We’ve got two!

Woke up to contractions on the morning of the 18th. They were steady at about half an hour apart most of the day. So I spent it in bed saving up energy, snoozing, playing mindless computer games etc. Tara – our 3 year old – decided to put nail polish in her eye so Karl nipped her to the doctor in the morning. Can never all be about mum!

My contractions picked up around 6pm and by about 9.30 the midwife was around and I was down to 5 min gaps. All was going pretty normal until about midnight when I started to feel really frustrated because it felt like I really wasn’t progressing. I didn’t have any control around my groin. Couldn’t relax or push or anything. It felt numb, like I’d had a local anaesthetic. But it sure as hell hurt everywhere else, despite the awesome relaxing power of our birthing pool.

Before my labour I’d spent a fair amount of time meditating on the birth of my first child. Since that was such a dream birth I wanted to be able to visualise it happening again! But it turned out that preparation came in more handy in helping me identify when things weren’t progressing like last time.

At about 1am I started to really feel like there was something wrong and started talking about getting me to a hospital. My waters still hadn’t broken so the midwife suggested we try breaking them first and see if that moves things along. So we gave it a go, but they were so tight they wouldn’t break. Spent another hour in the pool and then tried again. This time they broke and it made a massive difference. 5 mins later we gave birth to a baby girl!

Had some nice time cuddling her in the water but it was a bit hard to bring her up high on my chest as her cord was really short. About 5 mins later I started getting more contractions and really had the need to push. I figured it was just the placenta and deciding that I was well and truly over it just pushed it out. But when it came out it only went halfway and stuck. I reached down to feel what was going on and it felt really hard. My midwife got me to pull my hips up so she could have a good look. Her first panicky thought was that I’d pushed out my uterus since it was so hard. But then we both saw a foot!

Holy crap call ambulance!

I had a boy twin yet to come out and he was breach. The paramedics on the phone told me to get out of the pool and onto a chair with my legs up high and just push him out. That was the most intense 10 minutes of my life. I was pushing and pushing but baby still wasn’t coming out.  I then experienced this amazing moment of clarity and my brain just clicked on and said you’ve got another baby and he needs your help, get him out now! So I took a deep breath and pushed until out he flew. Through the midwifes hands even..

Just as she was cutting him out of his placenta which was still in tact, the paramedics ran in and took over care. He had a cord around his neck, wasn’t breathing and had no pulse. After 5 mins of resus they got his pulse back but were still taking care of his breathing when they took him to hospital. I was then able to birth the first placenta – which was delightfully easy after all the other bits! It was last to come out since she was on top and had pushed past her brother to come out – thus the intense labour! We spent about half an hour calming down, cleaning up, feeding baby girl etc then followed to the hospital.

Brilliantly, my three year old stayed asleep through all of this!

We then had the most intense week ever. Long story short, he suffered from Hypoxic Ischemic Encephalopathy, basically a shortage of oxygen and blood flow to the brain which can be really really serious. At one point there was also evidence of a stroke. The first couple of days he was having frequent seizures and was looking very ill. We were bracing ourselves for some pretty severe brain damage and early on there was conversations about the possibility of decisions around life support. But since then he has done nothing but improve. And on the following Monday we finally got him to have an MRI scan which came back normal. Including the news that the stroke probably didn’t happen, it was swelling on the brain which looked like a stroke. That’s now gone. So while he’s still got a way to go before he’s called a healthy baby his chances at a ‘normal’ life are almost on par as with any new baby. It’s been nothing short of a miracle – hugely helped by an amazing care team in the hospital. He truly couldn’t have been in better hands.

After a couple of days out of intensive care and into special care, the team decided to transfer him to our local hospital which also has a special care unit. This meant it was heaps easier for us to visit. And a less intensive unit meant the focus was very much on bringing him home. And it was only a couple of days before the doctor invited us to ‘bed in’ with him so we stayed at the hospital and were in charge of his care but the nurses were on hand if we needed them.

Unbelievably, less than two weeks after a pretty traumatic birth, we got to bring our little legend home.

We named the babies Curtis Taonga and Jamari (hasn’t got a middle name yet..). When I told my Dad the news on the first day he said oh he was just being a gentleman and letting his sister go first. I really liked that take on it. So given Curtis means courteous and polite we thought that was appropriate. His middle name is a Maori word and it means treasured object or person. He’s our polite treasure! Jamari is French and means strong girl warrior. Since she likes to lead the way! She’s an awesome baby and is doing everything she should be. Sleeps like a legend!

