Sunday picnic in the shade of the gum trees

Yesterday was such a nice cool change from this awful heat wave, we packed up a light picnic lunch and headed out to Kings Park.  In the shade of the gum trees, we munched on smoked salmon and salad on corn thins, nibbled on nectarines, and sipped homemade lemon cordial, whilst laughing at the undiluted delight of small boys whooping at the pioneer women’s fountain, which used to fill me with equal excitement when I was a toddler.  We wandered through the bush and made the resolution for the umpteenth time to remove all the exotics from our garden and replace them with natives… we looked out over the river from Mt Eliza at the tiny specks that were small boats and canoes out for a Sunday afternoon splash … we gazed on the boab trees and marvelled at their strangeness as a tree form… and vowed we should get out and do this sort of thing more often.
For our picnic rug we took an old patchwork thing I had made when expecting our eldest son, and it served as a bunny rug for all of our three in their infancy.  Purist patchworkers would recoil in horror at its 100% machine construction and cheap cotton fabric (we didn’t have much money at the time), but obviously it now holds great sentimental value for me.  I remember very little about where I bought the fabrics, or its construction, but it’s held up well, for sure.
Looking at my outfit, I’m reminded again how much of my “bought” wardrobe is purchased as souvenirs to commemorate some sort of holiday or event in my life; my skirt I bought when we holidayed in South Africa, my cardigan when in Sydney with my Monday morning gals for a weekender, and my horsey necklace when in Melbourne with two of my close friends.  It was just prior to Melbourne Cup, and window displays everywhere were horse-themed, or hat-themed, or both; I got this little mirrored necklace as a memento of our trip.

Details;
Shirt; Butterick 4985, white cotton, overdyed with coffee and blue dye
Skirt; Old Khaki, Capetown, South Africa
Cardigan; Country Road
Necklace; some little shop in Melbourne
Thongs (flipflops); Mountain Designs
Picnic rug; made by me