third day photo

It took us three days to get the first day of school photo this year.

On the first day, Wednesday, the early wake up and rush out the door was such a shock to the system after the long summer holidays that everyone was way too grumpy for me to even suggest it.

Instead we all five of us bundled into the car, drove all the way to the big girls' school, sat through their morning meeting, and then the other three of us spent the rest of the day wandering through The Garden of St Erth in the rain and the wind. 

We had such a lovely time. Miss Pepper grabbed the map and took us on the tour stopping at each significant tree and pointing out all of the plants she knows the names of. As mixed family farmers who barely get a chance to look up from the spot we're weeding, it's such a gift to look through another garden. To notice how cleverly they've interplanted vegetables in amongst their shrubs and flowers. To observe that the forest they're surrounded by, is the same as ours and how the garden nestled into a corner feels like a lush oasis. To see how seamlessly they've incorporated structures like arches and benches into the gardens without making it look old and formal. To recognise some plants and to be completely unfamiliar with others. To discuss our garden and how we can incorporate perennial borders, under-tree plantings and paths through the bush.

On the way out we bought some flowers, of course, and I satisfied my need to have more echinacea plants in my world. 

The big girls had good days too which was a bonus.

I didn't have any luck getting that 'first day photo' on the second day either.

Miss Pepper was straight out the door early to pick flowers for her new teacher and her new principal, but someone else had terrible period pain and then it just got too complicated. Instead my mum took the big girls off to school and we went to Pepper's first day assembly. And then coffee, and then home to the quiet we had been imagining for days.

Only it wasn't quite calm, or relaxing. The fierce wind that had blown in with the cool change a few days before had knocked over so many of the plants and everything needed tying up and staking or composting.

After that we went through and picked the cucumbers and tidied up the (still unripe) tomatoes.

All day I felt restless and agitated and couldn't work out if it was my way of adapting to the demands of the new school year, if it was the super moon and its accompanying winds, if it was the irritating insects that we're having problems identifying who are eating our precious dahlias, or if it's just because - no reason, no conclusion.

But all girls came home from their second days happy. Indi drove half way home from school, we picked a box full of plums, we went for a walk through the forest and to my great surprise, everyone was in bed by ten o'clock.

And then guess what?!

On the third day I got my photo. A few actually.

This year Indi is in year 12, Jazzy year 9 and Pepper year 5.

This morning they took me by complete surprise and came into the kitchen chirpy and happy. All three at once. So of course I grabbed my chance, shoved my new flowers at them and snapped photos as they made silly faces and posed. YES!!!

After that I drove them out to school. On the way home I listened to a podcast without any interruptions (!!) and then sat with my farmer boy in the sun-room reading in silence.

And so it begins: the timetables, the alarms, the driving, the homework, the organising, the watching the clock, the after school activities, the meetings, the emails, the juggling, the 'what's for dinner?', the checking the family diary, the bed times...I hope I can keep up, I hope I can stay on top of things, I hope I can be everywhere I need to be, I hope I can find some time for me in there somewhere...

I hope that they learn a lot, I hope that they love a lot of what they learn, I hope the world opens up to them a little bit more, I hope they have lots of adventures, I hope they find ways to cope with difficult situations, I hope they are patient and kind and are met with the same, I hope they find opportunities to lead and be led and above all, I hope this year is a really, really good one.

And just quickly before I go;
I'm reading - my mum's copy of The Break by Marian Keyes
I'm watching - (well actually watched and loved) - American Folk - The Movie
I'm listening to - the Modern Love podcast
I'm eating - new season's Jersey Mac apples, so close now
I'm hoping - that the wind dies down so I can plant all of my new flowers in the garden this afternoon
I'm cooking - plum leather in the dehydrator from the foxslane archives
I'm knitting - the front of my Mirehouse

Just before they left for school this morning Pepper asked me to consider changing my blog day to a Monday so I'm not still writing when the weekend arrives, Indi suggested I write this blog about the ever elusive first day of school photo, and Jazzy put on a funny voice and recited some of the questions I would probably end with.

So here they are - to be read in your silliest, posh voice.
Do you have a first day photo tradition in your family?
Do you think it still counts as a first if it's on the third?
(It just occurred to me that this is the last year that there'll be three in the first day of school photo. Woah! Now I'm especially glad I persevered.)
Do you have any other start of school rituals?
Do you miss them when they're gone?

I hope you have a wonderful weekend.

Bye now!

Love, Kate x

ps I have the words 'unapologetically herself' written on my hand in pen. I read them this morning in a chapter of my mum's latest manuscript and cannot let them go. How good!

