Art Workshops for children

This week I started teaching art workshops for children in my " garage studio".

Half of the garage is converted into a studio, this will work for the warmer season,but for the colder months I have to use our cottage.

The space in the garage is ideal, because of the concrete floor,so it doesn't matter if the art gets messy.

I teach 5 groups of home schoolers, total of 25 children.

This first workshop was inspired by the artist and architect Hundertwasser,very well known for his colourfull and 'out of the square buildings' in Vienna and his amazing artworks.

Hundertwasser believed that people are happier when they live in colourfull houses and close to nature.

He lived in and loved New Zealand and built the toilets in Kawakawa in the Bay of Islands,worth a visit.

I showed the children a book with his artwork and buildings to inspire them.

The children first drew their dream house or street with white chalk on black paper and they used oil and chalk pastels to colour and then glued different papers to the art work to add texture.

I asked the children to draw big and fill the paper and the houses could look out of shape and different and very colourful.

I sprayed the artwork with a fixative to protect the pastels.

Beautiful work emerged and the children loved the project.

a finished street

Colourful house

The drawing

A town

An apartment building with a tree growing through

Autumn at our cottage

Summer is gone and Autumn has arrived for already fourteen days when I believe the calendar on the wall.

Autumn in New Zealand  officially starts on the first of March.

While half of the world goes into the beginning of Spring and warmer weather, we are heading towards the colder mornings and nights.

I must say, we had only a few of those colder days, for the rest of the time it is still hot and the outside temperature today reached 28 degrees again and I am sweating in the kitchen making crab apple jellies and rhubarb ginger jam.
Last week my friend Elizabeth gave me a box of the sweetest Italian tomatoes "Roma"  from her garden and I bottled them whole  in jars and also made tomato sauce and I will write the recipe in the blog post. So keep on reading.

Shabby Chic Beach cabinet

Now the weather is getting slightly cooler I have finished the cupboard in my "garage studio", it was just to hot to work in there during February. I painted the cupboard with chalk paint blue first and then used a thinner coat of chalk paint green on top and sanded this layer of paint back to show the green colour underneath.

Then I decorated the cupboard door with a fish image from "The Graphics Fairy" website and painted the shells and seahorses with acrylic paint.

The cupboard is finished with wax to protect the surface.

So voila an old brown cupboard has now a new life in beach style.

The shells are painted in acrylics

Tomato sauce from my homegrown tomatoes.

This week I have been busy bottling and preserving; jams and jellies for my road stall and also for ourselves the tomatoes and plums in sauces and whole in the freezer for winter soups and pasta.
Next the pears are getting ripe,so bottling and freezing again.

My plant and preserve stall at the gate

The last of the summer sunflowers.

The recipe for the tomato sauce:

• Fill a big pot with tomatoes and cook until soft.
• Tip the whole lot into a colander on top of the big pot again and use a wooden spoon to push the pulp through the colander so you are only left with the tomato skins.
• Add half a cup of cider vinegar, half a cup of sugar,4 or 5 crushed garlic cloves, pepper and salt  to the sauce in the pot and if you want a bite to the sauce some chili flakes and cook slowly for a hour or so till the sauce thickens.
• You can thicken the sauce more with cornflour if needed.
• Pour hot into sterilized bottles and seal for the best, full of antioxidants tomato sauce ever.

Summer at our cottage

It has been a while since I last wrote a post on my blog, it was Spring time then.

Now we are into a hot and dry summer with temperatures in the high 20 and even above 30 Celsius degrees.

On Saturday it was 34 Celsius in the shade.

The garden has lost its Springtime fresh green look and the Summer garden has more muted and softer colours.

The vegetables need to be watered nearly every day and we have been eating beans, courgettes, carrots, corn, radishes, cucumbers, strawberries and potatoes.

Henk has made two more vegetables plots and I have sown beetroot and carrots, also cauliflower for the winter. 

The first apples are ripe in the orchard and we have a great crop this year. Some of the apples have coddle moth in them, because I didn't put a trap in the tree in Springtime, know now for next year.
Most of the apples are good and I have sold the first bag at my road stall yesterday.
While I am writing mint apple jelly is cooking on the stove.

Vegetable plots

Today I went and picked blackcurrants on a nearby blackcurrant farm.
The blackcurrants are picked by machinery and after the grower is finished the public can go and pick the leftover blackcurrants for free.
So I went this morning when it was not to hot and picked a container full.
It was not easy, because the berries are on the lower branches and more or less I had to crawl on my knees to pick enough.
I felt a bit like Ruth out of the old Testament, but instead of gathering left over wheat, I was picking left over berries and I was the only one picking in the field.
It got to hot, so this job is better at dusk when the temperature is cooler.

The pond in the garden.

I will make black currant jams to sell and black currant cordial for the winter, also I freeze the berries to use for baking.

Our cottage and the shell path and new vegie plots.

I am busy again with my art and opened a little studio with shabby chic furniture, bric and brac, handpainted cards and some of the paintings I have done.
The studio is the little cottage we build in the front and I open mostly in the weekends for visitors.

a Summer sunset

The little birds nests I found in my garden and were my inspiration for this painting. I love using soft colours and lots of layers of paint and washes to create a nostalgic feel.


Birds nest out of the garden

Two weeks ago we had a lot of rain overnight, it was a thunder and lightning storm with very heavy rain, so great for the garden and after the rain this beautiful rainbow appared.
Summer has many gifts for us.

The rainbow after a rain storm