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The Big Design Market

On Friday we went to The Big Design Market, which is being held this weekend in the wonderful Royal Exhibition Centre.  We've been in that building before - it's spectacular inside. The stallholders are displaying a range of textiles, stationery, homewares, lifestyle and children's goodies - all horribly expensive and all in good time for Christmas! 
A must-have, ingenious little number for carting a bottle of wine about!
Some rather funky leggings which I would have bought for my eldest granddaughter, if they hadn't been so expensive!
Something to please your postman!  Ours would be mumbling furiously under his breathe, in his usual fashion, if he saw one of these down by the five bar!  He might actually be persuaded to use it, instead of dropping packages over the fence!

The I wish I had a little shop lady makes beads and other pretty things.  I liked the name of her business,
and the farmer's daughter makes some very wearable jewellery, using recycled materials.  
Big, fat wools for fashioning Christmas wreaths, baskets and twiddly bits!
This was clever - old suitcases made into sound systems!
But for me, the stall below was the star of the show.  She sold notebooks of plain paper with old book covers front and back and some pages of text interspersed throughout the book.  The Story of Heidi was MY Heidi book, the one I had when I was a little girl.  A total blast from the past!  If it hadn't cost $35 I would probably have bought it, for old time's sake.  This was the book that initiated a yet-to-be fulfilled ambition to see the fields of wild spring flowers in the Alps!  That desire has been rumbling around for nearly sixty years - time I did something about it!
Tea towel anyone?
Plenty of shoe stalls to choose from,
colourful hemp twine, for wrapping Christmas presents,
and I really liked these, stools you could slot together, and lots of patterns to choose from.
We enjoyed our $2's worth of entry fee and then had a wander around the gardens next to the Exhibition building.  1 December was the first day of summer here, so a lot of the flowers are still in bud so not a huge amount of colour to see yet.  The magnolia trees were blooming though.

Homage to Georgia O'Keeffe.
Across the road from the Exhibition building there is a terrace of houses, some with untamed front gardens.  There were some jewels in amongst the green, including a rambling (out of focus) Cécile Brunner, and rose geraniums (so vigorous they forms a hedge along the front of the garden),
this lovely, gentle rose,
acanthus and an extreme honeysuckle!
Next door there is this property.  So much of another era and tragically neglected.  
It will be beautiful until the day it crumbles to the ground.

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