She’s the lesser known Muldoon, wife to actor Rhys, and the last in her family of three —which includes her five-year-old daughter Lotte May —to be published.
So, not surprisingly, Katoomba’s Eliza Muldoon is overjoyed Lazing on a Sunday Crafternoon has finally hit the presses.
The book project, with a nod in the title to music group Queen, took three years, 4000 photos and many, many crafty Sunday afternoons with Lotte, who is now five.
“I was feeling really bad about not making things with her and was really busy a lot of the time,” Ms Muldoon, who also works as program director at Blue Mountains Cultural Centre, said.
“I just thought it would be really nice to put aside a little bit of time, so at two o’clock, or thereabouts, on a Sunday afternoon we would just grab things from around the house and make something.”
Ms Muldoon, the youngest of a family of seven from the cherry-picking capital Young in regional NSW, grew up watching her mum do clever things with fabric.
“My parents just made things — they were a different generation and buying things in a small country town wasn’t really what you did. You don’t buy lots of toys for seven children.”
Ms Muldoon is delighted the book has inspired other parents to spend more time making things with their children.
“And that’s really where the book came from, people saying they didn’t really have much time or any skills and it was about getting people started.”
She said all the projects were easy to make, although initially her publisher at Allen and Unwin wasn’t convinced.
“I ended up bringing in a box with the things I had made in so she could turn my projects over and see they’re shocking, just really bad with terrible stitching,” she said laughing.
Ms Muldoon said her daughter Lotte now believed every family had authorial talent since Dad (best known as a Play School presenter and star of Nine’s House Husbands) had written a book with former Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd and Lotte herself had co-written a book with Dad about the Toulouse-Lautrec show in Canberra’s National Gallery.
But she added Lotte is a little over the publishing business.
“Towards the end of this book she got really sick of having her picture taken and I had to pay her,” Ms Muldoon said. “Four thousand photos for just a dollar seemed like a good deal to me.”
The book is now available in most bookstores and also online.
