Travel Blog: Cairns 2023

Australia is beautiful. Sometimes I forget just how big it is, and how little of it we have seen, but it turns out, it's really worth exploring. This year, we've already done a little trip to Canberra, but our main holiday for the year was nearly two weeks in Cairns. 

We considered driving, but the added time it would take just didn't seem feasible. We have friends who are currently doing a three year placement in Cook Town, so we knew we'd be doing a chunk of driving to get there. Visiting them was a major factor in going up north so we ended up flying and hiring a car. 

Cairns was warm, even in June, but the nights were chilly. We started by doing the touristy things, like taking a boat out to Green Island and snorkeling. The reef there was beautiful, even if the water was a little chilly. The trouble with snorkeling is that it's something that does take time to figure out how to do, and was particularly tricky for our girls. Sophie was less than persistent, though Rachel gave it a good go. 

Even on the beach, there was lots to see and explore. Everyone was feeling pretty meh about the boat ride over. Steve had taken sea sickness tablets, but it got the girls, especially Rachel. Poor kid had a rough time on the way back especially, but luckily managed to sleep for part of it. 

The next day we went out to Kuranda on the sky rail. We a little bit wished we had more time up there, because by the time we got up, did the Butterfly House and had lunch, there wasn't quite enough time to do a walk around before heading back on the train, but oh well.

 

The Sky Rail up was so beautiful and well worth it. But the real highlight here was the Butterfly House. Rachel was in insect heaven, and they even landed on Sophie sometimes, we think they were drawn to the colour of her backpack. 

Exploring the Tablelands was next on our agenda, which was going to be lots more fun before the girls got car sick from the windy roads. Luckily we still had the sea sickness tablets, so we gave them half doses and took it easy. We went to the cheese place for some amazing cheese, and checked out some waterfalls and rainforest walks. The Curtain Fig was lots of fun. We also went to a gem and minerals museum which had a really cool walk through set up and the girls cracked their own geode at the end. 

Street friends of ours had recommended getting kayaks down Babinda Creek, so we made sure to have that on our to do list. It ended up being possibly the highlight of the trip. We went to a place where a guy put us in kayaks at the back of his property on the creek and then just the four of us sailed down for about 9ks. There was lots of fun just enjoying the cool water on the hot day, and we stopped on the creek bed for a picnic lunch. 

Afterwards, we checked out Josephine Falls, and the girls braved some pretty freezing water to go down the rock slide. Kudos to Steve for spending the time and effort coaxing and encouraging them through the water to the top and sliding down with them. Rachel was keen to swim pretty much everywhere, even though it was actually quite chilly. 

After Josephine Falls we went up to Babinda Boulders for a look and managed to see a wild cassowary. Those birds truly look like dinosaurs have come alive. Hilariously though, when we got out of the car the first thing we saw was a random chicken strolling around the car park, so even though the cassowary was impressive and amazing, the more memorable moment for the girls was the chicken. 

Then it was time for us to venture north to Cooktown! We listened to Artemis Fowl in the car on the way. Even after all the years of travel to Bundy, I'm still surprised that the girls can handle longer and longer car rides now. We did nearly three hours straight at one point! 

Cooktown was a real change of pace after five days of traveling all around Cairns. Little things to look at and enjoy, but mostly just time together and with friends. One thing that the girls found in Cooktown was the coconut trees with actual coconuts on them. Rachel explored around our accommodation and began a collection and was quickly obsessed with the idea of opening one to find out what was inside. It was quite the saga but the girls were victorious in the end and had the pleasure of drinking the water/milk and eating the fresh coconut. 

One of the most beautiful places we went to was Cherry Tree Bay. A picturesque spot with lovely views on the walk there. Then our trip to Cooktown was over and we headed off to the Daintree. Unfortunately, this was where the weather for our trip turned a bit rubbish. We had planned to go to the Daintree via Mossman Gorge, so we could spend some time doing some rainforest walks there, but it was so so rainy and cold we didn't have any fun at all. 

We had a Daintree River cruise for crocodile spotting booked before we were going to take the ferry over into the Daintree proper, so we ended up just having to kill time and hope the rain would go away before we did that. It cleared up a little, which was a relief, and we did enjoy the river cruise, complete with crocodile spotting. 

The Daintree Rainforest is something to see. The way the thick rainforest creeps right up to the coast is rather spectacular. Still, the weather was not kind to us, so we couldn't enjoy it was much as we would have liked. I did like how relatively untouched the rainforest area is though, and really appreciate the way that it has been thus far protected. 

We rolled back into Cairns for a last couple of nights before flying home. We asked the girls what they wanted to spend our last day doing, and top of their list was going kayaking again. When we told them they couldn't do that, we compromised by spending time at the water park on the esplanade and visiting a second hand bookstore in Cairns city. 

