... on new things and being out-of-place. And eggs.

Well, it's done. We've moved house. I'm sitting here facing a strange wall in a strange room, surrounded by boxes, and I'm hoping that it will start to feel less odd very soon, as (I may have mentioned before) I'm not that great with big changes and associated upheavals.

In the midst of all the ruckus, Violet (the solo female from my batch of five Pekin bantam chicks last year) has laid her first egg, which was very sweet and small and brown. Here it is next to an egg from one of the grown-up ladies.

I'm always delighted when a young hen lays her first egg. In the nestbox, too. Clever chicken.

My Ma found an intriguing egg for me on the beach at Bilinga, where she now lives. She said it was just poking out of the sand a little bit, and at first she thought it was a ping-pong ball, as it was about that size. 

See, it has some tiny pink barnacles attached to it! For some reason this egg had been floating about in the sea long enough for barnacles to adhere to it.

It had distinct pores, and one end is almost spherical, the other quite pointed. It was quite ominously heavy. To my horror the day after my Ma had given it to me Something Started Oozing Out of it and stinking up the drawer I had placed it in to prevent Ollie breaking it. Ugh. This curious egg is now residing in a sunny spot well up the (new) back yard away from the house where it might dry out. I do hope it will, as some of my other egg specimens have done when given enough sunshine and time.

Pew, what a pong, though! It was the sort of magnificent stink that lingers in your nose and taints the taste of everything you eat for some time!

*

Anyway, like the egg floating in the ocean (how? why?!) or the barnacles attached to an egg (huh?) I'm somewhat out-of place. I can't remember what's in all these boxes. Better go and find out, hey?

... on eggs. Real ones!

I've got a few eggs to show you. A while back there were some mickies nesting in the wattle tree out the front, and one day, soon after tiny whistlings started coming from the nest, I found an egg on the ground. It was almost-intact, save for a small hole in one side, and it must have been shoved out of the nest as a dud. 

Then, another bunch of mickies nesting at my Ma's place. They'd built in a hanging branch of a paperbark tree, quite low to the ground, and it contained three of their lovely brown-speckled eggs. A few days later though, my Ma reported that the nest must have been raided by a bigger bird, for the eggs were gone (as were the mickies) and the nest was hanging crookedly from the branch. Did I want the nest? Oh yes please!

Can you see the wonderful stuff they've used to pad the nest? I'd seen a few nests where the birds have sourced fluffy building insulation to use, which is generally white or grey, but these mickies have found some two-toned synthetic green material, and used that. 

There has been some interesting chicken egg action around here lately. Normally my Pekin bantam girls lay white-to-pale-brown solid-coloured eggs, but have at look at this delight that awaited me in the nestbox recently. 

A speckled egg! There has been only one, and I have my suspicions that it's the result of some antibiotics that I have been giving Ginger, trying to combat an ongoing case of bumblefoot. Isn't it special? (Ginger is much better, too!)

Lastly, a couple of oddities.

That big egg at the back is a regular Pekin bantam egg. The little white one in front is an end-of-the-season egg from my Ma's English Game hen, Major Hoolihan. The tiny brown one to the right there is a bit special because it's come all the way from Stanthorpe, through the mail, from fellow BrisStyle member, Sarah. I believe the egg came from friends of hers, and it's extra-special because it's the very first egg one of their bantams has laid. Shortly I'll make moulds of those two wee eggs, and see what happens next!

... on finding, keeping, and other excitement.

Excitement comes in funny forms around here, sometimes. One recent burst was a result of a delivery of recycled shredded paper from Ecocern. It was some days late, having been misdirected from Sydney to Perth, but seemed none-the-worse for its WA holiday. Not so hot on the carbon miles, however!

It came in a large tightly-rolled bale, 20 kilograms of it. As it wasn't available in Brisbane I found two other BrisStyle girls to share the costs with, and once unrolled, each share filled a huge (wheelie-bin sized) garbage bag. I've got enough shredded paper to last forever, as you can see by my little foot in the photo below. Mountains of it. 

As soon as the paper arrived, I just had to pull a bit off to try out an idea I'd been chewing over. I wanted something to display my large hanging egg decorations in at the markets, and I had in mind a messy shredded paper nest on a sanded branch sitting on my linen tablecloth.

That's a work-in-progress photo, but you get the idea. A couple of those will almost certainly work a lot better than my previous paper-bag-with-the-top-rolled-down technique, which was admittedly only a temporary fix!

So, now to begin preparations for the upcoming markets. The next City Hall BrisStyle market is on the Saturday-after-next, on October 12, and I'm currently making a batch of my large natural-toned eggs. 

Dry, trimmed and sanded, these cast plaster eggs are ready to be drilled.

Once they've had their little metal rings glued into them and the glue has cured for 24 hours, it's time for the eggs to be painted with their base colour.

Maggie Beer's fruit paste containers make excellent mixed-paint pots. Thanks, Maggie!

