A New Path

Just short of five months since I buried my beautiful Max and life goes on... winter is done... thank goodness the warmer weather is on its way. 

It's too cold to garden here in winter (for me anyway) so I hadn't done any work in the garden since April, when I created the first garden bed here at my new property. But at the end of September I started planning the next garden bed and have been working away at getting that project underway and finished before the heat of summer sets in, and then it will just be maintenance over summer before starting on the next stage when the weather cools. I'm really happy with progress and a very big chunk of the work is done but plenty of smaller jobs to keep me going to get this garden to a state where it looks cared for again and not abandoned... the latter of which is how the previous owner handed it over to me.

So the title of this post represents both the work I have been doing in the garden, where part of the garden bed I created has a new path in it, but also represents how I want to have fun experimenting and testing some ideas, a bit of a departure from my previous work. As per my last post most of those designs have been retired from the Pinch River design library and brought to life under a little side project of mine simply named Gabriella Tagliapietra Design. However, I will be re-working some of my previous designs and the plan is that the hand screen printed textiles will be at the heart of Pinch River... but there is unchartered territory I want to explore.

This garden, as previous ones have been, will be a source of design inspiration for me... and is already even though it will be a while before the plantings have matured and are established. I love this property, it seems to be a well-worn path for local wildlife to go from A to B and back again. I have kangaroos here often enough and a swamp wallaby or too as well a resident red-necked wallaby here almost daily. Yellow-Tailed Black Cockatoos track past here very regularly and there are Gang Gangs about too. There's also the usual suspects like Wattle Birds, Magpies, Currawongs, Sulphur-Crested Cockatoos, Corellas, Piwis and Pigoens... and occasionally Kookaburras.

I've started the ball rolling and have been preparing some artwork for screen printing and even had a small batch of printing done... the latter is a bit of an experiment and the departure from my previous work... but will sit alongside the screen printed designs. It feels so good to be back here and this is mostly because one last piece of the puzzle that I had been waiting to fall into place did so about 6 weeks ago and now I finally have the time I so craved.

I'm also tinkering inside the house with some small-scale renovations so I've decided that for the rest of this year I am going to tidy up loose ends with these house and garden jobs. I want to spend the next couple of months finishing this work so that I have no distractions in the new year... because the new year will be when I re-launch Pinch River with new products and new design or two (not yardage though... that is still some time away).