A picture packed post

ANZAC Day


Last Wednesday was ANZAC Day and every year we go to Sydney to watch my Pa march. Pa was Navy and part of Z Special Unit, and wasn't allowed to talk about his involvement in the war until 50 years after the end of WWII. Its only in the last couple of years that they've been able to make an association and march under their banner. Its become a part of my year, like Easter and Christmas, that I couldn't miss. Things have changed over the years; it used to be just Pa, Nana and I, and the three of us would kick-on with the young sailors way after the other old diggers had headed home. This year it was me and my husband and daughter, my Mum and her husband, my sister, my uncle and my Nan and Pa. There was no kicking on but it was a good day none the less. My uncle held the banner, my husband marched with my Pa, the rest of us stood on the corner of George and Bathurst to wave them on - with Lil waving her flag and shouting "Good on you diggers!". But it's sad too. Their association only has seven members left and one of them passed out even before they started marching. And I love all these old guys. And once they're gone I'll still trek up to Sydney (a city I dislike) for the March and for their memory.

On to other crafty things now. I pray every night that my passion for a wide variety of crafts will be taken from me and I will wake up with a new fidelity to just one craft. But alas it is not to be so....

my new baby

Isn't she beautiful! I'm still learning, but I'm having fun.



The lovely lady who sold her too me gave me so beautiful roving too so I've had some lovely stuff to practice on...

The thickness is, shall we say, variable? But I'm assured that I'll improve.

Then my Mum bought me a little wet felting kit - I'm waiting for the right idea to strike me before I attempt it, but I'm thinking I might make a couple of little bowls or something???

And I've unravelled my first ever cardigan which never looked any good on me anyway, in order to refashion it into Knitty's Bobbolicious

Unfortunately I used two strands in this jumper and I only need only for the Knitty thing, so I'm having to separate into two balls. Its a painful task.

And finally, two lovely friends have had bubbies this week so I've had a go at stenciling some little singlets for them. I love stenciling with freezer paper, but really don't have the time to spend carving out intricate designs. I was trying to think of personalised - and quick - presents for them. And then I remembered my little paper craft punches which are now part of my daughter's craft box.

I just punched out a couple of each animal onto strips of freezer paper and it was sooooo quick! It would be better if you had larger ones because the definition isn't great on some of the small bits, but I'm pretty pleased with how they turned out.

Anyway, that is more than enough from me. I should be restoring order to my life after a weekend of tantrums (hers and mine) and sickness (his - hers and mine to a lesser extent) and general destruction of the home unit (all of us).

Oh stop, I'm blushing!

I finally met The Shopping Sherpa today when she popped by work to hand deliver the wonderful Canberra book. It was so lovely to meet her, kind of like meeting a penpal. She and Taph have evidently both been saying lovely things about me which I'm tempted to make some kind of self-deprecating remark about (but am secretly chuffed!).

As she said it was a bit like a blind date... I mentioned that George and I had the same discussion the first time we met outside of SnB; with me saying that it seems so, well, freaky to ask another woman out for a coffee or admit that you would like to get to know them better. To paraphrase TSS, 'when you're little you say "Hi, want to be my friend?" and lo and behold you've got a new mate'. But as we get older we become a little more cynical and start questioning motives and generally trying to deny what is probably a genuine attraction - in a totally non Single White Female kind of way!

Anyhoo, we chatted about stuff; Australia's cultural cringe about Canberra, moo cards (I love mine! She loves hers!), ladies shopping fabric (here's the one I was thinking about TSS), blog directions and pressures and such. We chatted for a good half hour and then she was off - because she had 'meeting' - the classic blind date trick just incase things didn't work out ;-) But I'm sure we'll cross paths again soon!

