My daughter Uma turns nine this week, and I’m in the studio working on her birthday present. Well… technically not right now. Right now I’m sitting in the car before school pick-up, scribbling down thoughts before they disappear. But in my mind, I’m back in the studio, surrounded by scraps, cutting fabrics, moving colours around, trying to solve the lovely little puzzle of who Uma is right now.

Every year I make both the kids something for their birthdays. Something useful. Something they’ll love. Something that feels, in a small way, like a snapshot of who they are in this season.

This year, the challenge is colour…

…up until basting, a quilt exists in two dimensions. Clothes become cut pieces. Cut pieces become small scenes. Small scenes slowly grow into bigger scenes, until eventually there’s a quilt top that can be held, folded, and understood in its full scale.

For me though, the real shift happens at basting. An hour on the floor…

So I jumped on an Instagram trend earlier this week, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

After my experience of social media burnout last year, I made a commitment not to jump on trends just for the sake of it. I did one of those “kind of rich” posts. They’ve been around for a while now, especially in the slow living, homesteading corners of Instagram. But this one genuinely caught me and resonates with how I’m experiencing life at the moment.

Like many, we’ve been paying much closer attention to where our money is going, how quickly it moves (and how easily it disappears!) Groceries creeping up, fuel, all the small things adding up. I’ve been leaning more consciously into a way of living that could be described as intentional frugality.

I’ve always liked that word…

Autumn is here.
(Finally, finally, finally!)

We’ve just arrived home from a week camping down in far, far East Gippsland. Warm days, properly chilly nights, every meal cooked on the fire and wild roaming beaches without bumping into another soul. Excellent progress on my Éclair Sweater, which still smells deliciously smokey. According to Rodolfo, there was even good swell.

Back home to proper autumn weather. Today has been grey, dismal and drizzly, basically my favourite. The fire’s been on all day…

I’m sitting here in the studio as the light drops out of the day. The sky has gone that flat grey which swallows colour; the trees silhouetted, their edges sharp and defined. The mountains have receded into a darker version of themselves. I think the kookaburras may have had their last laugh now that the frogs have started up. I can almost see the light disappearing in real time. Darker, darker, darker. It’s an unusual time for me to be in the studio and I’m noticing how different the space feels in the evening. The windows, which are so full of light during the day, now hold this wide, dimmed view, and the whole room feels hushed and contained.

The last fortnight has felt… balanced… but not in the way that word sometimes gets used…

I’m writing this sitting on the couch in the evening, wrapped in a quilt with a hot water bottle and a cosy jumper, looking out at the grey sky over the mountains. A flock of cockatoos just swept through the valley. It is the first cold evening in months. Something in me anchors when the temperature drops. I feel more like myself. The quality of my observation sharpens. The world feels clearer and somehow more alive.

The days are noticeably shortening now. The mornings arrive slowly and the sun certainly isn’t up before us anymore. In the evenings…

This morning I woke with that delicious disorientation – what day is it? Saturday? Monday? Wednesday? For a few moments, time felt porous, unanchored. I love that liminal pause, before the pull between the part of me that longs to be untethered, expansive, without boundaries, and the practical workings of my prefrontal cortex, which inevitably wins as the calendar snaps back into place.

I am sitting at our worn wooden kitchen table after a full and shifting week. It’s week four – or maybe five – of term one…

It began with another week of scorchers. The kind that press against the windows by 10am and suck the colour from the garden. Again broken by a cool change. A proper one. Sudden. Real, saturating rain and with it, sweet relief. The mornings are different now. The sun rising later, sliding sideways through the kitchen windows…

These last few weeks I have been easing back into the studio. Slowly. Intentionally. And particularly because I desperately need some pants that haven’t been mended within an inch of their lives…

This is something I love to make when the fruit bowl is looking a little tired. Half-eaten apples, wild roadside plums, slightly soft nectarines. Basically anything that can be stewed. I add a handful of frozen elderberries too. I pick them in season and stash containers away for moments like this…

This year felt like a turning point.

It was the first full year with both children at school. A magnetic shift that completely changed the shape of my days. After eight years with a small person almost always by my side, time opened up again. At first it arrived in vast, empty stretches, but slowly…

To celebrate the beginnings of spring, I have teamed up with gorgeous local friends to offer you beautiful folk some springtime altar medicine…

I love making all kinds of herbal salts. Such a simple way of getting more flavour and nutrients into our meals. I use whatever is in abundance. At the moment, in early spring, that means three cornered garlic (onion weed), citrus and rosemary.

This time of year again. The time of blossom and bulbs flowering, of fresh green shoots, so green they are almost luminescent. Time hasn’t quickened quite yet…

It begins: with the palette. Finding that sweet spot where each colour holds is own while also holding hands with each other…

Quilts should be hand washed only when necessary, around once per year. Best done in the summer months to speed up the drying process.