chicken bones, lightning, and Harry Potter

The Festivalising continued on Friday - starting with the obligatory coffee at The Bean - and Jeanette and I visited Jackie MacMaster's studio out at Chewton, which was just as colourful as last time. The stuff she had there was interesting enough I suppose, but sadly lacking was Jackie's handspun/dyed wool [ which was why I'd wanted to go ... grumpgrumpgrump ] and no quilts by Marcie C this time either, unless you count the colourful scrappy strippy one she'd lent Jackie to cover the ratty old couch, and which was being sat on ... horrors ... by a very large and admittedly gorgeous pooch .

We didn't get to look at all the interesting sculptures scattered around the garden as it was about this time that 'the man upstairs' decided to hold a heavenly fireworks display complete with percussion section. Standing out in pouring rain surrounded by large lumps of metal in a thunderstorm, just so that one can document the day in photographic form, is probably not the brightest thing to do, so Jeanette and I elected to skedaddle.
At which point the large, friendly, couch-sitting dawg, who was by now a large wet and very unhappy dawg, tried to get into the car with us and was rather firmly ejected.

There was another stop in Chewton - abstracts, landscapes and machine knitted woolies displayed in an old miner's cottage that is being restored. Nice enough stuff but not my cup of tea
so then we slogged back through the rain to the car, and went to see the work of an elderly lady that Jeanette knew of.
This lady has worked as a framer, is a rather talented maker of scraffito animal portraits, and an avowed bower bird.
Her little house is stuffed to the rafters and
as she has no family to leave it all to, everything has been framed up for sale.
and I do mean everything:
chicken bones, razor blades, old keys, and rusty machinery parts. All in frames, and keeping company with 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games ephemera, vintage lace and old sheet music:

[ and do you know how hard it is to find vintage sheet music with images of cats on ? No ? Well, as it happens, I do - bloody impossible ! ]
edited to add:
no I didn't buy it - see that red sticker there ? someone had beaten me to it - and in any case it was a little out of my price range :[

Here's Jeanette surrounded by some of the treasures - and there were 4 rooms like this!


I hadn't even noticed the ad in the Festival brochure and would have missed out completely had J not known this was on ...
Anyway, after the rather modest purchase of some cards printed with her designs, and then a flying visit to a local purveyor of handmade soaps, lotions and potions so that I could buy some of Nadie's preferred shower gel at 20% off, that was about it for the day.
Okay, so
the plan was for me to round off this post by regaling you with a report of the closing of the Festival in the form of a huge BBQ-and-singing-and-dancing at the Botanical gardens, but ...
I woke up feeling like c**p this morning - sore throat, headache, queasy stomach ... so not really in the mood to go mingle with thousands of unsuspecting party goers to whom I could pass on my germs, and neither was I in the mood or voice to sing joyously for all and sundry.
David and I are but two of dozens of choristers [ and to be honest D doesn't actually sing, he sort of vocalises more or less in time ]
I'm sure they coped without our input
I am now adequately medicated, and have spent the day reclining on the couch with Bear, providing David at intervals with what could be very loosly termed 'meals' and having a Harry Potter marathon.
It may not have been the Sunday I had planned but that's the way it goes sometimes,