Its taken me way too long to write this post, so I think I'll just remove my heart from my sleeve and mosey on to bed. But I'll leave you with these Dilbert cartoons

Back soon

Hi folks
I've been sick and away and busy with work but once I get myself sorted it will be back to regular programming. I had this awful feeling that I was going to miss another SnB tonight, but it seems it's on next week, thank goodness. So I'll drop another missive once I've got myself sorted out.
Lovies
TF

Finished items and a rush of blogging!

Little cardy I started knitting many moons ago, sewed up a couple of moons ago, and finally got the buttons on one moon ago. The little monkey looks really cute in it. People at childcare must be able to identify my child immediately because for the last two years her only jumpers have been in that yarn...

A little Lion brand Kimono sweater for the lovely G in Sydney. Her Mummy liked the wool, having seen it so frequently on my child, so this little one is for her. The pattern was uber simple (lacking in the finishing department), and I think I'm confident enough now to add some 'fluff' - like an edge and a neckband. But goodness help me if I have to knit in that pink stuff again. I think three years with a yarn is more than enough. I'll bundle it up and weigh it and offer it up to the first one who wants it.



And the beehive hat from Stitch and Bitch Nation. I look shocking in it, although my DH doesn't seem to think so. And Lily looks absolutely gorgeous in it. Anyhoo, best go. I'm killing time waiting for Lil to wake up after she decided to adopt '2am-5am is party time' as her mantra. I knew the sleeping all night was too good to be true!

Oh, and a new blogger to check out - the lovely George! http://georgieskitchentable.blogspot.com/

I'm spinning around

Well, not yet I'm not. But as of tomorrow I will be the proud owner of a spinning wheel! I've often been tempted, but thought that my husband would baulk at the idea of yet another fibre related craft. But today there was a notice on our work notice board, which mentioned (amongst many other things) two spinning wheels for sale and DH not only drew my attention to it, but even mentioned the spinning wheels specifically! I took it as permission to engage the enemy and purchased myself a little upright thingy. I'm so very excited. Add to this the fact that my lovely mother bought me a little wet felting kit over the weekend, and Lily slept through the night for the first time in ages, and I got to knit the whole way to work while DH drove and I tell you that I'm about as happy as I can get.

I am not gone, I'm just away...

sad - a friend's father passed away. I cried at the funeral, even though I didn't know him really, mainly because I could feel my friend's pain. I wanted to pay my respects to man who made G into the wonderful man he is.

bittersweet - catching up with G, even under such sad circumstances. He normally lives so far away. And also catching up with beautiful people from Sydney who came down for the funeral.

happy - Big Lilly and Savannah coming to visit. Savannah saying 'Meow'. Our girls playing together at Questacon - Mini Q. Sidesplitting laughter shared with Big Lilly and Nicole. Ah, if only I could bottle it.


busy - traveling hither and yon to see relatives.

chocolatey - around 3kg of chocolate received at last count...

fatal - my accidental hitting of a bunny on the way to the airport this morning. The universe punctuating the end of Easter perhaps? RIP Flopsy.

Pictures are worth a thousand words...

mainly because I can't be bothered to write much. Here are some photos of my spoils from the Harlot Happening, my finished-bar-the-buttons cardy and the wonderful wool from Happy Spider half fashioned into a baby cardy... not in that particular order because I'm lazy.

Heaps of Harlots!

A fantastic time was had by all at the Harlot Happening tonight. Thanks to Taph for organising a fantastic night, Jejune for the great puzzles and poster , Bells for blogging, and all the fantastic folk who donated and joined in the festivities. I scored bigtime, but you have to wait for the daytime hours for the pictures!

Harlot? Who you calling a harlot?

Ooooh, a Harlot Happening....

Canberra Knitters

Just found this site for Canberra Knitters


Well done Taphophile, Bells, Jejune, happyspider!

I look forward to being excited and inspired (even more than usual) by these lasses and their seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of all thinks knitting that happen in our fair city.

Knitting patterns from the year I was born

All I can say is that I'm glad I have no conscious memory of the fashions that year... which was 1974 by the way...

