I am currently studying millinery at CIT in Canberra, particularly Traditional Hat Blocking 1. It’s fab and I love it. I will do a post later on my first piece, a Fascinator. I am rather partial to hats.
On the Canberra long weekend, we had our first writers’ retreat at Dweebenhiem. Formerly, we called them Donnacons, but as this one is at Dweebenhiem and host by Matthew as well as me, the nickname is (wait for it) Dweebenhiemcon. A bit of a mouthful. Technically, this retreat was organised by Nicole Murphy and Cat Sparks and they did most of the organsing. I mixed things up a bit by inviting a number of local writers to pop in for a morning, afternoon or as long they wanted.
I was a bit behind in my work so the first day was finishing off a revision, which I’ve sent of on submission now. And the next two days were spent drafting the first 6750 words of a new project. I’m meant to be working on that right now, but I’m overdue for a blog post and I have Chaos Bound by Rebekah Turner to finish reading upstairs, so I’m doing this instead.
The weekend was an intense affair. It was like having a party from Friday to Monday. Friday Cat and Nicole arrived as our houseguests and they were dropped here by Kaaron and Tehani, so we had dinner and a few drinks. It was so much fun. Then the next morning the writers arrived and then we had dinner and more drinks on Saturday night, same again Sunday and Monday, which might have been quiet, we celebrated Nicole’s birthday. Phew! Hectic. Nicole had organised different people to do lunch and dinner. Saturday the lovely Kimberley brought lunch, Sunday Shauna made delicious pumpkin soup and Kylie and Russell made roast lamb for dinner. Leife brought tiramisu! Which we ate before the roast because we’d be too full otherwise.
The fridge started to fill up but Matthew said it wasn’t a real retreat unless there was too much food. To celebrate on Monday we had pizza and cake and champagne. I’m hoping at least some of the retreatees got some wordage done. Poor Matthew was out for day one, laid up with a headache. I caught him a few times playing a game. But he assures me he did do some writing.
Cat Sparks put up photos on Facebook and Flickr. See the stream here.
Donna Maree Hanson, Author, Phd in Creative Writing 
Wow, what an incredible thing to learn, must be ‘fascinating’ (ok, there was supposed to be a pun there about fascinators… 😀 )
It is a fun thing to learn. Unfortunately, it’s a full cost recovery cost so the fees are expensive. So I’m being quite engaged and diligent. It’s quite design heavy too. I’m not quite sure how I’ll do with that part. A bit like cake decorating, I need to have an idea of what I want and can do.