Welcome to Wednesday

Settling back into normal life after any long weekend is usually difficult, as we all know. But when it's an especially long weekend, like the one we've all just enjoyed, it can sometimes feel like swimming backwards through a river of drying glue. We therefore hope that your regular dose of Midweek Moments will bring a little spark of joy and happiness to the proceedings.

We'd also like to take the opportunity to wish Jackie a speedy Get Well Soon. As some readers and customers may already know, both Jackie and Carmel recently returned from the Australasian Quilt Convention in Melbourne with some sniffles and runny noses. Jackie's selfless devotion to Blueberries had her back on deck probably a tad sooner than her body wanted, which resulted in the sniffles and runny rose turning into something nastier and putting her out of action for a few more days. Rest up Jackie, coz people are missing your smiling face at the shop.

Show and Tell

Show us the item and tell us the story

Judith Rowling’s gift of warmth to her sister

What was your inspiration for this quilt?

It was my sister’s 60th birthday and she lives in Victoria where it’s very cold. She specifically wanted a quilt made from flannel, so when I saw the pattern in a book, I knew it was the right one.

How long did it take you to complete it?

All up, probably a few months. I did most of the work in Susan’s Wednesday classes and did the rest at home. Having the deadline of my sister’s birthday certainly helped as well.

How was it received?

She just loved it. I took it down in person because I wanted to be there when she saw it for the first time. She knew I was making her a quilt but it still exceeded her expectations. It was a wonderful moment.

How long have you been a sewer?

About five years, but I did bits and pieces when I was younger as well, like the curtains for the house when I first got married.

What’s the next project?

I bought some material the other week to make my niece a wedding quilt. It’s in December, so I’ve got plenty of time to get it done.

Toytime Circus

Toytime Circus Block of the Month
$30 per month for eight month.
Total over eight months is $240.

Click here to buy the Block of the Month.

Or

Toytime Circus Kit

$210, click here to buy the kit.

Big 'n' Bizarre

A road trip of Australia’s fibreglass monuments

The Big Fruit Bowl

If you meander east from Lithgow along the Bells Line of Road, you’ll eventually encounter the Big Fruit Bowl, located in the picturesque community of Bilpin. This is the ideal home for what’s officially “the world’s largest bowl of fruit”, as the area is the centre of prime fruit growing country, far more fertile than the larger, more touristy communities clustered around the Great Western Highway further to the south.

The Big Fruit Bowl has a major disadvantage over other more well known Big Things in that you can’t see it from the road. It’s located in the car park of a popular roadside business called The Fruit Bowl, which offers locally grown fruit at bargain prices. The owners, the Tadrosse family, report that the Big Fruit Bowl was already there when they bought the business back in 1985 from Gerry Harvey (of Harvey Norman fame), so no-one knows exactly when the structure originally appeared or who made it.

The 2.5m high structure is, however, a true phoenix of Australia’s Big Things, having been brutally vandalized and replaced several times in the last 15 years. As well as earning it a local reputation as a resilient survivor, this constant re-birthing has also provided opportunities for artistic additions to the collection of fruit it bears.

At the time of its first vandalism in 1996, the Fruit Bowl’s contents were modest – a banana, an apple and an orange – just enough for a very basic fruit salad, but not much variety. The pieces of fruit were all stolen while the bowl itself was actually ripped out of the ground and left lying on its side.

The Tadrosse family, took the opportunity to zhush the Big Fruit Bowl up a bit and gave it some strawberries and a big bunch of grapes to dangle artistically over the edge. The Bowl itself was also properly secured to the ground with a steel pole. Unfortunately this wasn’t enough to save it from a second incident of vandalism 10 years later, when the culprits actually pulled the Bowl clear out of the ground using a chain attached to a vehicle. Again, all the fruit was stolen. What the culprits were actually doing with these oversized fibreglass pieces of fruit is anyone’s guess.

Determined not to let the vandals win, the Tadrosses again replaced the Bowl, engaging the services of a local signwriter who also had some skill with fibreglass. The Big Fruit Bowl is now raised on a concrete pedestal and a reinforced steel rack so it would actually take a bulldozer or maybe an Ordnance QF 17 Pounder Centauro Hellfire II army tank to move it (although these days, anything is still possible). The Tadrosses have stopped short of fencing off the Bowl because, in true Big Thing tradition, people like to have their photos taken standing next to it. Given that each replacement has cost the family about $25,000 and extensive legal wrangling with insurance companies, the Big Fruit Bowl might as well be accessible for as much photographic joy as possible.

www.bilpinfruitbowl.com.au

And the last word...

"Friendship is sewn with love and measured by kindness."