Hunger Games meets Oz

It occurred to me that there is a lot more in common between the Hunger Games and the Wizard of Oz than first meets the eye. So here is my top ten of why the Hunger Games is really a modern spin on the Wizard of Oz.

1. The Capitol is not unlike the Emerald City. It's big beautiful and overwhelming for our country girl heroines. Whether you follow the yellow brick road or take the Panam express, you'll end up right smack in the city centre.

2. Upon arriving it is evident that a bad taste fashion bomb has exploded in both city centres, although it is permanently St Patrick's Day in Oz.

3. Our intrepid heroes head out against all odds to overcome evil and bring down the trickster peers at the top, President Snow and Oz. On similar promo posters (cloudy), they are four abreast and marching bravely into the unknown.

4. District 12, where Katniss comes from, and Kansas are both grey, grey, grey where the hard working citizens eke out a frugal living in drab landscapes.

5. In Hollywood it is always about the frocks. Glinda and Katniss both sport perfect puffy frocks with spangles and tulle and wings- oh my! What's the point of a big skirt if you don't get a good twirl in?

6. Accessorise, accessorise, accessorise!  Whether it be ruby slippers, bow and arrows or a nice brooch, choose an accessory with secret powers if at all possible.

7. A girl can always rely upon a marvelous mentor, preferably one with big hair and bigger head gear. Keep in mind it is likely she will encourage you to undertake dangerous journeys while staying safely behind at home.

8. Los presidentes often tell lies it seems and Oz and Snow with their white benign locks are both set on sending their minions into dire peril to serve their own purposes. They also favor a pulpit like device for oratory purposes.

 9. Our girls are both airlifted out of the lost zones too- Dorothy in a hot air balloon and Katniss in a hover plane.

10. Of course when all is said and done, it is family that comes first and no matter where you have travelled there's no place like home. 

By the way, Lenny Kravitz is also in the Hunger Games in case you didn't know. He plays a hip and groovy fairy godmother/ stylist borrowing from another famous fairy tale. Note his magic wand. Does this man never age? Eat your heart out, Glinda!

(All sources from Google images.)

Hungry for Oz

Last night I took a couple of the teen boys to see Hunger Games 2. It was a rollicking, dramatic good show although crunching a long book into a movie means there were a few hands up for question time on the way home.

Ooh, ooh, I know this one….

The husband stayed home and watched the Wizard of Oz with the girl childs. The 11 year old dobbed on him and told me this morning he stayed awake for the whole thing and sang along to all the songs. She rolled her eyes at this point because she is eleven. They roll a lot and I have had them checked and, yes, she now has glasses.

It's hip to be square…apparently.

Back to Oz. This morning Shorty Divine asked to watch it again. Her dad had gone to a crack of dawn activity and I was up getting the other girl ready for a swimming carnival so I put it on for her and pulled up a chair to watch. It was more fun watching her watching the movie. Her face when they land in Oz ("the beautiful garden") was pure gold!

She tried to explain the nuances in case it was over my head. "The house went up in the wind. It landed on a bad witch. They have to go on the yellow brick road." You get it.

She also said with dreamy eyes, as Dorothy sang about the rainbow, "It's reeeally nice, Mum." Nobody said that after the Hunger Games. Sometimes it feels good to watch something reeeally nice.

She's taking Oz to Nanna's tomorrow. I'm sure she and Grandad will thoroughly enjoy it together. He'll sing along. Some things cross age and fashion and decades to still make you feel good especially if you are with the right person.

As the Wizard may well have said to Dorothy when he sent her to ditch the witch, "May the odds be ever in your favour."

Take Five

The magazines at the doctors have had some good stuff in them lately. She often catches me snapping the mag pages on my phone. At least the days of coughing and tearing are over.

There was a rather nice typographic style cushion. It cost $85 which is fair enough if you have more spare dosh than me.

Anyhow, I thought I'd show you a nice cheap alternative. 

If you have a silkscreen and squeegee handy, which not everyone does, I know, then you just have the cost of the blank cushion cover. I got mine from Pillowtalk for $6.95. You really couldn't get the fabric and zip for that. The squeegee and screen are not expensive from any art shop and then you have them ready for the ensuing printing frenzy you will undoubtably begin.

