Nevertheless, every penny, (back then before decimalisation) that I could save by washing my older brothers cars, cleaning their shoes, even dancing with Dudley at a wedding for ten whole shillings - I only received 2 shillings for washing a car- went towards paying for horse rides when visiting my friend, who lived at Burnie on the North-West coast, during school holidays. My mum vetoed wasting money on horse rides, but Lindas mum was far more understanding...My room was awash with drawings, paintings and images cut from magazines for many years.
I am old enough to (just) remember the relaxed sound of draught horses hooves clopping about the streets on deliveries, mainly around, I think, Sandy bay, where we lived and North Hobart where Auntie Gyda lived in Federal Street. I also remember the horse droppings they left in passing and how I was told folk often had a pail and shovel at the ready for gathering in these little bonuses for adding to their garden beds.
Later, when I was married and we moved to a small acreage and by rights I should have been able to indulge my fancy, I still had a vision of me driving about the country roads in a simple gig...
However, I had just returned to work and study full time, the children were at school in town forty kilometers away and with all the commitments that entailed, (as well as the cost and additional logistics of keeping a large animal, including fencing, feed et al), there simply wasn't the time...maybe if any of the children were interested in riding things may have been different, but they weren't and so I never did realise my dream to have a horse of my own.
For the inchie this week I found an ancient image of me astride a sad looking and obviously very tired pony taken at the Sandy Bay Regatta many eons ago...looking at it you would think that if I had really loved horses as I thought I did, then I simply would have insisted the poor little chap be taken home for a rest and a good feed rather than accept a short ride and add to it's burden...still I was very young at the time, about six.
For the matting layer I used a scrap of grassy green card stock...I do hope the pony found some when he finally was taken home.
I am quite pleased with the look of this journal, plain and simple as always (mostly), but cohesive.
I used pages from an ancient, well, very elderly, Travers' French Shakespeare for the text fields on the ephemera. It is a lovely deep cream in colour but very fragile, so only suitable for adhering onto another more robust surface.
Circles, too, became a theme, and I made a serendipitous find in my stash of a dark brown and black Shakespearean themed 12 x 12 card stock, which fitted in very nicely both with the colour scheme and the book page text I had used.
Bye now,
Di