Catching up - I made a shirt

Here's a bit of catch-up blogging, to show off the top I made when I was at the beach at the start of the month. It is a very simple tunic top, from a very old pattern (early 1990s?) where I've made the skirt a hundred times but never the top. Until now.

I got the cotton in Delhi, when the delegation was looking at more typical souvenirs and I snuck off to the fabric section to speed buy a few things. Amazing how quickly I can make purchasing decisions when the pressure is on!

There is really not much to say about this top; it has no shaping or darts, a standard neckline and hem. The only change I made was to add the sleeve bands - originally it was cut all in one piece but I didn't have quite enough fabric if I also wanted to show off the border print (which I did!), so I cut separate sleeve bands and sewed them on. I think it looks OK, for a casual top.

Check out my fashion model posing. Might stick to my day job.

Conference in Hobart

In a fit of unplanned over-conferencing, I got home from Cambodia on Saturday afternoon and left again for Hobart on Monday morning for another week away. It was to a completely different type of conference though - the annual meeting and seminar of the association of parliamentary staff from around Australian and NZ - friendly and interactive and I even might have learned something. Maybe.



Hobart was beautiful. I hadn't been there in summer before and it just reminded me so much of a perfect NZ summer, especially in the evening. Warm but not hot, beautiful waterfront, and happy tourists having beers outside at the end of the day.While I was away Canberra heat-waved  through record-breaking temperatures day after day .... and today we're still headed for 39. The overnight minimum is 24, so it never really gets the chance to cool down. Aaaaargh.



Which made Hobart even nicer, knowing what the family was suffering :)  The Governor hosted a reception at Government House, which has a prime spot up on the hill overlooking the city (as they always do). Apparently it is unchanged since first built in 1858 (externally at least) and its own website says "Government House is today regarded as one of the best Vice-Regal residences in the Commonwealth" which you would expect it to say. I am not familiar with any other Vice-Regal residences but I thought it was pretty cool.  I have been binge-waching The Crown (awesome! I can't wait for the third series) so wore my plastic pearl button earrings.



Unfortunately the conference dinner involved two hours on a boat, and it was very windy and rough, so I decided not to go. A shame, but after the Cambodian Carsickness debacle I wasn't willing to risk it, so went for a lovely long walk round Battery Point and Sandy Bay. It was in full rose-blooming picket-fence prettiness. So different to Canberra.

Conference in Cambodia

Something different this week! I accompanied a delegation up to a conference in Cambodia - somewhere I'd never been before (and never expected to go to be honest). It takes about twenty hours to get there, through Singapore, but none of the flights themselves are longer than seven hours, so it's not  super long haul.

It was all entirely working, from breakfast meetings to conference sessions all day to dinners in the evening, but one of the days was a tour day where they took us around the truly amazing Angkor temples. I was completely ignorant about Cambodian history so it was very educational for me :) and the buildings themselves are stunning. This is me feeling pretty warm at Bayon.  A couple of climbs up stone steps in the heat and I was feeling like a very fat and pale Australian.



This is Ta Phrom where the trees grow through the ruins ... it just feels like exactly what ruins are meant to be (too many Hollywood movies...). It is dry season so there was lots of dust and not much grass - pleasanter for tourists I think. And of course we went to Angkor Wat, which is enormous and amazing! I am a very lucky duck to get to do these things, not least of which because Canberra had its warmest week on record - four days over 40 degrees - so I was quite pleased to be somewhere only 32 and very efficiently air-conditioned.

Doodling

I am back at work and engaged in the very important task of transferring vital information to next year's diary. Or rather this year's diary. I like a paper diary for taking notes in, and making to-do lists. Not meetings and scheduling, that is much better handled by Outlook, but for writing things down that I need to remember on the day that it happened. Or maybe should have happened, depending on how my week is going. But, looking back at 2018, I have to admit, I am a chronic doodler.

