What can I say? An event of this magnitude hopefully only occurs once in a lifetime. With so many lives lost, our country will struggle to deal with the scale of this terrible event. 
The damage to buildings and loss of the local economy will also be hard. In the next few weeks, it will be hard for Christchurch people not to become depressed, and many residents were already suffering stress from the continuing aftershocks.
My thoughts are with all of you living in Christchurch, and I urge those of you who live elsewhere to do whatever you can to aid the recovery - once the earthquake is out of the news, people will still need the support of their friends. Write, phone if you can, send a small gift now and then or if you are in a position to, please donate to the earthquake appeal.
One area that has been swamped is the neonatal unit, so consider making some tiny vests and beanies for the really little ones who arrived early because of the earthquake. It's been quite cold overnight since the quake, so they will be appreciated. Many families will have lost all their clothing, so donations of clothing will be needed later in the year. 
But right now the most meaningful thing most people can do is drop their change into the donation boxes at supermarkets - that will really make a difference.

Well, since the earthquake, things have been quite strange! Mostly it's been the weather, but at the same time most of my grandchildren (and my daughters) have had the H1N1 flu (despite innoculation), causing me a lot of worry. We've had nor'westerly gales, heavy rain (not usual where we live), some beautiful sunny weather and yesterday woke up to a 2cm blanket of snow which had arrived mysteriously in the night. 
Last weekend my partner, Ken, and I spent a day shovelling sand for the base of the new water tank, then had to use considerable ingenuity to get the new tank up on top of the foundation. It must have been quite a sight! The new tank is 10,000 litres and about 2.5 metres high. It's still not full as our water supply is a trickle feed. I really feel for the people in Christchurch who still have no drinking water or toilet facilities.
So, what does a craft dyer do when there's no water to dye with? well, I've recently begum making beaded costume jewellery. You can see the results on this page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Heavenly-Adornments/148824178477925
A few years ago, I made a lot of polymer clay jewellery for various felt outfits. You can see some of this in my gallery image of the Celtic Moonrise cloak. It seemed like a good time to get the box of Fimo and Dukit out again, so I've also been working on new designs for brooches and necklace dangles. I've also bought some Art Clay silver to try my hand at making fine silver sculptural jewellery pieces. Yes, I like to keep busy!
As soon as we had enough water, I decided to start work on a new range of pastels. The first one is Peace, which you can see on the home page. I will be adding to this range so that eventually I will have two collections: Pastels and Contemporary.