I’m recovering pretty well. I had a couple of stitches and ended up having a blood transfusion a couple of days after delivery. But home and settled now and starting to get our heads around the realities of three kids… We have to buy a new car, eek!

So that’s a really long story short. It’s been insanely surreal. It’s only been a week but already our lives have been completely changed. But thanks to some serious amounts of positive energy, unbelievably amazing support from friends and family and liberal doses of tears, it’s definitely a change for the good.

Wow we have a wee tribe!

Lots and lots of love and kisses.

Rayna and the rest of the Braybrook massif!

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Ok folks. Put your hands in your pockets. Uncle Kevin Buzzacott (Aboriginal Elder/Activist) needs money for a big operation soon. You can donate by buying his track “Rok Hop”. He needs your money quick, so dig deep folks and follow the link. You can donate as much as you want.

You can also buy one of my cross stitch patterns from the Radical Rags shop.  100% of proceeds between now and the end of Jan straight to Uncle Kev.

Uncle Kev is one of the most inspiring, endearing, radical and deadly funny elders in the movement to protect country.  The irony that a man who’s spent so many decades fighting uranium mining is now needing treatment for cancer is not lost on any of us.  Please give back to a man who has given so much.

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In knittning class we’ve learned to use both hand knitting machines and big industrial ones, and in weaving class we’ve worked with several kinds of  weaving looms. And I love it, especially the labs. It’s not often that school is so fun you forget the time.

A sample of what I’ve been doing:

Owls from an old cross stitch book that me and my lab partner modified to work as a weaving pattern. The owls are about 2 cm wide.

A knitted skull fabric I made on one of the big circular knitting machines. Each skull is about one cm high. (I put the coin there to show the scale, and only afterwards realized that it’s probably not so useful if you don’t use Swedish money and know how big it is. )

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(Click for a bigger image)

And a close-up to show off the stitches.

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Since I last made a loan the Etsy Lending Team has got more active and there’s a number of regular lenders boosting up our lending numbers.  We’ve just hit $4000 in loans!  Are you an etsy seller and a kiva lender?  Come join the team

My latest loan was a little hard to find.  I’ve noticed there’s a lot less makers on  Kiva and a definite increase in people selling cheap mass produced products.  This makes me quite sad to be honest.  I thought Kiva was about reducing the need for sweatshop economies..

Regardless, I did find the Morales family in Barranquilla, Colombia.  They make and sell a range of things to help their family prosper including hand made shoes, jewelry and clothing.

So give them a wave people, and wish them luck!

And for those of you out there still looking for last minute christmas ideas, consider a kiva gift voucher!  It’s a great last minute gift idea and the recipient gets to chose the person(s) to lend to.  Go on, make a difference!

Happy festive season everyone and see you in the next decade.

xox

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It took me quite a while to gather up the confidence to have a go. It’s all new and scary, you see. But I finally had a project I really wanted to do so I hitched up my pants and leapt in.

I was armed with the awesome tutorial by Pip which I wholeheartedly recommend checking out. Even if you’re not planning on doing the fabric thing and printing on paper with actual gocco paint, this tutorial is super helpful. I definitely used Pip’s tutorial alongside the official instructions and it made heaps more sense with both.

So I’ve now made TWO different screens and made a heap of patches.

The first lot were made as some pretty banners for vacant blocks of land.  We’ve attached ribbons on the corners so they can be tied on to fences.  I thought this was a good first project since the prints don’t need to be perfect and we can’t be too attached to them since they’ll probably get taken down.

Here’s a bunch drying.

And here’s a couple in action!  The first one was in St Kilda and the second was on Malvern Road somewhere

FUN!  Part of my little creative contributions to the realestate4ransom.com campaign highlighting the stupid waste of land we’ve got going on round the place.

The next project I did was in honour of Buy Nothing Day 09 and also as my wee action towards Copenhagen.  Being seven and a half months pregnant does preclude a fair amount of activism so I took the creative option!

I got the idea after a cool chat with an awesome Friends of the Earth volunteer at the Green New Deal conference.  Sorry I can’t remember your name! Hope you see these and like   When I get around to sewing up some more I’ll send some to the FoE shop.  I decided to border some of them with small black satin ribbon, just to make them a bit glam.  I also decided I very much like printing on calico.  It seems to pick up the ink best and it looks nice too.

Printing on fabric with Gocco is a little bit hard and takes a bit of perseverance.  I’d very much like to try it with someone else doing some of them!