And not a very creative one either. Day after day, week after week, the same lines appear. In different coloured inks because I like to switch it up (in my favourite but battered Lamy) but the same patterns.

Inspired by quilting motifs of course. I swear that it helps me think and concentrate. If I'm not doodling then I wander off mentally, but if I am doing something with my hands then I take in what the speaker is saying. I would rather be knitting of course, or doing some hand stitching, but apparently that is frowned on in the workplace. Foolish nonsense. When I run the world workplace craft will be encouraged, or possibly even enforced.

Happy New Year!

Well, hello there 2019. I do realise it's the 9th of January already but, as you might have guessed, we have been enjoying ourselves at the beach. Or at least I have been enjoying myself very much. The boys have been tolerating it with reasonable good nature, and my husband has been going backwards and forwards to Canberra for work. Except for the one Sunday where he took both sets of car keys home, and came back down for an unexpected trip Monday to give them back. Ooops.




Canberra melted through two weeks of 35+ degrees, but the beach was comfortable and lovely. Lots of swims, lots of booze, lots of food that only required unwrapping and many many books. A few walks to try and burn the booze off, but I don't think it made much difference. We tried to take a selfie. This is after I told him to put it higher so we looked up at the camera and didn't have four hundred chins ... but maybe not that high. There is a lovely beach vista behind us that was supposed to be included.



And here are the thousands that infest our beach for the New Year's Eve sandcastle competition. It was quite competitive this year ... and like every year, I think we should enter, if only we could come up with a good idea! And some enthusiasm.



Two weeks went incredibly quickly. I made the boys do one outdoor thing every day (usually a swim) but they spent most of the time watching DVDs, or on their phones, or watching the Netflix they had downloaded before we left. Number two son had a friend there so they spent a bit of time socialising, but number one son went basically full hermit.

But, as I told him, this is probably the last time we'll make him come on holiday with us. He finishes school this year and should have some kind of job next summer.  I stopped going on holiday with my family at the age of 16 ... and even that last summer I made a group of my friends come camping in the same campground up in Pauanui - I went and stayed with them and tried to pretend my parents weren't there.  I'm not sure how well it worked, from memory Dad used to come up and put our tent pegs in properly.

I came back to Canberra yesterday, spent today doing errands and paying bills, ready for work tomorrow. Very very sad face.

Berlin orange wool and dyed wool

I had some of the springy Berlin orange and yellow and pink wool left over, but not enough for a whole scarf, and nothing that really matched it. So I pulled out some of the skeins that I had made eighteen months ago and never got round to dyeing, and the food colouring, and dyed a couple of yellow/orange/pink skeins in the hope that it would get close to matching.

It kind of matched. Some were a bit closer than others. I used my awesome ball winding thingo again, which made a very professional looking ball. It is reasonably time consuming but very contemplative. 

And it made a very pretty scarf in the end. More orange than anything else, but a bit of yellow and pink. The close up is a bit more bluey than the real scarf, which is more like the full-length one. Another one to be folded up and put on the pile! Far too hot to think of anything woollen at the moment. 

Merry Christmas everyone

We had a very pleasant Christmas with a long lunch at friends, with other friends, and an assortment of teenage / young adult children. It was 33 degrees, but we managed to stay hydrated in traditional Christmas fashion. The food was amazing as ever - our host is a fantastic cook - and a mix up of traditional plum pudding and roasts with oysters, prawns, scallops and a wonderful lemon slice. Mmmmm, food....

We did put the Christmas tree up in the end, or rather number one son did. He decided to only put the gold and red ornaments on this year so it is a more subdued effect than usual. It is elegant until we turn on the garish multicoloured lights. I am more of a "throw everything you can at the Christmas tree" kind of person but I also left it in the box for ten days, so mustn't grumble. I have not bothered cropping out the piles of washing, or the fabulous fireplace. Not that we are likely to use it, it's heading for 36 today then going to get properly hot for the rest of the week! Canberra is very quiet, and very baking.