Using the variegated wool

Lots of weaving and no working going on here, which is rather lovely! We have had some scorching hot days but it doesn't matter because there is nothing we are trying to achieve. Excellent. So I turned the yellow / red / orange into a checkered scarf.

 

There are three different oranges going on here - one plain orange with white, one yellow and red, and one yellow and red and brown. The plain orange one is probably the least interesting. I really like how they work against the white. It looks a bit like chalk on pavement, or oil pastels. The colour changes work quite well with no great blobs of a single colour (except for the orange that is). I did a symmetrical warp and weft - two stripes of each orange, then a bigger white gap, then two stripes of the next orange. That is, when I remembered, there are a couple of oops patches.

 

I have an orange jacket that I wear to work sometimes when I get bored of black and charcoal; and this scarf looks perfect with it! I will definitely wear this one too, when it cools down again, if it ever does.

Merry Christmas!

 We had a lovely quiet Christmas just the four of us together.  I didn't make it to the church service on Christmas Eve  to see my son and his nativity play - I'm afraid it takes more than my son being Joseph to get me inside a church. But he enjoyed it and there was a big turnout.  I am not sure what flavour church it was - hang on I just looked it up - Anglican.  Although I think he said he took mass? that doesn't sound right.  Religion what a nightmare.

 We spent Christmas eating just what we wanted to eat, having chocolate at inappropriate times, and playing with our presents.  It was 32° for most of the day - still 27 when we took the dog for a walk at 8 o'clock at night -  so we weren't very active. I can't seem to upload pictures -I'm doing this on my iPad.  It's a shame because my husband got a new pair of Doc Martens and he wore them all day to break them in - with his shorts - it looked very cute.  Then in the evening we watched Hunt for the Wilderpeople which was a very lovely movie and today we had friends around for brunch and now we are all watching the Doctor Who special. Our own traditions!

Variegated wool dyeing

After having such success with the plain dyes, I've done some variegated dyeing with two or more colours on the same skein. There are a number of ways to do this but the easiest for me is to do a hot dye - where you bring the wool and water up to boiling then add the dye. It means that it strikes immediately, and if you add one colour to one side of the saucepan and another colour to the other than you get a variegated effect without too much blending.

I thought I'd start with ones next to each other on the colour wheel, so that if the dyes blended a lot it would be tonal (good) rather than sludge (bad). I did yellow and red. Here is the pan just after I added the dyes. It doesn't look very fancy at this stage. The red looks a bit crime scene.

Here are the skeins when I hung them up to dry. This photo makes it look like mostly red, but it actually has a lot of orange. One of them has a bit of brown in it as well (I was doing browns at the same time).

And here are some of the finished balls. It looks much better when it's wound up on a ball! There is yellow and orange and pink. I am adjusting to the idea of repeats, and what it means to have colours next to each other or widely separated. It is quite different for weaving than knitting - it might be better actually to have splotchy dots of colour in the saucepan rather than great swathes. I am not sure if that would work though, it might be a bit blendy. I will experiment further! The pale apricot one below is just using a single colour but deliberately with quite a lot of white space.

Cotton dyeing again

Nearly a week since my last post - and that is because we have been lurching from social occasion to social occasion like drunk fat flies. I put on some work pants this morning and struggled with a zipper that I swear went up fine last week. Which is lovely, don't get me wrong, but it will be nice to have a quiet Christmas and some peaceful time when the gallivanting is over. First though we had the final day of primary school. You can probably tell that I was making the uniform last to the end of the year, regardless of growth.



It was raining. Orienteering went ahead regardless, and he actually quite enjoyed it, although mostly because they got to jump in puddles. I was late for the after school mum's champagne celebration because I had to take him home first for a hot shower and a change of clothes.



He also wanted me to dye him some t-shirts to wear for the festive season. Which is very nice, and of course I obliged. He picked out some of my fabric as examples of the colours he'd like.




I warned him that I wasn't very good at replicating colours .... and it was true. I missed the green by a country mile, but he says he still likes them, and has worn them, so it must be true! What a good son.

 

Distracted

So much to do, and not focussing on any of it. I'm not really getting ready for Christmas, or the holiday, or the beach. It's hot, and I'm tired, and nothing seems very appealing at the moment except a cold drink and a quiet sofa. I bailed on one set of Christmas drinks at the weekend because of having to run the children around places, despite spending most of the year whining that I have no friends and never get to go anywhere. We did have our annual christmas catch up with one group of friends - a perfect summer's afternoon of eating and drinking and playing games. Quoits over champagne bottles is traditional.



