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Friday Favourites :: 22 July
Hello! It has been a little while since I’ve been here! I was unwell at the start of June and have really had some trouble getting back into the swing of things, both with reading and writing and sleeping, and it has really thrown me out of whack! I have been feeling a lot more like myself over the past week or so though, and now that school holidays are done I’m keen to get back to some of my routines, including popping in here regularly again – and I felt like a Friday favourites post would be a perfect way to get back into it. Previously I’ve tried to…
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Friday Favourites :: 27 May
Happy Friday and almost June everyone! We’ve had kind of a funny week this week – the weekend was busy with voting and I took an all day watercolour painting class on Sunday, then we had a day off school on Monday and I worked a short day Tuesday because I wasn’t feeling great and hello suddenly it’s Friday again! Our long weekend came at the perfect time, and we made sure that we did as little as possible and made the most of being home together. Something that I’m absolutely loving at the moment is getting to share my love of reading with my 8 yr old. Like many…
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Friday Favourites :: 20 May
Painting class is back! If you’ve been around a while you might remember that I started going to a watercolour class about a year ago. Our second term was cut short by a covid lockdown, and last week classes finally started again. I find it so helpful to have that time set aside where I actually leave the house specifically to paint, otherwise I am not great at making time to practice. Lately I’ve been finding myself super inspired by book covers, like this one for Eleanor Limprecht’s new historical fiction novel, The Coast, which was a perfect reference image for our class on clouds this week. Big thanks to…
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Friday Favourites :: 6 May
Now that I’m making weekly trips out into the world again, I’ve also been taking the opportunity for a regular pop in to my local library. I honestly missed the library so much while we’ve been working from home. We’re so lucky in Canberra to have a fabulous library service – it’s so easy to reserve books, and have them transferred to my local branch, and I regularly borrow not only books but also dvds. Over the past few weeks I’ve borrowed a bunch of novels and non-fiction books for both me and my daughter (it has been perfect for feeding her Dogman addiction!). Today I thought my library a…
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Friday Favourites :: 22 April
Hello and happy Friday book friends! I never quite understand how these short work weeks can feel so long but it gets me every time haha!We had the most lovely, relaxing Easter long weekend here – undoubtably my favourite thing has been staying in bed with my book and a coffee, and of course hot cross bun or two. I’m a big “bed reader”, but more on a lazy weekend morning than before bed of an evening. This week I had my daughter in there with me with her book sometimes, and my cat snuggling sometimes, and it was just so cosy. Let me know in the comments, are you…
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Event :: Nattie Kate Mason at The Book Cow
Ok, stop the presses! Last weekend I went to A REAL LIVE BOOK EVENT! It has been so long since I went to an in person event! I feel like maybe the last live thing I went to was the Sydney Writers’ Festival last year. In any case, it has been a while and my first time back was wonderful! On Saturday The Book Cow, a fabulous bookshop here in Canberra, hosted lovely Aussie fantasy author Nattie Kate Mason for a book signing and chat. The weather was absolutely divine (honestly, Canberra in the autumn can be so perfect) and we sat outside (which, besides just being divine also felt…
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Friday Favourites :: 15 April
Hello! It’s school holidays here and we are up to our eyeballs in books and lego and sleep-ins and Easter preparations. Something that I’ve been loving doing with my daughter on our lazy school holiday days is getting our craft on with some Easter themed cross stitches. I love the entire process, from tracking down patterns to collecting the colours, and the stitching itself providing a kind of meditation with the repetition of the stitches. We’ve been inspired to get into cross stitch in particular by lovely Mel from A Cosy Reader Designs, who regularly streams her cross stitching projects on her Twitch channel Hey It’s Mel B. Let me…
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Friday Favourites :: April 8
Happy Friday friends! Don’t they just keep speeding by? I have something that I found quite heart warming to share in my favourites today!I feel like I’ve mentioned before that I spent my summer reading Aussie fantasy novels for the Aurealis Awards – you can see some of the titles I read in the photo there. This week the short lists were announced and I have absolutely loved loved seeing so many fabulous local books and authors celebrated, and seeing how excited the community has been about the nominations. You can check out the short lists for all of the categories here.I can’t wait for the announcement of the winners!…
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Friday Favourites :: 1 April
I think I mentioned when I posted about reading Bitter Greens that I had booked a virtual writing course on plotting and planning with Kate Forsyth – one of my absolute favourite authors. We had our first session this week, and honestly, spending a couple of hours on Monday night listening to Kate talk about her writing process was just like a dream come true. I booked the course through the Australian Writers’ Centre, and it is two zoom sessions over two weeks. The session was so well organised – there were slides we could access to print out ahead of the class if we wanted, and lots of help…
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Friday Favourites :: 25 March
SEO for bloggers with Anjali from This Splendid Shambles Something a little bit different, but still book adjacent in a bloggery kind of way, for my favourite this week. This year I’m trying to get a little bit more organised with my blog, and with getting my content out there. One of the things I’ve been keen to learn more about was SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), so this week I did a training seminar about SEO for bloggers with Anjali from This Splendid Shambles. Anjali and I first connected last year when I was lucky enough to win a 1:1 Blogger’s Power Hour with her, which I absolutely loved and…
