April has been a good month & I don't usually do this but today I went looking for autumn.

Things are definitely changing in an autumnal way.
The signs are the usual ones.

​The sunset tonight was almost directly west, we’ve harvested feijoa & pumpkins, the leeks are ready & the tomatoes are ending, the days are noticeably shorter, the sun rises later, the late afternoon & nights are cooler, the angle of the sun is now low enough that the light reaches right to the back of the room & we’ve had the 1st snowfall on the mountain.

In autumn, the harakeke seed pods are empty of seed & almost threadbare, the rengarenga still hold seed but that may be only because of the cobwebs, the corokia has beautiful little yellow berries, the seed heads on the hebe are chaff & the Tawa has new growth.

In our native forest, which is evergreen, the changes are less obvious - in fact some of them, like the new growth on the Tawa seem incongruous & I’ve realised I have been overlooking many.

Every morning the grass is quite wet underfoot but the sun is consistently shining & the winds are minimal.

April saw me pretty scattered with the excitement of my whanau gathering to celebrate significant birthdays.
One of 'the aunties' turned 50 & our dad celebrated his 80th. Both superb reasons to gather together.
I did manage to do something every week for my '52 weeks of botanicals' project, however not everything is as connected as would be usual for me.  

My niece asked me to make a wedding gift for her friends so I thought I'd try some gold paint on fabric.
It was completely underwhelming so I was a little disappointed.

The photo gallery above is the sequence of events of making a beautiful little muka sampler which will be a touch piece for an exhibition which opens June 9th (more about that in June).

This is the prep work mordanting fabric & muka with home made soy milk for natural dyeing experiments in May.
This is the ground work for a series of explorations which I'm very excited about. 
It's a slow, gentle process with lots of time spent in the shed sitting stitching while my dye pots barely simmer.

I spent February dog & house sitting for friends in Melbourne so I knew that whatever I did for my #52weeksofbotanicals project most likely would use plant material which I would have to leave in Australia.
This put an interesting spin on the challenge & I enjoyed having this parameter to work within.

As a related aside, I did take the opportunity to go to the 'who's afraid of colour' exhibition at the Ian Potter centre in the NGV. Please go if you are in Melbourne before 18th April 2017, it's simply amazing.

I played with macro photography for a couple of weeks which was so much fun & so interesting I've dedicated a blog post to it.

I was a bit lost for ideas after the awe & amazement of the macro photography but while I was practising some calligraphy I got to wondering if it would be possible to use the calligraphy nib & ink to write tiny messages on to the dried eucalyptus leaves.
It absolutely is possible but totally detrimental to the nibs so I switched to a staedtler pigment liner instead.

Partly as a reaction to all those 'quotes' from somebody else, that some people love to litter their lives & minds with instead of taking the time to come up with their own, I decided to write my own messages to people & draw my own motifs & chose to write them on leaf litter I collected on my daily walk with the dogs.
This I titled the leaf litter project & used the hashtag #leaflitterproject on Instagram
On my last evening in Melbourne I took the dogs for a walk in the park & let the leaves fly off in the wind.
I doubt that anyone will find them & I don't really care.
It was such a fun project, equal parts cathartic & meditative. Also it's a novel idea & I'd like to revisit it in the future I think.

I have only the photographs of my 4 projects to remind me of #our52weekproject in Melbourne … but I'm happy with that.