And school assemblies, and concerts, and picking the kids up from various non-educational activities (an afternoon of video games! outrageous). We had the year 6 graduation on Monday - after seven years of primary school they are a pretty tight-knit bunch. Which is great, but they're also heading off to a dozen different high schools. There was a bit of twelve-year-old-girl sobbing, probably excusably because it was from the twelve year old girls. Lots of photos. I went the other way and took one of the parents. Feeling not at all sobby, but quite pleased.

We are going to keep in touch. Most of these were graduating their youngest child so really the end of the era! Including for us, after 9 years with the school. And I can say hand on heart that my kids have had one of the best primary educations you can get, at the local public school. It has been amazing.

 

Multicoloured dyed scarf of much colourfulness

So I wove eight of the colours into a scarf. I didn't use the green because, as I know now, you have to wind the skein into a ball before you do anything with it. If you try and do anything with a skein it will just go crazy. A useful lesson there. This is the bright green, and it is completely impenetrably tangled. Maybe one day when I have nothing better to do I will untangle it ... but not today.



I wanted to get an idea how every one of the colours wove up with every other one of the colours so I did eight even stripes up the warp and wove about three inches of each on the weft, in the same order. So you can see the rectangles where the warp and weft are the same - from left to right on the picture below it's the brown, the green, the black and the red. There's still a bit of variegation even with one colour because the dye took more in spots than in others. Where you're dyeing cotton, bits of white are an absolute no-no - they look really amateurish and appalling. But with wool it doesn't seem to have the same effect. A bit of undyed or lightly dyed looks quite good.

I took a close up of this bit because I think this is my favourite colour combination - the black and green and brown together. Isn't that unexpected? Yellow is my absolute favourite colour in quilting but it doesn't give the same oomph to weaving (in my extremely limited experience). The blue and pink down the bottom also look lovely together.



You can tell that it is slightly "warp-faced" that is, the warp shows more than the weft. If you look at the pure black rectangle, the one immediately below is red warp, black weft ... and it looks quite red. The rectangle immediately to the right of the pure black rectangle is black warp, red weft ... and it looks quite black. If my weave was perfectly balanced they would both read as much the same colour, and they don't.

So this is the finished product draped over the back of a chair. I plaited the fringe again to make little fat braids, which are very cute. I am definitely going to wear this one. When it was done I "wet finished" i.e. handwashed it, and some colour came out, but not heaps. I will up the rinsing for the next batch, but I wouldn't be terrified to wear it in the rain or anything. I am going to try dyeing variegated skeins next! Different colours!!!! Such fun.

 

 

December hurtling past

There seems to be a lot on at the moment - not so much for me because my life is very boring - but the boys have constant end of year festivities. Number one son is basically on bludging for the next two weeks - sessions called "movie appreciation" at school which means a DVD of Gremlins 2 and microwave popcorn. Number two son isn't doing quite so well; he is absolutely outraged that the final day's "treat" is going to be orienteering - which is his idea of hell, especially if it's 35 degrees. I said that given it is his last day ever of primary school he could probably take a packet of chips and sit under a tree without fear of repercussion (certainly not from me, I completely sympathise) but he is still very cross about the whole idea.

I dropped number one off at a water pistol party on Saturday that was over the road from the house where my husband I first lived when we came to Canberra twenty-two years ago! Such a nostalgia trip ... until I turned the corner and saw they'd completely knocked down the little 1960s brick box we rented and built something else. Gentrification? It's not exactly a posh end of town ... and that brick box was hideous, so I shouldn't be sad. But I am. It was fun.



On Sunday afternoon we decorated the Christmas tree. Or the boys did - while disrespecting our tree ornaments as tacky - most of which THEY CHOSE as toddlers because the bigger and shinier and sparklier the better! And it's too late to change them now, they are Our Family Tradition. As is watching 1980s music videos while we put the tree up (I tried to play Christmas carols once and got shouted down).

 

Other than that I spent the weekend weaving, a bit of light shopping (nothing useful like Christmas presents, I am not an early shopper) and trying to keep cool. The parliamentary sitting year is finally over after a frantic last couple of weeks, and we're all a bit tired. So a work morning tea is in order. I made cheesecakes like my mother used to make - that is, what the Edmond's cookbook calls cheesecakes. They have no cheese in them at all; a pastry base, with a spoon of jam, then a sponge cake top. I am sure they have a much more sensible name in the rest of the world?

