it was way past naptime by the time we emerged from the powerhouse museum yesterday afternoon. we had spent a good slab of time waiting for our turn at schmuck quickies — a sydney design festival event in which the performance jeweller yuka oyama crafts you a piece of jewellery from recycled materials, on the spot. today, the spot was a long line.

we got there about 11.30 to find the musical robot bears switched off and the adjacent schmuck quickie salon brightly lit and full of cameraman and sound recordist and abc tv producers. our 15 minute wait swelled to just short of 40 minutes (without the musical robot bears!), when the organisers came around to say that everything was running slower because of the recording, and it was now lunchtime and could we come back at 1?

so we did. we scooted out for a picnic of hotdog with tomato sauce and pie floater, and returned to the deserted atrium and waited some more. at quarter past one, yuka was back in action, most personable, asking if there was anything out of her bags of stuff that i liked, or if there was anything i liked in general. “i like fabric, ” i said, “and acrylic. and pink!” and then she was rummaging in her trolley and pulling out great handfuls of bright pink ribbon and thin plastic tubes. she worked nimbly, fashioning a necklace from the material, with a scribbly little highlight safetypinned to my collar at the very end. she even made a matching one for the kid.

“it is simple” said yuka, “but it is pretty.” and it was, but here’s the thing: as soon as we were done, the camera crew who’d been lurking in the shadows turned their machines and lights back on, and prepared to document the next participants. the ones who’d been filmed earlier in the day had quite elaborate pieces made; the girl from the tv station, in particular, had a resplendent brooch — an alien botanical specimen, really — attached to her jacket, spirited up from squirty nozzles from detergent containers and a cluster of colourful randomness.

would it be so wrong to imagine that the artist had rushed through ours so that she could make something more involved for the tv people? or had she really seen right into me, and discerned the correct flamboyant vs. low key ratio which makes up my personality, and worked accordingly? ultimately, i was pleased with my pink ribbon (and would have worn it out again today, but i couldn’t attach it to my shirt in as lovely a way as it had been yesterday, argh!), but maeve was rightfully disgruntled: she had wanted to be a bunny. we had barely made it to the exit when she began tugging it off. so we decided that we should go have pink ice cream.

if you are in chinatown, as we were, you might assume an obligation to have your ice cream at passionflower, or maybe the seven-years-out-of-date Y2K cafe. maybe you’d just pop into gelatissimo for a takeaway cone. but across from the entertainment center sits the inconspicuous shopfront of the cold rock ice creamery. i’d been wanting to try this for years: where they smoosh stuff into your ice cream on a cold marble counter. today was the perfect opportunity: it was the closest ice cream store out of all available options, and i was developing an uncomfortable chaffing from carrying the heavy, wilting child.

they had two kinds of pink ice cream for us, and one of them was turkish delight! at an adjacent counter were a great many things you could choose to have mixed into your ice cream for 80c a pop — famous chocolate bars, unlikely candy, frozen fruit, cookie dough, tim tams… and because of the company, i deferred to the unlikely candy option. surrounded by pigeons, gulls and their shit, we shared a cup of rose-flavoured ice cream with gummy bears. the ice cream was lovely and creamy, the gummy bears extra springy from being cold.

next time, perhaps in the company of myself, i shall have it with smooshed-in raspberries, and maybe, if i’m in the mood, smooshed-in chocolate fudge brownies.