Category 25

After a tough few years of bushfires and Covid-induced travel restrictions, a new major music festival will provide the NSW Sapphire Coast’s economy with a much-needed boost. And sustainability and community are high on the list of priorities.

The NSW’s Sapphire Coast will play host to a new major music festival which will have a strong focus on sustainability and community. Set to be held in Pambula over 23–25 September, the Wanderer Festival will be the first of its size in the region, with over 70 local and international acts including The Dandy Warhols, Ziggy Alberts, Sarah Blasko, The Teskey Brothers and local Indigenous choir Djinama Yilaga among many others.

If you’re interested in making a tufted rug and don’t fancy the idea of using a hook to pull each individual thread through, then a tufting gun is what you’ll need. There’s a few different versions on the market; ones that form looped pile, ones that make a strand pile, ones that do both and even pneumatic tufting guns which use compressed air. But if you’re starting out, a simple strand pile tufting gun like this one is the probably the best place to start.

In simple terms, once you’ve threaded the gun with your chosen colour and thickness of wool, and you’ve stretched the specific backing fabric tightly over a frame, you press the gun firmly against the stretched fabric and then guide the moving gun across it to produce a design.

Much like a sewing machine, the gun has a foot which sits against the fabric. Once you pull the trigger, the sharp channeled needle then pushes the wool through the fabric before a small pair of snips pop out of the channel and snip off the wool so it’s left embedded in the fabric. But it will keep firing the wool into the fabric really quickly, and almost feels as if it’s self-propelled, so you need to have a design in mind before you start.

This book brings to homes what Nornie Bero energetically gives to diners in her two Melbourne-based restaurants which champion Torres Strait Island flavours and Australian native produce.

Part autobiography and part cookbook, Mabu Mabu begins as the fascinating story of how a girl who grew up ‘with a spear in my hand’ in the far east Torres Strait ended up as the executive chef, CEO and founder of Mabu Mabu, a restaurant in Melbourne’s Yarraville and Big Esso, a 130-seat restaurant and bar in Federation Square.

When Nornie arrived in Melbourne as a young woman of colour in the late 1990s, it was the city’s multiculturalism that struck her. ‘And how we share culture is through food,’ she writes. ‘But, looking around Melbourne, I realised there was little understanding of Australian Indigenous food, and definitely not of Torres Strait Islander food. I knew it was time to change that.’

We love seeing what kids are growing with their families in their gardens, so snap and email us an image of what you’re harvesting at the moment. Send the photo to editorial@ pipmagazine.com.au – and you might even pick up a snazzy prize! This issue’s winner is five-year-old Ilona Arnott from Kalaru, NSW.