While on my bloggie break (part one)

Cherri asked me what I did while on my recent bloggie break ... so, here goes, guess you could call it a lot of this n that  :D)










First of all, I wanted to take a couple of nice pictures to frame and show off put in the guest room. That meant a lot of experimenting and learning to drive the new camera and its two lenses.  
That took ages, delightful ages I might add! So, after a lot of sorting and deciding, I settled on these two.
I'm quite thrilled to be able to slowly increase my photo skills.  MD quite literally dragged me into a Photographics shop on one of our trips to Lakes Entrance, and asked the fellow to show me what he's got (cameras, that is).  I froze... anything that had SLR written on just made me do that, however, now, I'm so glad he did!

Then, something I'd been putting off for ages .... cleaning the venetians  - ugh, what a job... hate it. I'd tried doing them just a couple of slats every few days ... nah, didn't work. Thought for a few mad months that if I ignored them they might kind of clean themselves - no such luck. Think I'd only done the first 5 slats when the novelty wore off and I decided to take a picture instead.

Got back into it and soon they were nice enough to hang our cards on (we keep our cards hanging for ages, I love to see them). 
That only left the venetians in the bathroom and laundry - see... while ever I had blogging to do, it was much preferable to cleaning the venetians ! LOL


Onto sewing now.  We'd finished the bean bags, but I'd been wanting to design some simple bags with handles that would be easy on my shoulders and neck... ta dah !

First, is my shopping bag - these colours look nice with jeans. The way I've attached the handles stops the top gaping open.  Also, if I start to feel a strain on my shoulders, I've made the length of the bag such that my hand can  can ease the weight off a bit by holding the underside.  Real pleased with the result too.
I've made a good start on some others as well.

Next is my gardening bag... to be honest, it didn't start out as that, but kind of evolved.  The super wide strap is so comfy to carry around the various pruning tools as I work my way through the garden. 


Hmmm, am sure I've seen that material somewhere before ;-)

It was also time for repairs to the shoulder heat pack I'd made for MD (as modelled by Panda below) - it was leaking wheat all over his chair.
Rebel jumped at the chance of modelling the other style of wheat packs.  
All ready for Winter.  A couple of these and a fleecy rug each... no need for the heater to be used quite as much.

Another long awaited job was a thorough cleaning of the fish tank - that meant everything, stones, plants, filter, the lot. 
For a few days I'd been noticing one fish in particular floating on its back - righting itself - then on its back again.  I was sure it was a goner and felt guilty for putting off that job. Amazingly, it came good again... they almost never do. Not that it's happened before..um 

Thought I'd break this post into two.  The next part will follow soon.
(I guess this will show up twice in the Reader now, but I'd left a gap at the end of the post a mile long... just had to fix it up :O  )