Shopping Sherpa is looking for an 8ply vest pattern for a one-year-old that would only use 135gms, so I went looking through stash to see if I could help. No luck sorry Sherpa, but I did find this hideous vest which uses lots more wool in appalling colours. [Get a load of the kid's sticky-out ear!]


And you could make one for yourself too. Or you could just forget the kid and make yourself a snazzy new, um, shirt (or as I call it, the holey moley bum-show-er-off-er-er).

Where the Hell is Matt?

Might be the exotic locations, or the music or just watching someone brave enough to dance in public, but I love this vid.

Weather to be moody by...

This was the weather in Canberra last night, as seen from Yass.

Angry and dark. And amazing.

Edit: Everyone's talking about the rain and hail - neither of which we got on this side of town...

Curse the universe

I'm a little sick. A little tired. A little pissed off with the universe and fate and luck and all that bollocks. I'm considering changing my twitchy fingers logo to be an extended middle finger. Anyway, rather than wallow in my cornucopia of unpleasant feelings, I thought I'd make a knitting needle roll. I think its pretty.

When I finished it, it was sitting in the sun and the reflection was bouncing of my daughter's green beaded butterfly shoes...

Another project I'm undertaking at the moment is the restoration of this lovely chair. We were driving through Exeter the other day on the way to Nowra and this masterpiece was sitting by the side of the road with a whole lot of junk.
I've wanted to restore a chair for a while, but didn't really want to spend any money on it! And there is was. I'm in the process of removing the varnish at the moment, and I'll need to repair a split in one leg. Nan gave me some lavender velvet to recover the seat with so I'm on my way. I love the idea of a chair with a story and history, even though I don't know what the story is! I'll post when its done. When I'm finished I think I'll drop a picture of it, and a thank you, into the letterbox of the house that it was sitting in front of. You know, just saying thanks for the chair...

Anyhoo. I'm going to try and do some cleaning or something so that I get rid of this nasty fug. So that I don't get to tonight and realise all i've done is wallow. and make a knitting needle roll.

Admiration of others

We went down to Nowra last weekend to see my Nana for her birthday. While we were down there DH's aunt gave Lily a 'Jemima'. For anyone who doesn't know, Jemima is a doll on Playschool. So this new Jemima is actually Lily's third Jemima.

Each of them is handmade. The non-knitted Jemima (known as 'other Jemima') was made by my Nana for my little sister. Its about 20-25 years old, and barring the lack of elasticity in her knicker elastic she's doing pretty well. Occasionally her hair becomes detached too... Her dress is beautifully made and I know was made with love. I'm grateful that my sister has shared her with my daughter.

The smaller of the other two is 'Jemima'. She's one of those reversible dolls. The other end is called 'Princess Fiona'. DH's great aunt picked her up at a church fair.

And the big 'Jemima mummy' was the gift from Aunty Jayne; provider of cuddles, kisses and fun, as well as piles of books and toys.


In terms of detail and craftsmanship, these two knitted Jemima's are just incredible. Jemima Mummy has roses, and hair ribbons, and picot edging on her clothes. Jemima and Princess Fiona even more so with individual flowers/patches on the dress, hair and hand ornaments and many-coloured clothing.

I know they're a little old-fashioned and some of the yarn is a little '$2 shop' in colour, but the work that must have gone into these... well I'm speechless. And I just want to throw out to the blogmosphere my thanks to the two old ducks that I don't know who are the artisans who crafted these treasured toys... as well as to the old duck that I do know (hi Nan!) another artisan who has inspired me so much to try and replicate her talent. And has given me half of her sewing room under the guise of 'cleaning out'.

We saw another talented old person, my Pa, on the weekend too. He's been bragging about the bag I made... saying it's 'bloody beautiful'. This is high praise from Pa - not that he's not generous with his praise, but its usually reserved for when I grow something he's struck for me, or bear him a great grand-child. And better yet, he's made a template of the handles from the bag and is going to make a stack of them for me so I can make some more! You rock Pa.