Dyeing wool

Two 500 g cones of 3 ply white wool arrived from Bendigo Woollen Mills during the week - so it's on to wool dyeing! Very exciting. I have researched extensively on the internet when I should have been using my time more productively, and it really is just a matter of food colouring and white vinegar. So much easier than chemicals and gloves and masks for the procion fibre reactive dyes I've been using to dye cotton.

First you have to wind your wool into skeins. I did it on the legs of a footstool, which worked perfectly well, but apparently you can get actual apparatus to do this. It doesn't take a great deal of brain work though, so fine to do in front of the TV when you've finished folding the washing. The endless endless washing.



In a scarf that has a three-metre warp and 130 ends there is about 800 metres of wool (assuming a balanced weave, which is a big assumption in my case!). I was wanting to dye in 100m lots - so that about eight balls would do a scarf. Just as a rough guide to make sure I have enough before I start. There is about 2000m of wool on a 500g cone of 3 ply, according to Bendigo Woollen Mills, which means 100m should weigh about 25 g. So I skeined up my hanks and weighed them on the kitchen scales. They are a bit random because I couldn't be bothered putting them back on the footstool if it was only a bit off, but generally we are dealing with about 100 m skeins.



After tieing them up, I soaked them in vinegar and water (about one part vinegar to five parts water) overnight. Mmmm, soggy wool. Looks like noodles.



The next step is to add the food colouring and apply heat. I used the little bottles of gel food colouring (AmeriColor) which was what the nearest shop had. I got six colours (turquoise, blue, fuschia, red, yellow and black). I squeezed in about half a teaspon of the gel, with about a cup or two of cold water, stirred it until it was mixed properly and added the hank. Then I put it on the heat, and when it came to the boil, took it off the heat. Apparently you have to avoid the wool felting, which will just make a messy tangle of blah - and wool will felt with sudden changes of temperature and agitation. So I tipped it carefully into another bowl, rinsed out the saucepan and used it for the next one. A different colour! So much fun.



I also did some in the microwave. Water and food colouring mixed in a pyrex jug, add the wool, then microwave for two minutes and sit. Another two minutes and sit. The thing with food colouring is that the water goes clear when it's done - all the dye is absorbed into the wool. And if the water's not clear, or close to clear, then you heat it up again and add more vinegar until it's clear. Or until you get sick of it, whichever comes first. I only had to re-heat one lot, the rest didn't need it. I think it depends on how much dye you put in. I didn't measure anything.

Then you leave it in the dye until it's completely cool, rinse it in warm water with a bit of wool wash (or dishwashing liquid because you are in the kitchen and you can't be bothered walking ten steps to the laundry to get the wool wash) and dry it somewhere out of direct sunlight.



Aren't they pretty? It was so simple, and you don't have to worry about splashes or chemicals because it is literally actual food that you are using. The wierd thing for me is not being able to fiddle with it - I am used to smashing the cotton about to get the dye where I want it, and this is quite different. And I got a proper black! I've never done a proper black with cotton, but the wool took like magic. They are the six colours just straight, then mixes to make the orange, brown, purple and green.

 

Another beach weekend

 

After a hot week in Canberra I was very happy to head off to the beach on Friday after work - with number one son this time. Number two had a birthday party on Friday evening, and a one-night-only Japanese anime film he and his friends HAD to see on Saturday night ... so my husband stayed with him and me and the big lad drove down to the ocean.

 

This photo was taken Saturday morning when I went for a walk. I left a note in case my son woke up - but he didn't. Not until 12.30!!! What is this? Fourteen year old boys are indeed the sleeping and eating machines that everyone said they would be. I shouldn't be surprised but somehow I still am.

 

I was determined to swim, so even though it was only about 20 degrees, we got into our togs on Saturday afternoon and headed round to the big beach to catch some waves. The water was FREEZING, but we stayed in for about three quarters of an hour. The surf was quite good. I had a wetsuit and an insulating layer of subcutaenous fat, so I was actually fine, but my son who had neither was getting a bit chilly by the end. Actually he was turning blue, and shivering, so time to go home for a hot shower.

 

We went to the big beach because the surf at the beach out of the front wasn't very good, but it turned out a sensible decision because the front beach was absolutely littered with blue bottles. These aren't the ones that kill you - normally - but the sting is apparently extremely painful. We don't swim when they come in. It's usually on an easterly wind and they're gone a day after the wind changes.