Five instagram Fridays

Five Fridays have passed since I first told you about The Centre of Contemporary Photography's instagram competition. Five weeks of wondering and exploring the one word prompt given to us, five weeks of taking lots of maybe shots, and five weeks of considering the way I use instagram, the way the other contestants use instagram and what that all means in the scheme of things.

And of course it means five Fridays of uploading the final photo, five Fridays of refreshing my feed constantly to see what the other participants have posted and five Fridays of second guessing myself, of feeling happy, of feeling unprofessional, cliche, inadequate, proud and pleased.

So let me take you on a journey back through those last five Fridays and tell you a bit about the story behind each of my photos.

WEEK 4 | STRANGER

I had spent the few days before the fourth Friday at The Slow Living Workshop and even though I'd had my phone out taking pics the entire time, and even though I had an idea that I'd like to submit something with flowers, I drove out of there thinking that I would have to post my entry a day after. That a Saturday photo would have to be better than no photo at all.

But late that night, sitting in my car waiting for Indi to finish her school production, I found this one amongst the millions I'd taken that week. It felt perfect. Like it represented the theme and my few days exactly. The stranger in black, the contrasting yellow of the wattle and the incredibly beautifully styled table.

I captioned it - I find these internet friendships we form so interesting. We are strangers yet we know intimate details about each other's lives.



WEEK 5 | TIME

My caption - These two and their sister. Their wobbly teeth, their birthdays, their new centimetres, their new tricks, their insights, their favourite songs, their squabbles, their seasons, their accomplishments, the books they finish, the year levels they complete, each day, each hour, each minute.

I woke them up at 5.30am that Friday. Jazzy wouldn't get up. Thankfully these two did. And thankfully the greys turned to blues, turned to golden orange and became awesome. Hand holding children and sunrises are totally cliche, but for a good reason I think. There are not many more humbling experiences than watching night become day, then watching it through their eyes, and then watching them become who they are to be.



WEEK 6 | UP CLOSE

No caption this week. No close up of beach washed up pebbles, no close ups of tropical flowers or leaves or fruit.

Our Indi. On the walk through the jungle from the beach back to the house. Sandy hair, holiday face, content.



WEEK 7 | MIRROR IMAGE

It took me a week to get this shot. Each morning for a week I'd run past the Port Douglas marina at 6.30 and hope for the best, but each day it was too windy and the ripples in the water disturbed the shot I hoped to take.

Until the seventh Friday. On that day I ran, I photographed just in case and not until I got home and flicked through my photo stream did I realise I'd gotten it. I flipped it for fun, didn't caption it and posted it before 8am, record!!



WEEK 8 | CONTRAST

Last Friday morning I walked through our forest with a bucket of watered down clay we had taken from our dam and a paint brush. I chose three blackened trees, loaded some podcasts on my phone and got to work painting stripes.

I borrowed this idea from our wonderful friend and local artist Petrus Spronk. A few months ago he came over to our house and shared a DVD of his own works using clay to paint the trees near his home. He is fascinated with the horizontal stripes in the vertical forest. And we all loved hearing the stories of his beautiful images as much as we loved looking at the photos of them.

Totally and completely inspired, I asked his permission to paint some of our own blackened forest and to my delight he agreed.

So on the eighth Friday I painted, and while it wasn't exactly easy to make even stripes on the charred bark, it was meditative. And when I finally stood back, I liked what I saw. And I photographed it and then I came down the hill to the house and posted it. I love that I can see the stripy trees from my kitchen window when I am doing the dishes.

My caption reads - Horizontal lines in an otherwise vertical forest. White dam clay against the 2009 bushfire burnt trees. With love and gratitude for the concept to my artist friend Petrus Spronk.

And that's it! Until this Friday of course. Better get my thinking cap on.

If you are following this on instagram I'm sorry for the repetition.
If you'd like to see my first three pics you can check them out here.
You can click on the #ccpsalonig hashtag on instagram to see what the other nine grammers are posting.
And if you feel like it you can even join in too by posting your own responses to the prompts using the #diyccpsalon hashtag.

Phew, did you get all that? I hope so.

I also hope you are well and happy.

Until next time, may your light be just right.

Big love! xx

My Fridays on instagram

I sometimes wonder a bit about how much my online worlds interconnect. If I post my new knitting project on Ravelry have you seen it before I get around to tweeting it? If I tell you a funny story on Facebook is it doubling up to blog it too? And if I write about something that is going on in my life as the caption to my Instagram picture, can I assume that most people who are interested in my goings on will have read it as a bite sized chunk and so there's no reason to tell it anywhere online again?

