Brenzen Fuerst & Lize Immelman of Lelu Boutique, Kilbirnie, Wellington : : : : : : : : : :  Welcome to My Wellington, a special blog post I'll write every now and then. I want to explore this beautiful colourful city of mine, beginning with my favourite places in Newtown/Kilbirnie (where I live) then…

Pattern Friday for today was inspired by the bare trees and leaves all around us this April. We've just returned from a trip to the South Island, and the forests down there were particularly beautiful: swirling leaves and reaching branches, everything golden and in transition. * * * * * * * * * *…

Just wanted to share these two lovely second-hand finds of mine. The ceramic dish will hold my hair clips or something similar. It's a Johnson Brothers pattern with the finest pinky sea shells and coral. And a weighty tome: Plants and Animals, published 1974 in Prague. I'll scan some pictures in soon. I know you'll…

Hot chocolate season has begun again in our house. It's always a favourite treat, especially for when the kids have friends over after school. I think I've written about this every year so I'm sorry about the repetition. But I also wanted to show off these great new (to me) cups sent by Helen. They're…

Ended up with a bit of a crazy Friday today, rushing from one place to the next. But I did come across this feathery pattern of mine in an old book- I'd been using it as a bookmark. It's a faded watercolour on cream card.  If you're in need of some bright new music, you…

This one has more of a late-summer theme: here I've stitched some favourite botanicals including faithful old clover. I made both this embroidery and yesterday's into small pouches for keeping precious things in, like jewellery or milk teeth. I wish now that I'd stored my kids' milk teeth separately- they've all gotten mixed up in…

This is a small embroidery I did last week while the country was still in drought– lots of dry grass and hardly any mushrooms to be seen, considering it's April. That seems to have changed now- the rain has begun in earnest. Which is a very good thing for everyone, our tiny garden included. If…

This week's pattern was made with watercolour paints in my sketchbook- I guess you could say it's a fanciful imagining of cotton plants, that is, if they grew with indigo blue buds. I like the idea of interlocking branches in a pattern, like a wild botanical tangle. Last weekend I saw Wilco live (my second…

I came across some ageing hydrangeas on a walk recently, and they reminded me of these hairbands that I made a few years ago. Strangely enough, I got a custom order request for a pair of them the same day, so I knew a felt-petal-cutting-session was meant to be. Each headband is made from tiny…

We took the kids to this great restaurant the other day for dinner. We all had roti + dhal and every last lentil was eaten up. I decided that we should make roti breads at home. And then, I decided to employ the children to do this. Arlo's now old enough to do the cooking…