possums

Photo courtesy of wollombi

Possums are an iconic part of Australian nocturnal life. And, although I live in Canada and am deeply enamored with Canadian wildlife, one benefit of being an ex-pat Aussie is that I can offer tasty morsels about two different countries in the one blog. Bonus.

One sight that is very difficult not to appreciate on a balmy summer's evening in many parts of Australia, is the sight of possums, silhouetted against the night sky, hurrying precariously along the electric wires overhead. They rush from roof to tree to tree to roof to... well, wherever their little hearts desire and to wherever there is a likely source of food and shelter. While they are widely loved they are also equally hated (like squirrels and other furry troublemakers all over the world) for making homes in places they're not supposed to, for making an unholy racket in the dead of night, and for sampling the new shoots and barely ripe fruit that you've been carefully nurturing in your backyard garden.

When they are accustomed to humans they can be very bold and, one memorable New Year's eve when I was eating at an outdoor restaurant with my parents, we had to be very firm with the resident possum who wished to share our table and in particular the platter of Greek delicacies that we were starting the evening with. Who knew that possums had a taste for tzatziki dip with pita bread?

Anyway, this is all to introduce to you the main piece of my latest embroidery triptych. The inspiration came from thinking about what you could see by the light of the moon. Because it was the dead of winter here and acres of snow and stark bare trees are hardly the stuff of inspirational embroidery, my imagination turned to other moonlit scenes I've known. Which brings us back to possums and their nightly journey from tree to tree. (It also brings us to flying foxes [or fruit bats as the case may be] but that's a whole other post.)

Here is my latest freehand embroidery with applique creation. It goes with two others (thus the tri in triptych) but I'm saving showing you the complete product until it's, well, completed. When it's done (with accompanying poem, of course) I'll tell you the story of who I made it for and why.


This was the best photo I could get, unfortunately. For some reason I don't understand, the camera panics with this dark blue background and does all kinds of weird and wonderful things to compensate for what it thinks is an egregious error in lighting. If anyone has any pointers that would help me take a better photo, I'd appreciate any advice.

I'm off to contemplate what rhymes with "possum".

2 comments:

  1. (( I'm off to contemplate what rhymes with "possum". ))

    Awesome. :-)

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  2. Emma, in terms of getting your navy blue background to be more accurately reflected in your photo, there may not be much you can do with the camera itself, especially if it has auto-focus, However, you can fix it with an edit eg in Picasa you can add light infill, adjust for contrast and then saturate the colour a little so the sky comes up blue rather than black. Will e-mail you separately a sample.
    Cheers,
    Alison.

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