I have no idea.

But just in case you didn't see this on my instagram, and if you did I'm sorry to be repeating myself, there's this cool thing that I'm taking part of that I thought you might like to know about too.

A few weeks ago 10 Melbourne instagrammers were contacted by The Centre of Contemporary Photography (CCP) in Melbourne, inviting us to take part in their inaugural instagram competition. And I was one of them, can you believe it?!! I certainly couldn't.

The rules are that each participant must post a photo each Friday for ten Fridays using a one word prompt provided. Other than that we would be free to use instagram however we liked.

At first I felt honoured and humbled and majorly overwhelmed to be included amongst such incredible photographers. I think I even jumped up and down a bit too. And then I promptly panicked and wrote back an email stating the ten reasons why there was no way I could play along. The first one being how incredibly talented and professional and arty the other nine photographers are. I thought I would feel silly taking my usual photos of wool and chickens and children alongside their masterpieces.

But then after a good long think, and a few kind pep talks from my peeps, I decided to play along. But I would be trying my hardest not to be intimidated, not to second guess myself and not to try and recreate anyone else's style. And I would post iPhone photos only, edited on my phone only, taken on or as close as possible to the same day as posting only. 

So each Friday we'll be posting our pics using the hashtag #ccp_australia. Each week there will be a different theme and each week I'll be hyperventilating while I work out what to post and hope to goodness that I don't make too much of a fool of myself while doing so.

The first theme was BEGINNINGS and my photo was the springtime one up above.

I think the first one was the hardest because I didn't know what to expect from the others. But around lunchtime as I was gathering veggies from the garden for dinner and flowers for the table, I had the brainwave to lay them out on the ground like that.

I tried doing the writing with seeds, then with petals before the chalk. Our dog ran through it a few times and I panicked as the others started posting their clean, stunning pics. But eventually I took a big deep breath and posted it. It's earthy and messy but then again so am I.

The second week's prompt was TEXTURE.

We moved all our flocks of chickens through the forest that Friday morning and I considered every wood-pile, every fallen branch, every bit of moss and every other interesting textural bit of forest I came across, but in the end I decided I wanted something brighter.

So at about five o'clock, just when I thought the light would be just right, I carried a chair and a pile of blankets I'd made down the hill to the back of the bottom shed. But no matter how I tried I couldn't get the shot I wanted.

I spent the next ten minutes running up and down our hill chucking those blankets on things, against things and underneath things before coming home and snapping the picture above. Sometimes simple just works better.


Last Friday's word was LIGHT.

All week I'd imagined something to do with feathers - light as a feather and all that. And it just so happened that last week our pullet flock started losing their baby feathers and I amassed quite the collection.

But out of the three, this last photo is the one I am least happy with. Although it has light and feathery light, and although it is earthy and farmy, I still don't think it is me. I feel like I tried something and it didn't quite work.

Luckily I've only got a few days before this Friday's entry to make myself feel better.

You can click on the #ccp_australia hashtag to check it all out for yourself and if you like you can even play along using the #diyccpsalon hashtag. Come November all the 100 photos will be printed out and hung as a proper exhibition and you can go along and see them there too. Wow!

Oh and these three photos were taken on my camera, but if you want to have a look at the proper instagram versions, please come and find me, I'm @foxslane over there too.

Anyway, enough about me, how about you?
Do you have your own rules for your instagram posting?
Do you feel like everyone's just repeating themselves, repeating themselves all over social media?
Do you think you might like to play along with this Friday's CCP prompt too?



I hope your light is just right.
Happy snapping!

xx

my story in eight

These are the last eight photos I took off my camera.

Mostly with photo taking, I take a bunch of pictures all at once and download them soon after and blog them not long after that. In those cases I pretty much know what to expect. And as the photos flash onto the screen, more often than not, the words that tell their stories come too.

Other times, my camera sits on the kitchen table or near the front door for days at a time, only picked up for a quick snap here and there. After these times the downloading is more of a surprise and more fun. Random snapshots that tell the tales of my life at a moment in time. 

As the eight photos in this post downloaded I was half looking and half eating a feijoa. As they popped onto the screen I noticed how autumnal their colour pallet is. I realised that I am so very obviously the Mum of school girls now as none of the photos has little kids in them. And I saw that although a huge amount more than these eight events has gone on in my life over the past few days, these photos do tell the story of my late autumn beautifully.

