We're almost there!...

Este fim-de-semana vou começar a montar a mesa de doces dos meus anos em minha casa, para depois a poder fazer no dia o mais rapidamente possível. Ainda faltam bastantes coisas, por isso preciso mesmo de ver como ficam as peças em cima da mesa, para não ter de perder muito tempo à última da hora.

Deixo-vos ficar as fotos de algumas das jarras em milk glass que vou utilizar, com o brinco como adereço. Gostam da ideia?

 

 

This weekend I'll be setting my birthday table at home, so that everythings works out and I don't have any drawbacks at the end.

These are a few of my milk glass vases that I'll be using at the table, with the earring as an acessory. Do you like it this way?

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Not a Real Home Office Tour

Although this is the week for home office tours on Show Us Your Life Friday at Kelly's Korner blog, I feel I am participating under false pretenses today.  You see, we don't have a dedicated home office at our red house.  Like many people with several children (we have four), we found that bedroom space was more necessary than a whole room for an office.  Maybe one day!

The kids have desks in their rooms for doing their homework, and apart from that we use our dining room table and a small desk in our family room for computer work.  I like to have computers in public areas rather than bedrooms so that I can supervise what people (read: my children) are using them for.

Today I will feature our dining room (already written about here) and the family room study corner.

I try to keep the office area in our dining room fairly minimal and well-organised.  Apart from the computer I have stacked in-and-out trays, a pen holder and two boxes, one for bills and one for taxes.  My favourite thing is the round mousepad with birds and flowers on it.

Not having much on the table means that it can be cleared away super fast if we need it for other purposes, like say, eating.

In the pictures below you can see the computer corner in the family room.  This is one corner of a large single room that is kitchen, breakfast room (except we eat all family meals there) and family room.  You can see other pictures here and here. 

The desk is an old roll top desk from which we removed the top.  I like to keep a couple of cute notebooks by the computer for writing lists, making notes and recording ideas.

 Thank you for visiting this week.  I hope you have a lovely weekend.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Flowers in My October Garden (and my first attempt at mosaic making)

The cupid who lives in our front garden is, like all cupids, in love with spring.  He adores anything that makes the birds and the bees happy, and in spring the birds and the bees are very happy because of all the flowers.  So here is our cupid's tour of the flowers in our Adelaide garden this October.

1. seaside daisy, 2. flowering carpet rose, 3. holly flowers and berries, 4. coriander flowers, 5. orange flowers, 6. lemon flowers, 7. yellow rose, 8. onion flower head, 9. apple blossom, 10. strawberry flower, 11. pansy, 12. yellow rose

(Thank you Jenny from Little Jenny Wren for teaching me how to use Mosaic Maker.  It's so much fun!)

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

What does 'in season' mean?

image is from www.allposters.com

Over the past week or two I have read in Adelaide newspapers and supermarket flyers that cucumbers and blueberries are in season.  Yet if I look in my own garden, the cucumbers are still seedlings and the blueberries have almost finished flowering, without a fruit in sight.  Cucumbers and blueberries may be in season in Queensland but they are certainly not in season in Adelaide or Melbourne or Hobart.

So why do we say something is in season when clearly it is not?

Living in a huge continent like Australia, just about anything can be in season at any given time, but that does not mean that it is truly in season in a local sense.  It is like someone in Stockholm, Sweden, saying that oranges are in season because it is the season for oranges in Madrid, Spain, over 3000 km to the south west.  That is roughly the same distance between Adelaide and Cairns, and the climatic differences are similarly enormous.

I think it would be fair to say that something is in season if it will grow within a few hundred kilometres of where I live, and particularly if it is growing in my own backyard.  Thus I know for sure that broccoli, broad beans, spring onions and peas are in season because I can see them out my window.  Cucumbers will be ready in December or January and blueberries sometime after that.

So then, why does this matter?  Am I just being pedantic?

In one sense it doesn't matter at all, especially if we want to support Australian farmers over, say, producers of frozen blueberries from China.  However, if we are trying to cut the food miles of what we eat then we need to be aware of what is likely to have been produced locally, and what was inevitably transported thousands of miles.  It might be fair for a national newspaper or magazine to say blueberries are in season but the local media should deal with local facts.

What do you think?  Does any of this matter?

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

French kiss in the USA

É por estas e por outras que eu adoro mesas de doces!... Olhem-me este trabalho fantástico publicado hoje no blog Ruffled (um dos meus favoritos, by the way), onde nos podemos aperceber, pelos créditos, da quantidade de pessoas envolvidas nesta produção e no excelente resultado final! 

Eu adoro o toque vintage deste tipo de decoração de mesas, os bolos de aspecto caseiro, a mistura de cores e de texturas, com aqueles cake-stands a fazerem roer-me de inveja!... Mas é uma inveja boa!! :-)

Parabéns à Amanda, criadora do Ruffled e à Melissa, do The Loveliest Day, pois esta mesa está deliciosa!

 Credits: Ruffled

Event Design & Styling: Melissa of The Loveliest Day / Vintage Rentals: Jen of Found / Cakes and Pastries: Melody of My Sweet and Saucy / Paper Goods: Jane of Olive Hue/ Photography: Ashley Rose of Ashley Rose Photography

It's because of dessert tables like this that I like event styling so much! Look at this wonderful job featured today in one of my favorite blogs, Ruffled. In this production, one does realize how much work is involved and how many people participate in such a lovely job!

I love everything vintage, especially where dessert tables are concerned, and I absolutely love these cakes, the colors and texture, nothing too matchy-matchy... and those beautiful cake-stands that I would die for!!... :-)

Congratulations to Amanda, for her wonderful blog, and to Melissa, of the Loveliest Day, who styled this dessert table amazingly. Check Ruffled to see more details.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Vegie Patch October 2010

I am so excited to have a vegetable garden this year for the first time since we moved to Adelaide in 2008.  Although it's still fairly early in the growing season the vegie patch is shaping up well. 

The previous owners had a cubby house in this corner of the garden which they took with them, leaving a bare patch of earth that just yelled 'vegie garden' to me.

I have divided the area into four beds with bricks, partly so that I can rotate what I grow, and partly to provide somewhere to walk.  I don't want to tread all over my new little seedlings!

In the picture below you can see broad beans, lettuces, broccoli and silverbeet.  There are also a few tomato seedlings, pea plants and radishes, but they are too small to show up in the picture.

In the shot below, taken from the side, you can see potatoes, onions and carrots.  The bare, straw-covered bed at the back will have summer vegetables once they are big enough to plant out.  I am hoping to get some sort of trellis to cover that very ugly metal fence and will growing grapes or passionfruit over it.

This rose-covered arch (not yet flowering) is the gateway to my vegie patch.  In another month or two it will be very pretty.

Here are the rest of my summer vegetables, growing in a mini greenhouse (I took the cover off for this photo).  There are watermelons and rockmelons, tomatoes, cucumbers and zucchinis, eggplants, peppers, chillis, squash and sweet basil.  I'll plant them out when they get their second set of leaves.

I'm trying to grow everything from seed this year.  I don't know if it will all work but I'll keep you posted!

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Seaside Daisies

Seaside daisies (Erigeron karvinskianus) are unlikely to ever win a prize in a flower show.  They are neither glamorous nor dramatic nor big.  Yet as a hardy perennial groundcover, they are hard to beat.

Thriving in the poorest soils with very little water and no maintenance, seaside daisies will provide their small pink and white flowers year-round in mild climates.  They will spread to fill any bare patches of soil.

And I think they are rather photogenic, don't you?

reade more... Résuméabuiyad