Hello and happy new year! Here are a few bits of our new house in the capital city. We are living in one of the inner-city suburbs, but we are lucky enough to have a big old house (I think almost 100 years old) with a flat garden out the back for the kids to…

Happy new year! I hope you've had a great holiday time over the past couple of weeks, celebrating and relaxing. Here in the South Island of NZ we've had a bit of rain and cloud, but mostly life has been rather sweet. Berries, parties, sunshine, the beach and friends and family to visit. Just the…

Wishing you a very happy Christmas with your family and friends, if you celebrate it. Thank you for reading this year and joining me on my adventures.  Love, Melissa xxx

Ths is a simple little cot quilt that I made for my baby nephew. I actually started making it back when he was a newborn, and had intended to finish it shortly afterward, but it didn't happen, (you know how these things are.) It sat on my desk for (quite) a few months and I…

I managed to make some gifts for fmaily and friends from my garden this year. Some early-flowering plants went to seed last week, so I gathered the seeds and made little packages of them with watercolour labels. And lavender I dried a couple of weeks back made some nice little linen sachets, a bit like…

Thank you for your kind comments on yesterday's post! Here are some edible gifts that I have made this week to pass along to teachers, neighbours and friends. They're also a gift to myself because I let myself do some fun 'making' in the kitchen when I should really have been doing dull tasks such…

These are 'memory books' which I've made for the children for Christmas. I haven't mentioned it yet here on the blog, but we are moving to Wellington in the first week of January and I wanted the kids to have their own little albums recording some of the happy times we've had here in Nelson…

Here are some happy child-related finds that came our way over the past week: 1) This is a beautiful little painting named 'Keira in the blue dress', by Jennie De Groot who blogs here at The Distracted Painter. She wrote to me a while ago, asking if I'd mind if she used this picture of Keira…

It stopped raining during the night and the sun is shining again! Hooray. When I went outside this morning, I found that my hydrangeas had started flowering for the summer. I hope the dry weather sticks around. Tomorrow morning I'm joining some friends at a local cafe for a little vintage/craft market and I thought…

It was very flippant of me to talk about yesterday's rain being cosy and atmospheric, because today the weather has progressed to a civil emergency… much too much rain altogether, and major flooding and slips in my town (we're so lucky that our house is unharmed, though.) So please stop now sky, thank you. I…