Photo one of the kitchen garden up there, tells the story of tiny little lettuces and spinachs trying to put on as much growth as possible while there is still sunshine and a bit of warmth in the air before winter really kicks in. Our kitchen garden is my happy place these days. I am always kicking my clogs on and picking some herbs or greens for a meal, doing a spot of weeding or transplanting or admiring. Yesterday we noticed the first few broccoli of the season which was cause for much excitement.

Photo two is of the loveliest, chunkiest wool I am currently using to knit my farmer boy a new beanie. I don't know about you but I find it very difficult to source really chunky, soft, pure wool. This stuff is from New Zealand, I bought it in Ocean Grove last week and now I'm thinking I should have bought more. Details here.

Yesterday I drove past farmer Bren on his tractor wearing two beanies at once, so I think next up once I finish this beanie will be a balaclava.

Photo three is of a marker for a seed tray filled with onion seeds in the hot house. On Tuesday we filled the hot house with trays of onion seeds and leek seeds. I'm hoping they grow big and strong soon enough to transplant them into the garden and leave us the space to start the tomato season all over again in August.

Photo four is of the bottle tree in Autumn. I love how that tree and its bottles tells a different story each season. After a summer of thick green foliage that practically hid the bottles from view, the leaves slowly turned golden and reflected in the bottles' glass. And now as the leaves fall to a carpet below the tree the bottles remain, swaying and occasionally clinking in the cool wind.

Photo five is of the basil seed we saved from this year's crop to dry out and plant again next year. There may not be any fresh, green basil leaves to flavour our cooking for some time, but our freezer is filled with containers of pesto for the winter.

Photo six is of the carpet of autumn leaves I mentioned above. I remember when I used to live in suburban Melbourne autumn was always filled with raked up piles of autumn leaves to be burned, composted and sometimes run through. The leaves on our farm are a bit more free range, blowing around, making a pretty mess and then disintegrating back into the earth. I think they are terribly beautiful and they make me happy even though I know that the leaves on the back deck and in the entrance way are a sign of my bad housekeeping.

Picture seven is of a big bowl full of green-manure seeds I mixed up before planting. Doesn't it look like soup mix! This mix of fenugreek, broad beans, peas and vetch went in where the tomatoes came out of the garden. Our garden worked super hard making the vines and fleshy tomato fruit over the past six months and this green manure crop will feed the soil and prepare it for next spring's plantings.

And picture eight I took a few minutes ago. Picture eight is of some gorgeous wool felt I bought off lovely Lizzie this morning at Mill Rose. I have book mark plans for this pile. Book marks with little vintage caravans parked on top. The publicity campaign for my book has begun and these book marks will be a part of it. I'm both excited and nervous. The release date is still a few months away but there's loads to do before then. Eeeeeeep!

I hope your week is telling a wonderful story.
I hope it is warm, delicious and pleasing to the eye.

Ciao x

The other Kate. x

I have this gorgeous friend called Kate.
She is the mama of two cute girls and guess what?
One of her girls is called Pepper.
Fancy that!! Two Kates and two Peppers.

Anyway, Kate has this business where she goes into people's houses and hangs out with them and takes photos and captures them in their real life. You might have seen the pics of when she visited Pip's house recently. Her photos are really amazing. Really clear and very, very inspiring.

So Kate came to our house to shoot us today. And her two girls and Ro and his two girls came too. And in the end including our girls there were seven girls and it was fun and it was wild. And we baked fancy four stranded challah, we made and ate a big meal with the farmer boys, we took the alpacas for a walk and played with the baby chicks. And the girlies took their clothes off and put them back on again  several times, swung on the inside swing, did nail polish and ate lots of eggs.

We adore those guys and loved spending the day with them.

And in the end we had a bit too much fun and had to make a plan for Kate to come over again soon to take more photos with less little girl distractions. We'll wait til after the school holidays I think. I'm just happy to have an excuse to have her over again soon. Yay!

Pic 1 - The kitchen pile of stuff.
Pic 2 - Me and Jazzy.
Pic 3 - Our bedroom wall.
Pic 4 - The Esse stripey pipes.
Pics 5 and 6 -  Braiding the challah.

More of Kate's gorgeous pics and her business details are here on her blog, go and say hello.

I hope you are having a wonderful week.
I hope you've had a chance to spend time with gorgeous friends.
And I hope you know how much your encouraging comments on my last post meant to us.
Thank you! I'll keep you posted.

I'm off to knit a few rows of my poncho.
What are you doing right now?
Bye!

xx

Makings in macro.