And to finish off this mammoth post, I attach a picture of my bubby girl with her two new miniature favourite toys - Sleeping Booffie (Beauty) and her Daddy-boy (Prince - but a pretty high accolade as she calls her father Daddy-boy. I'm just Mummy). She waltzes around the house singing the theme from Sleeping Beauty 'I know you, I've walked with you, Once Upon a Dream'... She possesses at least two of the things I prayed for in my child - a great imagination and a love of singing. She's also a very happy child so I guess I got the bonus deal!

Uh oh....

I've made the move into the new Blogger too... cross your fingers for me.

Busy busy

I've done quite a few little projects in the last couple of weeks that I haven't posted. The first was a gift for the lovely Josie. She was clearing out her stash in preparation for her move to China and offered me some lovely mohair-y type wool which I snaffled very quickly. I wanted to knit with it immediately and somewhere between casting on and row four it struck me that I could make a stole type thing for her with the wool to take with her to China! I knew she'd like the wool - she did buy it after all - and I did one of those "wind the wool around needle twice then knit" stitches. Any way, she loved it. And it can be worn as a stole, a scarf, a shoulder warmer or a snood! Talk about versatile. Better photos will follow...


Then I made this bag.

Nan had given me an old bag from her next door neighbour's mum, who had just gone into a home. It had these beautiful old handles.... so i unpicked the fabric, painted the handles and used two materials from Nan's stash (which seemed made for each other) and voila! I love it.


And finally, Golden Sun Moth (Synemon plana) - an attractive moth with green eyes, clubbed antennae, and no functional mouth parts. It lives for about 2 years, which they live almost entirely underground as larvae. They emerge after about 1 year, 11 months and 29 days, with their fully developed eggs, search for a mate, lay their eggs and die. They only live for two to five days, as they cannot feed. Its another of my threatened species series... this poor little mite is critically endangered.


Anyway, got to run - meeting the girls for Indian - Yum!

It wouldn't be Australia Day without a barbie...

and a small fire... Go Geoff, go!

Perhaps this is as good as it gets....

Lyrics from 'Beautiful World' great song by Colin Hay of Men at Work fame...

Tagged!

My goodness - my first meme. Thanks sadieandlance!

Here are the rules.
1. someone tags you,
2. you post five things about yourself that you haven’t already mentioned on your blog,
3. you tag people you’d like to know more about.

1. I'm addicted to systems of organisation. I'm constantly trying to find ways to make my work and home life more organised through sites like Flylady and DIY planner and lifehacker and organized home and the best free organisation software around [Australian too!] Thinking Rock. I love the idea of being able to have a streamlined, chaos free life; structured so that everything gets done when it needs too. I even went so far as to create a document called 'traits of an organised home' [summarising many of the applicable features from the sites above] which worked beautifully for about a month. Then collapsed. My intentions are good, but I usually get sidetracked by craft or something that seems far more important than ironing and end up not doing all the things that would make my life easier...

2. I love reading. I'm ravenous when it comes to the 'right' book and snatch every moment I can to devour it. My favourite authors are Margaret Atwood and Marion Halligan (great Canberran author), but I'll go for any Australian fiction really. I could go on and on about books. But I won't.

3. I smoke. I hate it. I love it. I must quit.

4. I'm a recovering alcoholic. My drinking was bad just before I fell pregnant with Lily, but I didn't drink during the pregnancy so I thought I was 'cured'. Things got pretty bad after she was born, and culminated in one big night when I was so drunk and out of control that I shaved my head [I previously had shoulder-length hair].

I realised then that my drinking was out of control. I've been a AA 'boundary rider' for a while, and it was certainly the catalyst in helping me stop drinking, but I find much more strength in the behavioural management approaches to drinking. I found AA spent too much time wallowing in alcoholism - I'd got my life back and wanted to spend it doing things, not moaning about how bad it was 5 nights a week.

