Like a substitute teacher at clown school

Which is how number two son described me when I asked him to take photos of me in the new shirt I'd made. In his defence, I had said "could you take photos of me in this terrible shirt I made, it looks ridiculous". I would like to think that if I'd said "could you take photos of me in this wonderful new shirt I made, I'm so proud of myself" he would not have made that comment. But you don't know. Teenagers can be cruel.



So the concept was sound - a loose, cotton shirt in a fairly neutral print that I could wear with jeans as a step up from  t-shirt. But it looks stupid, like a weird kimono / pyjama top. The cotton is a lovely heavy soft fabric, but was way too solid for this type of oversized shirt.

I even made it all totally properly - hand-stitched the yoke facing, pleats and plackets on the cuffs, the whole enchilada. I'm going to put it through the washer and dryer a few times to see if it softens up at all. There might be a dressing on the fabric that makes it stiff ... but I'm guessing not. I'm guessing it's just one of those disasters that seemed like a good idea at the time. Never mind, I quite enjoyed making it, between swims.

Practising my modelling poses or showing off my cuff pleats? You decide.

Beautiful beach weekend

It had been too long away from the beach for me, so I went down last weekend on my own and had a wonderful time. A massive storm came through Friday night with great cracks of lightning, torrential rain and hail; no damage done and quite spectacular. And then the rest of the weekend was just beautiful. There was a huge swell on Saturday - perhaps from the storm? I don't really know how waves work - so I got a couple of excellent swims with my boogy board. Caught some big waves ... or big for our little beach, which doesn't really get big waves. There were a few people on the beach but not heaps.

I sewed a bit, read a bit, watched Russian Doll on Netflix which I enjoyed a lot. Number two son had watched it and said it was quite "adult" (!!!! drugs and sex mostly, not entirely appropriate for a fourteen year old but what are you going to do) He got suckered in and had to binge watch all eight episodes, and so did I. 

This is a sunset shot. We don't usually get the sky reflected in the water quite as perfectly. It was very pretty.

And much much nicer than Canberra yesterday which had horrible winds and a hideous dust storm. There is normally a city behind that red haze. The winds blew over several large trees, and the red dust was on everything. Worse air quality than Beijing apparently! Back to lovely blue skies today, although the outdoor furniture is a bit grimy.

Linen wool blend

I can't actually remember why I bought this from Ice, I suspect it was on serious sale. And it didn't look at all attractive on the website, or even in the ball, but it wove up just beautifully.



It is very fine, so I set it reasonably close, and it turned out light and soft, but still with a bit of heft. The little random flecks are nice, and give it a bit of interest. It is 60% wool, 25% viscose, 12% linen and 3% polyester. It is quite likely that the coloured flecks are the polyester.



It was very soothing just to make something from all one type of wool, and see how it weaves up on its own. I am not sure what else I would put it with? Something soft, definitely. I still have four balls left, so plenty of room for experimentation.

The new enthusiasm

I've mentioned before that number two son has all-encompassing enthusiasms. They can last for weeks or months or years, there can be several at a time, and they always seem to involve considerable on-line shopping. And we are never quite sure what it's going to be. Thomas the Tank Engine was probably foreseeable for a four year old boy, and Doctor Who for a seven year old boy, but the Great Washi Tape explosion came out of a clear blue sky, as has the latest one. Succulents.

Yep, he's started indoor gardening. This is the top of the chest of drawers in his room. Did you know you can buy succulents on-line? I was not aware of this until they started arriving in the mail. There are little cutting nurseries on the outside table from plants we had in the garden.

He has also cadged cuttings from elderly neighbours when he's walking the dog, and bought them at farmer's markets. Somewhere there is a carnivorous plant. We are absolutely encouraging this hobby, especially because you can leave succulents for weeks at a time without watering, and some of them are very pretty.

I have been including the boys less and less on this blog as they get older, which is the right thing to do I think, but honestly they do quite as many interesting and strange things as teenagers as they did when they were toddlers. Number two son makes himself a large iced coffee every morning, puts it in a cup with a straw and carries it to school. Every morning. Strange....

The other Berlin wool

My husband bought me some other very lovely wool in Berlin - beautiful dyed skeins - one in a mid-red and one in a deep purpley red. I posted about it when I was winding it in to a ball with my excellent ball winder (I've done a lot of winding now and I LOVE IT, it makes the most delightful centre pull balls) but you couldn't really see the colour.

 This is the finished scarf. It was wonderful to weave. Clean, stretchy but not too much, soft but solid and such pretty colours. Decent quality wool is really delightful. As opposed to my photography. I thought if I folded it, and put it on the laundry basket, it would be better. But it's not.



