The Wool­shed Pot­ters, who are based at the Gear Home­stead in Porirua are hav­ing their annu­al Cash’n Car­ry Sale over the next two week­ends. You should get along and get your hands on some beau­ti­ful hand­craft­ed indi­vid­ual pieces, because they’re great for Xmas presents, and also for your­self.

You might be a lit­tle scep­ti­cal, think­ing that pot­tery is for hip­pies from the 1970s, but we’ve all seen knit­ting and cro­chet come back into vogue, so you should jump onto this band­wag­on quick­ly. Espe­cial­ly if it means you buy pots by Aimée McLeod, which you should, because she is super fan­tas­tic awe­some.

Pot­tery sales are from the Red Barn at the Gear Home­stead, Okowai Road, just off Whit­ford Brown Dri­ve in Porirua.

Open two week­ends in a row:

• Sat­ur­day 6th & Sun­day 7th Decem­ber
• Sat­ur­day 13th & Sun­day 14th Decem­ber
• 10.00 am – 5.00 pm

Also, while you’re out there, you might want to take the time to explore the Gear Home­stead, and pre­tend to blow up some sheep, because that’s where Peter Jack­son filmed much of Bad Taste.

Google Maps has today launched Street View for Auck­land, Welling­ton and Christchurch all over New Zealand.

A few months ago, on what looks to have been ear­ly in the morn­ing in win­ter, the Google­mo­bile drove around the streets of our fair city, pho­tograph­ing the streets.

You can now view these streetscapes as the clos­est zoom-in on Google Maps. They even made it down Cuba Mall!

View Larg­er Map

Street View in oth­er coun­tries has brought up all sorts of inter­est­ing finds, from “Hey, that’s me!” to get­ting snapped out enter­ing a broth­el (though Google say they will blur the faces of any­one who could be iden­ti­fied).

So if you find any­thing inter­est­ing, do share it with us — you might be reward­ed with a free tick­et to the TAWAs!

Update

Could it be? Is this famil­iar look­ing woman at the gate of Pre­mier House its for­mer res­i­dent, Helen Clark? 

View Larg­er Map

For a lim­it­ed time Welling­ton Arts Cen­tre-based painter Elis­a­beth Vullings is hav­ing an online sale of her sweet paint­ings here: www.elisabethvullings.co.nz

Small scale and only $100 each they’re on sale from today and will be updat­ed through­out the month. It’s well worth check­ing out her site for a piece of local art — the per­fect gift and a great way to sup­port our cre­ative com­mu­ni­ty. You’d bet­ter be quick! 

The Nation­al Library has joined the Flickr Com­mons project, whack­ing up many of their pho­tos on Flickr. At the moment, there’s not much from Welling­ton, but we’re hop­ing that will change as more are uploaded.

One par­tic­u­lar Welling­ton delight, how­ev­er, is a set of pho­tos of a ram­shackle house on Cuba Street called the Old She­bang (she­bang in this instance means dwelling).

And as well as that, Google are in the process of putting Life mag­a­zine’s archive of 10 mil­lion pho­tos online. So far, search­ing for Welling­ton brings up slim pick­ings, but it’ll be worth check­ing back on as the archive grows.

But until then, you can browse Life’s New Zealand pho­tos. Or, um, check out this pho­to of Madon­na look­ing all cool in 1984.

There’s been a bit of action going on at the old Buck­et Foun­tain, icon of Cuba Street.

First, it mys­te­ri­ous­ly dis­ap­peared:

We ini­tial­ly thought this was a retro ’80s David Cop­per­field-style mag­ic trick, but it turns out it was just tak­en down for main­te­nance.

The foun­tain returned, with a fresh coat of paint, ready to splash the good folk of Cuba Mall once again.

But then a hand-writ­ten sign appeared up the top. It’s not so leg­i­ble from the street, but zoom­ing in revealed this mes­sage:

“Prove your hunter-gath­er­er skills by find­ing food in the for­est at Te Papa.”

Per­haps, with the Cur­rent Eco­nom­ic Sit­u­a­tion, Te Papa is right to put the empha­sis on nat­ur­al his­to­ry and away from art.

And if you’d like to escape the mis­ery of mod­ern life, you can now jour­ney back in time to when the Buck­et Foun­tain was first installed in 1969, thanks to the WCC’s The Cuba Street Mem­o­ries Project.

From this, we learn that the Buck­et Foun­tain was orig­i­nal­ly nick­named the Sug­ar Shov­el Foun­tain and it was paint­ed yel­low and black (so 2000s!).

Just qui­et­ly between you and me and every­one we know, there’s some­thing tasty for tast­ing at Cel­lar-Vate on Molesworth Street this after­noon.

Today is all about hol­i­day drink­ing! We’ve got some fes­tive bub­bles and a refresh­ing rose. How could you miss the oppor­tu­ni­ty to sam­ple a quick glass of Cham­pagne on the way home?

See you there 4.30 – 6pm at Cel­lar-Vate.
 

Two of Welling­ton’s lead­ers are back­ing debate on a user-pays water sys­tem to reduce Welling­to­ni­ans’ reck­less con­sump­tion — now more than twice the nation­al aver­age.

Appar­ent­ly we’re using about 400 litres of water per day, per per­son.

The bulk of it gets flushed away.

And one answer, to dri­ve the cor­rect behav­iour of course, rather than make you behave as “they” want you to, is to install water meters on homes & charge for the usage. Just like Auck­land.

Kind of makes that 6 litre per minute show­er head that Nan­ny was going to make us get, attrac­tive.

There are plus­es & minus­es to this plan & we’d love to hear what you think in the com­ments

Full sto­ry here.