The girls hit the jackpot in the bookstore, as they had a huge stock of Tintin books in fantastic condition for a great price. They were so flushed with the victory of the Tintin book purchase that it was all they talked about for days. Even now, they read and re-read those Tintin books like they are the best thing since sliced bread. We have the animated series on DVD which they have watched before, but now they really like to study it and let me know when things have been missed out or changed from the original text when they are watching the episodes. 

On our last night, we went out for Japanese dinner and then an ice cream treat and stroll through Cairns city before heading back to our AirBnB. We happened upon a street performer, so we stayed to watch and Steve got to be part of the show at the end. Girls were delighted. It was a nice change of pace to just take it easy for that last day and a half and enjoy being together.

Sewing Obi

While I've sewn many a yukata or kimono now, I don't think I've ever made an obi that I've gone on to wear. This year, I was gifted a box of fabric from some family friends which included two silk wrap things. The moment I saw them, I knew they were destined to be obi. 

I washed them, unpicked them and lay them out. 

They had the most beautiful embroidery on them and I loved the colours, particularly the black and gold. Everything about these made me happy for sewing and the potential of taking something that wasn't being used and making it into something else. Hooray!

I bought some fancy interfacing stuff that I think is generally  used to make jackets and lapels sit correctly, because I really wanted the silk to hold up as an obi without crinkling. Then it was a matter of cutting them into rectangles and sewing it all together. 

The black one really does look stunning on, but it's so so difficult to get a photo of. I'm wearing it here with the kimono I made last year. 

Can not say how much I love these. Guess I'll just have to wear my kimono more often so everyone can know. 

Happy Bento

Nothing more satisfying in life than a beautiful lunch greeting you on a hard day. 

Obviously these aren't every day occurrences, but when they pop up, it is indeed wonderful. 

Palate Cleanser

This was some sewing I did at the start of the year as a palate cleanser after the cherry blossom dress of doom. My sister's husband owns a heath and wellness practice and had some Japanese style door hangings over some of the doorways. The ones they had were looking a bit worse for wear, so she asked if I could make some new ones. 

Easy. 

Fiona ordered some cool Japanese themed fabric from Spoonflower which was very nice to sew with. Given that everything was rectangles and straight lines, all the sewing went beautifully. The only tricky thing was remembering to turn the cranes so they would be the right way up on both sides. 

Incredibly hard to photograph, but they really do look lovely in the practice. This is what having sewing skills is for! 

Travel Blog: Canberra 2023

Trying to make the most of opportunities this year, when Steve was sent to Canberra for work in April and it happened to fall over the school holidays, the girls and I booked some flights to join him. Steve worked Tuesday to Thursday and then took Friday off so we could have the long weekend together. School started again on the Monday, so it was a quick trip, but still lots of fun. 

The weather was cold, but clear skies for most of the time. We spent loads of time on the Friday at Questacon, where Steve was in his science element, explaining all sorts of things to the girls and just generally having a great time. 

We went to the War Memorial. 

And up Mt Ainsley. 

The next day we did a walk through aviary, and a round of Cockington Green. Before going to the Arboretum. 

The Arboretum turned out to be fantastic. We had thought we were only going to spend an hour or two there, to let the girls have a play in the park, but we ended up staying for ages. There were heaps of different gardens to explore (including bonsai!) and the girls just had lots of fun running around. 

The weather on Sunday was rubbish, but we were meeting up with friends to go to church and then hang out before our flight home, so it all worked out ok. The colours on the trees were pretty spectacular for us Brisbane-ites and overall, it was just a lovely little spontaneous trip for us. 

Book Week

It truly is the most wonderful time of the year when people are talking about reading, books and characters that have influenced their lives. Book Week is just magnificent. Even when I see characters that were definitely movies first, I'm not too worried, because for everyone one of those, there are five more kids dressed up as someone they read about first. 

This year was a no sewing year for us. Not by design, but just serendipity. Sophie wanted to be Anna-Beth from the Percy Jackson series. Arguably the hardest costume, because finding an orange shirt proved to be incredibly difficult. Once we had that though, my friend Amy was kind enough to print and iron on the appropriate logo. 

Rachel wanted to be Lavender from Matilda. Mostly because she has a pet newt called Isaac. I guess this was the sewing part of the costumes, because I did whip up that little lizard the night before. We could have used some more forethought though, since the legs didn't turn out at all, and I ended up sewing them on inside out, but whatever. Rachel sewed the eyes on herself like the good little sewer she is. We borrowed her a different school uniform dress from a friend on the street. 

