Yarnivorous

G'day all! Thank you all for the kind messages of support. I'm still a bit freaked but I'm still here, just been realllly busy! Keeping busy is the only way I know how to deal with worry stress. (I am learning meditation which I am assured is excellent.) So I've been knitting madly on my new FO Summerflies , which I finished just in the nick of time for July, and I've been spinning up some very pretty brightly coloured yarn, and am prepping fleece for a shawl I have to knit by mid September (my bad! but the fleece is lovely and hopefully the FO from it will be wonderfully soft), and we've been out quite a bit. We went for a drive up to Warburton on Thursday and yesterday was free public transport day after a spectacular PT fail on Wednesday, so we tooled around the city and caught the tram to the spinning guild and Brunswick and bought fabric and stuff.... I have to share pics from our travels and talk about them too but I am run off my poor sore puffy foo...

G'day all! Over the last couple of days, I've spent most of a day at the hospital. Monday I had to talk to people about my operation. It sorta worries me when they are asking me what operation I'm having... and when the preop nurse tells me that I'm having a day procedure. The day before the operation I'm having an ultrasound with a wire put into my boob and also radioactive tracer for the sentinel node. That's a day procedure. I'm having sentinel node plus axillary dissection in one hit - they want to know which node(s) is the one taking the hit from my boob (might not be the annoyed one) and lumpectomy. So I have a small procedure the day before the big one. The big one is 5th August and I am likely to be in hospital for three days. Yesterday I got the results of my tests. Good news is the primary is down to 1.3cm. I had hoped it would shrink further but the oncologist was ok with it. It is now nearly a third the size it was. He says it would be t...

G'day all! A week after the fact, I reckon I ought to wrap up the Bendi posts so that I can go back to whining about cancer. I'm feeling a leetle stressed currently. It was on the Saturday morning... The Ravelry BAA breakfast. (Still haven't worked out the baa part - it is a group, etc, but why baa?) It was lovely to see some familiar faces, one of whom won the sock off: with the knee socks that you can't really see in my really bad pic but they are in the top left and have an almost invisible arrow pointing to them. There was also a handspun yarn off too for those of us knitting with handspun (heck, wish I'd worn my pinwheel jacket to it but I changed outfits). I didn't take pics of this cos it involves faces and some people don't want their face online. But then there was the exciting stuff. The lucky doorprize! And here is my bag with its number 42, the third number pulled! This was the table of lusciousness that I could choose from, so I chose the ...

G'day all! I've been mucking around in BigHugeLabs , making a few mosaics of the pics I took of sheep up at Bendigo. OK, there's a couple of young billy goats and three alpacas as well. Pics are big (probably will obscure the side bar some) to make up for the multitude of them. DOH! Pics are obscured by the side bar and I can't figure out how to make the sidebar smaller so the pics can be seen in all their glory - you'll have to click through to Flickr to see them properly! Now I'm sheepish! Enjoy! Don't you take your sheep for a walk? English Leicesters are such pretty sheep :-) Almost more sheep, goats and alpacas than you can poke a stick at. Not that you should poke a stick at animals or people for that matter. I love the shot of the young Dorset Downs ram in the centre - he has an attitude! Not all sheep are stupid, but some sure look it! Which one(s) do you think look stupid? And which one(s) look clever? Merino rams in all their glory. These ...

G'day all! (Part 2 - part one was bouncing about winnings :-) On Friday last I was up and at it bright and early - a kind raveller and local SnBer offered to take me up to the Australian Sheep and Wool Show in Bendigo. (She even brought me back home the next day!) We had to make a nice early start to give us the most time at the the woollen mill and the the show. I have to say I had a lovely time wandering around. My emphasis is on fleece and spinning stuff when I go to a fibre fair. I can get lovely yarn at many places but spinning stuff is harder to come by (though I do have a most brilliant guild with a fleece room and excellent spinning supplies). We stopped off at the Bendigo Woollen Mills first, site of the fabled Back Room. The back room has the closeouts and discontinued yarns and seconds and bags of laps and felting stuff. It has some good stuff there. I tried to show a little restraint and came out with: a bit over a kilo of white machine washable laps (they are ...

G'day all! I've arrived home from Bendi - thanks for taking me up there and lugging stuff for me, Toni! I was so excited (when I remembered to go check out the woolcraft room - only took me about two hours to remember to go look for the stuff I entered...). Nathan's jumper (sweater for Americans, not a pinafore) won third prize in its section! It's missing from the pic because it was modelled on the catwalk! LOL The poor young man wearing it is somewhat smaller than DH so it rather hangs on him. You can even see it in action! I almost jumped up and down squeeing but that would've made my pics and video even worse... I also won a voucher for a couple of days at Tarndwarncoort , aka Wendy Dennis' place, aka the home of Polwarth wool at the Ravelry breakfast this morning. I had swapped my door entry bag from 39 to 42 and 42 was called up third! (39 was not called at all - how lucky was I????) So I'll be having a lovely couple of days down at Wendy's pl...

G'day all! Just a quickie - I'm off to the Australian Sheep Show, aka Bendi sheep show. It is the closest thing to Rhinebeck or Maryland that we have. I'll try to remember to take pics. I'll be back tomorrow - am staying overnight! Oooh err. Hope I manage to survive it. There'll be lots and lots of sitting down along the way 8-) anon!

G'day all! Today could've been a very bad day. Last week, I started spinning again - haven't felt the urge to spin for about six weeks so I didn't! But I am supposedly participating in the Tour de Fleece and that means spinning. So I decided to spin up some of my Ixchelbunny fluff - I have a fair bit of her stuff, trying to support a local businessperson and all. Plus she's been doing it tough after having to have a hysterectomy last year when the docs found cancer. Here's me, perfectly fertile until recently but not wanting kids, and Charly wants them but can't. (There's my little plug ;-) I already had done half a hank of top and as is my wont, went over the top in spinning for about four hours on that first day. Then I backed up for some more spinning the next day, and suddenly I had a really sore shoulder, particularly the area under the shoulder blade and across the armpit into the ribs. On my right side. In rubbing the sore bits, I found a ...

G'day all! Anyone got the cheese? I'm still here! I'm feeling better than I did but this last round has knocked me for six (as we say here in Oz, and possibly anywhere else they play cricket). I seem to have a mild cold as well cos my snout is playing up. (Yes, all you mums out there, I am looking after myself, taking my temperature regularly, eating as well as I can, keeping my fluid intake up, etc.) Oh and I think I am discovering what hot flushes are. Yikes! But I must be feeling better cos yesterday and today I spun some yarn and knitted! I spun 50g of lovely BFL/seasilk/bunny from Ixchelbunny. (I should link her but she's probably plenty busy enough at present getting ready for Bendigo.) I started work on a little wrappy shawl of my own design (mainly cos I discovered 300m of yarn from last year's TdF and decided it had to be used immediately). Now if only I would sleep the night through, things would be grand! I panicked myself today by finding a lump...