We’re delighted to welcome Katrina Forstner to the team to help us make the most of our outdoor spaces in terms 3 and 4.

She’ll be with us on Friday mornings assisting the community gardeners to develop a forward plan for our gardens and 🌱 explore propagating, planting and composting etc. in more detail.

And at 10.30am each week she’ll have arty gardening activities available in the community shed and/or garden suitable for young families and people of all ages and abilities to join in. Just $5 for some arty crafty fun … and then stay on for morning tea at 11.30am.

Interested? Here’s what’s coming up:

• 16 July - Collect/sort seeds and make and decorate seed packets to take home as a gift or for community distribution via our Seed Library

• 23 July - Smudge sticks with herbs and flowers from the garden

• 30 July - Chase the rainbows away and make a cute cloud wall hanging

• 6 August - Indoor plant propagation and upcycle a can with colour.

It should be a great morning of low key creative fun for grandparents and grandchildren, parents and kinder kids, creative adults and anyone who enjoys spending time doing creative garden based (slightly messy sometimes) activities (with the reward of morning tea afterwards).

Just pop past any Friday morning during school term to check it out and join in. We’ll look forward to seeing you soon.

Eight people came along to learn from Gordon on Saturday. They’re now experts on the basic care and maintenance of their overlocker.

So fabulous!

Gordon recently ran a similar course here for sewing machines as well.

If you missed out and are keen to come along next time, keep an eye out. We’ll schedule both courses again next year.

By now we hope you have wandered past ACC on your daily walk and noticed the new art on our fence in the Alphington Neighbourhood Gallery.

If not, you should! The artist we are featuring this month is local Steph Briggs. The works on the fence include illustrations from a book that documented lots of familiar scenes from 2020, called ‘The year we stayed at home’. She also has some delicate sketches of houses from the neighbourhood and beyond (some done on commission if you are interested in documenting your own lovely house).

You can find out more about Steph here.

This community arts initiative is supported by Yarra City Council (thanks!).

Steph’s fur baby Leo is one of the stars of the exhibition.

Steph, Leo and Angus popped past on their lockdown walk to check it out.

Last year we made a little rhyming series of animated pictures (GIFS) with some funding from the Community Bank on Queens Parade … and then put them together with a voice over … and turned them into a poster that loads of locals collected from ACC on their daily neighbourhood walk.

It seems timely to pull them out again.

Here are the GIFS.

Here is the poster (we trust it is still gracing many a fridge or toilet door around the neighbourhood).

And here is the animation with voice overs if you’d like to watch it (it is pretty cute!).