I declared yesterday a housewife day. All day long I cooked and cleaned and washed and baked and shopped. That meant that today after bush kinder I had a chance to play with my new, but very late, birthday present macro lens.

What a great way to show you what I've been making.

Knitting the sleeve of my Ruby Red Ribbed.

Crocheting the hem of my Farmer boy's pillow case.

Baking afternoon tea cookies.

Ahem.

Mama and baby.

The very first photo I took with my new macro lens once I got it home was of these #$%^&ers. I guess they have become immune to that essential oil mix spray I've been swearing by for months now. Bum!!

Knitting Farmer Bren another beanie. Man it's cold here.

Playing around with some crochet.

Book marking ideas for brooches.

Sewing manchester for the caravan.

And washing and combing Miss Pepper's hair. It is long! Past her bum-bum now. I'm not cutting it though. No way! She's my last baby and I'm hanging on to that new born hair for as long as I can.

So that's me.

What are you making?

Bye now. xx

Favourite 4 Photos Friday.

So here we are heading down the home stretch of Blogtoberfest and with only two days to go I've got to say I've really enjoyed this blogging every day thing this year. Actually, I've blogged more than once a day, because I've also posted four blogs on my other blog.

For me its been great to put a little bit of time aside every day to capture a moment in time. To talk about what I'm making or how I'm feeling.

I signed up to blog every day in October thinking that if I missed a day nobody would notice but me, but I don't think there has been one day that I haven't known what to post about.

All those 'how to be creative' books talk about keeping journals and I have tried and tried but I don't seem to be able to stick to writing, drawing and sticking things in a book. I guess my blog has helped me to keep a version of a journal and I really enjoy it.

A lot of the time when I have something on my mind that I'm trying to process, if something has happened that I want to remember, or if I've made something I want to record, popping it on the blog means that I can move on. Kind of like a brain dump.

So nearing the end of October I am wondering how I will blog from here? Will it be every day? Most days? Some days? I guess I'll just play it by ear and see how I go.

Have you played along this year? Would you consider blogging every day? How did you go?

And these are my favourite four photos from this week that haven't made it onto the blog so far.

1) Jazzy trying on a new dress. That girl can model anything from a size four to a size seven. What would I do without her?

2) Our 1,300 chookies are not pets. They are out in the paddocks free ranging and doing their chooky thing. But once Miss Pepper catches one and cuddles it, you'd think they were as tame as can be. This one was lucky enough to be sung 'row, row, row your boat' to and fully snuggled.

3) With Pixie not around anymore it seems the farm dogs have to have cuddles too. Don't worry, we are looking for a new pet dog.

4) Apple blossom, pear blossom, plum blossom, quince blossom. Its been quite the week for climbing trees and watching bees.

So my blogland friends, I hope you have a truly happy and wonderful weekend. Ours is looking crazy busy but fun. Cross your fingers for us that we don't get too much rain.

And if you'd like to pop your four favourite photos of the week on your blog, I'd love to come and see them.

A photo shoot.

The other day Bren was doing an interview for The Weekly Times about our farm when for some reason he mentioned this blog. Before you knew it, the journalist had set up a time to interview me for a Foxs Lane article to run next to the Daylesford Organics one.

Because she isn't a blog reader or writer I found myself trying to explain the sense of community, the sharing of inspiration and the friendships. I tried hard to make blogland sound like the wonderful place it is for me and tried not to make it sound like Internet dating.

While she found it difficult to understand that I often repurpose bed linen and tea towels to make clothes for my kids, she loved the idea of crafters making a difference with charity work and aid relief. She also loved the concept of 120 women from all over the world making and swapping pin cushions and teaching each other new skills and sharing patterns.

So as you can see from the photos, this morning was the photo shoot for the article.

Bren had his photos taken out in the paddock with a couple of chooks and these are the pics he took of the photographer doing mine.

After the girls were in bed last night I had the brilliant idea to crochet up one of Kirsty's granny shrugs to wear in the photo, but didn't quite get it finished in time. Instead it is sitting on my lap being worked on.

I am always nervous before I read articles about us and what we do here and this time is no exception but it feels more personal. Daylesford Organics is our business and we are used to talking about it in a public forum but Foxs Lane is my baby. It is filled with my thoughts, my projects and...well me.

Wish me luck.

And while I'm on the personal, I'd like to thank everyone who took the time to answer the eight questions on their blogs. Its been great learning more about you guys, and so interesting to see how different our answers are to the same questions.

If you'd like to answer the eight on your blog, pop your link in here and off you go.

I hope your Monday is a funday.