What is really easy though is printing on paper!

Last weekend I went to the open studio for the super cool Gemma Jones.  The open studios were part of the Big West Festival – which was also super cool!  Can’t wait til the next one! (I should also write about that – especially the knitted bridge installation – but I reckon it won’t happen so go check out the other cool crafty stuff on their website).

Gemma gave a couple of demos on how to use a Gocco and we all got to have a go.  It was MOST FUN.  I picked up some new prints for my wee girls new room so the walls are quickly filling up with rad art.

Those prints were done on an old sex guide book.  Some of the pages were hilarious!  My favourite was ‘what to say in bed – and when not to laugh’.  Genius.

So now I’ve gotten over ‘the fear’ I’m psyched to do more!

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Further to the rad things in the last post is this awesome new group that’s just popped out of Adelaide.  So if you live in the crazy hot city – check out Radical Craft Adelaide.

They’ve been holding some crafternoons.  Next one is on Dec 12 for those who want to stitch and bitch radically.  It’s gold coin and funds go to ActNow Theatre for Social Change.  Bring along your current project or they’ve got cross stitch kits on hand for a few dollars.  RSVP and check out all the details on Facebook.

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I’m sure most of you have checked out the handmade internet sensation regretsy.com – it’s a hilarious site and has quite the cult following these days. I was very proud to have not one, but TWO products featured on there! First off (and not that surprisingly) was the embroidery porn piece I did for the Craft Cartel Trashbag Rehab workshop earlier in the year. It sold within hours of being posted on regretsy and I’ve had tons of custom orders. It’s been quite surreal.

What was then even more surreal was the email I got from Regretsy asking if I’d be keen to be part of a card series they were planning. Yeah why the hell not?

So you too can own your own piece of embroidered gay anime porn, and even better – share the love with your friends and family!

That’s mine discretely being censored by the others..  You can buy 8 of one design or a set of two of each.  And at $10 a set, that’s quite the bargain.

And in other regretsy news, they’ve managed to sign a book deal with Random House.  I’m thinking the porn might not pass their censorship standards.  But luckily I have another product on regretsy’s site – the legendary Plug Rugs!  Which have, of course, now sold out.  These also popped up on the salon.com story about regretsy.  So hopefully they get in the book.

The other rad thing I’ve been meaning to post for ages is the pdf of the Interventionist Guide zine!  If you go to the website and click on Guides, mine is about halfway down.  The zine features a whole lot of my thoughts about urban spaces and how we relate to them as humans.  As well as the tutorial on how to cross stitch a heart on a bicycle basket.

Finally, have you checked out the London-based Craftivist Collective yet?  They’re getting up to some seriously ace stuff.  This latest pic popped up on Facebook and I reckon it’s a big bucket of brilliant.  They’ve got tons of things going on so if you want to join in go join them on FB.

xox

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In collaboration with the realestate4ransom prankster campaign against the rampant land speculation plaguing Melbourne’s suburbs, Radical Cross Stitch and the Melbourne Revolutionary Craft Circle invite you to engage in a small piece of community beautification. This post is all about the how – make sure you read all about the why before you begin.

The following document contains full instructions on how to cross stitch a dollar sign on your favourite local block of vacant land.

Materials:

x Red wool – can be obtained from your local op shop, your own craft stash or raid someone else’s
x Time
x A fence with either diamond or square grid on a block of vacant land
x A friend or two – ‘cause these things are always more fun with mates

Part A: Finger Knitting

Step 1: Tie your wool in a loose loop around your index finger

Step 2: Swing knot around to the back of your index finger then loosely loop wool round your middle finger.

Step 3: Bring wool round the back of your hand and from left to right, wrap over the front of your fingers above the existing loops.

Step 4: Take hold of original loop on your index finger and pull it over the second loop and over your finger and release.  You’ll need to bend your finger down to get it over easily.  The first one might be a bit tight if your original loop wasn’t loose enough.  Don’t worry this is normal and won’t happen on the rest of them.

Step 5: Repeat step 4 for the loop on your middle finger.  Will look like this when finished.

Step 6: Take hold of loose wool and wrap around your hand counter clockwise, ensuring the new wool sits above the old wool looped on your fingers.

Step 7: Repeat steps 4-6

Step 8: After about 7-10 rounds a ‘snake’ of knitted wool will be forming behind your hand.  Pull on this snake to lengthen and tighten it.

And that’s it!

