Continuing on

Merry Christmas everyone - I am so looking forward to a break which may - covid-willing - involve some beach time! The Sydney outbreak looks like it's on the decline with only 8 cases yesterday; they've put some serious lockdowns in place so it should keep shrinking. Famous last words! I like looking back on these blog posts with my narrator voice on "But she was wrong. It was not on the decline. Even as she wrote those words, a mutant strain was brewing in the Dee Why bowlo that would change the face of Christmas .... for everyone" etc.

Lifeline held its first bookfair this year which was a very joyous occasion. I don't think many people knew it was on because when I went for Sunday-afternoon-$20-a-bag there were hardly any people there and still masses of books. Good books too, so I filled two grocery bags to the absolute brim and I will enjoy them at my leisure. This is the desk in the bedroom.

There are some library books in there too, just I case I run out. Despite working through Christmas last year to organise that massive conference I am not taking leave this year - just the time between Christmas and New Year when my organisation closes down. I feel slightly ripped off but there's not really any option given how short we are on staff at the moment, but I feel that I am owed a holiday. Perhaps March?

What a difference in a year

Ten days without a post! All I can say is that work is completely bonkers, and weekends are full of sleeping and socialising. We were meant to have a weekend away to walk to the top of Australia's highest mountain (not that high, it's a day walk, there might be snow or there might not) but the weather forecast was bad so we decided not to. Even though it's not exactly the Alps you still don't want to get caught in a sleet storm so we put it off until March. Apparently January and February 'the flies will carry you away' which doesn't sound appealing. So I went for my usual 16 km on Saturday morning and on Sunday afternoon we went (with the boys) out to Tidbinbilla to do the Sanctuary wetlands walk.

It's almost exactly a year since we were here with my brother and sister-in-law from NZ. It was shockingly, terribly, depressingly dry. These two photos are the same spot - a year ago and yesterday.

This is why Australia burnt down in January. Everything was bone dry and dead.

But what a difference a year makes. I know that something major has to be done about the climate or these dry spells will just continue and get worse, but in the meantime, it is very pleasant to see turtles and fish and black swans and magpie geese and even a tiny little Eastern bettong rustling in the undergrowth. 

More weaving

I'm finding a heap of good things to binge on Netflix and Binge and SBS On Demand ... which fits in nicely with lots and lots of weaving. Ages ago I ordered a very cheap microfibre yarn from Ice which I have never used - it looked incredibly shiny and plasticky and ugly, despite being a pretty blue. I wove a sample and it weaves beautifully; looks like twine, feels like silk. 

But I couldn't get over the appearance of it so left it in the cupboard until I was feeling adventurous a couple of weeks ago. I put it in narrow stripes with a plain mid-brown on the weft, and the pale blue fluffy alpaca blend on the weft. And it's lovely! The bit of shiny is fine, and the colours blend beautifully.

I was so pleased that I did the same thing with green: plain wool and shiny stripes on the warp and a fluffy mohair blend on the weft. That turned out nicely as well, it is very light and flowy.

So I decided to go the whole hog and do a full warp of the peculiar microfibre (which made it much easier to deal with, unsurprisingly it stretched completely differently to the wool yarn so stripes was a bit awkward to manage) with my dyed blue/yellow on the weft. And I'm pleased with that too! 

Except for the ugly plasticky fringe. I might just cut it fairly short and forget about it. You can't tell from photos but it is very soft and drapes beautifully.

And finally here is one that has no shiny bits at all, just the brown and green in a 3-1. This is a cool threading because it makes two quite different patterns on each side as you can see below. The colours aren't very exciting but it would probably be quite a practical scarf to wear.

Windy as heck

It was hot and windy on Saturday, then it rained, and it was cold and windy on Sunday. Not the best kind of weather for doing anything outside but I forced myself to do the 16 km walk on Sunday morning so I would have had some exercise. The lake was brown from the rain and white-capped from the wind and VERY unappealing. Usually Sunday morning is yacht racing and dragon boating but not today. 

There were still quite a few people out and about though, biking slowly into the wind or running happily in the other direction. It doesn't matter so much when you're walking.

Saturday I did lots of errands, which was satisfying but I forgot that Christmas shopping is upon us and the shops were PACKED. The boys have not expressed much interest in presents this year so they could be getting bugger all if they don't give me some ideas soon. Or I could chuck cash at them I suppose. I was set on finding a pair of white lace up summer shoes, which I did, and they are nicer than they sound - not lawn bowls shoes, honestly. 

