Dramatis personae

I’ve realised that I haven’t really written anything about me, and that doesn’t seem right. (And yet, if this blog is about diarising my projects for my own reference, why would I need to write about me? I know who I am! But the myth of addressing some out-there audience is part of the fuel of blogging I suppose.)

Not only that, but I have in fact posted a photo of G, my partner (and playing with his food at that) before I posted a picture of me and I know that can’t be right! So here I am.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not a publicity hound. In fact, I spent years terrified of cameras and although I have come to grudgingly tolerate them they still don’t thrill me, and I’m not the kind of person who whips my camera out every opportunity and takes photos of events. In hindsight this makes me a bit sorry. There are hardly any photos from the last 15 years or so of my life, and now I kind of wish there were! In fact, there are so few photos of me around that finding one that I am happy to share here is tricky.

So I’ve been looking to change. There has been a distinct increase in the last year or two of photos of me, but mostly in daft outfits, since falling in with a crowd that sees dress-ups and photo-shoots as a perfectly acceptable activity for socialising. And while that is a good thing, I’m still not in the habit of thinking of TAKING photos when things happen. One of the motivations of deciding to blog was to encourage myself to take pictures more often and capture the special memories. So far so good! The ninjabread picture of G, which I love, wouldn’t have come about if I hadn’t decided to blog about the baking process.

Would you like to see one of the daft outfit photos?

Wearing my punk pirate outfit and playing dress-ups on the beach. The star of the day was Madame Ornata who wore a 1980s style, bright purple, giant prom dress to the same shoot.

Embarrassingly, neither of these pics include a garment I have made! That will change though.

There is more to me than being a recovering photo-phobe. I am 31 and live in Wellington, New Zealand in a beautiful suburb called Island Bay in a lovely home I own with G.

Island Bay beach, at the end of my street (about 50 metres from my house) - and still only a 20 minute drive to town

I work a full time office job doing boring things with change implementation and business improvement (ok, I actually really like the profession but it’s as far away from the creative stuff I’ll be covering here as I can get). When I’m not doing that I attempt to sew, embroider, bake, make jewellery, do general hand crafts, and have just taken up knitting. Oh, and blogging. In reality, I don’t do anywhere near as much of any of this as I want to do though!

I also do all the paperwork for G’s business. G is a motorcycle mechanic and all round motorcycle addict. Here he is hard at work in our home workshop.

He's rather gorgeous, but I've always been a sucker for curls.

He works part time at a shop in town and part time we run our own little repair business out of our workshop at home. In many ways we have nothing in common, but we both understand the time-, money-, and sanity-consuming passion of hobbies, and most weekends will find him in his workshop tinkering with engines and me in my craft room sewing or crafting, each happy to know that the other is equally content with their thing. And he supports me the best he can. He’s particularly good when it comes to tools. Most of my pliers and cutters were his or he bought for me, and he bought me a converter so I can use his drill press with itty bitty drill bits. It’s a beautiful match.

I’m sure all the other important players in my life will crop up in stories so I’ll wait until then to introduce them.

I better keep writing stories then…