2018 HOT HITS!

Hello friends,

I have to start this week by thanking those of you who have written to me from near and so very far to tell me what my blog means to you. Honestly when I sat down to write my blog last week I quickly typed out a list of about 16 things that I wanted to write about - my blog break was number one.

But then somehow item number one went for so long and took up so much space that I decided to leave it at that. I'd included that bit about feeling sad that nobody even noticed my blog posts had disappeared even though it made me feel terribly uncomfortable, I'm all about  messy reality after all.

If I ever doubted that my blog was read and received and appreciated, I certainly don't anymore. Thank you for writing to me, thank you for being so understanding, thank you for not being demanding of me, thank you for reading along, thank you for telling me about all the things you love about my blog and what it means to you, and seriously thank you from the bottom of my heart for taking my family into your hearts and being so kind to us, it means the world.

So before I use up all my blog time and space again this week I'd better move along to my 2018 highlights reel. I've never actually done this before, I don't think, but late last year and early this, as my social media feed got filled up with other people's highlights I decided that it would be fun to do the same. 

As an added  bonus, scrolling through last year's 51 posts has convinced me further that I have to stick around. What a great record of a moment in time. Even the posts that I remember struggling with, feeling like I had nothing to say, are interesting to me now from a distance.

So without further ado, here it is, my 2018 hot hits!

January

2018 went off with a bang when we celebrated our farmer Bren's birthday with a big beautiful party. The night started with fancy cocktails and a communal feast in the garden and ended up many hours later with a bit of table top dancing. Quite a contrast to his birthday celebrations this year, a few days ago, which were much more low key, but still just as special.

Happy birthday my love!

January was also filled with a lot of talk about becoming a flower farmer. It's interesting to read my confident words of a year ago and to think of how much more I know now, yet how aware I am of how much learning I still have ahead of me. The more you know - the less you know. Feels like a bit of an ongoing theme with me.

February

The girls went back to school and started year 5, year 9 and year 12.

I wrote a blog post that included this chunk of text - '"I think I'm happier now than I've ever been in my whole life" I blurted out as we drove past the newly planted sunflower patch. "I feel like I'm more authentically, honestly me than I can ever remember being. Like my skin fits and I feel comfortable wearing it.

And I didn't mean that kind of happiness that is short lived, giggly joy. I could have called it satisfied or honest, but it felt bigger and more worthy than that. It was more of an underlying positive feeling about where we live and the way we've chosen to live. It was about nature and love and creativity and time.'

The days were warm, the garden was full of flowers and our baskets were full of produce.

March

March saw us harvesting baskets and bowls and picking bags full.

We started farmers marketing again. We opened the farm gate stall. And the Fowlers machine, the freezer and the dehydrator started humming away, preserving the bounty.

April

Reading through April's posts I remember struggling at the time to write them. I remember questioning myself about how interesting they were. Feeling certain that I was just repeating the same seasonal stories from the past nine Aprils, and running away from the computer as soon as I'd pressed 'post'. But this morning I loved reading back on what I was preserving, learning, picking, pickling, listening to and feeling. I'm positive there's a lot of repetition from year to year on this blog, but that's living with the seasons for ya.

May

The temperatures plummeted and the season started to change in earnest. We pulled the tomatoes out, we picked the last of the apples and we started seriously stacking wood.

In May my insomnia peaked and I wrote that it was - frustrating exasperating and scary

And very excitingly, my studio build began.

June

In June my studio build continued.

The mornings were frosty and the days were cold.

We pulled nets off the trees, pulled out the annual flowers, dug up the dahlia tubers, planted spring bulbs and loads of flower seeds.

AND I conquered my monster fears and gave a 45 minute presentation about my crafty life and taught a bunch of awesome crafty women how to knit socks from the toe up at Soul Craft festival.

July

In July I wrote my first blog from inside my studio. A room of my very own. I can still remember the feeling of walking in and closing the door behind me for the first time. The only thing I can compare it to is driving down a highway alone after I first got my driver's license.Freedom, independence, space and opportunity.

Farmer Bren started turning the most beautiful bowls.

And we spent quite a bit of time staying in the mountains close to the girls' school so they could go to their early and late classes, musical rehearsals and be part of the social scene.