A rayon dress

One of the sundresses that I made at the beach is so comfortable that I've started wearing it to work - you can snazzy anything up with tights and a jacket! Rayon is lovely to wear but a bit of a curse to sew with; too slippery. Luckily this dress has hardly any seams.

It is a raglan sleeve with a centre back seam but absolutely zero shaping anywhere else. So yes, a sack, but at the same time it falls nicely through the body and of course is incredibly easy to wear. It does need ironing after washing but that won't kill me. These photos were taken by the 6'2" number one son so are on a downward slope! I am trying to be cool sewing blogger with this pose but I think the background is not working in my favour (although I am so happy with my new kitchen that I would put it in every photo if I could).

This photo I took in the mirror to try and show the raglan sleeve seams but of course you can't see a thing in the print. Which is good. And the inside of the seams are beautifully finished with my lovely overlocker, which does make a very nice edge. And this is the pattern - it is designed for knits but seems to work fine on wovens for me - because I am not making anything tightfitting! Plenty of room to pull it over my head and then float away from the blubber rolls.

Heatwave at the beach

This weekend was the first of the summer heatwaves - cracking 40 across most of the south-east - and I very very happily spent it at the beach. The heat was coming from westerly winds which means even our place was scorching; one of the handful of days a year when we think maybe we should get air-conditioning. But there is a cure for that, jump in the water, which is still freezing. Wonderfully beautifully freezing. I wore a short wetsuit and stayed in for over an hour both days, and then late in the afternoon a cool change came through and dropped the temperature 15 degrees in half an hour.

As well as swimming I sewed and read and ate. The roof guy came at 6.40 am on Saturday which was a bit early but he repaired the skylight that had been leaking and some other roof-related activities. I didn't get up to inspect it ... but saw his photos. Seems fine (?) and I had a nap in the afternoon after my swim. It was a perfect couple of days and I can't wait for the long Christmas break.

Busy!

I am trying to learn the ropes at my new job - spending a lot of time talking to people which is lovely but tiring. And very little else is happening ... we had a social weekend with friends round for dinner on Saturday and then lunch with other friends on Sunday. I dead headed the roses and pruned back some very shaggy things, but otherwise no exercise. Saturday I went up to the new Spotlight in Gungahlin which is the new suburbs right to the north - I go there about once every five years and remember why I don't bother. Outer flat suburbs with not much going on and lots of sky. Didn't stop me buying a heap of material though :)

I have done a bit of weaving, including with this I dyed myself. It is a lot more yellow than I thought it would be, but quite pretty. Note unfinished crossword in the background, a sure sign I am busy at work and need a holiday.

Once in forty year rain event

 Turns out all that was needed for our garden to look good was the wettest spring since 1976! In hindsight, when we moved into the house 15 odd years ago we should have put in rainwater tanks and a watering system ... but we were so determined not to after the water-guzzling horror of our previous (gorgeous) gardens. If it lived it lived, and if it died it died - which is all well and good but perhaps a medium path of gentle watering might have worked better. 

Even the pretty white climbing rose my husband planted 13 years ago which has never really done much is clambering up the elderly prunus and flowering. 

It is mostly valerian, geraniums, lavender, alyssum and other things that are VERY hard to kill. Pigface of course, and various grasses. 

There's rosemary in there too, and lots and lots of euphorbia. Actually I think they are taking over a bit, so will be harshly dealt with in winter. 

And a king parrot, for some red colour in all the pink. 

Weaving with the Ice Yarns

I've been very happily using the Ice Yarns in every possible combination, and with random things from the cupboard. Scarves are great - they take enough time to get a feeling of accomplishment, but not so long I get bored. And then on to the next one! I will no doubt get sick of it soon but not yet. 

Here's the random few balls on the sewing table. I wind the bobbins up in my sewing room and it is getting covered in fluff and bits of wool. The orange and the green at the bottom of the picture are the same wool in different colours, so I put them together in a straight houndstooth.

The grey is a similar weight but has bobbly bits hanging off it, which gives an interesting texture. I put that with the orange in a log cabin style (yay! quilting term!) that is more subtle than I thought it would be but still quite nice.

The green on the top is a lovely fluffy wool / cotton blend and the colour seems to go with everything. I used the 'zucchini' colours that I dyed ages ago on the warp, with the fluffy green on the weft, and it turned out really pretty. It is super soft as well.

I wanted to keep using the fluffy green so I put a very random collection on the warp of bits of left over green. It is different but I still like it, and of course nice and fluffy. What is the point of a scarf that isn't snuggly?