I got to have two Book Weeks, so I recycled the Mary Poppins from last year, and went as Matilda on the second day. I based my Matilda costume off the stage musical, since I wanted to be able to sing the songs. Borrowed a grey skirt from a girl at church (it's her high school skirt), and then wore a Cue shirt of Sarah's that was in my dress up box, along with my blazer and tie from when I lived in Japan. 

Look around, look around, how lucky we are to be alive right now! Here is me as Matilda leading the revolt against the Trunchbull at school. Some days are the best. 

Despair Dress Hopefully Redeemed

Much much earlier in the year, I decided I wanted to make a replica of a Princess Highway dress that I love to wear. I'd already made replicas of a skirt, which I feel was very successful, since I was able to reuse it to make my Mary Poppins skirt for Book Week last year, so I was pretty confident that I could replicate this dress. 

I'm fairly sure I did a mock up of the bodice in leftover sheet fabric, and then turned my attention to some Japanese fabric I had in my stash. It was a lovely cherry blossom print, and there were meters and meters of it. I thought it would look really lovely, so I lay it out and got started. 

Then I found out it was very sheer. I hadn't noticed before because it had come folded over, into what would be a good width for kimono making, but when I unfolded it, I discovered it's true see-through nature. Totally fine, I rationalize, I'll just line it. I've got loads of lovely cotton bedsheets that will work perfectly. So I cut the bodice and everything is going smoothly, before I remember, now the skirt has to be lined, my pocket construction won't work the way it was supposed to. Sigh. So I've got to rethink all of that. 

The other thing I've got to rethink entirely, is how to cut the skirt out. The fabric is only about 60cm across, which is pretty narrow. One width, won't be enough for a front panel of the skirt. Two is a bit much, but doable, except it lands me with a centre front seam, which I don't think I can stand. I did sew it with the centre seam initially and it did turn out I hated it. So then I unpicked it all, and cut one of them into two and sewed them either side of the front (is this making sense to anyone?). 

The skirt of the dress was definitely much fuller than it needed to be, but the fabric was so sheer and I was using the selvage edges for the skirt, sides, rather than have to deal with firstly working out by how much smaller to make each panel and then spend twice as long on each seam because I would have had to French Seam them to make them sturdy and beautiful. 

It turned out that I had also cut the skirt panels excessively long, and the hem on them was turning out to be ginormous. At this point, I was so over this dress. What I had thought was going to be a beautiful, flowing easy to wear dress, was turning out to be a layered, bulky monstrosity. Not sure it would ever recover, I put it on the dress form and tried adding belts to see if that helped things.

. 

It did. A bit. So after another week or so of procrastination, I just finished the hem and called it done. 

I've honestly been having a rough year in my mind, and this sewing experience did not help things. Even though I've since made other, much more successful projects, I'm still not feeling all there. I did wear the dress twice before the weather got too cold, in an attempt to move past the somewhat disastrous sewing experience. But I was not feeling like I would reach for it too quickly when the weather changed. 

What I did do, after a sewing break and a palette cleanser, was use the pattern, and all I'd learned from making it, to make another dress. This time out of a (non-sheer) cotton that mum picked up on sale at Spotlight. 

This dress worked exactly as I had wanted. This dress fit so well, sewed without having to rethink or unpick anything. This dress looks beautiful on the inside as well as the outside, because I did do French Seams on the sides and finished the other edges with bias binding. This dress has pockets to write home about and is exactly what I need to wear for a great day. 

I listened to a sewing podcast recently which talked about taking the time to reclaim the items that you didn't have the best experience making. Make new memories with that item, so you can move past the bad ones and still enjoy it. 

I guess I don't often have too many bad sewing experiences, or items that I'm so frustrated with that I can't bring myself to wear. The last one I can remember was this dragonfly dress, which wasn't a terrible experience so much as turning out to be not my style of dress after all. Maybe it was time, but listening to the podcast did make me consider the cherry blossom dress again. I should give it another go. 

After all, I'm the only one who knows about the sewing grief I experienced, and I don't need to let it stop me wearing it. Also, it did pave the way for a dress I do truly love, so it can't be all that bad, right? 

What they Wore

I realized as I flicked back through the very haphazard posts of this year, that I neglected to share what the girls wore to guides the night they celebrated the Coronation of the King at Guides. I made the crowns, which I talk about here, but didn't follow up with a quick post about the rest of their outfits. 

They were pretty funny picking out dresses, because I have made them loads of princess style dresses which still fit (see red one here and blue one here), but for some reason, they wanted to wear anything but that. In the dress ups, they found an Asian style dress I had bought in New Zealand of all places back when I was 17, and my formal dress, which my mum had made in the same year. 