1. Cut out the number of choice. Mine's a five because I have five offspring and a girlfriend is turning five decades so I thought she'd like one too. It's also just a nice, fat, curly graphic. If you google your number and go to images, you'll find a lots of designs, then you print and photocopy to the desired size.

 2. Place the cutout on the case then lay the silkscreen down over the two. The edges of the screen are taped with masking tape so the paint stays inside the border of the paper.

3. Spoon on some fabric paint or just acrylic would do really. You can add some fabric emulsion to it or just never wash it if you have really, really clean children and flying pigs at your place.

4. Spread the paint through the screen with a couple of pulls of the squeegee on a 45 degree angle.

5. Lift it up, et voila, you have a typo cushion of choice for next to nix.

It's all a bit beige but you get the idea.

Some people are also turning five years in a few months which is possibly preferable to five decades.

Alive, alive....oh!

Around 6.30 am there was a crash which drew the Big Fella out of bed assess the damage. The dog was up and behaving foolishly running around chasing dust motes or some such thing. We all got up and proceeded to go through the morning "Where- are's".
Where are my rolls, where are my smurfs, where are my marbles...? That last one is me.

Pre- breakfast kit in case a flying fish should smack you in the noggin.

As he left he asked Lala to  pick up the pebbles scattered around the door.
She obliged, then realised they were from the fish vase that houses Miss Lulu, she of the wafty plume fins and big eyes, like a lovely blue burlesque queen. That is, it usually houses Miss Lulu when it is on the cabinet and not lying on the floor vacated in a pool of water!

Lala yelled for assistance and we all ran, stat, for the scene of the crime. Notably absent from the carnage was the victim. "Where-is the fish??," they all demanded of me simultaneously. Ms Lulu was nowhere to be seen but outside the glass doors, Lola, the dog was smacking her chops on her bed. Of course we assumed the worst. It must have been Ms Lola in the lounge room with her sticky beak nose jumping up on the new couch to reach the fish vase.

There were assurances that it would have been quick and we'd buy a new one, blah, blah....and we started to clean up the pebbles and water. I picked up the pillow from the chair the dog had jumped from and there, lying curled in the foetal position was a small irridescent blue clammy blob. The nearest mourner let out an unsympathetic,"EEEEW!" and then the fish twitched. Just a little twitch but it sent them running again. "Water!! Quick! She's alive!!"

I scooped her up amidst more eeews and plopped her into somebody's hastily refilled brekky glass.
She hung poised in the glassware then with a flick of her flaccid tail, she was off lapping the glass and refilling her gills like nobody's business.

After being off her food for a while, she has had a full recovery and is now up on the piano out of reach, tormenting the dog with her flickering fish moves forever.

So now they are all singing the "Alive" song around the house thereby providing another reason to be grateful to the universe. X- Factor is over and we have the TV back from the tween-2-teens. (HMMM- that's a good name for a girl band!)

"Alive!"

Channeling Georgia

 The boys at school have been painting some landscapey bones in the desert kind of stuff this week.
Georgia O'Keefe was one of the painters referred to. We like a bit of Georgia.
Here's one I prepared earlier on primed paper.

 There's another in progress. I like to try a little feminization of the boney subjects. The boys were being a bit grittier with their desert tones. 

 I have never been much of a painter type but seem to be getting a bit addicted to it lately.
It makes my mouth water ....

and gave me a brain worm....

Here's to my first last child's namesake. Sing it Ella!

the Return of Lefty

Today is an anniversary of sorts.

It is one year since I had my last zappo of radiation and was freed of the treatment that squashed 2012 (and hopefully the cancer) like a nasty bug.

Coincidentally the universe swung around a bit this week and threw me a bone. The $15000 surgery that is required for breast reconstruction has been offered to me gratis! There is a small but amazing programme still existing in the fast shrivelling maze of Queensland Health that offers this if you tick all the boxes. There are questions about weight, height, smoking, etc. Then you pass to level 2 where they checkout your scar recovery, muscle, muffintop and sanity.
Yesterday they finally rang to say I was in! Straight up in the New Year, Lefty ll will arrive. It will be a long recovery but the Universe threw us another bone and my job was extended another year. They are happy for me to take the time needed to recover. So The Divine Ms M aka Shorty can start prep with a mother on board who can be home again during the day sans l'offspring to get strong and healthy and maybe bake a few cakes and make a few paintings. At first the surgical side of things made me fairly nervous but there was a need to fix some problems from last year's surgery anyhoo. So I figured what is there to lose except my muffin top which they use to make the newby. 

