Oh my goodness – what a surprise. My beautiful friend Jess from Brown Paper Bunny has nominated me for a Stylish Blogger Award. I am beyond flattered.

So here’s how it works firstly  I need to honour Jess. She and I used to work together (at a law firm) and luckily for me we’ve remained friends. You really must go on over and visit her beautiful blog. You’ll be surprised to learn she only started drawing a year ago – her work is beautiful. Secondly I need to tell you 7 things about myself that you may not know. So here goes in no particular order:

• I once suggested a name for a race horse that was submitted and selected by the Australian Racing Board – the name was Chinoiserie.
• I have a penchant for coffee cup motives and my particular favourite is the Sun Java logo.
• I am not a night person. Feel free to get me up at 5:00 in the morning but don’t ask me to stay awake beyond 9:30pm.
• I have twice been to Newfoundland Canada and I would live there in a heartbeat.
• I cried the first time I saw Van Gogh’s Starry Night.
• I went to high school in Japan for a year and lived in a house for 3 months that was attached to a Buddhist temple as my ‘Dad’ was a Buddhist priest. He taught me how to meditate.
• Both my boys were born in February but one in winter and the other in summer.

And now I have the added pleasure of sharing with your my nominations for the Stylish Blogger Award… drumroll please

When I first ‘met’ (we did a blogging course together) the brains behind Notabilia, I’m pretty sure she didn’t even have a blog. She’s a New Yorker that now lives in Singapore and writes about art, food and the life of an expat.

I have long been a follower of Brandi from brandi girl. She’s a woman after my own heart with her colour posts, her eye for detail, her beautiful jewellery and her infectious personality. When I’m in need of colour inspiration I know I’ll find it here.

Katrina from Ma Joie Press is a letterpress master whose blog is a mixture of her work and home. It’s also one of my favourite blog designs. I got to work with her last year when she created invites for my Dad’s 80th and it was such a great experience.

I was first introduced to Eat Live Shop when I coded the redesign of this gorgeous blog. Renee has so much energy and I love that she just says it like it is. She’s got such great taste and I love how she arranges her posts.

Look what arrived in my mailbox yesterday all the way from Amsterdam. So how is it that Dutch chocolate made it’s way to me? I’m glad you asked. I’ve had the pleasure over the last 7 weeks of taking part in the Blogging Your Way eCourse delivered by Holly Becker of Decor8 fame and Leslie from A Creative Mint. They managed to create a community of like minded individuals who have been so supportive and I’ve made some lovely friends. By way of saying thanks I offered my services of the web nerd variety and suggested that if anyone had a nagging technical question then feel free to ask and I would try my best to answer. I received a lot of great questions and I’m happy to say I managed to answer them all and make a few people very happy along the way (which is always nice). One such person is the delightful owner of Fat Fat Sheep (great name right?) who was so happy that she felt compelled to send me a present by way of thanks. Actually she pointed out that the S & T are for Super Thanks. I feel very special. Now I better go hide them from the cyclist who’s a chocolate fiend.

This is my contribution to Piper’s alphabet hop. In case you’re wondering Piper, from One Sydney Road has put together an alphabet hop and today is my turn as the proud owner of the letter M. The idea is you take your letter and go and photograph things that show your interpretation of that letter. When you’re done reading go and check out the other contenders for today, letters K, L, N and O. A special mention for my fellow M bloggers – Magpie and Muttonfly, The Maddie Chronicles and Deros.

For my letter I went with M is for Markets. These photos are from the EPIC (Exhibition Park in Canberra) Farmer’s Market. I visit these practically every week with my good and sometimes bad (she travels a lot) market buddy. To say I love going is an understatement. How could you not love a location that lets you buy local wines, organic chocolate and vegetables that have travelled 10km from the farm to your table? It’s the highlight of my Saturday and I could never go back to buying fruit, vegetables, bread, wine or even meat anywhere else. The best part is that this is a real farmers market and most of the market sellers travel to Canberra every Friday evening or in the wee hours of Saturday morning to setup shop for the morning. The official start time is 8:00 but I usually arrive around 6:45 and by 11:00am it’s all over for another week.

My market buddy and I are the devoted attendees that brave the elements and most especially the Canberra winter. These photos were taken 2 weeks ago and I think the temperature sat at -1 (Celsius) the whole morning. Is it worth it? Definitely.

{P.S. Getting this published on the right day in two time zones was an interesting challenge… thanks Piper for letting me take part}

Hey friends, we’ll I’m slowly unpacking the boot after my move to WordPress blogging independence. Update your bookmarks as you’ll now find me at http://www.current-observations.com but http://blog.current-observations.com will also still work. I hope you’ll drop in for a visit soon.

Well not literally, this is a cyber move. I have decided to take the plunge and enter the world of a self-hosted WordPress blog. Thanks to the lovely Tara at Scoutie Girl I’m setup and good to go. I would like to think that everything will go swimmingly but, well, that would be too Pollyanna of me. I hope you can put up with me while I’m ironing out my technology teething issues and moving my domain name, posts, images and comments. I will be reverting this blog back to theheasmans.blogspot.com and reclaiming current-observations for the new one. Wish me luck and I’ll meet you on the other side.

The lovely Eileen over at bluebirdluxe is running a giveaway for this book, which I really want to win so I’m making every effort to check all the entry boxes! My grandmother did beautiful crochet and I know if she were still alive she would be so chuffed to see how much the art of crochet is still so prolific – maybe even more so. I’ve seen some lovely crochet lariats on Etsy and I would really like to try my hand at one.