



The perfect accessory for a young boy's leaf collecting!



He is not quite as happy wearing it as the original - this one is made of Tasmanian merino wool, whereas that one was a softer acrylic yarn. Mine is also a little big for him at the moment (so it will last a while) and therefore doesn't fit as snugly and swivels around a bit, which he dislikes. I didn't bother making a brim, because my version is mainly for winter. However, the way it rolls up at the edge is enough to keep the sun out of his eyes.



I am not entirely satisfied with it either - I would have liked to work out how to add ear flaps to it, as it doesn't keep his ears as warm or protected from the wind - which he needs this year. As a result he tends to wear a bonnet with a hoodie over the top instead of his new hat when we are around the house - we save this one for wearing out!

All in all, though, I am quite pleased with my first major crocheting project. Anyone who wants the pattern let me know - I didn't have time to type it in this morning.

Handmade Tuesday & more about weaning

I have a pile of things I have made recently (while sitting with Wombat in his playpen) which I want to show off, so I will make Tuesday my day for displaying my handiwork.

Remember the Mummy Wombat I showed you a while ago? (Or guinea-pig, as my niece insisted.) I promised that a Daddy and a Baby Wombat would be forthcoming. Here they are!



I didn't have quite enough felt scraps in one colour, so Daddy Wombat is a combination - as Yeti said, male Wombats often have a darker stripe down their backs. They are still pretty guinea-piggy, though I did try to get the ears into more wombat-like positions.



My Wombat has seen neither real wombat nor guinea-pig, so he does not mind the similarity. If mummy says they are wombats, then wombats they are. (He likes to hold two of them and bump them together... and he giggles when I make them give him 'wombat kisses')

I am quite pleased with how the wombats turned out as my first felt toys, but the real star of the show is Rosie the Hen.



If she looks a little bedraggled, it is because Wombat has already chewed on both her head and her tail!



Not only is she a chew toy, she is also my first FINGER PUPPET! The elastic is a little tight on my finger, because it was made for Wombat - she pecks and 'boks' around with a very satisfying realism. Wombat puts her on his finger and wanders around showing her things ;) couldn't manage to get a photo of him with her, though - he would stop as soon as he saw the camera...



Rosie comes straight from the book Rosie's Walk. This is one of those wonderful books with hardly any text in them - where the parent/reader explains the story as they go - these kind of books are Wombat's favourites. (Another really good one is Hug - I have linked to the Amazon.com pages for these books as they have good reviews. If you are in Australia, I don't suggest buying from Amazon as the exchange rate is a killer - check out the Huggies book club instead - with free postage & member discounts, it is my favourite place to buy Wombat's books.)



Next, I guess Wombat will want me to make the fox! Now that will be a challenge!

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

In other news, tomorrow I am going to have to tell Wombat that there will be no more mummy-milk from now on.

Since I have started cutting back on feeding him, the boobs have decided enough is enough, and their days of bounteous production are over - for this baby, at least. They ache like a bruise and I feel like I've been belted in the chest. He has been really good about not biting me, but nursing is just not the pleasant experience it used to be.

I wish the timing was better, as he is already upset with his premolars erupting... but I shall just have to try to explain it to him and get his cooperation and understanding. I'm constantly amazed at how much he understands, and the connections he makes between things in his books and things in the real world. He has a number of books with pictures of baby animals drinking milk from their mummies, and slightly older animals eating & drinking from bowls, so I will spend tomorrow discussing those with him and telling him he is not a baby anymore, he is my little boy, and while I still love him very much and that will never change, it is time for us to move on to the next stage.

Of course, I will have to come up with a new way to settle him to sleep. What's your tip for getting Wombat to snooze? Do you have a tried-and-true technique for toddler naptime?