Now time to keep knitting.  You’ll need about 10 metres for this project.  Once you have about 5 metres of knitted wool, cut the wool and tie it round your finger knitting to knot it.  Don’t worry about this looking too attractive; it’ll get chopped off during the fence stitching process.

Part B: Fence Stitching

Now these photos aren’t as sexy due to the whole night time installation aspect of this kind of thing.  Turns out my camera doesn’t like taking close shots of bright red wool at night with a flash… But you’ll get the drift.

This tutorial is based on a stitch done on a diamond shaped chain link fence.  If you’ve struck gold and found a square grid fence, the directions will be slightly different.  I’ve italicised the extra bits.

Step 1: Figure out where you’re going to start.  You want your stitching to be nicely centred.  Don’t rush this process!  Count it a couple of times if you need to.  Make sure your design has enough room without running into the edge of the fence, or into a broken bit of fence.

Step 2: Tie the end of your wool onto the fence onto the left corner of the diamond or bottom left corner of the square. Don’t worry about the hanging end bit of wool, you can tidy these all off at the end.  But ensure it’s tightly secured so it doesn’t come off!

Step 3: pull your wool straight across the diamond and through the next diamond.  Pass the wool behind and down to the diamond below. Gee that’s kinda hard to explain – look at the picture! For square grids you’ll go diagonally up and then down.

Step 4: pull the wool vertically (or diagonally) up, through and behind to the next diamond.  In the picture my next diamond was the one up and to the left from my first.

There’s your first cross!

Now a brief pause to talk about tension.  It’s really important to keep all your stitches tight!  Firstly because it looks better, secondly because it lasts longer and finally and most importantly because it uses less wool!  All that time finger knitting – best to use it efficiently!  I usually stop every couple of stitches and give everything another tug to make sure it’s nice and tight.

Step 5: repeat steps 3 & 4 for the rest of your pattern.  Once you get the hang of it you can start to get a bit clever about using the ‘thread’ to secure the behind work a bit neater as you go along.  You want to keep the behind work as close to the stitches or the wire as possible so it keeps it neater and makes your finished design really clear.  There’s no clear way to explain how to do this because it all depends on what direction you’re going in.  It’s something you pick up with practice.  So the more fence stitching you do the better!

Step 6: When you’ve finished the pattern, tie your wool off as tight as you can.  As with your original knot, make sure it’s super secure.

Step 7: Cut off the extra wool.  Make sure you leave a couple of centimetres spare just so the wool has a little bit to move before coming undone.  Remember your stitching has to brave the elements so it will all move a bit over time.

Step 8: Step back and admire!!

Congratulations you just made one ugly mofo fence, heaps less ugly.  And if you’ve used this pattern – you’ve also helped educate your community that this wasted block of land that appears to be just collecting weeds and rubbish is also helping line the pockets of some fat cat speculator.  These blocks don’t just sit there doing nothing – they sit there making money!

The Pattern!

While of course you can use this tutorial to make whatever pattern you want – there’s no such thing as a bad fence stitch! – this tutorial has been put together to encourage to get on board with our campaign to highlight the vacant land in our suburbs.  Land that is sitting there being ugly when it could be a lovely home – or a nice local business.

Here’s the two dollar sign patterns.  One for a square grid (these are the easiest to do – but the fences are rarer) and one for the diamond grid.

They’re not the best quality image for the diagonal fence sorry…  Will work on getting a better one, but it should do the trick for now.

And that’s it!

I’ve also made a pretty pdf version (8MB) of this doc which is easiest for printing if you prefer.

Very much looking forward to seeing what people can do with this tutorial.  As a special treat, if you send me pics of your finished dollar sign and let me know your postal address I’ll send you one of our limited edition gocco printed speculator cum rags!

So get out there kids.  There are literally hundreds of canvases across our suburbs to decorate!  If you need help finding one maybe check out the invest page on the realestate4ransom.com site for some ideas.

xox

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Those of you who’ve been following this site for a while will know that one of the biggest issues that concerns me is the stifling effects of land speculation on our communities and our creativity.  While many of us crafty types would love to make stuff full time, it’s just not possible when we need to work so many hours a week to pay the rent/mortgage.  It’s bloody frustrating that our economic system rewards those that just buy and sell for a living yet punishes those of us who actually create.

One of big current issues in the craft world has been the ripping off of the ideas and designs of independent crafters/illustrators etc.  It seems like a weekly occurrence that some big company has found the work of a designer online and stolen it for their own products.  And who has the legal budget to fight that kind of crap?