We had a great weekend once I'd recovered from the week and had some naps. Lovely, lovely naps. I did the 16 km walk again (anti-clockwise this time! quite a different experience) which was easier than the first time. We went out for a fancy lunch with friends and I even managed an hour or so of gardening before it got too hot. 

Such a busy week

 Parliament is back sitting and this week has been busy ... interesting, but busy. And raining still! The garden looks unbelievably lush, this photo is from a week ago and it is already different. The roses are out for starters. 

I did end up getting the new job here I applied for, so I finished up with my current team this week and today I'm wheeling the trolley full of unecessary stationery to my new digs. My new, less salubrious digs ... but I am still next to a window so can't complain. Natural light is a very unusual thing in today's battery hen public sector cubicle farm. 

We are going to do a weekend away with a bushwalk later in the year so I went for a 16 km trial walk to see if I could do it. I could ... just. My little legs were very weary at the end. Here is a completely lucky photo of a sulphur-crested cockatoo on the wing - I startled him as I walked up.

Another cooking fail

We had a work afternoon tea on Tuesday to watch the Melbourne Cup. Normally there's an organisational party but not this year, so our little team sat in the tea room with some snacks and watched the race. Very strange not to have the crowds at the course, and most of us hadn't put any money on it. I thought I would make a lemon drizzle cake ... and it failed.

I forgot to put baking powder in - it needed self-raising flour and I used ordinary flour. Which of course I didn't discover until it had been baking for 45 minutes and I went to check it and found this lumpy rubbery disaster. And I'd made the drizzle too. It was completely unsalvageable so I binned it and made a chocolate brownie instead. The worst thing was I was just about to put the brownie in the oven and thought 'the texture of this is a bit strange' and I'd forgotten to put the eggs in. I think I was a bit tired. 

It has been a tiring week - lots of work on and the US election of course, and even though you know it's not your country it's hard not to watch. The thought of another Trump presidency was deeply depressing - even though it looks like that's not going to happen there will probably be a fair amount of bullshit to go through before he goes away. What a nasty piece of work that man is. 

Wet weekend

 We have had the wettest October in Canberra since 1976, which is very welcome but not much fun. The weekend was predicted to be 100% rain but I went to the beach anyway. Saturday just bucketed and bucketed but Sunday was only showers. 

I didn't swim at all - and the easterlies had brought in the bluebottles. They had to move the nippers on Sunday morning round to the sheltered beach, luckily the winds had made enough waves to do a bit of rescue practice. The parents were huddled in jackets and coats but eight year olds are pretty unstoppable. 

I made a shirt and didn't do much else productive, except buy a vacuum cleaner and a new iron. I had lifted my existing iron from my dad's cupboard (thanks Dad) where it was still in its box and un-used  but it had given up the temperature control ghost and started randomly melting things. The only problem is I deliberately bought an auto-off iron in case I forget about it - turns itself off after 30 minutes. I have one at home and it's great, but the new one doesn't just turn itself off it beeps angrily until you turn it off or use it. What is the point of that? I just want an iron that will quietly go to sleep, not something else in the house that complains at me. In all other ways it is an excellent iron though, so I'll keep it, but nowhere on the box does it say that it has the most annoying beep of any appliance I've heard, and we have a very irritable fridge. 

Swooshy skirt

 Here is the skirt I made last month - it is plaid and swooshy and I wore it to work.

I used McCalls 7022 again because I know it fits, but view F this time so nice and swirly. The material is a fairly boring brushed cotton but I like the plaid and I like that it is a medium weight. In my head it is Alexander McQueen circa 1995 but in reality it is probably more overgrown schoolgirl. It was slightly too short so I hand-sewed a bias binding hem, which looks better anyway, although it seemed to take forever.

Swooshy, swooshy.

Weekend walk

 It rained both days on the weekend, so I mostly sat inside and wove. Weaved. Woved? Sunday I needed to stretch the legs so did a 10km walk and only got slightly sprinkled on. I decided to stick to pavements and parks rather than bush tracks to avoid the mud ... it was lovely but the scenery is looking most un-Canberra like. All the green!

This is very unusual. It is good for bushfires but bad for grass fires - the lush greenery will be brown and crackly dry by Christmas, and the Canberra government is not well set up for prompt grass mowing. Or any grass mowing really, we are not used to it growing beyond ankle high. The storm front came through Friday night when we were happily tucked up in an Indian restaurant with friends. Dining out twice in one week!!!! Hedonism.

