Surprise!

I couldn't resist putting up this picture. I was walking with Penny today, enjoying the last of the autumn weather, and there it was.

This is a peppercorn tree. It is not a native but they are all around the place, especially along my train line. It is regarded as invasive but I remember years in my childhood when we would find the Emperor Gum Moth caterpillars on them. They were gorgeous. I haven't seen any in years, the cocoons and caterpillars, there are still plenty of trees.

The recent rain, the fact that we are now having decent dew, and the lack of extreme heat, mean that we have bright green grass in all our parks.  Lovely.

Apparently Melbourne is one of the few places in the world that gets the bulk of its rain in winter (no snow, thank goodness) and that, coupled with native trees that are not deciduous means that we have lovely green winters. I remember my first train trip in Europe in winter - it was like looking at a black and white photo, white ground, black trees, no leaves, no colour. So different from winter here.

I am not much of a fan of black and white, they seem such stark colours. Despite this, I have been enjoying my doodling and black line drawing. I even attended a Zentangle workshop at the Embroiderers Guild last weekend. The morning was learning about different Zentangle patterns and then we applied some of them to fabric, using free motion machine sewing, in the afternoon. Our instructor was Lee Vause, an accredited Zentangle instructor and she had some interesting insights into the various patterns.
A few of us also had quilting backgrounds, as does Lee, and there is a very close correlation to a lot of the quilting patterns and some of the designs. So we had fun making up our own patterns and playing.

This is a collection of the designs we came up with, using pretty much the same patterns as each other. 

We were asked to bring fabric that was 12"x12" or 15"x15". I didn't really read this closely and didn't notice the little inch symbols, so my pieces were tiny compared to everyone else's - I did 15cm by 15cm. But I got two done, compared with the others who only did one 12"x12".