On it goes

A cold and sleety day today so on with the fire! It is making such a difference with the very bleak grey weather. And I still enjoy lighting it, putting more wood on it, even cleaning the ashes out. We will see how long that lasts. 

I bought some strange bobbly wool from Lincraft on sale - I don't usually bother even looking because it is mostly acrylic and oddly expensive - but this was a 100 gram ball of 100% wool for $4. It looked interesting and was a bargain so I bought it, dyed it fiery yellow and orange and wove it up.

It's strange but I like it. I deliberately did a very fine warp quite far apart, so the weft would draw all the attention, which I think it does. It's very solid, almost like a rug.

I have some more that I've dyed blue and I'm going to make a wider thing, almost like a blanket. 

Other than that not much is going on. I did my week's work and now I have another three weeks off, for what it's worth. I'm going to make sure I leave Canberra a few times otherwise it just gets sucked into an endless whirlpool of boring chores. I traipsed around town today following recommendations on fixing my handbag - but it's not possible apparently. You can't get grease stains out without destroying the leather. So that's a bummer. On the plus side, I went to a vocal workshop on Saturday afternoon - like a group singing lesson for very beginners. I certainly learnt a lot (I didn't even really know how vocal cords work, and now I do) and it was fun to sing in a group. I might find a choir with very low standards....

Variegated wool

I bought eight balls of multi-coloured wool a while ago, and then did the pull test on it, and discovered it wasn't strong enough for a warp. Which is fine, I will use it on wefts ... and I did. And then took some crappy photos just before the suitcase rummage because I was worried that I would sell them all with no record! Hah!

I thought I would start with left over dark and light yarn, in stripes, to see what looked better. There is black, light blue, and cream, and they all look quite cool.



So I did a darker one - this is the leftover Bendigo wool/silk blend in dark red and blue stripes. Different again, although you don't get many of the weft colours coming through.



Then I thought that perhaps I would do a grey warp to really let the variegated colours stand out. I'm not sure if it worked so well.



And lastly two random balls of crochet cotton - yellow of course - that I had in the cupboard. This is actually quite cute in person, although the cotton's not very snuggly.



Have I used up all eight balls? No I have not. Has my enthusiasm for this wool vanished? Yes it has. I am at work again this week, although just showing my face until I take another chunk of leave. It is very very quiet in here but I'm glad I came in to keep things kicking along for a while.

Ticked one off the list

I only had two must-do things on my leave list - the taxes and repainting the bathroom ceiling. Taxes are done, and the bathroom ceiling is now done too. When we had the ensuite bathroom done in 2013 (and I found the date on this blog, what a wonderful tool for keeping track of the minutiae of my life) the paint job was pretty crappy to be honest. It started peeling and showing mould within a year, and bothered me every time I looked at the bathroom ceiling. Which wasn't all that often luckily.

 

Anyway it gave me a great deal of pleasure to borax the mould off, scrape and sand the flakey paint off, and give two solid coats of proper water-resistant and anti-mould ceiling paint. Ceilings are a bit of a pain because you're looking up the whole time, but it's such a small area it didn't matter. Hopefully I did everything right and it won't start peeling off or growing fungus again, but only time will tell!



We went for a lovely walk around the lake on Sunday. The weather was exquisite, clear and warm, and some of the trees still have autumn colours. We also voted in the federal election on Saturday, where the centre-right party was re-elected against everyone's predictions, including their own. Canberra remains completely left wing of course :)

I cried because of a handbag

I think I mentioned that I bought myself a proper grown-up handbag in Sydney, and it has been lovely! Solidly made, exactly the right size, comfortable, and looks good. Or it did look good, until number two son left his takeaway lid on the table, and I laid my handbag on top of it, and now one side has a large ineradicable grease stain that looks exactly like a rectangular takeaway lid and left over singapore noodles. It is a lovely cobalt blue, and the stain is much darker, and very obvious, and I cried.

In fact I sobbed, for quite a while. It was that thing where my house is tatty, my car is dirty, my clothes are too tight, my career is going nowhere, and I spend my time driving other people around and making largely inedible meals ... but my handbag? My handbag was Perfect.  So I may have overreacted to its Ruin.

This was yesterday morning, and because I like to run away from my problems, I picked the furthest away town that was consistent with getting home in time to pick number one son up from his university extension course, and went to Yass for the rest of the day. Yass is a town of about ten thousand people about an hour away from Canberra. It is very cute, and I had a delicious mushroom burger for lunch and sat in the cafe reading the newspaper, and wandered around the middle of town, poking around the shops and admiring the historic buildings. (I'm from Canberra, anything built before 1950 is historical).



There was an excellent ramshackle antique / junk shop that seemed to be made of several buildings knocked together that took a good hour to poke through. I bought some champagne glasses that nearly match the one that was smashed a couple of weeks ago, and didn't buy the carved bathroom stand in the photo below! I saw it and said "good god" and random old lady said "fight you for it" and her husband looked worried for just a split second even though they must have been married for fifty years.

Anyway the weather was exquisite, and the landscape to the north is beautiful in the sun (the sky seems bigger than here) and I felt much better by the time I got home. I tried some internet remedies for grease stains (cornflour) overnight which didn't work, and halfheartedly googled replacements but it's a Coach men's messenger bag, and they don't seem to have the blue anywhere, it's boring black or brown or navy. I think I will just have to accept that I am a plastic handbag person.

