Italy - instalment number 1

Its 4:30am (Dubai time) we are an hour away from landing in Dubai Airport. It feels like we have been flying for a week! Emirates are great and having your own tv in the seat in front is a god send. There are about 900 different channels, games, movies etc. I have watched The pursuit of Happyness, and Dejavu. Trevor has watched Wild Hogs, Holiday, Bugs Life and played Black Jack as well as looking through the information channels about the aeroplane and Dubai. There is a wicked sun rise happening here. By my watch it is about 12.30 Sunday lunch time in New Zealand

This is some of the transit area of Dubai Airport. It is really strange seeing the flight schedules on the monitors in Arabic. The monitors in English have flights to hundreds of destinations – places like Damascus (who goes there?).

The six hour flight to Rome didn’t seem too long although the in flight entertainment was not as good as the long haul flight to Dubai. I slept most of it. We sat beside a couple on their honeymoon – not sure what nationality they were but definitely Middle Eastern. She was wearing a head scarf and had lots of henna tattoos – they were off on a cruise – couldn’t quite make out where – They had a honeymoon cake that someone had given them and they didn’t like it – he tried to give it to us but we felt that we had been eating all the way from New Zealand to Rome – so a cake was just too much.

We arrived at Rome expecting to take ages to get through customs etc. We got off the plane, walked towards baggage claim – were stopped at a door by an Italian wanting to look at our passport, he gave a cursory glance, we collected our luggage and that was it!

We were greeting by a lovely young Italian driver complete with suit, sunglasses and Mercedes! He proceeded to drive us from the airport to our hotel at a speed of, on average, 150kms/hr while most of the time speaking on his mobile!. We arrive safely. It is about 31 degrees.

Our Hotel room is the size of our bathroom at home with a tiny wee ensuite. It is lovely and cool and really quiet the whole building is stone. We went for a walk around and found this fountain just around the corner. We refreshed our hot feet in it.

We to bed at 5:00pm and slept till 6:00am.

Italy

Well we are nearly all packed and ready to go. We leave Queenstown tomorrow morning (Saturday) at 8:50am weather permitting, fingers crossed, but we don't leave Christchurch until 6:00pm Sat so have time to drive if needed. Hopefully I will be able to use my laptop and post our progress and pictures as we go.

Franklin Arts Festival

I have just heard that my Marrakech Bag that I won first prize with last year is being used in the television add on the Living Channel advertising this years Franklin Arts Festival - o how exciting - shame we only have poor mans TV.

I won't know until we get back from Italy how this year's entry went.

Into the Light

After a frantic last minute dash I finished this piece to be submitted to the Franklin Arts Festival. I really like this one and the comments from home were very enthusiastic. I'm now worried it will sell as I did not put a large price on it.

More Journal Pages

Here is my contribution to the "Illuminations" journal

Journal Round Robin

I am involved in a Textile Group called COOTS (Central Otago Outside the Square) and I have organised a Journal Round Robin for this year. Here are photos of some of the pages I have completed for some of the Journals. The first is "Best Reads of 2006" my choice for this page was "Jo Seagar Cooks" a recipe book - just for something different. The next one is "Best" and I did best Season - Autumn for my page. Using a poem from Brian Turner from the Book - Timeless Land which are paintings by Grahame Sydney and poems by Brian Turner.

The Third one is Cat Dreams - for my inspiration for this page I used the Book "Slinky Malinky" by Lynley Dodds - from the Hairy Maclairy (sp) series.

Exciting News

On a personal level, Trevor met with Architect John Blair yesterday and he has agreed to design our new house - how exciting. Almost all of Trevor's work in the past three years has been John's design - they are great.

Display of tea cosies

QEG

The Queenstown Embroiderer's Guild co-hosted our annual Friendship Day in Garston (45 minutes south of Queenstown) on Saturday. It was an uncharacteristically cold and bleak day there. We meet with other ANZEG members from Fiordland, Invercargill, Gore, Dunedin, East Otago. We had a fantastic turn out of over 60 ladies which made for a lovely display of work. We felt we may need to find a more appropriate venue to cope with the growing number of ladies travelling to this day.

A lovely shared morning tea was had and then we caught up with other Guilds news and programmes for the year together with a bit of stitching. Here is a pic of our Tea Cosies which were a guilt challenge last year for the launch of our recipe book.

Arrowtown Autumn Festival

Woohoo I won "Best Local Applied Artist" at the Arrowtown Autumn Festival for my piece "Ophir Bridge". I am using this posting as a practice for this blog.