Lichtenstein tweaked.

This year has gone so fast with work and refinding the making mojo and the support and happy company of lovely friends. Thanks to all of you- again.

Lifting the house

Sometimes I imagine being the headstrong yet adorable companion to Dr Who. I would get in the time machine and go back to when Ollie Twist was owner-building this farmhouse in the 1930's. He would be sitting out the back of his shed down the back playing his clarinet, an enviably SMALL instrument.

Apparently he was a congenial and open minded man so he would greet me happily enough once over the initial surprise at the appearance of a police box in his paddock.

Then after being introduced I'd have a stern word with Ollie.

"Ollie", I'd say, "There are a few things you need to change when you set about building this house of yours as it will one day be mine. I would appreciate you making the hallway twice as wide so I can have a couple of dressers with storage and lovely vinaigrettes on them."

After explaining the vinaigrette principle, I would go on to politely request that he also make the sun room twice as wide so we could fit more people out there and a table and chairs. We used to have them out there till the chillun  got too long to get in and out of the chairs and the Big Fella moved it around without permission while I was at the footy one day. Yes, we embrace role reversal here.

"Also Ollie, I would also like the subdivision of the farm to be just a little wider on the eastern side so we can keep the pair of ancient poinciana trees together and while you're on that concreting craze out the side could you lay a slab in the big empty room that could be a  great studio if it had a floor?"

"And one more thing, Ollie," I'd ask, as I followed the Doctor back into the Tardis. "Could you please make the house just a metre higher so I can build in underneath with plenty of light and no expensive house lifting which is very much the thing in this part of Australia in about eighty years time. Think what a visionary you would be!"

The door stays!

In the meantime I have taken out my house lifting frustrations on the doll house with castors I bought about eight years ago. All things come to those who wait. At least the Noahs won't get wet feet in the next big flood.

Settlement and fragments

On Wednesday I was taken to a marvellous exhibition at the QUT gallery that is really worth a wander through should you work near there or be in the general vicinity. It is by a Phillipino husband and wife team, Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan and was made with many collaborators including their five children and various community groups.
This show,"Fragments- Another Country",  has it all, my people. There is crochet, vintage everything, handmade objects, recycling, clutter and culling and a great deal of thought provoking loveliness.
It is about the ordeal of relocation and  immigration and what we humans think is important enough that we would keep in our  lives should we have to choose.

One room was filled with walls of intricately made aeroplanes all made using recycled and found objects like the rest f the exhibition.

The boys I went with were most taken with this lairy modded bus/car.

 These cupboards are made from a rare kind of oak only found in Queensland but packed with every imaginable bit of ephemera from the owners' past lives in the Phillipines. One boy pointed out a Sarah Vaughan CD. I was impressed that a fourteen year old even new who Sarah Vaughan was!

Then there was a colossal sculpture reminiscent of a ship or the barricade from Les Mis.

It filled an entire room with struts and sails made of crocheted rugs and vintage knitting needles. Yes! Vintage knitting needles! I was in Heaven, I tell you.

Then there were wonderful assemblages made of old cardboard and twigs. Pull yer socks up there, boys!

At the end we got to make our own special objet that we would choose to keep should we have to give up everything and leave our homes. The boys labelled them with names and where they were from and reasons why that was their chosen item. The twinettes were, as usual, chalk and cheese. One wanted to take his bed so that he could always have a comfortable night's sleep. The other made an abstract lucky charm molecule thing to bring luck in his new home. I made a ring to symbolize my family, because like most of us, that's what I value most.

Then we mailed them on a huge pile of treasures made by all the other visitors.

It gave food for thought about people who have to abandon homes and come here with nothing hoping for new lives and those who are already here and lose everything in sudden catastrophic events like the awful bush fires in New South Wales. May they be safe with their families too.