Suitcase rummage

Today I packed my scarves in a suitcase and hauled them to my $25 spot at the suitcase rummage - a kind of low key market / clothes swap that happens here and there every now and again. I didn't have high hopes (it is more focussed on young trendy things, and vintage) and I'm glad because I sold exactly four scarves over the five hours sitting in the freezing cold! I'd also taken a suitcase of clothes, which went slightly better, although not with the hipsters. Just the middle-aged or elderly, of which there were a few.



I had the boys as helpers, which was very kind of them, especially because the fog didn't lift until one and it was very very cold.  Number one read his book and went and got snacks, and number two listened to music and bought himself some second hand clothes, which are very cool on him and were super cheap.  Lots of people commented very positively on my scarves, but perhaps it wasn't the right crowd to sell many ... with the low entry cost I thought it was a chance to offload some. They are kind of taking over the house a bit. The price was about right looking at the other hand-made stuff there, but there weren't a lot of people about. Perhaps a combination of the cold weather and Mother's Day.

I sold my 1960s leopard fake fur coat to a gay couple who were going to a 'fur party', and my 1990s camel wool coat to an elderly lady who regretted giving away one just like it twenty years ago. My target market! And then finally  home to make a roaring fire and have takeaway for dinner .... not cooking on Mother's Day.

Back to chaos

Gee, I'm glad I enjoyed that three hours of peace and quiet when I last posted, because there hasn't been any since. The pansies have been sprayed with a combination of water and tabasco - but we have to wait until the flowers come back to see if they get eaten. And I haven't conquered the fire lighting yet, but I'm giving it a red hot go. Get it? Red hot? Oh hilarious. 

Last weekend my husband's parents, sister and her family, and aunt and uncle, were in town for the Last Post ceremony for his great-grandfather who died in WWI. The Australian War Memorial has the ceremony every day, and they commemorate someone who died serving in the defence forces, and tell their story. There are usually quite a few tourists, and visiting VIPs, and a piper and a bugler and an ode. I don't really go the War Memorial at all, but trotted along for this one, and it was just lovely. They had a picture of Private Greer, and the family placed wreaths, and then an Army corporal talked about him and his service, and family. It was beautifully done, and very moving - they look after the family very well, making sure we knew what to expect. Here is my husband and number two son after placing a wreath.

 

So after that we went out for a meal, then Saturday night everyone came back to our place for dinner, which was fantastic, although did involve vacuuming the dog hair off every surface. The dog loved it (she loves visitors, and hopes for dropped food). 

 

Then number one son had to be in Sydney first thing Monday morning, so instead of putting him on the 3 am bus I drove him up Sunday afternoon. We spent the night in a hotel, then he went off to his thing and I went to the art gallery. It was a beautiful clear Sydney day - cold and crisp.

 

There were about as many people looking at 15th - 19th century European art as you would expect on  a sunny Monday morning in Sydney. I had a lovely couple of hours, then went to a wool shop, then son texted to say he was finished so we had lunch and drove back home (an hour later than we should have because we caught a bus back to the hotel and missed the stop by FOUR KILOMETRES so had to catch a bus back the other way, except my Opal card had run out of credit, so had to find a shop to recharge it .... it was a comedy of errors except by this stage NOT FUNNY.) 

 

This giant metal Captain Cook is not 19th century European - actually by a NZ artist. He is quite cool, just relaxing there.

So today  I went for a run, did the grocery shopping, laundry, and finally finished off the taxes after FIVE conversations with Red Cross, who are having difficulty issuing an accurate tax invoice. I am quite concerned about their lack of ability to keep track of money, but they got there in the end. 

Starting to breathe out

I've (nearly) done the taxes, offloaded several items to the local Buy Nothing group, tidied up several more drawers and taken yet another boot full of stuff for donations. I've tried conquering the fireplace - I am not very good at lighting it yet, it takes more attention than I feel it should, but I'm using a scientific approach to find out what works. My Dad did it with a single match of course, but he's gone home, and I have to figure it out myself.... But it's worth it. Even though we haven't had any below zero temps yet, the firelight in the corner is just so lovely, it's worth the agonised staring. I tend to fiddle with it too much, I think the secret is just to leave it alone.

We actually had some rain this morning - 2 mm, but we take what we can get - and the garden is looking very autumnal. My husband bought some pansies for winter hanging baskets that look fabulous, although he is super pissed off about the pansies that went into the big pots for winter colour. Something has eaten almost all the flowers of them, apparently "that bastard possum" which is a variety I am unfamiliar with. Why would anything just eat the flowers? Are they tastier? Don't possums eat fruit?



I am not sure what we can do about it. Possums are protected here (in NZ we would just catch it and drown it (well, truthfully, I only did that once in NZ, and felt very guilty)) and we can't net the pansies, surely. They look quite feeble though.



I have also been for two runs, where I realised how fat and slow I am, but the weather has been very warm while we wait for the rain to come in. We've known it was coming for two days, and it should have been more than a morning's worth....



So I am generally starting to wind down and actually realise that I am on holiday. Still quite a few more chores on the list, but it is nice to do them in the peace and quiet.