this precious life

Life is just so precious.  Fragile.  You never really know what is going on inside these bodies of ours - they look so darn healthy/normal on the outside.  And then something happens to make you all too aware of how quickly things can turn upside down.  We had a health scare yesterday with a member of our family which brought this so very obviously to our attention.  We are lucky in that everything should be ok in a week or two,  thanks so much to one very smart person who picked up on it.  Still scares me senseless even so.  The words brain and surgery should never be in the same sentence.  Ever.


So I'm going to try not to hold my breath for the next few days.  Try to take a page out of Thea at For The Visionaries blog and "remember why we are alive and remind us to sit down, look up at the sky and just breathe".  Well said.  So please be healthy everyone, and do have a wonderful Christmas with the lovely people in your lives if I don't pop in before then.


Jx
PS.  Find Spoonful on Thea's blog here.


Update: 01.01.10  
My sister-in-law is well and hopefully coming home from hospital tomorrow, YAY!

i'm going back to school

to learn how to do this, screenprint by hand!  I enrolled myself in a 3 day screenprinting course recently and I received confirmation of my enrolment today so I'm all excited.  The course seems pretty comprehensive, learning about different methods of exposing the screen, single and multiple colour printing, printing to paper and fabric.  Should be lots of fun, I hope!  


Image:  ATOZ_

lonny mag take two

The other night I spent a lovely couple of hours lost in the second issue of Lonny mag.  For those who haven't heard of Lonny, it is a beautiful online design magazine chock full of inspiring places.  This image above is one of my favourites from a feature on the Kate Spade New York refit, a riot of colour! 

I love the online magazine concept but I must say I would love even more to curl up on the sofa with a real paper copy, it's so much more relaxing.  Oh well, maybe one day Lonny will go to print, fingers crossed???

In the words of Molly, do yourself a favour lovely ones and take a look!

Image:  Patrick Cline for Lonny mag

the decking must go on!

I am a little late in showing you the progress we made with the deck last weekend but I just didn't want to see another decking board (ever again) for a little while.  It doesn't look like we did all that much but believe me we did not stop!  My excitement of the weekend was a quick trip to Bunnings to buy more nails (like 3300 more nails, and I think we will still need more) and drill bits.  SO much fun.

Crazy as it sounds I do kind of enjoy it, parts of it anyway.  The back/chest/arm pain and bruises not so much but it does feel like an achievement at the end of the day.  We can finally walk out of our house onto the deck which is a major thing for us. We are a good team, we have a little system going - hubby cuts and hammers and I pre-drill all the nail holes and hammer the odd nail as I go.  I'm not the greatest hammerer - my hand-eye co-ordination is not the best.

So it is back to the drill and hammer this weekend.  We still have all of this to be decked...

and this...

It is going to take awhile but we will get there in the end.  I can't wait to see it finished and bring all of our outdoor furniture out from the garage.  And the bbq, how nice will it be to finally have a barbie here.   Have a good weekend, hopefully more relaxing than what we have planned :)

extinct - Dinosaur Designs sale store!

Are you a fan of the rainbow resin wares of Dinosaur Designs?  Do you live even remotely close to Sydney?  Unfortunately I can only answer yes to the first question but you answered yes to both then you are in luck!

Dinosaur Designs have opened a sales and seconds store called Extinct in Sydney where you can purchase their beautiful wares for a bargain price.  Yes, please!  Good idea for a Christmas present for your design loving sister/friend/gift to self!  Lucky for me my lovely sister visited the Dinosaur Designs store when she was in Melbourne last month so I have a feeling there may be something extra special under the tree for me this year - Yay!

Extinct is at 585 Elizabeth St, Strawberry Hills, NSW  - Appointments are necessary to ensure your entry into the store, go here for more details. 

Image: Dinosaur Designs

it's beginning to feel a lot like christmas

here in the Palmer household.  I decorated our tree last night and it was super quick and easy with this new little plywood tree I purchased.  I usually revel in decorating our big 7 foot tree but this year I opted for a simple, minimal tree.

