Coast days

We went down the coast for a couple of days - not entirely sure why but we certainly found enough to do when we got there! The weather was cold and windy and rainy everywhere, so we figured we may as well be somewhere that was closer to 15 degrees than 5. It's only 59 kilometres as the crow flies but the weather can be wildly different. Much excitement on the local facebook page because a seal was having a nap on the beach.

Mostly very chill creatures, seals, but they have sharp teeth and are surprisingly large. Everyone was avoiding it, but that part of the beach is off-leash dog exercise, so there might have been a cavoodle or two in danger. Or a white crusty dog. No great loss. 

I made a couple of dozen library bags for the local school which is a quilter's group endeavour. Nice mindless sewing - once I got into the swing of it - and a good way to use up odds and ends of fabric. If the kids don't mind random colours, which I'm sure they won't. 

I also meant to do a day's errands in Bateman's Bay but got trapped at the first hurdle - changing my driver's license over to NSW - which turned out to be unnecessarily complicated. So I didn't go to the hardware, join the library or buy some thread ... just had a bacon and egg roll to soothe my shattered nerves and came back home again. And it's still not sorted, I will try again this week. 

I should have a photo of a finished quilt to show you but this was the attempt today - the horizontal quilt!!!! It was so windy (a cold wind too) that I gave up. Perhaps tomorrow. I came back up for the quilter's group AGM on Saturday afternoon. I am now secretary, which doesn't seem to be too much work, but I guess I will find out ..... There were six ladies at the AGM, so most everyone got some type of position :)

More before and after

We have finally finished the last edging and mulching in the south beds at the front of the house so here is the transformation. In our defence, a lot of this is just summer vs winter, with the leaves off the trees. So before is overgrown, beds full of grass and trees just randomly doing whatever they wanted with their branches.

After is a lot more orderly, even if a bit stark.

Honestly, those trees and shrubs were suffering with crossed over branches and sad twisty bits. We did them a favour. Honestly. At least the hellebores on the bed we mulched with fallen leaves are incredibly happy and covered with new growth. Although that might just be the month of frosts we've had.

And here's the last before and after - we have spent a couple of days repainting the kids' rooms in our old house in a futile attempt to get someone to buy it. Removed the child-chosen brights including extra-bright feature walls and painted over them in off-white. It's very sad, but the rooms do look bigger now ... this turquoise took three coats! Most of that was remediating the short-lived but sooty scented candle phase.

Height of ruralness

On Wednesday we reached the pinnacle of country living when we finally put a match to the Burn Pile. The Burn Pile has been growing bigger and bigger with all the logs and branches that have been pulled out of the creek and other stuff that is just too enormous to chip and no good for firewood ... and that has just been down in the lower forty too far from the house to do anything with easily. So it's been put in a pile for Burning, and on Wednesday we Burned.

It was a perfect day for it, freezing cold with frost, then clear and sunny and absolutely no wind. We had to tell the local RFS of course (who then made a facebook post to let everyone know but giving the wrong address, eye roll) and warn our neighbours 48 hours in advance which was an excellent opportunity to say hello to the neighbours. Which we have been  meaning to do since we moved in but have only done friendly waves so far. 

It started off with a solid application of diesel then it was a couple of hours hauling branches to chuck on, then a couple of hours making sure it kept burning, and then a couple of hours staring, raking, playing with the coals and burning random twigs on the ground. It was awesome, I love burning things at the best of times and this was massive. It was all out by dinner time and our four huge piles of branches have gone. 

It was nice just to stand down in the lower forty and admire the view. It's a fenced paddock next to the road, over the creek bridge but we have no use for it at the moment so I never go down there. It's very pretty and people wave as they drive past because nothing says rural togetherness like Burning. 

And the other advantage is that the neighbours over the back said they would pop in, which they did, while I was in the shower, so had to do a dressing gown run past them to get some clothes on ... but once that awkwardness was behind us we had a good natter. They've been here 15 years so could fill us in on the last two previous owners, and the other neighbours, and the weather, and useful things like that.

