Blogger inspiration

I feel a bit uninspired lately, I have to apologize for that. I want to thank the kind people who have emailed me to make sure I'm ok: I'm fine and just a bit pre-occupied! Hopefully the weekend will rejuvenate my blogging sensitibilites and 'think different' as this old Mac ad proclaims with the divine Callas. I hope her singing will inspire you this weekend!

Fun weekend projects

This past weekend, I went to the National Building Museum to check out some of the new, and very interesting, exhibits. They have the best gift shop in all of DC: Fun games, household items and every design book under the sun! I picked up a few postcards from Monkey Designs which contain parts to build models of some houses -you can see a few above.

I bought 7 and thought I might build 1 or 2 for some fun. I built 4, just couldn't stop myself! I started with the Georgian house you see to the far right, then progressed to the yellow Greek Revival style house which was a bit harder. I then moved onto the pagoda which, while it had a lot of steps -wasn't as hard as the French Styled house with lantern on the roof (a lot of swearing went into the creation of that TINY lantern). These houses stand about 1 1/2" high - TINY pieces to cut out with an exacto-knife!

But it was a lot of fun, I plan on digging up a miniature train set from micro-machines (do they still make those?) and putting them under my mini christmas tree this year!a blurry picture of my weekend projects. The 3 left are a Greek revival house, Buckingham Palace and Chartres Cathedral.

Australian War Memorial

In honor of Memorial Day here in the US, I've decided to focus on a monument most of us probably aren't familiar with -the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, Australia's capital.The memorial was first conceived after WW I. However, a competition for the design of the structure wasn't completed until 1928. Because of the great depression, the monument then wasn't finished till 1941. The style remains Art Deco which was popular at the time. Housed in the building is also an Australian military museum.interior of the dome above the Hall of Memory. Stained glass depicting the virtues of soldiers surround the space, you can see one of them above. They were completed by Napier Waller, a 1-armed veteran who also did all of the mosiac work here in the hall.The central courtyard.

The cloisters around the pool contain rolls of honors to commemorate the 102,000 soldiers who died in the field throughout the numerous battles Australia has participated in. The rolls list name only, because, as it states, "all men are equal in death".

Top image courtesy of Les Butcher on Flickr.com. All others from wikipedia.org