I've gone for a sweet, colourful look with a combination of glass, beaded and sequinned, and paper mache baubles.  The sequinned and beaded baubles I made myself many years ago when I obviously had WAY too much time on my hands!  They are very time-consuming to make but the result is just gorgeous.  All that is missing now are the gifts - must find time to do some Christmas shopping, pronto!

quirky etsy christmas gifts

How cute are these little people by mooza!  Officially they are Male/Female signs for the bathroom (very cute for the office bathrooms, no?),  but they would look great decorating a child's room too.  mooza also makes letters and numbers so you can spell out your child's name for their room.  There is also plenty of choice with the patterns and colours- I chose the retro ones, but here are some lovely Japanese papers too.  Really quirky - love it!

For the person who has everything - monogrammed coasters  letterpressed by Adrienne Wong.  This one is a P, can you see the letter P's in the pattern?  The letters are not so obvious so the patterns take the fore until your look a little closer, very clever Miss Wong.  They have been given the seal of approval by Gwynnie over at Goop and I think they are pretty fab too.  

Very, very cute little book for children written and illustrated by Kathy Panton.  I love her illustration style, it reminds me a little of the Very Hungry Little Caterpillar book - remember that?  I wish it came in a hard board version so my little nieces wouldn't tear up the pretty pages.  The illustrations from the book are also available as prints.

M is for Magazine.  Well this is a magazine file with a difference.  Painted on one side and natural Birch veneer on the other, by paperdollwoodshop.  I love typography in the home.

Oh my goodness, how C-U-T-E is this Toddler Bed by sproutstudios!  Too bad it isn't made in Australia, and we'll just ignore fact I don't have a child of my own to warrant having one!  I must be feeling a little clucky though because I just realised that 3 out of 5 of these little finds are for children :)

our first home

First homes, there is something so special about them, mine will always remain in my heart. We drove past our first home on the weekend and it is looking fantastic.  I could not be prouder of the home that we created together seven years ago.  We designed most of the home ourselves with some help from our builder.  We were pretty young and made some bold choices which have hopefully stood the test of time.  I miss the red front door, the light-flooded rooms, the view, but most of all I just miss the amazing 'feel' of this home. 

                

Sorry for the poor quality images, the photos were taken on film so I had to scan them.  We built our home in 2002 and these photos were taken in 2006 just before we sold our home.  It looks very much the same now, the new owners have added some shade sails for the front entertainment area and the frangipani trees have grown beautifully. I did take a photo but it came out all blurry (found a teeny tiny little fingerprint on the lens later, probably belonging to one of my nieces).  We were lucky to have sold our home by word of mouth - a friend of a friend's parents bought our home and they are lovely people.            

                

I had to show you the view from the back of the property also as this is why I loved living here so much.  Almost every room in the home overlooks this view, it was so incredibly relaxing.  There is still a vacant block of land right next door which is yet to be built on.  I would LOVE to build here again, but the hubby is not so keen.  He thinks we would overcapitalise by building the home we wanted here and much as I hate to admit it, he is right.

We have built another two homes since we lived here but they were project homes instead of a custom build and we weren't able to alter the design of the homes much at all. I don't think I will ever project build again, the experience is not the same as when you put yourselves into the design as we did with our first home.

I would love to design my own home again, our home at the moment feels a little too grown-up for us, if that makes sense??  We built it for re-sale - silly thing to do, will NEVER do this again. It is more suitable for a big family and a more mature age group. Lots of neutral colours and classy finishes which sounds lovely, but a little boring to be honest.  I am ready to live in a smaller home (less to clean, less empty space, smaller mortgage), with more individuality, and designed with ourselves in mind instead of some imaginary prospective buyer. Sounds pretty much like our first home! 

Do you miss your first home?  Was it more special to you even with it's faults?