We were chipping the next day and Mr Neighbour came up to examine our chipper that had been the topic of discussion the previous day - Mrs Neighbour had thought we got people in to do our chipping because 'one of them was wearing high-vis'. No, one of them was not wearing high-vis, one of them just got another pair of amazing gardening overalls in a colour that appeared on the website to be burnt orange.

It is not burnt orange, I look like a traffic cone, if traffic cones were spheres. But I don't care, they are so amazing, and after a day's burning it was kind of greyish anyway. We have finally got some pallets to store next year's firewood from everything we are chopping down ... but we need some more, that didn't really make a dent in the chop pile. Peak Ruralness. 

Choppity chop chop

The joys of a neat and tidy twig-garden have gone to our head and we have turned into chainsaw wielding maniacs. It's gone from careful googling of tree types and thoughtful pruning to two options - "head height" or "knee height". We are clearing out crossed branches, dead branches, ugly branches and any branches that stab us or clip us on the ear. Then we take those branches and run them through the chipper while staring at the remaining trees.  Chip one, teach a hundred.

It looks SO much better. We are nearly done mulching those beds and I even spent many sad hours trying to dig the periwinkle out. With very limited success - much like the grass it will be a process of dig, smother and poison. And burn, we haven't used our flaming weed gun yet and it's always very satisfying. 

We bought a little wagon for the ride on mower. It has already been super useful - holds about three wheelbarrowsful - and is wonderful for moving heavy stuff like firewood. 

 The electrician had our power off at lunchtime on Wednesday so we went into town for a bacon and egg roll and took a detour up the road above our house. The main water supply for the town is up there, and the overflow goes down the valley and is the creek that runs through our place. It's very rare for it to flow, but with all the rain this year we've only ever seen water in it. Not normal. 

You can't really tell from this photo but we're looking down a fairly steep hill. The water dam is up to the left, and there are trees in the little valley that lead down to our place, which is where the big clump of trees is. It gave us a good sense of the geography that we hadn't had before ... the countryside is looking very brown and wintry! It was cold. Our visitors went skiing for a couple of days with low hopes of snow but ended up having heaps including heavy falls on their last day. They stayed another couple of days at the snow then overnighted with us on their way back north.

The selvedge quilt!

Sorry Pam, but here is another finished quilt. Yes, I do make them quickly, but it is amazing how much quicker you get with practice, and also what else am I up to? Nothing, that's what. And it's great. 

In my defence, I have been working on this one for about 15 years. It takes a LOT of selvedges to make a quilt, and I'd do a few blocks every now and then, when I felt the urge for mindless sewing. I found them in a drawer, realised there were 100 (actually 102) which is a nice 10 by 10 quilt, sewed them together and quilted it up.

Strictly speaking I didn't quilt it, I tied it with embroidery floss. And there's no batting because it's so heavy - strips sewn over strips onto a backing fabric - so I just backed it with a flannelette sheet. Although I stuffed that up a bit because I bought something I thought was a flannelette sheet but which was actually some weird synthetic with a slight stretch ... I liked the colour (pale pink) and it felt soft and fluffy but the fabric was a bit of a disaster. It was from Kmart though, so I probably could have predicted it.

But I ploughed ahead, made 100 little thread knots, put some binding on it and who would know? It looks like a proper one. It was lovely to put it together because of the trip down memory lane with all the fabrics. Some of them people had sent me which was even lovelier! A group effort. 

The pretty

For the past two years - when we described our retirement place to increasingly incredulous friends who wondered why we would do such a thing - at some point we would just shrug our shoulders and say "we bought the pretty". Because we did, we bought the flowers and the blue sky and the embroidered tablecloths and the hammock. But, every day, I look around and admire the pretty. Even in the depths of winter. Here is fog this morning just starting to burn off down the driveway.

But still misty over the back, towards the creek.

Here is the other end of the day, as the shadows get long and it starts to get cold.

But still sunny over to the west, until the sun finally hits the hills.

Or the west this afternoon, as a big storm rolled across. We were enjoying the sunshine and thinking about doing a couple of hours chipping when we heard thunder and saw the black sky. About half an hour later it bucketed through with lightning so close we checked out the windows for burning trees. And there was hail! Just little peas luckily.

Our visitors have left to do some skiing - it was so lovely to have them stay and show them our corner of the world.

