A new homewares brand has started up in Hobart: smith+purton. We design, screenprint and make (okay, we outsource the making to someone who knows what she is doing with a sewing machine!) funky homewares such as tea towels, cushions, textile wall banners and crafter's fat quarters, with children's and adults' aprons, and new cushion and fat quarter designs to come later this month! So far all the fabric used is hemp-organic cotton or hemp-cotton denim, and it's all printed with water-based, solvent-free inks, so you can rest assured it's a clean process resulting in a safe (nevermind durable, original and desirable!) product! We also post on our facebook page and our store blog a new illustration each Monday, to keep things interesting. Here is this week's offering:

Here's a stack of our tea towels, folded and ready for packaging and shipping. Oh, we'll ship to anywhere in Australia for free too!

Here is one of our hemp-organic cotton tea towels, Kitchen City, also available in black, for $25, or as a pre-hung wall banner in red or black for $39.

Here are our yardage print Kitchen Scribble tea towels, currently on sale for $20 each!

One of our zingy hemp-organic cotton cushions, orange Zigzag.

So here we are. And we have one last offering. If you sign up for our mailing list before this Friday, 17 August, you'll go in the draw to win your choice of one of our tea towels, shipped free to wherever you are in the world! Sweet!

The Market - August

The Market, Hobart's monthly Sunday art and craft market, is on again this weekend. Zando Design will be there, selling the Manhattan series of candle shades, plus a new series: the Hobart Deco series...three iconic Hobart art deco buildings miniaturised and adapted into shade format. What a souvenir!
There will also be loads of other fantastic stuff, plus hot soup, coffee and cakey nibbles to sustain your arduous shopping adventure!

The Market at the Masonic Temple, Sandy Bay Rd, Hobart. Sunday August 2nd, 10-3.

Winter Beach Market!

Okay, I'm ready to say the M-word again!

Maaaarrrrket!

Winter Beach Market, this Saturday June 6th, 9-2 at the Blackman's Bay Hall, the Esplanade, Blackman's Bay.

Come along and you can see and BUY some of these little beauties:



They're all original, hand-cut paper candle shades and they're way more delicious in person! Look for the Zando stall, also selling badges and cards, possibly bib+washer sets, toddler-free time permitting!

Fad no# 25?? Markets!

Just did another market today: The Market.

It went okay for me - I didn't exactly sell out, faaaar from it, but I covered my costs and added to the business coffers a bit, so I'm happy enough. I feel a bit overfed on cute and folksy though. I may have to make my next stall all about blood and death or something to provide a little heavy relief to all the lightness!

Anyway, now I need a holiday from thinking about how I can turn inexpensive and simple materials into funky marketable products. I need to stare at a shit movie for a night. Or read a book. I need to not say the word "m...m...mar..." nope, can't do it. Can't say that word for a little while.

Chocolate calls. Adieu.

The Beach Market

Saturday March 14, that's NEXT Saturday folks!, is the first Beach Market, held in Blackmans Bay, just south of Kingston. It's a new market, selling locally created craft and design, fresh produce and funky stuff. I'm in it. So please come along, oh invisible and silent readership!

Here is a sample of what I will be selling...




Where: Blackmans Bay Hall, Ocean Esplanade Blackmans Bay
When: Sat March 14, 9-2

A terrible weekend.

Victoria, my beloved adopted state, has suffered terribly this weekend. I send out my most heartfelt condolences to all who have suffered loss of one kind or another, and I encourage everyone to make a donation to the Red Cross Bushfire Appeal, even if you can only spare twenty bucks like us. In fact, to save contributing to their website crashing, you can donate at the cashier of Coles supermarkets as I discovered today. Probably at Woollies too.

This can be a savage country to live in.

Death to all arsonists.

15 seconds of fame!

A fellow Etsy seller, Dizzydolly, has featured me on her blog, so go there and check it out! Aint the internet wonderful? We can all be superstars!

New stock on etsy! The first two of six Stella card and badge sets.

Run free, my pretties!

My etsy store is alive and kicking at last!!!

My partner and I have finally started our etsy store, Zando Design. So far there are just my badges for sale, but now we are up and running you can expect to see lots more stuff soon!

It's rockabilly, not rocket science!

Don't get me wrong, we love living in Tasmania, but what does it take for a guy to get a decent haircut around here? My partner has been stumped as to where to get a cut. Every barber or hairdresser he asks about quiffs gives him a stunned silence. I think they think we're trying some sort of prank call. When we say, "You know, a quiff, like James Dean, or Elvis?" they often say, "Never heard of it, but you can talk me through it!"

