Author Archives: zefiart

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About zefiart

Blogger, DIY-er, poodle lover, graphic designer, dog groomer, recycler, artist, wonder woman in my spare time.

cats (and more) in pastel

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Slightly blurry pic. Sorry.

Sometimes I actually DO paint. Or draw. I never know what to call it really. I mean pastels come in sticks, but apparently you ‘paint’ with them cause you layer the colours on similar to paint.

Whatever.

These are two kitties I did recently. I did the Halloween one below for the mini art competition we had last month and while I was in the mood I did the black cat as well.

Both of these were done on coloured board which I’m finding is a great surface for pastels. Luckily I have a source for these boards so I can get them for free. For the show I bought some ready made frames and framed them. I now have them sitting in my living room like all the other projects I’ve made cause…

I think I might put them in my etsy shop… there is only so much space in here.

Last week I also attended the first life drawing session I’ve taken part in for many years. It really is a great way to sharpen those observation skills. Quick sketches to start with, 1 minute poses then 5 minutes, so that when you get to 10 or 20 minute ones you feel you have so much time! I only took a photo of my last 20 minute pose cause I gave that to the model.

z

…paros and lainee – photos to enjoy

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I’m so tired. I’ve been battling various organisations and government agencies on the phone for days and I’ve just had it. Time to take a break. So I thought I’d just share some photos on here that I’ve already shared on Facebook for my friends who haven’t seen them.

Starting with a photo of a collapsed Lainee on ‘her cushion’ on the couch. And below, a bored Lainee when a friend and I talked and talked at a coffee shop and ignored her.

Then there’s a series of photos I took while walking in Parikia one evening and early one morning. Below is the same street both at night and in the morning.

I didn’t walk all the exact same streets so first enjoy the night shots…

Then the photos of an early morning walk on my way to work. I love it when its so quiet.

I think I needed that just to calm my mind.

z

house reno update

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The house is progressing. I’m off to Athens next week to have a look at where we’re at, organise some stuff, run around like an idiot as usual.

…I’m having a little trouble with a few things. The electricity connection mostly. But I won’t bore you with that right now… its a whole post in itself…

Yes, there is light in the photo above, but its only a jerry-rigged connection to show me how the lights look. Pretty cool. Not entirely me (who likes shabby, vintage and rustic) but a nice clean modern look.

So, enjoy some photos of a house which looks entirely different to the disgusting place I took possession of after kicking out the deadbeat tenant. If you want to remember that mess, click here.

The balcony door is in place in the new kitchen. The little balcony is being tiled with the same tiles as inside.
TIles on the bathroom walls and a new smaller window.
New back door and window in the small room that used to be the kitchen. Where the window is now used to be glass bricks to let in light. Now we can get air in as well!
The window in the main bedroom isn’t in yet cause the window guys broke it… We await a replacement…
I’ve gone with the same floor tiles throughout the house.
Spots embedded in the lowered ceiling.
All new doors and frames. I didn’t pick the doors… hm… I’d have gone with all white.
There will be a new door on the storage space above the bathroom. That’s where the hot water cylinder normally sits but we no longer need one in there as we are connecting to natural gas.

I’ve already ordered mom’s bed (Ikea), one with drawers underneath, the single bed for the small room and mattresses. I’ve ordered and bought most of the appliances needed and all bathroom fixtures. The kitchen cupboards and wardrobes will be ready later this week I believe.

When I get there on Monday I think all that will need doing is making sure all is under control and buying anything I haven’t yet bought – eg. oven and dishwasher.

And…. providing we actually have electricity and a window – I will be able to start cleaning and moving stuff downstairs for mom!

Other than that I’ve been pretty flat out with a ton of stuff which needs it own post.

later!

z

radio face photo display

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This is something I finished a while ago, but it started back in Australia when I found this old Philco radio face in a tip shop. Soon as I saw it I knew I wanted to display photos of my dad in it.

I brought all the way it to Greece with me, I was that sure of what I wanted it to be.

Somewhere along the line I printed out the photos of dad I wanted to display, photos taken from the age of 14 to about 23 going left to right.

In order to finish it I needed knobs. I couldn’t find anything like that here. Perhaps I’d have had better luck in Australia where such things are tip shops and op shops abound, but here… not to lucky.

