awake

it's 7.26 on a sunday morning and i have been awake since 5.30...... even the cwa weren't awake yet. they were surprised when i went out and gave them their breakfast - leftover wild yak takeaway and chook pellets. bthed had to be vigourously discouraged from joining in as he is a fan of both takeaway and chook food. and even if he didn't like their food he would have to try and steal it on principle
it's also 8 degrees. and it's going to be wet and blusterous. i might go back to bed and read if i can encourage young w not to use me as a footrest

saturday

i'm having trouble throwing off this pernicious virus which has seen me in bed for the last 3 fridays :( it's very frustrating...

but i slept in until nearly 10.30 this morning and feel much chipperer.

it's anzac day here - commemorating a day of complete and utter slaughter when the australian imperial force landed at gallipoli in turkey on 25 april 1915. my grandfather william dickinson and his brother arthur were both there. i wrote about them and their brother in law leslie clark, last remembrance day.

in Australia it is a holy day - a day of great and real solemnity - which is not an emotion australians go in for as a rule. but anzac day is something apart.

all the shops were shut until 1pm and when we went around to psarakos found that they were shut for entire day. unruffled we trotted around the corner to pippa may cook and had some much needed coffee hot chocolate and a raspberry coconut slice chosen by w.then a stroll down high st to the hardware shop to find something for my challenge quilt and then a further trot to the pet food emporium for cat food. salce's is one of those old fashioned feed stores - barrels and sacks of grain and mysterious poultry mixes, bales of straw and shelves full of everything your horse, hen, dog, cat or guinea pig could desire.

then we took billthedog for a walk back to high street and checked out the other second hand bookstore. a better selection than the usual one but a tad more expensive and em and i decided we liked the poeple in the other bookshop better. w scored 3 picture books (at $1.50 each they were bargamonoius), i got a couple of novels and em picked up a janet evanovich.

wha? where?

what happened to my weekend? where did it go?

for an account of thursday evening see the scrumpster - but my gin and tonic at the gin palace was fab (although the scrumpster's orange martini was fabber but stronger and not for the likes of me*) as was the food at post deng. but the revelation for me was that the part of the evening i had been dreading turned out to be better than ok - for years i have disliked frank zappa's music. it seemed discordant and loud and not music. but hearing it live i changed my mind - i listened to it instead of reacting to it and apart from the rather self indulgent everyone gets a solo in every song aspect i really enjoyed it. the poor scrumpster got progressively more and more ill as the evening progressed and we left before the encore and before the scrumpster collapsed in a feverish heap....

friday was spent in virus-laden sloth - reading the health-giving dorothy sayers (see previous post for the current obsession) and visiting the chiropractor to be given a clean bill of spine and bidden to return in three months for further tweaking...

saturday is a bit of a haze and today i spent in some lackadaisical cleaning and in creating an impromptu quilt.

in between courses of iron chef last night i decided to play with some paper (including some bangladeshi silk paper from the oxfam shop) and inks - it all seemed to work well together so this morning i layered them with some plain black cotton a salvaged felted blanket for batting and some black silk chiffon to tone down the sparkliness of the middle panel elements.some frenzied free motion quilting later and i have the ginkgo shadows quilt (seen here mid quilting)
and here is the marmalade i made last weekend from last year's frozen seville oranges - really chunky and yumbo bumbo. some of it anointed the bread and butter pudding which is currently in the oven (seen here preparing for its fate)*i am a terrible drinker and feel woozy and giggly then sleepy after one glass of wine. cocktails are a one way street to oblivion i'm afraid...

sur le weekend

how to sum up 4 days of graduated sloth? my memory of good friday is hazy and dominated by the continued dorothy sayers reading jag - i bought 'strong poison' on thursday and had finished it by friday afternoon -> une crise de lord peter wimsey :( luckily as i cruised the inner north looking for a church that wasn't locked (yep - on good friday) i saw that the local second hand bookstore was open so i rushed in and plundered their stocks of sayers books (i only bought 5 - i did leave them some...) and i did find all saints northcote open and welcoming for some quiet reflection.

frogging of the rosedale sweater continued, to yield enough rare yarns humus (well recognised, ping) to make a rare yarns ruffle cardi. (how long is it since you bought me that pattern susan?)