Rachel was enamored with my formal dress, and Sophie loved the Asian style one. Unbelievably, Sophie was also tall enough to get away with wearing it, without me having to do any adjustments. It was a little long, but with the side splits, it didn't matter. 

Rachel's on the other hand, needed a fair few things adjusted to make it wearable. I asked her if she wanted me to remove the sleaves that I had put on spontaneously one year when I was working at an OSCH and we had a dress up day. She told me no, she loved the sleeves. So I just tucked them up a bit to make them short enough for her arms and otherwise left them. 

Then I took up the shoulders, hem of the underskirt and tacked up the sheer overlayer in places to give it a swishy ball-gown feel. The dress was a bit chaotic, but very Rachel. Sophie was very particular about how she was a Princess of Wisdom and I do feel that she nailed that look. My red and blue dresses did get used on the night by some other girls who needed a dress, so good to know my sewing didn't go to waste after all. 

Belated Camping Memories

 Much earlier this year, back in April actually, I took the girls camping. We went to the usual spot for a "just the girls and I" camping trip, since it's easy and still fun. The difference this time, was that we also took some friends. The girls cousin Hugo and our friend Mia both have Dads who are into camping, but their Mums are not so much. Kind of like Steve and I, but reverse. 

Anyway, we booked a couple of nights and the kids had a blast. It was a bit rainy, but dry enough for us to venture out and see the glow worms at the Natural Bridge the first night. 

The next day we did the Warrie Circuit, which I a little bit regret suggesting, since the rainy-ness had made a lot of mud. We did the walk in good spirits, only a little complaining from the kids at then end, which was abated when I told them I'd dish out a marshmallow for every hundred steps we went up. 

While I could barely move the next three days from the pain in my knees and hips (welcome to old age?), the trip overall had been a success. I'd like to thank the playdough I packed for entertaining the kids for a lot of our campsite down time, and the audio book, Have Sword, Will Travel by Garth Nix and Sean Williams, which also kept them occupied and resting for the before bedtime hour and the two hours it took us to pack up in the morning. 

On the way home, we stopped off at the Gold Coast for a play and an impromptu swim (kids only!) Sophie cooked us sausages on the BBQ for lunch and we picked up a pie from Yatala for dinner. It was beautiful and a lovely reminder that we live in a beautiful part of the world. 

One of Those Cakes

Some days, you've just got to make a cake. Rachel went off for a play a couple of Saturdays ago, but upon arriving at her friends house, things unfortunately did not turn out as she had hoped. Her friend was there, with nothing to do, but it still being only 9:30 in the morning on a Saturday, didn't feel ready to actually have a play. Poor Rachel came home in tears. 

What's a mum to do, but suggest some quality one on one cooking time. Surely cake will fix everything? If not, it will come pretty darn close. Coincidently, a day or two before, Rachel had seen this video of cake making on YouTube, and so requested to make something similar. Why not? 

We made a very thin chocolate and vanilla cake (as well as a round of cupcakes) and let them cool. Then she cut circles and stacked them to make mini layer cakes. 

We had fun making a ganache to cover them (Rachel was pretty excited when she found out she could ice a cake with something made of chocolate and cream) and then I let her go to town decorating with icing and flowers that we had in the cupboard leftover from her birthday. 

This cake was just what we needed. Especially starting back to school for term three that week. Just what the doctor ordered. If the doctor were me, and cake were medicine. 

Getting ready to write this post, I realised the last spontaneous cake we made was the Duck Cake back in 2021! And before that, was the Just Because Cake in April of the same year. The world needs more cake. 

Could be though, that we haven't been making as many because Sophie has been in the kitchen much more. She made a spontaneous purchase of a Bluey Cookbook (I think back in the Easter holidays) and has been quite inspired in the kitchen ever since. 

Another reason could be that we have all been too busy reading to need to make a cake "just because". I for sure, know of no better escape from reality and am so glad to have this shared love for books with my family. 

More on that reading next time I hope. See you then!

Rachel Turns Nine

This month has been pretty busy but the highlight has to have been celebrating Rachel. Now that she's finally riding a bike, it's hard to get her off it, so we gifted her a bike basket. She decorated it with butterflies from Nana and some star beads. 

While I get older and am personally less concerned for birthdays, they really do bring a little something special to our lives. Especially when you can make a cake for it. 

Rachel chose the piano cake from the Australian Women's Weekly Birthday Cake Book this year. I had the same when I turned nine. Coincidence? Probably. White chocolate kit kats really do make it super easy to make. 

Her birthday fell on the last day of school, so we invited her friends to hang out at the park after school finished for the term. They ate snacks and cupcakes (complete with Rachel's signature insects on them) and ran rampant in the park together. It was some beautiful chaos that I was glad to see.