I ended up buying some new knobs off ebay. No idea what they’re supposed to be used for, I got them for the cream colour more than anything. I glued them in place and now the radio face is in my bedroom on what will ultimately become my gallery wall.

Here you can see where it is, next to the tea bag dress I made for the Art From Trash competion in Australia a few years ago, and above the memory box I made for my grandparents. On the other side is the memory box I made for mom and dad.

I want to make more of these – I have the clothes from my baptism and think a display box with them and photos from the day would be nice, plus one with childhood photos of myself and my brother growing up in Griffith NSW… I’ll get to them one day!

For now I’m just pottering along, living and creating!

z

the white rabbit

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This was a quickie project that took months to make. It actually started out as a papier mache rabbit project which began then came to a screeching halt. It sat on my table, then on the bookcase for months gathering dust till, earlier this week, a friend who has an art gallery on Paros where I showed some work this summer, encouraged me to enter something in her Halloween art competition.

I wondered what to do… and decided the best thing was to finish the white rabbit… only now he’s no longer cute and fluffy but evil and scary! Though he still has a cute fluffy tail!

If you haven’t watched The Holy Grail, you gotta see it. The white rabbit is the funniest scene, in typical bloodthirsty Monty Python fashion.

So. Rabbit here got second place. Not too bad. It was a nice evening, lovely art, a bit of fun in my boring life.

Yeah, I haven’t written for a long time. No excuse except for illness and fatigue. I was just sick and tired of everything, including blogging.

I have a few projects to share and updates on the house reno in Athens which I’ll try to get onto sharing in the next few days… but basically I’m still alive and on Paros, not kidnapped by aliens. Simply alternately busy or buried under couch cushions watching movies on Netflix. I really should get a job as a movie critic… at least it would be a productive use of my time…

z

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reno 2 update

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I’ve been back in Athens for almost a week now and I’ve been organising things for the apartment downstairs. I did post about getting rid of the deadbeat tenant and the condition of the place after he left it. That post is here.

So for the last week I’ve been talking to the guy doing the reno work, choosing tiles for the floor throughout and the bathroom walls, picking a vanity and rearranging the kitchen and bathroom layouts to make it all better and compromising where things didn’t need to be as complicated or expensive.

I’m pretty happy with how things are going and feel confident with the guy I gave the job to. I’ll do one more run through today before I leave for Paros to make sure I didn’t forget anything or want any more power points. Cause you can never have too many power points but too few is definitely a thing!

Here are some pics of the progress so far: most demo has been done, old wardrobes and kitchen ripped out, electrical cables in place.

The balcony door from the new kitchen.
The cute balcony which opens up to the small garden – the main reason I loved the kitchen to the front of the house.
The wardrobe recess which I am including in the kitchen to take advantage of a bit of extra space.
The living room.
The main bedroom.
My floor tile choices – I’m going with the bigger/lighter floor tile throughout and the matt white wall tiles in the bathroom.
This is the vanity/sink I like. I like the green but it will be rather limiting in accessory colours.
My first choice is the dark grey. Very classy. I think white would be too stark with the pale grey tiles and the white walls.

I can order things like taps and shower heads online, maybe even the cooktop, oven and rangehood. But I may be back in Athens to choose those in person, who knows? I have no idea from week to week how things will pan out. I think that’s the major stress everyone has in these COVID times.

Posting on the tablet is a pain in the butt, the app is slow to repond and drives me crazy. I’m going to publish this now so forgive any typos as I’m not wasting time trying to read and correct stuff!

z

leave me alone, i’m on holiday!

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Yeah. I’ve gone and disappeared again as I do periodically. But in my defense… I was lazy.

Ok, ok, I was busy.

My boss told me I had 2 weeks of work then a week off work (which turned into 2 or maybe 4) so I said fine, I’ll go on that trip to Denmark that I’d been putting off for over a year.

So, I packed my bags (well, one tiny carry on bag) and went off on a Viking adventure.

And I loved Denmark. I visited a friend who lives there and spent time with him and two teenage daughters (an adventure in itself!), visited some museums and interesting places, some second hand stores, walked around Copenhagen lots, saw the countryside, and generally found I loved Denmark.