saturday we went to the st andrews market for the first time since the black saturday fires - the market place is south of the burnt out parts and there was no evidence of the cataclysm that had happened but it was still a fairly subdued visit.

and i made w a not entirely successful robot - something weird happened to his shoulders....
yesterday we went out for breakfast/lunch at coco inc as part of the eat our way up high street project and we were underwhelmed (see the scrumpster's review here). i had the big brekky and felt as though i had been fat-poisoned all afternoon.

stage 2 of our trek along the merri creek helped - apart from the storm water rubbish along the banks it was very picturesque with parts of the creek looking like wind in the willows. lots of ducks and moor hens and even a pale blue heron.
i had a creative fit and made the first stage of my challenge quilt - inspired by annabel's work (again - i will have to pay her some sort of retainer or royalty fee) although hers is very neat and you will notice that my strips have shaggy edges (intentionally!!) and i have gone for a very textured look - i used a fine cotton as a foundation and sewed strips of a heavier weight cotton and cut up bits of old linen and doileys - all gleaned from the op shop. i couldn't sleep on saturday night because i was plagued by the idea of this quilt - so toby and i got up and did some writing in the craft journal....
today was supermarket shopping (held over form yesterday - i went down to the supermarket to find the carpark almost empty apart from lost souls peering through the locked doors...) and restocking the fridge and larder which had been laid waste during the first week of the school holidays and had gone into hubbard syndrome.....

then stage 3 of the merri creek trek - this time we tried to get from the st george's road bridge to clifton hill but were stymied by a lack of path... so we retraced our steps of yesterday and fed the ducks instead.

then home for some indigo dyeing of yesterday's quilt and an old shirt, amongst other things...

and the easter bunny (who - w told me solemnly - is made of wood....) was quite generous, thank you. although not as generous as annabel who sent the most amazing box of english chocolate - look at this cornucopia (and it's all delicious...)

cat in a creative space

cat in a creative space
Originally uploaded by textileseahorse

molly sleeping in her favourite spot, surrounded by balls of frogged sweater, the start of a new cardi and a nice cup of tea

action sunday

i did it ! i finished the hempen cardi - it lies ablocking on the kitchen table - and hopefully growing - a lot. it did look rather underdone for someone of my amplitude and when i tried it on it was beyond ahem.....
other activities today included going for a brisk walk along the merri creek - wherein lurked a few surprises
there was a fair bit of debris which had been flushed out of the storm water drains after the spectacular thunder storms on friday - including this splendid find which i hoiked out of a tree and will use in a future art quilt.
we walked around to ceres which is a serene urban community farm built on the site of an old tip. if you walk behind ceres, between it and the creek, you can see evidence of its past
we also made chocolate chip biscuits
and took last year's seville oranges out of the freezer to make marmalade
and yesterday i played with the new gadget - a clover yo yo maker. i should have known that something that promised ease and swiftness would end up causing knitted brows and some small swearing... but i worked it out in the end and made a couple of smaller than expected yo yos or suffolk puffs as they're more prettily known.
and the cats have decided that my sewing table is the best place to sleep...

my creative space saturday

my creative space saturday
Originally uploaded by textileseahorse

this weekend's tasks are to:
- play with the new yo-yo maker
- and to sew up the gisela cardi i have been working on for some time

having finished the brave new world challenge quilt and getting the handles on my bag (never again!) i feel like a bit of a play - just noodling around with no particular theme or deadline.....

knitting help!

i bought the spring interweave knits this morning and was pleasantly surprised. i used to subscribe but didn't renew it this year because the designs seemed to be getting dowdier by the issue. which is why, of course, i found so many patterns i want to knit in this edition.

the one i want to knit most is this one
the problem ? it's knitted in laceweight yarn.

1. i have no laceweight yarn in my stash - i don't knit laceweight yarn because it would take forever and make my hands hurt
   
2. i don't want to buy any more yarn as i have an accusing stash taking up room under the bed (and i mean this - i really don't want to buy any more yarn this year)
   
3. i have a couple of options in dk or worsted weight yarn that would look great
   
4. i don't know how to upscale the pattern without creating a shrug that would fit an elephant....

any suggestions from the uberknitters out there?? could i knit the smallest size in dk???

i also like this one but perhaps with a different neckline.that neckline would drive me nuts - see how the model is clutching at it???