Scrappy stars

Here is a little quilt I made because the scrap strips were getting a bit out of control ... and I do love a scrappy quilt. I called it "pruning and mulching" because that is all I think about other than quilting. It was a fun make. 

I tried to do a floral theme but I didn't have quite enough florals so some are just floral-adjacent. I did capture the sunset on the washing line though, it was very pretty.

We have Brad's brother and 11-year old niece staying at the moment, which is lovely, to have visitors! Unfortunately we have had the worst weather with serious rain all up the east coast. They managed to get a bush walk in Monday but Tuesday was a Canberra day of museums and yesterday was wandering around Braidwood (ten minutes max) then driving to see the floods. It's clearing now thank goodness.

The most exciting thing was watching our wombat discover that its burrow was completely flooded and it had to find somewhere new to sleep. It rampaged around the front lawn for a bit (wombats are super cute when they run) before disappearing over into the cow paddock next door. I refused to go outside to take a photo so this is a wombat through the window. They are quite big ... it's called Chonky. 

Here's the creek beside our road into town. It runs behind the properties that sit behind ours, so our house isn't likely to be flooded but our only way out is the bridge just before town and it was sitting pretty close to the water for an hour or two. 

The destruction continues

 A week since I posted! Nothing exciting to report except for three Canberra days this week, which is probably two too many. We went in Sunday for the scale model swap and sell - I went to the Canberra Quilt show for the first time in years. I enjoyed it but it is about half the size that it used to be when I did white glove duty - it used to be in two buildings and now it's in one, with fewer quilts and not nearly as many vendors. But entertaining for a couple of hours. We then had a lovely long lunch with friends and yet another quick trip to Ikea for blinds ... Monday I went in on my own to go to the doctor and have a lovely gossipy coffee with a colleague from work (I'm not missing it, but I still love to get the goss) plus buy some ugg boots because it has been minus 7 which is COLD. Then Thursday we went back to get the house ready for another futile open day, bought some electric blankets (see minus 7 above) and did grocery shopping. Exhausting!

But there has been time for continuing the destruction. Here is a perfectly fine bay tree that was innocently growing away ... except it is three metres tall and about a foot from the house and suckering like a crazy thing. I can understand why you might plant it there - there are oregano and rosemary bushes too - but it has gotten way too big and was making the kitchen very dark.

So it got the chop. Chainsaw guy did the hard work and we pulled on ropes and removed the branches using the less serious chainsaw and the loppers. Small pile for firewood, much larger pile for the chipper and plenty of little suckers still living to supply bay leaves for casseroles.

It went through the chipper like a dream - long straight branches with lots of leaves. Our chipper doesn't really mulch the leaves very finely but that's OK, we are still going on beds where we want to kill the ivy. It smelled lovely and was fun to spread about. 

Of course now all we can see is the sad state of the house exterior. It's weathertight and not too bad but needs a re-paint and a bit of carpentry care in spots. That is not my photography at an angle... that is how badly that wall and the chimney leans in. That's an unused chimney but it is very picturesque so I think we have to keep it. We also had the pipes freeze for the first time! The tenants never mentioned it so we think it was a combination of the cold and the removal of the bay tree. The acanthus certainly looked very sad losing the shelter. Anyway the pipes are barely lagged so we will get onto that, should be an easy fix. 

And in even more exciting news we now have matching his and hers safety helmets with ear muffs and face shields. Gardening is more dangerous than I had anticipated. 

Sedimentary

This quilt is called "sedimentary" - it was only two weeks ago that I did the label but I've already forgotten why it's called that. Perhaps rock? Perhaps the layers of dirt/sand/mulch/rock that we're digging up in the garden? Perhaps I meant to call it "sedentary"? We will never know.

It's a log cabin done entirely because the 2.5" scrap strips were spilling out of their bag. I did 25 blocks, which limits the layout - a lot of log cabin layouts require an even number of blocks in each direction. So this is a deliberately asymmetrical design. It looks quite clear in the photo but in real life it's hard to see, and the colours are quite muddy. You can't go wrong with a log cabin though, it always look homely and very quilt-like.

