Lightening Online

As promised, here are a few more selections from the Artyculture Fashion Parade held at our recent Field Days. These were some of my personal favourites.

Wheat Wedding

This wedding gown is made from wheat and flour bags. Baling twine has been used to secure it together and the bride carries a bouquet of dried wheat.

Carcass Couture

This garment was inspired by bones. The main bodice is made with netting and chicken wire and adorned with appropriate bones. The main feature of the handbag is a foxes head.

Carcass Couture - Rear View

Don’t you just love the use of this backbone?

Peacock Allure

This garment was inspired by peacock feathers and uses fly screen, silver insulation, peacock feathers, net and second hand buckles.

Elegantly Tubed

This evening gown has been fashioned entirely from bicycle inner tubes.

Elegantly Tubed - Rear View

Note the delicately stamped detail on the bottom of the dress.

Stuck Up & Dried

This dress has many MANY dried rose petals carefully stuck onto flywire. Isn’t it stunning?

Wedding Wrap

I had to save the best for last. This dress is absolutely STUNNING and I’m in awe of how much work must have gone into making it.

The petticoat is made from silver wine bladders while the actual dress is made from layers of shrink wrap. The bouquet droplets, jewellery and droplet detail on the dress are also made from silver wine bladders.

Wedding Wrap - Rear View

More silver wine bladder droplets in the hair decoration and an unknown amount of shrink wrap and hours of work in the detail of the dress. You could almost wear this to an actual wedding, although you wouldn’t want to get too close to a fire or heater!!!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this little glimpse into the handiwork of the Artyculture parade. I was absolutely stunned at the amount of creativity and work that must have gone into fashioning these garments.

The wedding dress from shrink wrap was definitely my favourite although I also REALLY liked the rose petal dress and the gown made from inner tubes is simply stunning.

Which would you choose as your favourite?

These are my latest zucchini pickings. It would seem being away for a few days can result in overgrown zucchini!!!! The largest of these is 45 cm long!!!! It’s unreal!

Here I was thinking that my zucchini crop was coming to an end. Turns out they’re a plant that just keeps on giving! Awesome!!!!

Now, I know there are HEAPS of great recipes out there for using zucchini.

So, I thought it would be GREAT to have ourselves a little “zucchini lovefest”. This works a little like a carnival (without using the carnival submission website).

All you need to do to join in this little lovefest is post your favourite zucchini recipe on your blog and send me the link to it. I know some of you have already posted zucchini recipes on your blogs. Send in the links to those. If there is a zucchini recipe you LOVE already posted somewhere, it’s fine to send me that link too. If you don’t currently have a blog but would like to share a favourite recipe, simply send me the recipe and I’ll post it here.

I’ll also be trawling the web for some great suggestions for using zucchini.

I’d like to post my “zucchini lovefest” on Thursday so if you can get the links to me ASAP that would be fantastic!!!!

Here’s a contact form to make it easier for you to send in your links/recipes/tips. Let the zucchini lovefest begin!!!! 

cforms contact form by delicious:days

Well it’s officially no longer June but I think I’m going to need my “reduce the trash” challenge to run for a little longer than a month.

DH and I have been working outside this afternoon and there’s been lots of recycling going on.

Yummy juicy weeds and snails and millipedes from the garden have gone to the chooks. They’re having a great time scratching through my offerings looking for bugs and will nicely turn them into eggs for me. In a day or so I’m thinking I’ll gather up what’s left of the weeds (they don’t eat them all) and dump them into the compost. Hopefully the chooks will leave some droppings on some of them too to add some fertiliser to my compost. We have a long term plan to make better use of our chooks in turning and fertilising our garden soil. That requires a bit of infrastructure to be built so for now I just do what I can by hand (when I have the time and energy).

DH has been cutting up some old plastic bottles for me to cover some of our poor little seedings that have been getting munched to death by an array of bugs. Fingers crossed this helps them get to a stronger stage so they can withstand the bugs. We’re just making things up as we go along here so who knows whether this is going to work or not. In the meantime, it’s helping us reduce our trash.

DH is really on a roll this afternoon. He’s found an old wooden gate that he’s going to sand back and paint. He wants to build a gate so that the backyard is accessible from the front area of the house (will make it easier for the kids to come to the back door instead of the front door when they get home from the bus). That’ll save us a few $$ in materials and adds to our recycling/reducing landfill efforts.

I was asking DH the other day how our quantity of rubbish is going and apparently we are doing better. We fill a green wheelie bin around once a fortnight which I don’t think is too bad. I’m not entirely sure that includes our office rubbish though as DH often collects that just before he does a rubbish run. Hopefully we’ll soon have a shredder and can compost more of our paper waste.

So that’s where we’re up to for now. Heading in the right direction but with plenty of room yet for improvement.