 

 

I dragged him out for an evening walk. It wasn't  particularly pleasant, but we had the beach to ourselves! Lots of lovely fresh air. He was taking artistic photos with his iphone of shells and stuff.

Wool and cotton

Here is the next scarf - I was very pleased with how easy the cotton was to warp on the yellow and green scarf, so I did blue and yellow 3 ply crochet cotton on the warp, and then put a selection of random stuff on the weft to see how it hung together.



The colours are not very complementary on the ball - that browny yellow really didn't match at all - but once you get it woven in and the colours blend it's amazing what a difference there is. They seem to work much better together. The bright blue and the browny yellow are a fluffy acrylic; the yellow is that wierd linen/cotton again; the dark blue is an 8-ply wool I had in the cupboard and I used a bit of the cotton on the warp as well.



I plaited the fringe which took a while but ended up quite cute.The fluffy feels lovely! I am totally going to wear this next winter.  You really can use any random yarn on the weft, so I'm eyeing off my tub of assorted wools I've collected over the years. Some of them are hideous synthetics but maybe it's their time to shine! But firstly I'm going to take a short detour into wool dyeing. I have ordered some plain white 3-ply and read all about it on the internet and I can't wait to try it. You use food colouring! How cool is that. I will take photos.

Summer summer summer summer

Remind me not to whinge about cold weather - the weekend was scorching! Thirty-two degrees both days and building up to a whopper electrical storm on Sunday evening. That delivered a heap of very welcome rain. We had put aside the weekend for gardening ... but it was too hot. After a couple of hours on Saturday morning I was drooping (and dripping) so had a cold shower and gave up. The garden is looking lovely though. We hauled a lot of mulch to try and keep the weeds down and the soil reasonably cool.



In the afternoon we went to the 100 objects exhibition at the National Museum. It was awesome! Objects from the British Museum, which may be worth visiting at some point in my life :) We ooo'd and aaah'd at the amazingly old things, and odd things, and interesting things - and did the "if you could take one home what would it be?" discussion. Both my husband and I decided, independently, that we would take home the chronometer from the Beagle. We both thought that the actual chronometer (which is a very cool thing in itself) from the actual Beagle would be pretty awesome to have on your sideboard.



On Sunday I went to book club where the bloke in our book club (there's only one) had picked 'Lightning' by Dean Koontz. It was crap. Even the bloke said it wasn't as good as he remembered it from 1989 when he read it first. No shit. About fifty pages in I thought 'Jesus Christ this better not be time-travelling Nazis' and what do you know, another twenty pages, turns out they're time-travelling Nazis. Not that a crap book matters because we only spend ten minutes talking about the book anyway! Our  next event is the Christmas dinner, and we decided to not even try to have a book for that one. Just dinner.

 

Trying cotton

The 4-ply blue wool scarf was lovely once it was woven, but it was a tiny bit thick and fluffy to go comfortably through the heddle slots when I was warping. So I've done another scarf as an experiment with 3-ply crochet cotton - just the stuff from Spotlight, so nothing fancy. Mostly cream with three narrow green stripes on one side and three narrow yellow stripes on the other side. And here is the finished product.



I experimented with a variety of different threads on the weft. Some of it is the same crochet cotton that I used on the warp - yellow at far right in the photo above - which makes a nice light open weave. Some of it is thicker yarn - the cream is an 8-ply cotton that I use for knitting dishcloths. The thick yellow is a cotton/linen blend that felt absolutely lovely on the ball but wove up really strange ... quite coarse and ropey and spongey. I don't know how to predict what yarn will do! The thin green is crochet cotton and the darker thicker green is a cotton/silk blend that was on special at Spotlight and is really lovely, both on the ball and woven. I just hemstiched the ends, and trimmed and knotted the fringe.

 

The cotton was much easier to warp, but the finished product isn't as nice as the cuddly wool. And my edges are still a bit wobbly. I have washed it and will perhaps use it as a summer scarf. Is there such a thing? We're headed for our first thirty degree day of the summer today, and I don't really want to wear any kind of scarf. Anyway, for the record, this was another 120 end scarf 2.5 m long on the 12 dpi heddle.

Quick beach weekend

Number two son and I snuck down to the beach for a little getaway on the weekend - my husband had his annual scale modelling club exhibition / competition so we took ourselves away from that madness and enjoyed some sun and sea.