Whilst this might seem like a new phenomenon, the practise of capitalising off the creative talents of artistic communities has been around for a long time.  And the most damaging application of this practise occurs in the land markets.  While we’re out busting our bums creating vibrant awesome and sustainable communities, behind the scenes is a secret, shady bunch of land sharks circling.

It’s called gentrification – and there’s a really good explanation of how it works on the I Want To Live Here film comp site.

It sucks that we bust our asses creating great places to live only to get priced out of the area by lazy land hoarders cashing in on the value our hard work creates.

I think it’s super important for creative people to understand because it’s pretty common to see creative responses to the aesthetic issues of land banking – but rare to see these responses address the real drivers behind the issues.  I’ve been  seeing more and more projects emerging that are designed to make boarded up buildings attractive or to ‘help’ landlords find creative people to move in.  But while the intentions behind these projects are very positive and genuine, they do all have the long term effect of making the land more valuable, thus compounding the problem.  What’s needed are creative ideas to try and break the cycles and systems that create the problem of high rents and vacant buildings in the first place.

But of course the first step is understanding.

I always say that an important role of the artist in society is to act as a mirror of society – so we can see what we’re really up to, and to help create the visions of the way things could be.  Inspiring and creating change is something artists and crafters are really good at – and have been doing for centuries.

So I was super proud to be asked to be part of a team of local creatives keen to get together and create a visual campaign around the effects of rampant land speculation in Melbourne.  It currently takes 9.5 years of full time average wage to buy an average house in Melbourne (it was 4 years when the subprime crisis hit the US).  This is absolutely insane!  Yet still our media and politicians continue to perpetuate the myth that forever rising property prices are a good thing.

But who are they good for?  Not young people, that’s for sure.  How many of you young renters out there could ever imagine having the half a million bucks it takes to enter the market in Melbourne today?  How many of us continue to buy the story that the First Home Owners Grant is about supporting young people.  When in reality all the policy has done has further inflated prices above and beyond the original grants.  First Home Owners Grant? Baby Boomers Bailout more like.

This stuff is so important for creative people to understand for two reasons.  Firstly because it directly impacts on our lives in regards to the hours of our lives we waste working to pay for the roofs over our heads.  And secondly because our own communities are guilty of perpetuating the same behaviour.  I can’t count the number of craft and indie design markets I have seen this year alone with insanely high stall fees.  There was one in particular I saw where the stall fees for a ‘fringe’ event alongside a major design event were higher than for the design event itself.  And this is becoming more common.

We need to call bullshit on it.

The fact that there is a massive shift in awareness towards the important economic and environmental benefits of handmade stuff is freakin awesome.  There are wonderful communities everywhere making and buying the things they need in life without destroying an ecosystem or exploiting another community in the process.  We need to do what we can to support these systems and a big part of that is keeping a close eye on the marketplaces that support the trade in these products.

I have personal experience in running a market so I have an idea about how much these things cost – in both time and money.  Our markets were run for the love of craft so we didn’t ever break even on costs but we really didn’t charge much for stalls.  What was important for us was that our sellers had the freedom to make really out there stuff.  Charging a high rent – which is what a stall fee is – would impact on that freedom, so we kept the fees low.

I know we could’ve charged a bit more.  I’m sure our sellers would’ve forgiven us for wanting to at least cover costs.  But if we had of charged that, and if we’d have hired a flasher venue and spent more on advertising etc there is NO WAY we would’ve been charging some of the stall fee levels I’ve seen recently.

I think it’s essential that if the craft movement in particular is going to have an analysis on issues of environmental impacts, multinational retail and workers rights we must also have a solid analysis of the politics of property – both physical and intellectual – since these areas have such massive impacts on our practice as crafters.

Enough ranting.

For this campaign we decided the main objective was to try and get young people to pay attention to the way land was being used in our suburbs.   And to try and draw attention to who really drives the debates around these issues.

So presenting Melbourne’s latest real estate company: realestate4ransom.com Check the website and Facebook for more info on what it’s about and to see some of the images of the street part of the campaign.  I’ll try and update some major bits here too.

But the main reason for this post is to get some of you undercover operatives in the Melbourne Revolutionary Craft Circle fired up to get out and do some craft!  I’ve put together a tutorial on how to do a dollar sign on a fence.  This post was supposed to be that tutorial but given the length of this post already I think I’ll do it separate..

So check out the website, fan us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and Youtube (stay tuned for mad clip) and help us spread the word about what’s really going on.

Tutorial next!

xox

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