5. We have a cat named Rosie and my daughter's name is Lily. I often get them mixed up. I love flower names and would love to name other children Holly, Jasmine or Patterson, but am frightened of becoming like the women in Keeping Up Appearances who are Violet, Rose, Daisy and Hyacinth. My Nana is alot like Hyacinth actually, but that's another story.

So there you go. I tag, Shopping Sherpa, Miss Minnie and Taph. I can't tag 5 as I don't know anyone else that has a blog and reads this regularly!

Cheers
N

Man it's hot...

It's 10.40pm and it's 27 degrees... that's 81 degrees Fahrenheit. And the songs running around my head are:

• I'm feeling hot, hot, hot
• Might as well be walking on the sun
• It's gettin' hot in here {we've already removed our clothes...}
• Burn, baby burn, disco inferno
• The heat is on
• Light my fire - gonna set the night on fire {its already on fire Jimmy}
  
• Hot in the city
• Some like it hot and some sweat when the heat is on {no kidding}
  
• And anything by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers

(Many thanks to my darling husband for his un-natural knowledge of 80's music...)

Sweat, I mean, sweet dreams...

Ah, the sands of time...

We went through a pile of things at Mum's today and found a heap of my sister and my old Barbies. Here they are - sans clothes. Note the bent arms and variety of skin colour.


Then I noticed that the new Barbies that Lil had were different. The arms no longer bent - just straight. Or jointed (the dancing Barbie). mmmm I wonder why the change. Then the really old one with weird-ass white fuzzy Marge Simpson hair and a slanted swiveling waist... and the really large Barbie with the checky grin...

I'm no fan of Barbie. But I was once, and its kind of cool to see my daughter playing with the toys that I played with 20-odd years ago. But I often feel the need to wrap them up in cotton wool so that they more closely resemble a normal woman...

Bye 2006

My crafty end to the year... it was strangely satisfying.

There are gonna be some changes around here...

I feel the need for a new look for the new year, so things may look a little dodgy for a while... hope you don't mind!

And I hope you had a lovely christmas or holiday and have recovered from any family traumas.

Thank god its nearly over

I'm really not that into Christmas. Shocking I know. Previously I've been called the Grinch, Scrooge etc, but since Lily came on the scene I've had to make a concerted effort to be 'christmassy'. We've dressed the tree, sung carols and done the present wrapping. I've even encouraged her use of bubbles to make Santa's beard - as illustrated here...

I draw the line at tinsel which I believe was thought up by vacuum cleaner companies so they could cash in on the Christmas period. Anyhoo, I have been doing a few Christmas craft things, like little birds soft tree pattern and Wee Wonderful's Elf Stitchettes which are pretty cool...

And that's as far as I'm going. (But I decided I liked non-sewing machine related crafting again and so I did a bit more embroidery...)


And this time in three days most of the hoo-har will be over and we won't have to think about Christmas, other than the Christmas sales... not that I can do much damage in Nowra which only has a Scablight.

The other good news is that this f**ken year will be over soon. I'm so over 2006, especially the last six months. I can only hope that the make-your-life-hell fairy will decide to go and bug someone else.

But the best news is that my little sister will be home from her south american trek tomorrow! Yay! Lil thinks she's just been on a plane for the last six weeks...

So Merry Christmas everyone (well the several folk who have continued to read my sporadic ramblings). I hope that you are safe and well, and happy.

Kisses

A little Rudolf...


A bit of a Labyrinth swap I just did... I made the Bowie fabric myself!

hehehehe

CRAZY CAT LADY...

My sister would soooo be pissing herself laughing at this if she 1. read my blog and 2. was not climbing Machu Picchu... we used to joke that she'd end up spending her days with 'Mr Whiskers' as her significant other!!
http://www.prankplace.com/actionfigures.htm

I miss her....