That's not what we're paying you for!!!

What's next..."Doctor, doctor, I need an apendectomy!" "Never heard of it, but you can talk me through it!"

Sheesh. Looks like those cheap flights to Melbourne might be the only hope.

Feel the love!

I'm really getting into this living-in-Hobart thing! My Tassie blog project is starting to bulge already with all sorts of local goodies, and looking back through it I feel excited and proud of what my home-state is coughing up!
There is so much more upcoming over the next few months... folk festivals, wooden boat festival, Taste festival, 10 Days on the Island...plus we're going on a clan holiday to some supposedly fantastic holiday "shacks" (think faancy!) in Bicheno. Can't wait to post gorgeous photos of that! (Can't wait to have gorgeous experience, more's the point!)
Meanwhile, it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas around our place... the first time we've really decorated or "done" Christmas together at our home. The out-laws are all flying over for a few days so it will be a prety big week all up! Woohoo!

Inspiration.

It's been kind of a big week for me. Someone very important to me had a medical miracle performed on him...well perhaps delicate neurosurgery is all in a day's work for the neurosurgeon, but to us he is a god. Recovery is going well, and it has renewed my sense of rightness in being here.

And on a much lighter and fluffier note, I was inspired yesterday by a market of crafting mothers, and will try my damndest to be a part of this venture next year. Read more about it here.
We're off to another market today, a design market in the IXL Courtyard at Hunter St. Can't wait to see what there is... hopefuly not too many Huon Pine pepper grinders. The world only needs so many of them!

Culture shock.

I've moved interstate, back to Tassie where I grew up. I'm having good days and bad days about it. The good days are looking up at the mountain looming over the city from every vantage point, seeing my mum and dad and other relatives easily and without that intensity that the fleeting visits of the past necessitated, and knowing how much good stuff is a short drive away (though I haven't yet taken many short drives to the good stuff). The bad days are feeling a keen longing for Melbourne, for markets with choice and ethnic variety, for running into people I know as I walk down the street, and for that exciting sense of anything might happen, anything might be discovered that I still got frequently even after a dozen years living there. I have to be honest though, part of my melancholy is a longing for the life and the me before I had a baby - cycling to life modelling jobs or the pool, doing two hours of yoga uninterrupted if I felt the urge, poking around the op shops without navigating a hummer of a pram (I love my buggy, don't get me wrong) and timing my pottering by the tolerance level of a bored baby. But of course, and I really mean this, I'm not just being tokenistic, I wouldn't exchange my motherhood or my boy for ANYTHING, and having him is easily and unquestionably the best thing I've ever achieved. I also am able to recognise that another contributing factor to my homesickness is that I left a well-entrenched and longtime sense of belonging in Melbourne to come to a place that is both familiar and strange (in many senses of the word), one where despite my family links, I feel a distinct lack of belonging. So far. This will change once I have found a playgroup I like and some simpatico mothers to hang out with, and also once I increase my human-powered mobility (never mind the petrol prices, I'd rather use the car as little as possible on a day to day basis. Bodies were designed to move themselves about.) via some sort of baby-seat for the pushie. Then I can ride to the city, the docks, the art school to meet Dan when he is studying, the Botanical Gardens, the museum. We kind of fluked it when we ended up moving to Glenorchy. It turns out I can walk to the library (a great one, too, with the best Rock 'n' Ryhme I've ever participated in), supermarkets and fruit market, pool and basically all the local amenities worth using within half an hour, which satisfies my daily exercise fix. But Glenorchy is no Preston, despite being a northern suburb, and Hobart is no Melbourne, no matter how you look at it. I'm just going to have to come to terms with that.

Birdy Num Nums?...I think not.

Birdy Num Nums, a parent-, child- and pram-friendly cafe on Nicholson St, North Carlton, has been my recent cafe of choice to meet people with my hummer of a pram and squirming child. It is a bit of a legend among Melbourne mums, so I thought I'd try it out in my last weeks in this city. Big disappointment.
The first two times I went I only had milkshakes or iced chocolate - not too hard to get right. Yesterday we went for lunch, and in a spectacular show of mediocrity, everything that eventually made it to our table was very poor! Crispy squid on a Vietnamese salad was soggy calamari on a small wilted heap of salad mix with some token grated carrot and crushed peanuts. An insulting $16.50. All coffees and the chai were appalling and the other three mains all looked very lame as well. The dry, wizened mushrooms with my friend's eggs made my heart sink. Not to mention the waiting staff, who all seemed to be on work experience. Not what I would've thought was the wisest choice for a weekend lunchtime.
I was so utterly disappointed, perhaps most so with myself for staying, eating and paying.