Now for a most exciting happening. I did a happy dance in my seat (you know the one) the other day when I received news that my application for the next Finders Keepers market here in Brisbane had been successful. I'll be occupying a debut stall site on the veranda of The Old Museum, so let's all cross our fingers for calm weather, or I'm sure Kuberstore will be taking flight (in many, many pieces) out over the RNA showground! Weather predictions aside, I'm so delighted to have this to prepare for, and I'm sure the next six weeks will simply fly by. Eeek! But HURRAH!

... on taking an idea and running with it.

Last week I shared some in-progress shots of the speckled egg cards I've been making for the upcoming BrisStyle Indie Market, which is next Saturday. They're now all packed up with their stripy brown-paper envelopes in A6 plastic sleeves, and C has made me a nice little plywood box to display them in on the day. Many thanks, C!

These will be available for $4 each on the day. Hurrah!

Then, I wanted to try a more random assortment of eggs... different sizes and varying shapes, and arrange them like the photo of the real eggs displayed in the Launceston Museum that my friends had sent me. 

I set about taking this idea and turning it into a repeating pattern. I photographed my paper eggs, jumped into Photoshop, and three days later I had just about figured it out! I'd never made a proper repeating pattern in Photoshop before, so I learned a few things along the way. One thing I wish I'd figured out sooner... start with the corners. I wanted this pattern to work as a tile - that is, for the original piece to be able to be repeated infinitely without any discernable join on any edge, not even by one pixel. So, once you have got one corner sorted out, you essentially have all four. Wish I'd figured that out sooner.
Anyway, here's the resulting pattern. This is a piece slightly larger than one tile.

One thing I'm glad I realised early on is that it's helpful to work at the highest resolution you can, although I did eventually figure out that there's a 2GB limit on Photoshop file sizes on my computer. This amazed me - and then didn't, when I remembered that the first computer our family owned had a hard drive with a total capacity of 2GB, and that it cost almost $20,000. Phew!
So, I worked big - this is about actual size:

After I'd triple-checked that everything was in order in terms of the repeat, I could then start to play. Oh did I play. I'd forgotten how lovely working in Photoshop can be, and in fact it's very easy to go crazy with variations and become a little overwhelmed. Once I'd got myself back under control, these were the results:

I'm feeling like it's Christmas morning! There's so many possibilities. I feel like uploading them all to Spoonflower, digital printers of fabric and wallpaper, and ordering lengths of silk and upholstery linen, and wallpapering my whole house.
I'd love to know your favourite version... do let me know!

... on variations on a theme.

Friends sent me a couple of photos they took on their recent trip to Tasmania. They saw these in the Launceston Museum and thought of me, egg-fancier that I am.

Isn't that just the most delicious collection of eggs? Such a beautiful way to display them, too. I saw them, thought of my stack of nice old coloured pastel paper (found for me last year by my excellent-op-shop-rummager-friend Beck) and my mind started racing. 

The result was a little stack of speckled bird egg cards. Each one is a little bit different, given the random nature of the speckle, and I've really enjoyed the simplicity of this cut-and-paste project.

I'm using thick watercolour paper as the base card, and I've found a supplier of some lovely stripy-brown-paper envelopes to go with them. I'll make another handful, pop them into some C6 plastic sleeves and try them out at the next BrisStyle Indie Market in City Hall on the 14th September. 

It's always refreshing to try variations on a theme - just call me Egg Girl!

... on two new things.

I've been saving up the cast eggs from this one mould I made a while back, in honour of an odd little egg that one of my Ma's chooks laid. Her name is Major Hoolihan, and she got her name because she's very neat and somewhat busty-looking, like her namesake from M*A*S*H.

That's her odd little egg, alongside a regular-sized bantam hen egg. Normally she lays eggs of a decent size, so I don't know what she was thinking that day. 

Anyway, every time I've poured a batch of plaster lately I've been pouring into that one tiny mould, too, and so now I've got over 20 casts of this egg. I mixed up a batch of pale blue acrylic and painted the lot of them at once. Speckles, too. I had another chevron wall hanging in mind.

After the cacophony of colour that has been characterising these wall hangings of late, I'm pleased with the muted peacefulness of this one. With all the possibilities suggested by eggs (whether symbolic (rebirth, hopes for the future, etc) or practical (omelet, chocolate mousse, etc!), I think this would look lovely in a child's room.

Followers of Kuberstore on Facebook will have already seen these in-progress photos of a little nest I've been working on. I'm currently preparing for the next BrisStyle Indie Market in City Hall, and I was fraying the edges of a piece of linen to use as a tablecloth. Afterwards I was left with a huge handful of these wonderful stormy grey linen threads. I took a needle, threaded it up with a piece, and started working it through the handful, shaping as I went.

I was initially planning to use a single large white plaster egg with this nest, but thought I might try out a special speckled one instead. I used a few layers of watercolour paint as the base colour (which allows the nice texture of the plaster to come through, especially if I rub it back with paper towel while it's still wet) and then speckled it with white, followed by layers of satin varnish. I had to be very patient (and I'm the least patient person I know) because this is the first painted egg I've done that hasn't had a hanging loop in one end. I had to do it side-by-side and let it dry inbetween-times. Patience, Em!

