so this happened...

Months of furious sewing and no blogging culminated in one pretty awesome looking femme Loki meeting Stan Lee at Sydney Supanova yesterday.

IT.

WAS.

AWESOME!

Meeting THE MAN.

 Loki with Loki, drawn by the very talented Hollie, and signed by Stan Lee

Aside from the 4-5 hours I spent in the line to get the autograph and picture, it was an awesome day, everyone was so nice and the cosplays were amazing! Can't wait to do it all again!
Posts about how I created the costume will follow (eventually).

Spring

Cymbidium

Snapdragon

Dendrobium

Daisy

Clivia 

Grevillea

Dendrobium

Lavender

Magnolia

Lemonade lemons

Blueberries

Valencia oranges

Tomato

Strawberry

The Australian Garden Show

A few months ago I saw an ad in the paper for the inaugural Australian Garden Show in Sydney, and since I love garden shows (and have been cruelly deprived of the Flora Festival since 2011), I was super keen for this one. I signed up to their website as soon as I was able, and followed them on Facebook: the release of details was agonisingly slow, but phrases such as "sustainability" and "kitchen garden" kept me hooked, I also loved the idea of on-site restaurants using ingredients from the kitchen garden, and the display gardens lit up with fairy lights at night.
So, did the show live up to its own hype and my expectations? No, it did not.
Why? Oh so many reasons.

First, the location. 
The AGS was held in Centennial Park... The middle of Centennial Park.
So?
Centennial Park is freakin' huge, not at all flat, with few proper walking paths (i.e., not a dirt track).
While this is partially an I'm-lazy-and-don't-like-climbing-hills whinge, I'm also annoyed by the lack of common sense here: the majority of the people who attend these type of events are the elderly or families with young kids in prams, so proximity to the main road and public transport (buses and trains) should have been a priority (rather than a cross-country hike that makes just walking into Mordor look like a piece of cake*).
Yes, there are roads through Centennial Park, but
(a) driving to, and in, Sydney is a nightmare.
(b) finding parking in Sydney is a double nightmare.
(c) paying for parking in Sydney is a triple nightmare that may require you to take out a second mortgage and sell your first born.
Taxis are an option if you don't mind death-defying insanity, and are a millionaire (and can therefore afford the fare). There was a rather large taxi stand outside the main gates, but in all the time I was trying to get into, and out of, the gates, I only saw one taxi pull up (despite the crowd of millionaires waiting).
Another problem with holding the show in the middle of Centennial Park was the complete lack of shade. Lovely trees all around, and me burning like bacon in the middle of the damn grass field they chose for this show.
Like easy access to public transport, adequate shade and seating is an absolute must for an outdoor event where the majority of attendees are elderly or families with children (and extremely pale, whingy bloggers), particularly if you want them to hang around through the day and stay for night events. This is a fundamental flaw across all outdoor events, and I cannot understand how organisers keep overlooking this!

(* possible exaggeration from someone with sore legs)

Look at all that shade! 

(If you listen closely to this picture, you can hear me getting sunburnt)

Second, the content of the show.
(a) the food: when we (my mum and I) arrived at the show, around 11am, we were starving, so we went straight to one of the big restaurants for an early lunch. This beautiful marquee with its elaborate, and delicious sounding, menu, was fail central. Within a few minutes of entering I was convinced that the entire wait staff had been drafted straight out of their first week of a TAFE hospitality course. I had plenty of time to observe this as we waiting fifteen minutes for service, before we eventually gave up and left feeling annoyed, slightly discriminated against and still very hungry.
We ended up in another marquee that was serving fast food that you had to line up for, so while we at least got served, I don't think the quality of the food justifies what they were charging for it (although it never does at these types of events).
I got better service, better food, and better value for money from the food trucks.

(b) the display gardens: the impression I got from walking around was there were maybe a dozen (I didn't count and I haven't checked the website for an exact number), and they were all virtually the same, with the exception of a few details; they all followed the same basic layout of path, sitting area and water feature; they all had virtually the same plants, mostly natives and greenery, no interesting floral features; and they all had boring modern designs, very much aimed at the put-it-in-and-forget-about-it types, rather than the hobbyists and serious gardeners whose gardens are an on-going project and always changing.

Design by Brendan Moar.

Designed by Myles Baldwin.

Designed by Jim Fogarty (while this design has a name, to me it will always be "Halo respawn bunker")

(c) the retailers: one of the main things I was looking forward too was browsing the plant retailers, and again I was disappointed. There were so few! Only two veg and herb sellers and and a few flower sellers (mostly orchids). There were more people selling garden tools (special mention to the Hozelock people who were wonderfully helpful and a delight to chat to), garden services and crafts than there were selling plants; tourism and media was especially overrepresented. The only floral displays were inside the Grand Floral Pavilion, which was disappointingly sparse (not to mention poorly ventilated, and therefore hotter than outside in the lack-of-shade). At times I questioned why they even bothered to call it a garden show, the garden focus seemed entirely contained to the talks/lectures, while the rest of it looked and felt like a regular market (a very spacious market... seriously, why were there so many giant open spaces with nothing in it? (see picture #2) If you're going to put all the stalls so far apart, then put up some darn shade sails in between and fill the space with seats!)

Floral display, Grand Floral Pavilion.

Another floral display, Grand Floral Pavilion... and that was pretty much it.

Third: the price
$35 for one adult. On top of train fare. To get into a show where they charge $10 for a freakin' take-away chicken burger that you have to eat standing up while getting heat stroke.

The good points? The port-a-potties were fancy, and not yet disgusting.
That's right, the highlight of my experience was the toilets.

Conclusion: poor execution, some of which I would attribute to the usual teething problems of an inaugural event, others to plain bad organisation/management.
The AGS website bills the event as "a stylish and unique event celebrating Australia's love of gardens and outdoor spaces", therefore I was expecting the same do-it-all-and-grow-it-all-yourself approach of more regional and country garden shows. Instead I found that the target audience/consumer of this show is entirely city-based, whose garden space is limited to a balcony or terrace garden. The entire focus of the show seemed heavily skewed towards edgy, modern gardens that are nice to look at, but don't require a lot of work, and therefore I would only recommend this event to people who I knew preferred that sort of outdoor space.
For anyone who prefers practicality, food and/or flower production and permaculture, I would say move along, this is not the garden show you're looking for.