August

In August I started painting from nature as a way to reclaim my creativity and give myself permission to continue with something even though I wasn't great at it.

We took Pepper and some friends on a Goldrush adventure through the forest.

And then finally my insomnia defeated me - I cried all the tears. I scraped the bottom. It terrified me.

September

In September, the spring equinox, the daffodils and wattle came out and coloured our world golden.

And then my all time knitting hero/guru Mary Jane Mucklestone came to Australia and Felicia brought her to our farm for lunch!! How cool!!

A few days later I attended my first ever craft retreat - The Craft Sessions where I met loads of wonderful women, learnt heaps of new skills and shared a room with Mary Jane. I still can't stop smiling when I think of those few days and nights, the late night conversations, the giggling and the story telling. Definitely a 2018 highlight for me.

October

In October our Jazzy went overseas with school for six weeks and turned 15. Our Pepper turned 11 and had a treasure hunt party. I stressed about the jungle-y state of our farm and my farmer boy calmed me down by talking about living with nature rather than trying to tame her.

I planted and planted and planted seeds in the greenhouse.

I started spinning lessons with Rebecca from Needle and Spindle who I met at The Craft Sessions and I fell in love. The apple orchards tried to blossom in a week of rain and wind. And farmer Bren made a bowl from a eucalyptus burl.

November

In November Indi started and finished her final school exams and then turned 18. Our Jazzy came home from her overseas adventure with so many stories to tell and songs to sing.

The giant foxgloves flowered, my spinning obsession continued, we harvested the garlic, divided the dahlia tubers and Bren and I spent three glorious days alone at the beach celebrating my birthday.

December

There's only one post in December. It was a month of finishing school and the commutes there and back, planting out the gardens, picking flowers, starting to pick veggies, time alone on the farm with Bren while the girls spent time with their grandparents at the beach, getting used to a slower pace, working til 9.30 at night, and the mad scramble to find new podcasts while all of my usuals take summer breaks.

In 2018 I knitted - five beanies,  one sweater, one shawl, two pairs of slippers, two cardigans, two pairs of socks, countless blanket squares, some swatches and I'm currently half way down the body of another cardigan knitted using my very own hand-spun. If you're the knitty-type, you can find all the details on my Ravelry page.

According to my Goodreads tally in 2018 I read 52 books comprising of 16,448 pages (insomnia will do that to you).

We survived our first final year of school and were thrilled to learn that Indi was the dux of her graduating class. I didn't eat processed sugar for 365 days. We grew food and flowers, Farmer Bren renovated his workshop (that post is still in my drafts), we drove 1,000's of kilometers, we cleared a track around our property to start fencing it for sheep, we watched a few series, I learnt stuff and taught stuff, there were boys, lots of written and played songs, lots of trips to the gym, some new friends, lots of emotions, tears from laughing and crying, some wonderful celebrations, some great memories.

I can't wait to see where 2019 takes us!


What are your stand-out highlights of 2018?
How have the first eleven days of the new year been for you?

See you soon!

Love, Kate x

wish i may - wish i might

Hello my lovelies,

Another Friday, another Foxslane post.

So much of my last week, if not the past three weeks, or even the last year, has been affected by the fact that I can't sleep. It feels like I've spent so much time talking about and trying different preventatives and cures, working on my sleep hygiene, pushing harder at the gym, cutting down on coffee, learning meditation, taking herbs, writing lists...but still I can't sleep. My body has forgotten how to sleep. And so I've been walking around feeling like the front of my head is filled with soggy cotton wool and hoping the right words will come to me in conversation when I need them.

It's frustrating and exasperating and scary. I feel like I'm wasting the days of my life working at quarter strength. Wandering around in a daze, dazing around in a wonder.

But late last night when I was preparing myself for another eight hours of lying in the darkness, my farmer boy suggested that whatever happened or didn't happen overnight wouldn't matter because all I had to do today was sit up in bed, knit a couple of rows of my shawl, edit some photos and write my blog.

I hardly slept at all last night and feel like I'm in slow motion again today but it's been kind of nice taking the pressure off and not expecting to get anything done but the bare minimum. So please excuse me if I'm a bit incoherent in places, I'll totally forgive you if you lean on the pictures instead of the words. And let's just cross our fingers and hope that by some miracle something changes soon and I sleep and make sense again.