I didn't swim although I probably should have - the weather was beautiful but the water is still a bit cool. Number two son spent a happy couple of hours in the slightly warmer waters of the creek building sandcastles and watching the sand bars get washed away.



I threw my loom on the back seat and happily warped it up down there. It is a very portable craft - at least when using my wee loom. And the bamboo has grown well, although not as rapidly as the neighbour's shed! Very sensibly they built the structure at the back first, so we have a big shed and the frame of the first storey of the house up. Even though it is ugly and very close to our house, at least now we know what we're dealing with, and hopefully the bamboo will do its thing and provide a nice tall green wall to block it out.




We came back Sunday morning to go to the school fete - they decided to have a "twilight fiesta" this year, starting at 3pm and going through to 7 pm. And including a bar, for the first time. Which is all good in theory but it was absolutely freezing and blowing gale force winds. Nobody wanted to sit around with a nice glass of chardy, even for charitable purposes! The trash and treasure, the book stall and the cake stall were all in the school hall and very well patronised. The rides were fine too, but I think the food stalls copped the worst of it. I did my hour on the Mexican food stall selling nachos and corn on the cob to the starving masses ... the food stalls all sold out in the end so I think overall the fete did just fine. Not much you can do about the weather.

On the plus side we got rid of at least eight bags of stuff to the trash and treasure. On the minus side my son bought back one bag of assorted crap, including something that I had donated. Sigh.

 

 

Weaving at home

During our weaving course I'd been thinking about buying myself a rigid heddle loom to weave on at home. My weaving teacher said that the Canberra Spinners and Weavers hire out equipment, and she'd ask them to see if there was any available - I might have to join but she would ask. So she came back with this - I am not hiring it but "borrowing" it, as apparently they don't really even want it on their books. It is not a fancy loom. It is as basic as you can get. I think it is home-made.

 

It was missing an apron rod, so I went down the hardware and bought some more dowel, and some thin skirting board for stick shuttles. My husband did some sawing and drilling and I did some sanding and bam! everything I need to weave. I warped it on the dining room table with the loom on an upturned washing basket. The wine is not compulsory (yes it is, it took about two hours while I figured everything out).

 The heddle kept moving about so I propped it up on a very large Peter F. Hamilton.

And for the rest of the week I've been weaving! The edges are much harder to keep straight than the nicer looms we had at class, and I can only do plain weave on this because it doesn't have shafts as such ... but I turned something from yarn to cloth. This is still quite amazing to me.

And here is the end result. A nice soft blue-toned scarf with a fringe. For the record (becaue I never write this down) this is done with a 4-ply baby wool on both warp and weft, 120 ends 2.5 metres long, with a 12 dpi heddle. I am well and truly addicted.

Scarves and tie-dyed t-shirts





Here is a bigger photo of my scarf - still not a great shot - it turns out scarves are even harder to photograph than quilts! I was going to give it an action shot on my pink wool coat but it was just too hot. We had the first proper summer storm last night with three hours of thunder and lightning and hail and heavy rain ... cooled the air down nicely after a hot and humid day.

 

 

It's been a busy sitting week at work as everyone tries to get things done before the end of the year. I'm not going to comment on the US election. It's too depressing ... but if there's one thing that working at Parliament House has taught me it's how easy it is to get caught up in it all and forget there's a whole big world that really isn't influenced by govrnment at all. So I will hold that thought, and attempt to be zen.

 

 

We went to a Woodstock themed party last Saturday night and I got to use my dyeing skills for an actual garment! That my husband then wore!!! It was heaps of fun (both the party and the dyeing) because the brief was just to make it as loud as possible. I can do that! And we were a long way from being the most colourful people in the room ... here is the dog wondering what on earth is going on. I don't think dogs are as colour blind as most people think.

 

Another head cold

I fully meant to blog earlier in the week but got knocked down by yet another head cold - this has been the sickest year! I don't know why, it's not like I'm working too hard or going anywhere particularly full of germs. Must just be old age. I left work early on Tuesday  and had Wednesday at home to recover. Which meant I missed the work Melbourne Cup festivities ... chicken and champagne lunch and watching the race. I had already bought $20 worth of sweep tickets (and got back exactly $2.40. Gamble Responsibly.) I think the cold is starting to go away, and a couple of days at home over the weekend will perk me up. I wanted to go down the coast but that's not going to happen sadly - I am too woozy for the open road.



