Carte Postale
Around 2 years when I started post crossing, I kept a stash of around 10 cards at any given time. Over the months, this grew to.. well I don’t even know how many blank postcards I have now. I bought about 3 kilos worth while away last year, and I tend to buy boxed, booked and well any old card I can lay my grubby hands on. Some of them end up in my own collection (though I do prefer them written on) and the rest are set aside for Post Crossing requests. If someone wants sunsets, boats, camels or anything else, I would dig through my stash to find something. After a while I got tired of that, and sorted the cards into categories for easier findering. Here’s the old system in action:
It worked pretty okay, but had some downsides. For one, this house is pretty much full of millipedes who like to crawl into boxes and die. Also the cards get bent up and dusty. ALSO the boxes tend to attract other bits and bobs that are not cards. ALSO unless i kept something in there to prop them up, the cards tended to all fall over all the time, which for some reason seriously annoys me.
I just finished sorting out the stash – including all the random things that weren’t in the original boxes – into these drawers. Ideally, I’d like to replace these with wooden drawers at some point, but for now the plastic is okay (and cheap). Plus sides are that the cards are stored flat, away from dust and bugs. The only downside is that oversized cards don’t fit, so I’m trying to think of something to do with those (apart from send entirely oversized cards to people for a while).
It’s odd how good I feel about finally sorting out the pile of cards. I also had a really good clean out of the cards I got in bulk a year or so ago, tossing the ones I’ll never send. Well not tossing, putting in a box to decide what to do with. I SHOULD throw them into the recycling, but I might collage or something with them. You never know.
My god this blog is fascinating, isn’t it?
Airplants
I wandered to Savers today to see if they had any nice breakable china for me to break and stick airplants to. They didn’t, but I hovered aimlessly for a bit eavesdropping on a woman in her 40s who was there with her mother. She was one of those people who can’t do thinking without talking, so the conversation ran like this:
“Mummy, what’s this? Is it for weddings? I didn’t have one at my wedding, but I don’t remember my wedding really. Went to work the next day, so my brain didn’t really realise I was married. Mummy, look at this, this is Copperart, this is. I’m going to get that, that’s collectible, you can’t get Copperart anymore because they closed, that’s really collectible. I’ll get that for a present or something. Mummy, look at this doll, it has fake eyes. No some dolls have real eyes, this one has fake ones. Mummy is that more Copperart?”
For those playing at home who have NO idea what Copperart is, I present you with this commercial:
So so so very collectible, and not at all available in $2 shops everywhere.
Once I got home I was stuck for something to attach the plants to, so after some pondering I remembered the rubbish pit in the paddock. See, this house was built in the early 1900s and being on a few acres the original owners, and a few of those who came after, used a ditch in the paddock to toss their trash into. This sounds very nasty, but it’s full of wonderful broken china and even old toys (although I think our mass excavations of the 1980s uncovered most of the choice pieces). I dug around with a stick for a bit until I uncovered some nice bits of china to mount the plants on, and here are the results.
I’ve long been a fan of Tillandsia, but have only ever found them for sale stuck to horrible fridge magnets, so finding them loose at the Garden Show was awesometacular. Did you notice how I said Tillandsia and not Airplants just then? That was me pretending to know more about them than I do – for example, I have NO idea what the names for these ones are.
While at Mitre10, I picked up a large light globe which I hope to be able to make into a terrarium for another airplant. Ahem, sorry, I meant Tillandsia.
Flower Show
Even though I don’t currently garden, I like pretty flowers (coz I am a girl) and so went along with my mother and aunt to the Melbourne Flower and Garden Show yesterday. It was a stinking hot day, and we about broke ourselves wandering around in the heat, but it was very lovely overall.
Generally speaking, I didn’t really enjoy the “Arrangements”. Not to crap on those who worked hard on them, but they just weren’t to my taste. A little too much “deep meaning” and not quite enough plant life. I know, I know, it’s art and that’s great and I love that people did it, just not my taste. Having said that there were two I really loved:
I really liked the rose graffiti, for one. The colours are awesome and the booth was laid out really well. The second one I loved was the carnation wheel:
The building was not as busy this year. Last year when Mama and I went it was a day of almost non stop torrential rain, so everyone was inside mostly. This year was totally opposite, the gardens were packed and the hall pretty empty. There were plenty of lovely shady spots to collapse though, which was handy.
The stalls and booths varied from the simple to the complex, with prices to match. One booth which stocked a delicious array of carved sandstone garden sculptures also had prices up to $16,000 so I don’t know how many sales they made on the day.
Gardeners are a generally friendly lot and while wandering alone looking for Mama and Jan (I’d dashed over to the Museum to stock up on postcards while I was in the area) I struck up quite a few conversations with people as we wandered the pathways. Conversations about flower colours, prices and delicious furniture, as well as offering directions and suggestions. Everyone was there for a good day, and the cheerfulness of the crowd was pretty infectious.
The Collectors Stand was probably the busiest. They were selling cuttings for cheap, for one, and for 2 (grammar be damned) they had a wonderful collection of cacti, air plants and other weird and wonderful plants.
I picked up four air plants (one of which is stuck to a frog ornament, there’s a shock) and a Dead Elephant Plant*. The airplants, which I’ve always loved, will be mounted this weekend. Mama availed herself to the cheap cuttings (seriously, some people were buying up huge amounts).
The Growers section was back again this year, giving us so much beauty and colour.
Just deliciousness. You can see a few more shots (including the garden chairs someone needs to buy me please) over at my Flickr Set of the show.
*If you go to your local nursery and ask for a Dead Elephant Plant they will think you’re a lunatic. What you need to ask for is a Stone Plant. Mama and I call them Dead Elephant Plants because when I was a mere slip of a girl we had one that looked like someone had buried a dead elephant with its feet sticking up out of the ground.