So how about we get back to the photo, or five, a day, okay?

may twelve

Last Saturday we picked the last sale-able apples from the trees. Five crates of Jonathan's. It was so cold that I couldn't feel my fingers, the rain was dripping off the trees and nets down my neck when I looked down and up my sleeves when I reached up, and it wasn't an altogether pleasant experience. But the apples were bright red and beautiful, they came off easily and we filled the crates in no time.

As we walked the rows of the orchard afterwards and noticed how the leaves were turning golden and fluttering to the ground, we thanked the trees for the beautiful apples, made plans to take the nets off before we pick the grannies, and acknowledged the fantastic season we've had and all that it involved.

We put those apples on the farm gate stall and by the next evening a box had been taken for an apple pie cooking lesson at a Women's prison nearby and the rest had been sold to passers by. We took the signs down, we put the scales away, we emptied the money tin and then we closed the stall doors until next season.

may thirteen

On Sunday we helped Indi paste one of her photos on the water tank at the top of the hill. It's part of her year 12 art folio and has all sorts of theory and meaning behind it, but like I said I'm not in the right head space for explaining anything complicated so you're just going to have to take my word for it.

She printed up some more yesterday that will hopefully get pasted around our farm over the weekend, I'll report back next week.

After the trek up the hill and the pasting we ate pancakes for Mother's Day lunch.

may fourteen

After school on Monday we went for a walk through the sunflower patch to assess the storm damage. Being such a late crop they're probably not as strong as they could be and many were lying down or bent over, but still there were enough standing upright staring at the sun for us to get lost in the magic of and bask in their glow.

may fifteen

These are the chrysanthemums I bought myself for Mother's Day. Bren bought me a blue handled pocket-knife which is equally as pretty and I probably should have taken a picture of, but I forgot.

may sixteen

On Wednesday Bren and Jobbo built the roof of my studio. I had been worried that adding a roof onto the structure would make it too big and overpowering in that space, but after they played around with angles for a while I think they got it just right. I love it and its little pitched roof.

Bren's parents drove up for lunch which was fun.

And then I walked up and down each row of flowers until I found enough for a bunch.

may seventeen

Yesterday I planted some more garlic, I pulled the basil out of the garden and saved the seeds, I watched as they wrapped the studio up in sisalation and Miss Jazzy got her braces put on her teeth.

may eighteen 

Today. A few days ago when they were discussing ideas for the ceiling of my studio, I sent my farmer boy an instagram photo of a ceiling I love. It was one of those dreamy cabin photos with a pitched roof, chunky rafters and big, wide, dark boards covering the the entire space. From there the boys went into action pulling bits of timber out, sanding, staining, oiling and then holding them up to be discussed. At one point Jobbo remarked that he'd always wanted to see what sump oil did to the colour of a wooden board and the next thing he knew Bren came back from the depths of an old shed with a bucket full from an old tractor. From time to time we laugh at him and his hoarding tendencies and then at other times we are swiftly reminded that he's the one laughing. Or feeling smug anyway.

Eventually they sourced some hardwood offcuts and spent today getting them ready. Jobbo cut them to size, Bren sanded them down and then they played with the ratios of linseed oil to sump oil for the dark and richness.

They got rained out this afternoon because sanding is not an inside job, but with any luck by this time next week I will not only have had some good hours of sleep - but I'll have a studio ceiling too. How exciting.

And I'm still knitting my Merricks shawl in Abbe's Noble Fox yarn. I've just finished the second colour and am about to make a start on the border, it's the most beautiful blue and I'm so excited to use it.

Which brings me to now, still sitting up in bed, staring at the late afternoon shadows dancing on the wall, wearing the new to me cardigan I bought myself this afternoon on our local buy/swap/sell Facebook page, wondering what to make for dinner that Jazzy and her new braces will be able to eat.

And that's me!

Please tell me about you. Are you building? Wallpapering? Is your team winning? Are you excited about something? Dreading something else? Please fill me in, I'd love to hear it all.

Love! Love!

Kate x