African Flower Chain: Link 3

Our next stop was Augrabies National Park.  The weather looked promising after the previous nights cold. The sun was shining and life was good.

Augrabies Waterfall is in the Orange River close to where it becomes the border with Namibia. It is the dry season so the falls were rather 'small' according to the locals.  Still it is an impressive site.

We camped in the park above the falls and woke up to monkeys trying to steal our breakfast!

My third flower is at the lookout point right above the falls.

African Flower Chain: Link 2

After a two day stop-over in Klerksdorp to visit old school friends, we are back on the road.  

We took all the back roads which lead from the highveld of North West Province to the Kalahari of the Northern Cape. 

We passed farmland and quite a lot of mining activity on the way. We spent most of the day on the road and only reached the Witsand Nature Reserve at sunset.

We woke during the night from rain (and cold) and when we looked outside this morning there was ice everywhere!  The rain froze during the night. The officer at the Reserve told us they had never experienced this before.  Another cold first for us.

Two very common sites in this area:  Huge 'versamel voel' nests where many birds live together in a sort of 'apartment block' and Springbok.

I left my second flower at one of the lookout points in the reserve.

Have you seen it?

African Flower Chain: Link 1

Snow. Not something I often associate with South Africa. But yesterday, we had snow in all 9 provinces of the country.  We received our rental camper in the snow and we arrived back in Pretoria in the snow.  What a way to start our trip!

We set off from Pretoria from where we followed the Magaliesberg Range to the west.  All the time with heavy cloud cover and cold.  Near Rustenburg we turned away from the mountain towards the south west. 

We passed Derby, Koster, Ventersdorp and arrived in Potchefstroom in the late afternoon. The countryside changed from Bushveld to Highveld. We saw different antelopes, a warthog, lots of ground squirrels and mongoose and a wide range of birds. It felt good to be back in this country.

We have a lot of family history in Potch.  My mother went to school and university there, my Mother-in-law grew up there, my father-in-law studied there and my husband did his army training there.

There are lots of stories to tell about the family and their history in the town and university, so it was appropriate to start my chain of flowers here. I tied my first flower to the street-name post on the corner of Gerrit Dekker and Steve Biko streets.

Gerrit Dekker was a professor of Afrikaans literature, and an author among many other things. Steve Biko was an anti-apartheid activist and founder of the Black Consciousness Movement. 

Let's see where this chain leads us. Are you following?

Never too young...

The Princess trying her hand at crochet

African Artifacts close-ups

Remember the African artifacts I told you about earlier?

They are all piled into a corner waiting to be packed. 

Here are some more close-ups.  

Crochet Experiments

I came upon this blog post by Creative Fidget a while ago via Pinterest. 

It made me think of the pile of t-shirt yarn I made ages ago and haven't used yet. 

(Now that I am packing I think of a lot of things I stash for later use....)

My experiment with crocheting a piece of t-shirt yarn into a spiral has produced this.  I tried different ways of  covering the yarn to expose it more or less.  I think if I alternate the color of the t-shirt yarn and the color of the crochet yarn, I might just get something interesting going here...

Now back to packing...

On show in New York

For the very first time I have a piece of my own creation on display in an Art Exhibition.

If you are in the New York area, please go and have a look at this great show, 

curated by the very talented Joetta Maue. 

The show opened last night.

Checking in while Sorting out

Just to proof that I am not doing nothing...  

Just because I am not creating doesn't mean I'm not keeping my hands busy!

In preparation for the big move I'm sorting through the whole house. 

Purging, filing, cleaning, and all such constructive things. The moving company will do the actual packing but we have to sort everything and make sure they only pack the things we really want to (and are allowed to) take to Australia.

Lots of magazines staying behind.  I know this is really sad, but I've decided to go digital from now on.  Much kinder on the trees. And the storage space.

You can't pack candles, did you know?  They melt and make a big mess in the box.

My biggest achievement so far was to reduce a huge, and I mean really huge, pile of school books, artworks, reports, photos, etc into a neat filing system. I kept everything but without any system.  If it wasn't for Pinterest, I wouldn't even have known that it was possible to have a system.  Now I have a file per child per school year, each containing that year's photos, reports,  awards and samples of their art and written work. 

Really cool, if I say so myself.

The next challenge is my work space. Desk, sewing station and fabric stash. 

This is going to be a biggie...

Just when you thought life was getting boring...

...everything changes.

We came back from Australia and everything was as it always was. 

Good.

Then I got very good news:  My 'My daughter" piece was selected for a show in New York.  

Yes, NEW YORK.  My first. To say I'm thrilled is an understatement.

For the local scene I was preparing a new quilt to go into the Quilt Art 2012 exhibition here in Dubai.  I entered two existing pieces and one new (unfinished at the time) piece.

All still good.

Then my Dad got sick. I flew down to SA, spent some good time with him, left him to recover and came home.

Came back to the news that our contract in Dubai will finish soon and it is time to move on. We always knew it was coming, after all, we are expats, we don't stay in the same place for ever. But we thought it might last a bit longer...

While my head was filled with moving and relocating thoughts, my Dad passed away...

Now I am back from South Africa for the second time this month.  I am packing our house. I will go back to SA in July to help my mother pack her house. 

New horizons. For both of us.

But there's a new dawn on the horizon.  We are moving to Australia.  If all goes well we will settle in Adelaide. It's a small, beautiful, green city. Very different from Dubai. 

Life is still good.

(Oh, and the new quilt never made it to the show - still unfinished.)

Dubai in pictures 22

My husband took these photos yesterday.

Here he was in a client's office in the Trade Center area.  

Looking down Sheikh Zayed Road towards the south.

This was just before sunset, taking the dog for a walk behind our house.  We live on the edge of the city near Jebel Ali.  The townhouse complex where we live is surrounded by open veld/desert. 

The difference between the two photos is about 20km's.