My walk took me past another Floriade mini garden, with roses. Our roses at home are starting to bloom, which is a bit later than usual, but that might be because I pruned them so late. At least they are looking very happy with the rain, and not sad dead sticks. Speaking of, the pittosporums are covered with little bumps that look promisingly like new growth ... not actual new growth of course, but potentially they could come back. Or they could be covered with a bizarre fungus, who would know.

Yarn!!!

My Ice Yarns order arrived in record time! I have no idea why, I thought shipping was taking ages at the moment, but I am not going to complain - according to the label it came via Istanbul, Liege, Dubai and Sydney. From my Postal Industry Ombudsman years I retain some interest in international postal hubs, mostly because they are often places you wouldn't expect. And, given 2020, they all sound ridiculously exotic at the moment ... I would be delighted to have a week in a three star hotel by a commercial airport in Belgium right now. DELIGHTED.

And this is the haul. Mostly I went with no-fluff lace weight or fingering weight wool that would sit nicely on a warp. However that blue is a self-striping alpaca blend, and the pink is the beautiful silk-merino blend that I've had before. The light blue is also alpaca and very soft and fluffy so only wefts I think. The cream is an interesting wool-cotton blend that I had hoped to be able to dye for warps but on closer inspection I don't think it's strong enough, so will use for wefts.

That cost me just under $200 Australian including shipping, which is a bit of a bargain. Certainly enough to keep me quietly weaving for many months - I am still mesmerised by putting together different yarns and making them into a length. And yes, I know have dozens and dozens of scarves. I am justifying this by deciding (in my head) that when we retire and move down the coast I will have a stall at the Moruya markets where I will sell them. This may never happen of course, but it has nicely moved my frame of reference from "pointlessly making more scarves I will never wear" to "industriously building up stock for my future cottage industry". Much better.

Sweet sixteen

My littlest baby had his sixteenth birthday, which is quite a shock, even though I knew it was coming. Because he skipped a year of high school he is the young one in his friend group, so he's very happy to have a birthday and catch up a little bit. Until next year.

We went to his favourite Japanese restaurant which was a hit all round (it is truly delicious, I had a lot of tofu, which appears to have gone straight to my CHINS) and they put a candle in his green tea and black sesame ice cream (which was not truly delicious, I don't understand Asian desserts) and everyone sang him happy birthday. Which he tolerated very well.

His father had made him a lovely chocolate cake with chocolate ganache for second dessert when we got back home. Unfortunately in the kitchen reno we have lost the birthday candles - I think I threw them out because we have been re-using them for at least twenty years - but husband says no, they are around somewhere. We couldn't find them, so he ended up with a sparkler on his cake, which he refused to go near or try and blow out. The cake itself was amazing.

I will go out with him on the weekend and buy his present - he wants a pair of Doc Martens!!!! I was so excited when I bought mine in the early 1990s to wear with black woolly tights and a tartan miniskirt. Everything old is new again. His main present was the 16th birthday trip - we offer two weeks, one parent, anywhere in the world - and I was a bit sad when he chose to forego the parent and go on the school trip to California in January instead ... but in hindsight, absolute genius. He would have been a very sad birthday boy if he'd planned an adventure for this month with no chance of going anywhere for the foreseeable future.

Another beach weekend

It was grey and windy over the weekend but I didn't care, because I was at the beach. No swimming (not just grey and windy but COLD) but several walks, several books and I made two sundresses in a fit of optimism. That there would be sun! After last summer's unbelievable heat and dryness, everything is looking very green and damp. I know it's early days yet for summer but even this time last year it was  brown, and it's just not the case this year. Fingers crossed we keep getting decent rain.

Oh, except for these people of course, beautiful spot for a wedding (other than it being a public pathway, hello random strangers!) but it would have been gale force and a bit nippy by the afternoon. October, what can you do.

This storm didn't come to much luckily because our skylight in the bathroom has started leaking. The lovely neighbours whipped up on a ladder and did some siliconing if you can believe it - so nice. And so handy! We are very hopless desk pushers who can barely hold a hammer but will buy them some beer.

And there were two elections to watch; the ACT and New Zealand, where both Labor governments got easily re-elected. Canberra is a very lefty town so by the end of this term Labor will have 23 unbroken years in power. Although I should say 'power' because it is the government of a single city of 400 000, so we are not exactly at the forefront of world domination. And neither, to be fair, is NZ. But it was interesting to watch with one eye while sewing, and a nice relief from right-wing extremism and lunacy.