Painting toys has been great fun and yet I was SO ready to move on by the end of the month. The trouble was that even though I got faster at painting them, they took at least an hour, often more, and a couple of other things in my life suddenly began to demand more time. The 8-shaft weaving course work suddenly increased – we’ve had long block of up to six weeks between samplers and suddenly that went down to two – and I’ve had some health issues that required tests and appointments. On top of that La Niña has brought so much rain to Melbourne that the weeds have gone nuts (and the vege seeds I planted early rotted in the ground). The sort of health problems I’m having don’t go well with weeding, and I suspect one of them is the direct result of injuring myself while weeding.

But they were a lot of fun to paint.

This spaceship from the Thunderbirds ought to have gone in the last batch, but I didn’t realise Paul hadn’t photographed the last page of that sketchbook.

“Dolly” (I’ve never been much good at naming inanimate objects) was given to me by my Mum along with clothing she hand stitched. I made more clothes over the years, which certainly would have added to my enthusiasm for learning to sew my own clothes eventually.

The martian was among the toys loaned to me by my friend KRin. The scene where we first meet them is my favourite of the first movie.

I met my ex at a D&D group. I only played one other time, so I’m not sure why I bought the dice.

To mix it up a bit… a magnetic office toy. The hardest of all the paintings, though the tiny cereal and spaceman toys were tricky, too.

An old tin toy of Paul’s.

There is something deliciously goofy about KRin’s plastic octopus.

Where’s the cheese, Gromit?

I thought this was a duck, but Paul captioned the file “wooden insect”. It chirrups when you pull it along by the string.

Another movie tie-in.

A very happy dinosaur.

Anyone for tennis?

I was given this bottle of Avon ‘delicate daisies’ perfume for children when I was a child, and I always thought it was peculiar that they packaged it in a skunk named ‘Mr Sniffy’.

These cereal toys were Dad’s, I think. I always thought the mermaid was surprisingly sexy for a child’s toy.

Plastic astronauts use to turn up in the houses of one circle of my friends, like a sneaky calling card.

I thought this chair might be a bit boring as a last picture, but it led to some interesting discoveries. The Integra chair is a bit of an icon in Australia, with an interesting history. My parent bought me one when I was a teen, and I think got the small version as well for Dolly. I knew that the chair was special somehow, which is why I’ve kept and looked after it, but I hadn’t looked into it until now.

After thirty days of gouache paintings, I’ve gained some experience in using the paint and accumulated a bunch of paintings of which a good half are worth framing. For December I was planning to paint food in acrylic paint in an altered book, but realised I wouldn’t have the time in what is often the busiest month of the year. So I switched to drawing hands and feet in pencil. So far it’s going well and I can do them in the evening while half-watching the tv. Yay for multi-tasking!