He would much prefer to be giving up nappies! He is pretty much potty-trained for poopies, but he still hasn't worked out how to tell me when he needs to pee - and he is wetting a lot, especially at night and nap time. It is a half-hour struggle to get a nappy on him now :P He cries and squirms off the bed, runs around the room, insists he needs to sit on potty instead, and then bounces off again after a few seconds. I lost my temper tonight and forcibly held him down - once the nappy was on, he was perfectly happy to be dressed in his pyjamas. I guess it's just that with winter here, he doesn't get as much nappy-free time as he would like, since it is too cold to run around with no pants on. I am investing in some fitted cloth nappies with velcro fasteners so I can do a quick change without asking him to hold still while I fuss with pins - but at $25 a nappy, I can only afford two a fortnight. I have a hemp fleece one which is great for night-time and two different brands of bamboo ones are on the way. At least buying them piecemeal I get to try out a wide range of styles.

As time goes on, I will review them - and a pile more children's books - over at What Wombat, where I shall also try and write every Tuesday. This week's review is on the Fisher Price Link-a-doos Infant to Toddler Rocker.

Been a while...

Sorry for the silence, folks... several excuses:

• my new 'qualify as a solicitor' course has started and it is very intensive... I also can't allow myself to fall behind and then spend all day and night for a week catching up before exams & assignments (my previous study habit) as now I have a Wombat to worry about...
• I am redesigning my home website - Fractal Myth - and I am hugely pleased with the results... I will invite you for an inspection when it's finished...
• Wombat is behaving very strangely - not a cheerful Wombat at all! I think the frustration of not being able to communicate his desires is getting to him - he is at the point and grunt and cry if you don't understand him stage. We are having several huge tantrums a day, which is very tiring. Of course, he does seem to be growing a whole LOT of teeth all at once, so there could be a pain factor involved, and I did take him down the street and let a doctor stick a needle into him last week, so he's not entirely sure Mummy has his best interests at heart... especially when she insists on forcing him into a nappy when he wants to run free... or won't let him play with mosquito repellent / broken glass / any other dangerous or poisonous substance that takes his obsession. Tonight he screamed and screamed at the dinner table and I had to take him away - why? He wanted his Daddy's corn-on-the-cob. I had cut some off my cob for him, but he WANTED the whole thing - not to eat, just to examine & play with. Yeti let him explore it for a while, but then took it back. Wombat explodo!!!
• mother-in-law is also frustrating me - she suggested I was being the gestapo the other day because I wanted her to keep her bedroom door closed - there is a leadlight bookcase in there with broken glass panels - she wants to just cover it with contact, but I can see Wombat smashing the whole thing... anyway, while being her usual lovely self, and very sweet to Wombat, she makes me feel like a rotten mother just by being around when he cries - which he's doing a lot. We are talking about moving later this year and getting her a place of her own by the sea, which I think we would all appreciate (though the thought of trying to pack up all our junk while looking after Wombat terrifies me! there's SO much of it!!! I am such a hoarder and Yeti is as bad)

I know every mother goes through these battles, and I know I am what the Baby Whisperer calls a subjective parent who shouldn't take all this so personally... I just get inordinately annoyed at having an audience ;P especially when Wombat has gone from an (almost) angel baby to a holy terror overnight - and I'm pretty sure it's at least partly my fault.

We are going to take Wombat for a picnic today - see if we can cheer us all up a bit.

Anyway, dawn is here and I have to go hang a load of nappies before Wombat wakes up... I also think he is angry with me because I have been getting up early (4-5am) to study, and sometimes if I haven't finished what I am doing, or he wakes up too early and it is too cold to get him up, I leave him to play in his bed for a little while - he has a nice collection of cloth books and stuffed toys there... I never leave him to cry, but on occasion I have let him whinge a little bit, hoping he would go back to sleep... I think this has made him feel a bit neglected :(

Before I go, I was honoured by Alkelda the Gleeful from Saints & Spinners dedicating her most recent example of 'Children's books that never were' to me.

This inspired me to write an entry for her. I don't have time to create a book cover, so this photo will have to do - my first FELT TOY! (I got a big bag of felt scraps cheaply on ebay... I have always wanted to experiment with making felt toys!)

Here is WOMBAT!

(this one is Mummy Wombat - Daddy and Baby Wombat are on their way)

My Wombat stole her from me several times while she was being made, and delighted in bouncing her around by the thread... but when I handed him the finished product, he threw her across the playpen... and when I gave her back to him, he chomped her head - several times :P Maybe I had better attach some elastic to her so he can go back to bouncing her!!!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Children's Books That Never Were. (Schelle's Contribution)

(Alkelda, you may want to rewrite this - I don't think it's as good as yours! But then, I don't know if you will have heard of Ruth Park's Muddle Headed Wombat series...)