Birdy Num Nums? Bloody Yuk Yuk.

Back to (back) bibs.

Reversible unisex bibs made for some friends having as yet gender-unknown babies. I actually bought the fabric new, which goes against the way I want to produce these, but I was in a hurry to make them and not having anything suitable in my stash I had no choice.

I've since scored some cool pieces of fabric from a local charity op-shop, one where you can still come away with a bag of stuff and only $3 poorer...a rarity in these days of op-shops knowing their hip value!

The definition of tragic and pointless:

A fat guy in a fluoro vest wandering morosely up and down in front of a 24-hr McDonald's shifting lawn clippings and leaves about with a leaf blower...ON A VERY WINDY DAY!

And what's more, some idiot pays for this service!

Tagged!

I got tagged to answer (answer? fill out? how does one respond to a meme? what is a "meme" exactly?) by this lady.

So here are my responses...

What was I doing 10 years ago?
Oh god. Erm...
Possibly moving from a share-house in Northcote to another in Clifton Hill; halfway through my BA in Linguistics; smoking a lot of dope but planning to quit; going to raves and indulging in other substances; wearing lots of glitter, bindis and fluoro accessories (dear God!); making a set of costumes for my ex-sister-in-law's dance production; pining over my socially-awkward archaelogist housemate, and generally thinking I was pretty clever and street-wise! (Which clearly I so wasn't!)

Five snacks I enjoy in a perfect, non weight-gaining world:
1. hot jam donuts
2. white christmas
3. lashings of gorgonzola (more of a non-tight-budget world)
4. pork crackling
5. King Island Belgian Chocolate cream dessert (Dad bought me some after Jethro was born...mmmm!)

Five snacks I enjoy in the real world:
1. seasonal fruit
2. toast with avocado and black pepper
3. sushi rolls
4. turkish bread, dukka and olive oil
5. jerky

Five things I would do if I were a billionaire:
1. build our house and fit it with the best of everything we want (yoga studio, totally self-sufficient, orchard and gardens, lap pool...)
2. buy a really cool car and get it greened up so I could drive it guilt-free
3. buy a few homes around the world, including one in Rio, so I could be near my brother
4. do something philanthropic, like set up community wind-farms or solar-power a school or something
5. um...I dunno, it's been so long since I fantasised about having squillions of dollars. I just want enough dollars to get by without stressing. So, maybe another atruistic thing. Definitely something towards a more sustainable environment.

Five jobs that I have had:
1. chamber-maid (for one lousy, tedious, stressful day!)
2. child-care worker
3. dish-pig
4. life model
5. graphic artist

Three of my habits:
1. finishing other people's sentences (often wrongly!)
2. looking for errant curly hairs on my scalp and plucking them out (like a simian looking for lice - one of my least attractive traits!)
3. making to-do lists

Five places I have lived:
1. a dome in Hobart
2. North Fitzroy with her
3. Northcote
4. Clifton Hill
5. Preston
....basically, within pages 29-30 of the Melways!

I'm s'posed to tag five others to do this, but I can't really think of five other bloggers, so I might just let it end here.

I expect I'll get 7 years bad luck or something.

More white noise in the blogosphere.

I have created yet another blog.
Why?
Because I'm anal, and I like to keep things organised nicely. This blog is for fads and general life rambles and activities, Stella is for Stella pictures, Buttons is for badges and the new one is for my list of things good about Tasmania. This new venture is my self-prescribed therapy for dealing with increasing feelings of angst and panic at moving house/ moving state/moving back(wards?) / moving to an island.


The idea is to catalogue all the great cafes, shops, venues, natural wonders and gold in them there hills that I come across once I move to Hobart, as a reminder to myself that whilst it may not be Melbourne (which is a good thing, really!) it does have plenty to satisfy needs for good food, cultural diversity (I'm not sure about this one, but I'm hoping!) and entertainment.

I secretly hope that it might even become a bit of a hipsters guide to Tassie! (Which would mean more secret hoping that I am actually a bit hip myself!)

Today's efforts...

I love this one especially!

Bib la difference!

I have fine-tuned the shape a little, narrowing across the shoulders, taking off some length and closing up the neck-hole slightly. I'm quite happy with this version, and will make more like it.


I've got a cool piece of fabric with a Japanese-y cartoon print called The Itazura Kid (a recycled garage-sale pillow-case!) in mind for the next one.