Empress Wu Designs with Wilma

Why bilums , buttons and broken bones? They were certainly contributors to a very hectic week for me last week. I finally got around to doing the washing from our trip to Papua New Guinea, and the biggest job of all was soaking the many bilums we received and washing and drying them . Bilums are beautiful traditional PNG needle woven /string looped bags used for carrying all sorts of things from babies to kau kau ( sweet potatoes). Thank goodness for modern products like Napisan - it makes the job easier, but not less time consuming. But the result is worth it - I love these bilums . Next, the buttons.... Earlier in the year, I had agreed to running a felted accessories workshop at my friend's studio LamboArt on 27 June. I thought ... no problem ... a week between getting home from PNG and the workshop ... plenty of time to get organised. All the felt project samples were made well in advance, but one of the workshop projects is what I call a felt button brooch - a beaut...

Home Sweet Home .... we had another wonderful and amazing PNG adventure ( not without incident - see later ) . Here's a summary.... The first week was spent preparing and attending the wedding of a friend, Frank Goi. The wedding was in a remote village, called Gun ( pronounced more like the French 'un") on the border of Western Highlands and Chimbu Provinces. The second week was back at Mando where we worked as Rotary volunteers last year as well. Day 1 : Travel . Newcastle-Brisbane-Port Moresby - Mt Hagen. Sleepover in Mt Hagen Hotel. Day 2 : Shopping for essentials like toilet paper in Mt Hagen, adjusting to altitude, travelling by vehicle ( complete with police escort) to the village via muddy, slippery , rough gravel mountainside tracks. Huge welcome - hundreds of people in the rain. Hard to believe that a couple of generations here haven't seen white skinned people before! Welcome was by women wailing and screaming, as well as traditional dances and music, prese...

Today, I am very excited about our trip to the Eastern and Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea . We leave very early on Monday morning, and need to have our bags packed in our friend's car tomorrow afternoon, so I am rushing around madly trying to gather things together to pack our bags tonight. Besides the traditional costume I will be wearing for our friend Frank Goi's wedding ceremony in Gunn, a village in the highlands west of Mt Hagen, I will wear Rotary T shirts and trousers. The rest of my luggage will be supplies of wool for the women in Mando (a village in the Eastern Highlands, near Goroka) , so they can make bilums (bags) and children's clothes. Last year, I taught about 50 women in the village to knit and crochet blankets and other wearable items for their families. In the Highlands, it gets very cold at night, so woollen items are much needed. Of course, we are fully stocked with the usual array of travel essentials when you are going to live in fairly primi...