The Extremely Intelligent Wombat by Ruth Park

From the editor:

Dear Ruth Park,

Thank you for your recent submission. Unfortunately, while I think your book has merit, I do not think we can publish it at this time. Our young readers are simply not ready for animal characters which are smarter than they are. It is damaging to their tender self-esteem. I would like to suggest that you consider rewriting your book with this in mind. Perhaps you could call it something like 'The Muddle Headed Wombat'?

If you must have an intelligent character in your story, I would advise making that creature physically inferior in some way. Perhaps something small and ineffectual? A female mouse would be perfect, especially one that complains about her frustrations all the time.

Having a Quoll for the Wombat's sidekick is also a problem. No-one knows what a Quoll looks like, and by the time the book hits the shelves, they are very likely to be extinct. It may be worthwhile considering changing this character to something that children can easily relate to. A cat to go with the mouse is a good idea. This character should also have some trait that allows children to laugh at it. You might make it look scruffy but be very vain about its appearance, for example.

I am sure a writer of your talent will have no difficulty reworking the Wombat's adventures to emphasize his incompetence. It is important for children to feel that they are superior to the natural world and not threatened by it. The world is not ready for a Wombat superhero - though that does raise some interesting marketing possibilities. If you are agreeable to dumbing down your character to suit the tastes of the general public, I may be able to interest our publicity department in producing a range of soft toys to match. This could be beneficial to us both.

Please consider my suggestions. I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,
Garrulous MacKenzie
Junior Editor
Children’s Division
Bunyip Press

Love a boy in uniform

This entry is going to jump around like a frog on a hotplate, if you will excuse the somewhat painful metaphor...

Have you ever noticed that the more you have to write about, the less time you have to write in??? I am desperate to get the latest Bunyip update out - I've dropped back to doing them monthly - his month, not calendar. He is now 10 months old, and so much happened in the last month that I want to record... but between teething & the heat, he is not sleeping, and I am getting no time to myself at all!

I am in the process of redesigning my home website, and have the template all prepared and ready, but part of my reasoning is a fresh dose of paranoia. Now I am posting so many photos of my life all over the internet, I don't want to have quite so much personal information associated with them... on the very slim chance that someone undesirable finds an unsavoury use for them. This raised the new dilemma of finding a blogging name for my son. I wanted to be a little bit original, and a little bit Australian, which cut out most of the candidates as they were either too American or already being used... anyway, to cut a long story short as it is already 3:30 am and I MUST get to bed, I finally realised that there was only one name for the aussie offspring of a Yeti and a Myth... BUNYIP!

(Other possibilities seriously considered included Snugglepot, the L'il Bloke, Jackaroo, DJ and Number One Son...)

One of my motivations for keeping this blog is to record the more crafty things I make... so here is my latest project - overalls to protect my Bunyip in his new-found mission of exploring the world. MIL came home from a charity shop with a couple of army cadet camouflage shirts that didn't fit either Yeti or myself, so I remade one into overalls. I am very pleased with my ingenuity in getting two overalls from one shirt!

The pattern is very simple, traced from a pair of existing overalls. It is a size 1 but I have added extra seam allowances and hems where possible - the Bunyip is not going to stop growing anytime soon!

This pair use the sleeves of the shirt as the legs of the overalls. The sleeves were double fabric in front, and had button-adjustable cuffs, making them ideal for the purpose. Whoever gave the shirts away forgot to remove their shoulder patches from one of the shirts, so Bunyip got his own military insignia as well!




I didn't have enough fabric to make two bibs, so this pair use the epaulettes to fasten the straps, and the pockets were unpicked and resewn as knee patches.







This pair were made from leftover scraps from a skirt I made while pregnant and still wear. I put the buttonhole in the wrong place, so added the heart motif to disguise my mistake and it ended up being my favourite detail! If you look very closely, you can see that the legs are patched together in several pieces as I had nowhere near enough fabric, but I am pleased the pattern doesn't show the joins.







Here he is modelling his new actionwear!