Colours, Stash building & Long Weekend away in Adelaide & surrounds

I think I've mentioned before that tigerboy seems to think it's mandatory to get out of Brisbane if there's a long weekend. We have quite a few long weekends in the first half of the year, so he's generally stressing himself and me over where to go - God forbid we should stay at home. Now, I like to travel as much as the next person (which would be why I've done quite a bit) but sometimes the stress he creates surrounding a long weekend makes me wish we didn't have a public holiday coming up.

I got to ride a panda at the Adelaide Zoo - it was near the enclosure for the real ones, so good enough.

Well, back in June? the decision was finally made to go to Adelaide and stay with my Aunt who I hadn't seen for ages and he hadn't met. She also used to be quite the sewer and has a formiddable stash - not that that had any bearing on me deciding on Adelaide ;) .  Normally I'd only take carry on for a trip lasting 2 weeks or less but she informed me that I had to bring at least one bag to check in because she was counting on me to clean out some of her stash, naturally, I'm a considerate niece and I obliged.

Unfortunately for me, my Aunt does not wear the same colour palette I wear and loves shiny fabric. I did mention to her that she could have kept me and my future tastes in mind while purchasing fabrics decades ago, you know, if she really loved me. She admitted that it was shameful negligence on her part.  It seems that she also got rid of all her vintage patterns eons ago and what she has left are mainly 80's styles (as I came of age in the mid 80's, it's not something I like to revisit). I did however manage to get a stack of fabric, some notions (dang it, I forgot to take her bias binding!), and some patterns - yes, I used that checked bag!

Speaking of colours, PoppyKettle did a post on having her colours done and I wrote an essay in reply - I'll just repost that essay here:
My aunt was a big follower of the whole "having your colours done", my mother however was completely opposed to it. I've never really known which colours did or didn't suit me (or anyone else for that matter) but I've always wondered if there was a magical set of colours for me. Over the years I've found that there are colours I avoid (yellows, beiges, greys and pastels) and colours I always gravitate towards (black, occasionally bright but dark colours and more recently red) but as for shades? No clue. I was really just going with colours I liked and had no idea whether they suited me or not. Oh, I like purple too - I think it makes my eyes look bluer. To make things trickier, my hair has been every shade between platinum blonde to fire engine red, including deep, dark auburn - surely that's got to make a difference as well.

I don't think I have an 'eye' for these things. Recently I went to said aunt's place and while going through her stash (to pilfer fabric) this topic came up so I asked her to "do my colours" as she was the expert (anyone is compared to me). After much draping with fabrics she concluded that she thought my instincts had been fairly correct and that yellows looked awful on me, pastels looked wishy washy and although black looked pretty good, red and deep orange were better. One thing she said was that if you wear something and everyone says how fabulous you look in it, that's probably a great colour for you (which is why I pounced on red a couple of years ago, a particular red dress I have never fails to get lots of compliments - thinking I was on to something, I asked tigerboy about it "I think red dresses just stand out." was the reply, not helpful, apparently we're both useless in this area). But those compliments are going to depend on the style of the garment too, aren't they?

I've known women who slavishly followed the colour swatches they had and in one case in particular, I thought she always looked washed out and dreary - I'm sure that's just my particular preferences interfering, so maybe it depends on the "eye" of the person that does them and their particular preferences? Upshot - I'm still clueless and likely to be wearing all the wrong colours now that I'm actually injecting something other than black into the wardrobe. Maybe all those years of wearing black, black and more black have made me even less clued in to this concept and I'll improve - for crying out loud, if anyone ever sees a pic of me in a colour that either does or doesn't suit me, please give me the heads up, I need all the help I can get!

Adelaide Zoo

Hahndorf

We went to Hahndorf in the Adelaide Hills where I bought more patterns and such from an op shop. I also picked up this nifty thing - apparently, it's for communion glasses but it's very close to a scissor holder that someone on pattern review got her husband to make (I promptly ordered one from tigerboy), the only difference is, hers didn't have holes at the bottom.

I couldn't resist the chocolatiers in Hahndorf either - the mocha I had from one was so rich that later that day tigerboy asked if I wanted to visit a chocolate factory  - "I never thought I'd say this in my entire life but I think I'm still chocolated out!!". I bought a dark chocolate with chinese five spice (a combination I hadn't tried before) - amazing! If you get the chance, try it.

Getting some petit fours for dessert.

Apparently, Hahndorf is normally packed with tourists but we were lucky, there were hardly any people around - maybe because we went on a weekday?


Gorge Wildlife Park

We also went to Gorge Wildlife Park which was fantastic - I'd highly recommend it if you're in the area. We could have easily spent the whole day there, the place is huge with so much to see. They also have free koala holding where you can cuddle with the koala for ages and take as many pics as you want - at most places these days that would cost you more than the $15 entrance fee, actually, I think that at a lot of places these days you don't even get to hold the koala, just pat it while someone else holds it. Major bonus, there wasn't a two mile long queue, booking or any of that palava, just turn up, wait a couple of minutes and cuddle with the koala while it eats eucalyptus leaves (their breath smells nice).

Cuddling with a koala at Gorge Wildlife Park in the Adelaide Hills.

You can ride a hippo there too, a blue one, no less! (I'd say blue hippos are fairly rare)

Playing with kids - one of them thought my jeans bag was very tasty, and tigerboy started to panic when another one started eating my hair (probably wouldn't have been any worse than some hairdressers I've had!)

The park had a lot of albino animals - kangaroos, wombats, peacocks and probably others that I've forgotten. You can see a lot more albino roos in the background of this shot of me with a mother and her joey.

See the joey in her pouch?

They had some strange birds too - this one is looking straight at the camera, rather a limited field of view.

A pigeon? with a perm?

 I think I've been successful in either doing something crafty or picking up some crafting supplies on each of our long weekends - aren't I a lucky duck!

Don't you know it but the day after we came back from Korea, tigerboy started hassling me about where we'll go for Christmas if his workplace is going to shut over that period. It can't be somewhere that closes for Christmas (to hard to do things if everywhere is shut), and it needs to be close (we'll probably only have about a week), so soon I have to start looking into that.