Last weekend was fairly busy - number two son had his birthday party which was lovely. This is the cream-filled sponge with passionfruit icing and sliced banana birthday cake. They are very self-contained and nice group of kids and they just sort of hung out, and ate, and took the dog to the park. Twelve year olds .... long may it last. One of his friends stayed for a sleepover which was good, and then we went to her parents' house for lunch on Sunday and had our own little party. Finally, some social life of my own. And yes, he has green hair again. Leprechaun.

I went for a run Sunday morning and it was super windy and grey. They were having races of those tiny little boats with one person and sails like teatowels. This photo is just them starting off but I think some could have come to grief before too long; it was that windy. The water didn't look particularly pleasant to have tipped over into.



And we had our last weaving class, which is sad, becasue I have been enjoying it very much. I hem stitched the ends of my scarf and twirled the fringe into little tassels with this fringe twirling machine. A bit fiddly but rather fun. I have washed the scarf, which apparently is essential to make it square and set the threads or something, and I'll take a proper photo of the finished product to show you all. In the meantime you can admire my twirly fringe. That boucle really didn't want to co-operate.

 

 

 

Squares, squares, squares

I decided to do a border of pieced squares on the delectable mountains quilt - I thought it needed something on the same scale as the interior, but not more triangles. So squares. Which is all very simple in theory but it took me absolutely FOREVER to do a very basic border of three rows of 1 1/2" squares. And I am not at all confident in my seam matching. It looks good in the end, although probably not so much better than a plain border.



But it is done now, and I'm starting to think about the next project. Something a bit less scrappy, and a bit more modern, and not so many seams. I have preliminary-pulled a few fabrics to see - based on the blue-background poinsettia print that I've had for ages and never used. It doesn't go well with others, so I might make it the focal point and select others to go with it. Still pondering anyway - a full week of work won't allow for many new projects to start.



And this turned up to weaving class last week - a funny little toy loom but it made me laugh because we had one exactly like it when I was growing up! I had forgotten all about it until I saw that one so nicely in its box. I have no idea whether it's the same brand as ours because we had lost the box, half the bits and (crucially) the instructions ... I know my older sister once successfully wove something on it but I never quite understood how it was supposed to work. Didn't stop me trying though! Every few months I'd wind something on and fiddle around with it before ditching it back into the cupboard. Hah.

 

Explanations to my readers

So, this is a galah. Beautiful bird - pink and grey - but dumb. Tends to end up as roadkill, which is what the other weavers have named my scarf. Thank you ladies.

(Photo credit - Peter Fullagar)

This is a democracy sausage. A cross between a bake sale and a sausage sizzle; resulting from Australia's combination of fine weather, Saturday elections and compulsory voting. And chronic underfunding of public schooling, if you believe the parent-teacher association.

A heddle is "a looped wire or cord with an eye in the centre through which a warp yarn is passed in a loom before going through the reed to control its movement and divide the threads" - except in a rigid heddle loom it's not wire but a fixed wooden contraption. So you can only do plain weave.

And Dad, this is to konmari something. Marie Kondo is a bit crazy, but quite edifying. Frankly, I think you could adopt some of her principles, just saying. You are supposed to go through all your possessions and ask "does this spark joy?" and if not, you ditch it ...

And back to Monday

We had a quiet weekend - my husband was up in Brisbane for his mother's 75th and sister's 50th birthdays - so the boys and I mostly hung out at home. Number two son had his birthday as well (very popular month, October) and one of his presents was a ticket to Wicked currently playing at the Canberra Theatre. He is clearly too young to go alone, so I was forced to accompany him.



It was awesome! Very loud (I don't think they had the sound exactly right) but wonderful songs and a very talented cast. We had prepped up by listening to the soundtrack beforehand, and we had both read the book. I don't think it is entirely age appropriate for my son, but he wouldn't be stopped. I've never tried to censor my kids' reading, I figure if it's too old for them they will think it's boring, and I used to read all sorts of stuff from a ridiculously early age. Anyway, the musical was very enjoyable; with a full house of people who all clearly enjoyed it too.

On Sunday we went into the city to run some errands and for him to spend some of his birthday money (never takes that child very long to spend money). I was waiting for them outside some shop and noticed the knitted trees. Not sure what's going on there. They didn't look at all weatherbeaten so it must be quite recent. A bit groovy for Canberra.