So, it's finished, and is now available in my Etsy shop. This is something a bit new for me, and I'm quite liking the look, and the process. I might have to source some more linen and see what comes next!

... on now.

A lovely morning... the studio is warm, a 'This American Life' podcast is on, my hands are dusty with plaster, the sun was out but now a misty winter shower has come across, the latest pour of eggs are curing and I've got lots to do. Lots! I'm going to be doing my first BrisStyle Indie Market in the beautifully restored rooms of Brisbane City Hall on Saturday 10th August. I've got a whole table to fill, display ideas overflowing, a stall helper arranged (thanks Ma!) and just over three weeks to prepare.

I'm about to package up this set of five speckled eggs and send them off to a secret destination that I hope to be able to reveal more about soon. Exciting!

I had a visitor with a camera yesterday (more on that soon, too), so the scurf that usually lingers about in the studio has been momentarily tidied away. It prompted me to find a proper home for the huge pile of newspapers that had previously been living in the hallway, and helped me accept that although I may have hoarding tendencies, I'm not too bad. Not yet!

A cup of tea and my morning will be perfect! How's yours?

... on Market preparation, and a new sign!

Tomorrow night it's the first BrisStyle market for the year and, weather permitting, I'll be there! I'm sharing a table in the co-op section, and would love for you to drop by and say hello if you're passing through King George Square in Brisbane - I'll be there from about 4.00pm.

I've been busy making myself a new Kuberstore sign, which I hope to be able to suspend from the marquee somehow. I had in mind some kind of speckly-flaggy-banner-cardboard-cutout-letters-type creation, so I cut out a newspaper mockup to see if it might work.

Yes, I think so! I then speckled up a nice big piece of brown card, cut out my logo from white card, and painted in some shading.

I've just finished glueing and varnishing it this morning... here it is!

I've mounted it on a piece of corrugated cardboard, so it's very light and hopefully won't be too tricky to install. We'll see!

This time I've resolved to make things a bit more vertical in the display department, so have recycled my old sign into a brooch-stand. That should clear up enough space for me to be able to sit at the table and carve some plaster, which both gives me something to do, and demonstrates what it is exactly that I do. I have wondered whether people looking at my things realise that I make them from scratch. This will only be my third market, but one thing I have noticed is that people are more likely to approach a stall and have a good look if the owner is either already busy with a customer, or they are sitting there concentrating on making something. Plus, just standing there behind my table watching people looking at my things (or worse, not looking!) makes me feel very awkward and exposed, and is something I have struggled with so far. Perhaps this is the answer!

So, my rainbow watercolour plaster bird's eggs will be making their first appearance - can you believe it's only five weeks until Easter? Something from this cheerful little collection would make a lovely Easter gift for someone who doesn't eat chocolate, and I'll have several wall hangings available, as well as individual hanging eggs.

Weather, please be kind to us - and do drop by if you're in town. I'd love to see you!

... on an idea.

Ideas are funny, aren't they? You'll be minding your own business, maybe digging in the garden or peeling potatoes, not thinking about anything very much, when... WHAMMO! A thought will suddenly arrive, unbidden! into your head, leaving you thinking "Where did THAT come from?" and then, as experienced by me a week ago; "... and why haven't I thought of that BEFORE!?"

The thought was this. I'd finished drilling holes and glueing metal loops into the tops of a batch of my smaller plaster eggs. They were ready to be painted, and I was planning on undercoating and then layering up the acrylic colour coats on them in an array of rainbow hues. But I swear, I wasn't even thinking about them one morning last week when suddenly I thought watercolour. WHAMMO! I thought of my previous experiments of colouring my plaster letters by soaking them in ink, and wondered why on earth I've never thought of colouring the eggs in a similar way. I knew, from the letter colouring trials, that the plaster has various densities that absorb the pigments to different degrees - an effect I wasn't pleased with at the time. WHAMMO! I had a vision of a plaster egg soaked in watercolour paint, and it was all mottled and lovely, picking up the textures of the plaster; dark in places and light in others, any textural differences in the plaster highlighted... I had to try it straight away.

I couldn't believe my eyes! They turned out exactly as I'd imagined. I could see that less colour was absorbed where I'd sanded the eggs. At the bottoms, where the plaster is denser (I think the smaller particles naturally sink to the bottom when I bang the moulds to get the bubbles out) hardly any colour went on at all. Inbetween, the colour was really rich, and any surface textures were picked out with denser pigmentation. The result was, for want of a better description, really watercolour-y, and I was so surprised!

I speckled them all up with white paint, sealed them with several coats of varnish, and sat back to look at them. They look like galaxies!

There's rainbow craziness all over the table, and I'm feeling pretty happy about it. I've set out a couple of rainbow-song wall hangings (you know... "Red and yellow and pink and green!") which I'll have ready for the next BrisStyle Twilight Market in King George Square. First market for the year - less than three weeks to go now!

I know I said I was planning on retiring these eggs. I was wrong. They've evolved!