Blues and browns

Here is what I am working on at the moment. It is literally a two-colour quilt, even though there are dozens of colours in it, because I dyed all of them myself from two colours. So I know it's two colours, even though it looks like heaps. The two original colours are a light blue - close to the one on the right, and a brick red. I am just doing different sized triangles at the moment - I might mix it up a bit down the track but I probably won't.

It was cold and rainy and windy over the weekend. I went for a run (a slow walk/run) on Saturday afternoon and the sun broke through very dark grey clouds briefly, and the wind died right away. For a few minutes it was lovely ... unlike the rest of the weekend.

But it didn't bother me, because this is a picture of my Mother's Day. A selection of chocolate, as requested, and a decent library book, and some peace and quiet. The wind was howling outside so this was extra nice...

Finished my lemoyne stars

And here is part two of the white-with-scraps ... the lemoyne stars. Points chopped off, no thought given to the colours and bordered with a random print.

I thought there were too many seams to do complex quilting, so went with a design that avoided the seams altogether. Circles in each of the squares joined together by a straight line. I called it "Please disregard my previous email" because my binding was being interrupted by having to respond to work things, and perhaps I wasn't always sending the right email to the right person. Oooops.

Winter has hit with a vengeance, which is a sudden sharp change, and one I possibly wasn't prepared for. I had to work late a couple of nights this week after not being outside all day, so left the building at 8.30 Thursday evening feeling  very grumpy and sorry for myself .... to be hit by two degrees and pelting sleety rain. I stomped to the car feeling very hard done by indeed.

48 hour beach escape

I quietly snuck off to the beach on Friday afternoon to get a fix of salt water, blue skies and a bit of much-needed serenity. I did ask if either of the kids wanted to come, but they didn't, so I just left. Ahhhh the peace and the quiet. It was absolutely lovely autumn weather - these are the poplars lining the road outside Braidwood.






I did intend to do some sewing and other useful things, but I ended up going for a couple of very long walks, and then I spent Saturday afternoon lying on the sofa, in the sun, with a book. All afternoon. Before cheese and crackers for dinner, and season two of The Durrells. Have you ever heard of such hedonism?
The water was too cold for me to think about swimming, even with a wetsuit. I paddled, and other people were in there enjoying themselves, but I couldn't be bothered. It was a very lethargic escape. We are back into the joys of budget week this week - I myself am not involved thank heavens but Parliament House is full of excited people....

Sunset (with dog poo bag)

Here is a pretty sunset from Sunday evening. There had been a storm earlier, with hail and lots of rain (finally) but it cleared away into this pretty sky. I was trying to take number one son for a very overdue driving lesson but we gave it up after twenty minutes when the hail started. We haven't quite made it out of a big parking lot yet ... still concentrating on changing gears and turning corners at the same time. It is awkward.

Here he is holding a dog poo bag soulfully in one hand and a small fluffy dog on a lead in the other. I told him to gaze atmospherically at the sunset and this is what I got.


The weekend was spent mostly at home very quietly, which we were all quite grateful for. My husband had to go to the airport on Sunday to meet overseas participants for a course he's running, followed by lunch at the relevant embassy, but I didn't feel a lot of sympathy for working on a Sunday because I am not sure if "lunch at the embassy" is actually work. I went to book club - the book was "The girl with all the gifts" which most of us liked, but I didn't. It is actually quite a good book but it is zombie-themed and frankly it was too squishy for me. Too much eating of intestines and hiding in ceilings ... nothing wrong with the book itself but not my kind of thing.

I also did some fabric tidying. Having reduced my print fabrics from four cubbyholes to two, I am now on a mission to do the same with the hand dyed solids. I have three partially filled cubbyholes of solids, and on the weekend I took them out of colour order and arranged them in random order to get more inspiration. The plan was that there would be unexpected colours next to each other and I would get lots of ideas for new things. Instead it just looks like a complete mess ... but at least they are neatly folded now and I know what I have.

Sixteen patch scrap

I have quilted and bound the sixteen patch scrap quilt and called it "Propping up the bar". Wishful thinking I suppose. The quilting is very boring straight lines, and you can see that the colour wash is more optimistic than real. I didn't really have the right mix of colours to gradate it properly.



But it was a very good way to use up one of the strip scrap bags and it makes quite a pretty quilt for something that hasn't had any thought put into it at all! It is nice to get something finished finally. I haven't had much time for quilting, but I potter away for twenty minutes or so at a time, and I get there in the end.



After deleting Candy Crush I have now gone and installed Farmville 2 which is proving to be just as much of a time suck!!! I have no self control. It is not very good though, and I should get bored of it quite quickly. Honestly, what is wrong with me that I spend the tiny amount of spare time I get doing something so completely pointless.  Yet another character flaw. 

And the beach

My sister and her two boys came over from Auckland to visit us when we got back from Sydney which has been lovely. We've shown them the good Canberra things (Questacon, the arboretum, IKEA) and we dragged them down to the coast to show them our particular piece of Australian coastline.



The weather has been glorious for their visit; not too hot, just best sparkling autumn.  We all went for swims because the weather was so lovely ... but it was a bit deceptive. The water was clear and pretty and very very cold. I was OK in a wetsuit but nobody stayed in for very long, not even the seven year old.



My sister and I dragged them on various walks which they reacted to with the kind of special enthusiasm shown by teenage boys for walks with their mothers. And seven year old boys too. The older three have been plugged into various devices for as much of the time as we let them. The youngest one still likes playgrounds but there's not much common ground .... except for ice-creams and chocolate biscuits. That gets them all interested.

And Sydney

The boys and I had a lovely few days in Sydney being tourists. We stayed a suburb or two out of town - about a twenty minute bus ride to the CBD - which meant we could have a decent two bedroom apartment with a kitchen instead of all being crammed into one hotel room. One room is not good for family happiness.  And a bus is tolerable when it's a different city and there's no work (or school) at the other end.



This is the sun setting over Darling Harbour. The first evening we were there we took a bus down to Circular Quay, then a ferry round to Darling Harbour. It's a good ferry ride because it's just public transport (so not too expensive) but it goes out past the Opera House, under the Sydney Harbour Bridge, then over to Luna Park and a couple of other stops before Darling Harbour. Quite coincidentally it was a beautiful evening with lovely orange western light on all the tall buildings. Very very tall buildings. We felt very small town people.

Number one son has an eye for engineering and kept noticing things like glass lifts and peculiar balconies and odd features forty stories up. We spent a bit of time standing in the street like country folk staring up at the amazing sights. I think it's good for them to practice being uncool for when they're older.



This is the hill outside the observatory - we enjoyed that and the Museum of Sydney that had the history from the first Fleet and how Sydney grew. I don't know any of this stuff of course so we could be well informed and then stop for chocolate brownies when we got tired. I think we all find historical things quite fascinating because the built environment of Canberra is so recent.



The highlight of the Botanic Gardens was the pond with eels in it. Lots of native eels - apparently they wiggle over the grass to get there when the pond periodically gets drained. I found this revolting, the boys thought it was fascinating, so I read the botanical labels on the trees and shrubs while they watched the eels in the hope that one of them would eat a duckling. Which apparently happens ... but not when we were there. Boys.