Path of destruction

It's us, we are the path of destruction, as we prune and chop and dig our way around the house. I know it has to be done but I feel very sorry for some of the poor little shrubs that were just doing exactly what they are meant to be doing - growing and making pretty flowers. But they are all four foot across, with leaves only at the edges and massive dead twiggy hearts and they have to be chopped right back, to look sad and forlorn and covered in frost. 

Dad here is the rosemary that I didn't dig out but cut right back after you said that your one didn't die ... so if it dies it will of course be all your fault. 

This is a before shot of what I thought was going to be a small bed, quick to dig .... it was not. It was a nightmare of grass and bulbs and unidentifiable shrubs - that's a clematis (we think) over a dead tree and it's built up against some very old fence posts and random bits of concrete. And a brick.

This is what it looks like now. Much better! The old tree is very rotten but I figure the clematis will hold it up. There are red hot pokers over the back, and those early jonquils have grass all though them so we'll have to wait until they've died back and dig the lot up.

And here are the apple trees! What a difference. Actually I think two are apple and two are possibly pear trees ... whatever they are we pruned them for jesus and hope they'll live. The 'pear' trees have ferocious spikes on them, but were all very satisfying to chip. 

Isn't that a fabulous apple branch? Quite an old tree I think, and has clearly had a number of solid prunings. We will spray for moth but a proper treatment requires us to clear the bed below, which sounds like a lot of work, so we'll see whether we can be bothered. 

Brad took a lower branch of one of the smaller oaks - half an hour with the chainsaw then half a day getting the branch cut up, chipped and moved, or stacked for firewood. The cows were weirdly interested ... they just stood and watched, especially when power tools were involved? What goes through their minds? 

We raked up all the oak leaves and dumped them underneath the pines were nothing grows anyway (except mushrooms). There are some plants that like an acidic soil apparently (rhodos? Sounds unlikely) so we have a long term plan for a garden bed there. 

Yes, Pam, I do miss my grown babies, but they are very good at messaging / facetiming at odd moments and they are living interesting lives ... Melbourne is about 750 km from here so a good eight hour drive with stops - it takes all day but anything you can do in a day we think is a reasonable drive! It's the overnight ones where you might seriously consider taking a plane ... 

Melbourne and surrounds

We have just returned from a few days in Melbourne which was wonderful except for the weather which was TERRIBLE. Freezing cold, wind, rain and bleak. I took basically no photos which is unusual but it was not very picturesque. We spent time with number two every day, which was really really nice. This did mean a lot of amazing food - we had fabulous Thai, Vietnamese, Korean and an excellent cafe where number two goes for business meetings ... theatre people like a good coffee shop. I took a photo of my meal.

We also did a fair bit of shopping, including some very groovy shops that I would never have found on my own, and then boring grocery shopping to fill up the share house fridge in the time honoured parental way, and op shopping for two dining chairs which they needed. Ten dollars each, bargain. Number two also got the three of us free tickets to this play - it was definitely more peculiar than we are used to but funny and interesting and we really enjoyed it (or my husband and I did, our playwright child was a bit more judgy).

My husband had the Australian Model Expo to visit (he entered a model, got a Commendation which was very pleasing) and I had a quiet poke around and lunch by the river ... I sat outside even though I got a bit rained on.

And we did a day trip up towards Daylesford where friends have recently retired to a seven acre block, although they've had the block for years. It is basically the complete opposite of us - it was a sub-divided farm, so a completely blank canvas, and they built a hempcrete house themselves, and various sheds and outbuildings and planted everything new ... they are going as self-sufficient as possible so goats for milk, alpacas for wool (she spins and knits), ducks and chickens for eggs, huge gardens of vegies and fruit ... it is amazing and we were in awe. They built a greenhouse using recycled materials, have solar panels, feed the goats from farm waste and only need to heat the house when it's not sunny because the insulation is so good!!!! Utterly diametrically opposite to what we are doing (they don't even have a chipper because they are growing not chopping) but it still looks incredible and they are having so much fun. Just like us.

This is feeding the goats. It SNOWED when we arrived. Not much, just flurries, but my god it was cold. We went into town for lunch though and it was so pretty. I would like to return when the weather wasn't so awful.