It's a houndstooth, not that the pattern is very clearly defined. Houndstooth is becoming my go-to pattern when I want to blend a couple of colours together in an interesting way. And it's super easy.

What I've been reading - the second half of 2018

Since I delighted the internet with my reading list of the first half of 2018, I should keep going and let you know what I read in the second half. Definitely fewer books! 42 compared to 61. I think because some of them were quite solid and took a while to get through ... but it might be because of the loom purchase. Books are down, Netflix is way way up.

So here is the list, in the reverse order that I read them in:

Jennifer Saunders	Bonkers: My Life in Laughs
David Lodge	A Man of Parts
A.S. Byatt	Ragnarok
Charlotte Bronte	Villette
Terry Pratchett	Snuff (Discworld, #39; City Watch #8)
Catherine Lowell	The Madwoman Upstairs
David Profumo	Bringing The House Down: A Family Memoir
Nigel Williams	R.I.P.
Daphne Merkin	The Fame Lunches: On Wounded Icons, Money, Sex, the Brontes, and the Importance of Handbags
Claire Fuller	Bitter Orange
Juliet Barker	The Brontes
Barney Norris	Turning for Home
Matt Haig	How to Stop Time
Brian Martin	Holt College: An Oxford Novel
Jonathan Bate	Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life
Angela Meyer	A Superior Spectre
Tim Winton	Eyrie
Pamela Holmes	The Huntingfield Paintress
Gail Godwin	Grief Cottage: A Novel
Audrey Niffenegger	Her Fearful Symmetry
Joshua Ferris	The Unnamed
Frank Herbert	Dune (Dune Chronicles, #1)
Tim Winton	The Boy Behind the Curtain
David Nicholls	Us
Damon Tweedy	Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor's Reflections on Race and Medicine
Juliet Marillier	Dreamer's Pool (Blackthorn & Grim #1)
Jacqueline Lunn	The Unknown Woman
Jennifer Egan	A Visit from the Goon Squad
Jennifer Egan	Manhattan Beach
Jane Harper	Force of Nature (Aaron Falk, #2)
Katharine Murphy	On Disruption
Douglas Coupland	Generation A
Lionel Shriver	Property: A Collection
Julia Baird	Victoria The Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire
A.M. Homes	May We Be Forgiven
Victoria Glendinning	Rebecca West: A Life
Virginia Woolf	To the Lighthouse
Sally Brampton	Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression
Laura Shapiro	What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories
Philip Hensher	Kitchen Venom
Fredrik Backman	My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologises
Philip Hensher	Tales of Persuasion

As usual, it is all over the place. Literary, light, non-fiction, biography, memoir, old, new. I do sometimes follow trails; you can see a Bronte theme, and the biography of Leonard Woolf I read at the beginning of the year led to both To the Lighthouse and Rebecca West, which then led to A Man of Parts, which is about H.G. Wells (and it's great, by the way, highly recommend). Janet Malcolm's biography of Sylvia Plath (which isn't on this list for some reason, clearly my system is not infallible!) led to the Hughes biography. Both very good books but clearly there are a number of perspectives you can take on those two lives. 

If I had to pick the three best - to be honest I can't even remember what most of them were about, which tells you something - it would be Tim Winton's Eyrie, Julia Baird's biography of Queen Victoria and Sally Brampton's memoir. My criteria for a good book is that it made some kind of memorable impact, which isn't very scientific, but there you have it. None of them were dreadful (I don't finish bad books, I just stop reading, and they don't go on my list) but some were a bit forgettable.

Cotton and silk

I really like the idea of weaving cotton, but I'm routinely disappointed by the reality. Either it's fine cotton and ends up solid, or it's spongy cotton and ends up coarse and strange. I am going to keep going though, because I am a Weaving Scientist! No, actually, because I have overbought lots of cotton from Ice and have to use it up. Before I will let myself buy more.

This was the starting point, a very pretty variegated 100% cotton. In lovely shades of pink. 

I knew that I wanted to mix it up with something a bit different, so I went down to the Crafty Frog and found this cotton silk blend. It is 78% cotton and 22% silk, and is a little bit bumpy. Is that a technical term? Maybe nobbly.

And this is the end result. I am getting so desperate for places to try and photograph my scarves that I am draping them on the laundry hamper! Not great. I put the variegated cotton on the warp and the bumpy cotton silk blend on the weft. It was beautiful to weave - smooth and clean and lovely to touch. You can see that the variegation on the warp made a strip effect.

And this is the close up. It's nice - certainly nicer than some of my other cotton disasters - but it still doesn't work as well in a scarf as wool. There's just not the drape and softness. I will experiment more!