In fact it reminded me quite a lot of Melbourne and Tasmania: “If you don’t like the weather, give it 10 minutes”. It would be beautiful and sunny, then suddenly pour rain without warning, then the sun would come out, then it would drizzle for a while, then it might get windy and cold… Just like home!

Since I’ve been back I’ve caught up on sleep and am now spending time with my oldest friend – I’ve known her since 6th grade. That’s way more years than I’d like to specify. Anyway, she has a house on Paros and comes every year except last year (thanks COVID) so I’m being a bit of a tourist with her, spending hours on the beach.

Hey. Its hard work. And very tiring.

That’s why I haven’t been posting. I put all my Denmark photos on FB but if anyone wants me to share them on here I will… and sooner or later I’ll get back to sharing projects.

z

meet patch

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As promised, here’s Patch. He’s the first ever dog sculpture I made – this time using the same system for the armature but hand sewing the body for the finish.

He turned out great and I love him. He’s about twice the size of my usual dog sculptures and he took way longer to make due to the hand sewing. I want to make more like him but they are very time consuming, and I also love the glued fabric look… hm… Then again I love the hand sewn patched look as well… Oh the dilema!

Whatever. I’m really surprised I couldn’t find him on my blog yesterday. I was sure I’d shared him. Obviously not. Either that or I called him/the post something totally unrelated so he didn’t come up in my search.

Odd.

z

a little donkey

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I thought I’d try something other than dogs a while back and just finished this little guy the other day.

This is how he started – newspapers, DIY paper pulp, foil, toilet paper rolls, cardboard and tons of masking tape.

And this is him finished. Air dry clay for the details, fabric and a bit of colour to finish him off. He’s a very solid little guy, not heavy but chunky.

This guy is actually bigger than the dogs, about twice the size. More the size of my first fabric dog. I can’t find the post he’s in so here’s a pic.

Ok… I think I never shared this guy… I can’t find him on the blog anywhere… so I’ll have to share him soon!

Other than that, its back to work tomorrow for a few weeks. No idea for how long, we’ll see. Summer is more than halfway over now. Time flies.

The island is full. Traffic is horrendous. We have one main road that runs across the back of the old town and getting from one end to the other can take almost an hour when ferries are in the port (which is almost all the time from about 10am till mid afternoon). Meanwhile if you want to get to the other side of town you best go by 9am cause traffic starts to build by then… People drive like total idiots. They overtake on bends and on double lines. One guy went around me at an intersection, then cut in front of me as I turned!!!! Ambulances rush around the island picking up people off the road where they’ve crashed their motorbikes or 4 wheelers. Its constant. And yet our powers that be in their infinite wisdom think bring MORE tourism to a small island via an international airport is more important than building a hospital or shoring up the infrastructure that already can’t cope with the swelling population of the summer months.

Enough of my whining. I have to live with this shit since I chose to live on an island/tourist destination which is growing and being plugged as the party island thanks to the German reality TV series shot here…

But enough.

Winter will be here soon and with it the calmness of only people who live here driving like idiots.

z

marble paintings

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As I said, I’ve been busy using my non-work time to do some of my own work and finish some projects I’ve had sitting around the house in various degrees of incompletedness. (Ok, I don’t know if that’s actually a word but its working for me.)

Here are some of the paintings on marble that I’ve done over the last week.

Its been really windy lately. And I mean so windy there are no mosquitos or flies outside when I open doors. I love that. The wind, not so much when its this strong. However, I’m not complaining. Its been so much cooler with the wind to cool us down. I hear we’re heading for another heatwave this week – just in time for me to head back to work. Wonderful.

My back has been killing me for the last few days. I think it might have been sitting at the computer for long hours to get some work done. Ugh. Hopefully that will heal itself before I have to head back to work. A heatwave and a sore back won’t be fun.

I’ve been loving having this time to myself though, to be able to get stuck into my own work and my own home. I even mopped the floor! A useless exercise as with this wind everything is covered in a fine layer of dust the minute you finish. Oh well. Such is life. At least mom can’t complain that I didn’t make an effort.

Lainee has been much happier in the cooler weather, jumping around and playing when we go out for pees. I love that. She never used to do that when I first got her, nor did she cuddle in bed. Now every morning she wakes me up with kisses and demands belly rubs and cuddles. I love her.

Well, back to work. Can’t sit here and chat all day!

z