Yarnivorous

G'day all! Happy New Year! Happy New decade! I thought last year was a fairly fertile knitting year but it appears I knitted no more items than the year before, according to Flickr. 39 in 2008, 39 in 2009. However, there are four or five items for which I have no photos. So that makes 43 or 44 FOs. Admittedly some of those items were, for example, two pairs of fingerless mitts for children but I think a pullover for Nathan well and truly balances that ;-) I've already started on this year's knitting. I'm knitting a hat in some yarn that is new to me - Sirdar's baby bamboo . I thought this might be a good yarn for chemo hats but it feels vaguely prickly against my wrist and neck. It might settle with a wash. Ah well, I'll find out sooner or later I guess! The weather has been totally amazing here over the last 24 hours or so. A big change blew through at around 9pm, bringing a fantastic natural light show and a dumping of rain. 25mm (an inch) at our curr...

G'day all! I finished up some projects overnight and today. It's been good knitting weather - stinking hot (close to 100F/38C with a wind from a furnace) and gosh I admit to enjoying the air conditioning at various places. Good knitting weather, as I said. As long as you have air con. Even without air con you need to do something apart from perish. You need to see pics of DH's new jumper/sweater. All handspun (by me!), roughly 1500m of it. The green was all hand carded by me from some corriedale cross fleece I bought at Black Sheep Gathering back in June. I used a substantial amount of the fleece dyed with Kelp from Landscape dyes in this jumper, blended with some moorit Bond Corriedale, some of the CVM Missy's black fleece, some yellow/green dyed fleece and some orange top. The same orange hand-dyed top that made up the contrast came from oh dear, umm, lady in Wyoming, Sheila, of Sheep Shed Studio? This is a very well travelled jumper already. It went to Europ...

G'day all! I just had to share this most horrid photo of me with you. (this photo really needs a caption but I've not got much opportunity to run a contest at present - most of my stash is probably still in Oakland and we have to be a little careful with our money at present) I'm probably spinning a yarn. I hope I am spinning a yarn (telling a story). I may be yelling at my father in law for using the flash on my camera in broad daylight. Just as well the wind didn't change! Note the ginormous hands. I think I got them from Pop. He was done with them and I needed some, etc etc. anon!

G'day all! I hope you all had lovely Christmases! Even better, all your Christmases came at once! I had two Christmases - one on Christmas Day at my brother's place, then one on the 27th at the PiLs'. Both were very nice days with lots of food. My brother was having two Christmas dinners on the same day - one with his side of the family, then one in the evening with my sister's in law family. She had the place all cleaned up and ready for the next invasion by 4pm. How organised! So I have eaten well. I must send a big shout out to my MiL. She has put up with us and fed us every day for the last week or more. I appreciate it and I guess that Nathan does as well. We've had a few nice sunsets along the way - hope I've not shown the pic before! I have to show off the Christmas knitting I've done but I have to redo some of it and also the laptop has nowhere to download the pics AGAIN. It needs a bigger hard disk. I only got three items done in time - Na...

G'day all! Starting to get over the initial shock of my new diagnosis and status. Now I have to wait for the next step in January. Thank you all for the encouraging words. I hope I can, ahem, live up to your expectations :-) But much more exciting this evening was this: taken on my PiL's balcony. That is a tawny frogmouth . They are not at all endangered (they seem to have worked out how to live with humans and their cities) but it is still lovely to see them. We only went looking cos they seemed to be saying 'hip hip HOORAY!' which seemed a little odd quite frankly. MiL thought they would be possums (proper possums not this opossum stuff that is quite frankly a little scary - I rode past a dead, bloated up one once and it was about as big as a medium sized dog!) having an argument. No, instead it was three tawny frogmouths. Two were flying around together and a third was trailing along. They looked like gargoyles on the roof nextdoor. They were all talking t...

G'day all1 I shall start with the good. I scored some Sundara sock yarn before I left the US. It came home with me on the plane. (I can't remember their names but the dark one is almost colour-correct and the light one is wrong but I can't be bothered wrangling the colour correction stuff any longer.) Hooray! Plus I got a lovely parcel from Dreamcatcher but that is for Christmas. So exciting! And nearly all the parcels I sent myself from the USA have arrived. Plus I worked out a nice pattern for the yoke of Nathan's pullover and it is coming up pretty well. I have hopes that I will have the thing finished for Christmas. The bad news? The tests came back positive. Unpleasantly positive. If anyone wants to know what a mammogram and biopsy are like, let me know and I'll get back to you - my online presence is flakey still (rather like me at the moment!). I will face a long and hard road over the next few months. Surgery, chemo and radiotherapy, in some ord...

G'day all! We are still on pretty flakey ground with the DSL (though we are told that it will be fixed by close of business tomorrow). I've got a heap of pics to upload but our link keeps dying and sometimes revives again by itself but mostly we have to perform artificial resuscitation on the router... Also I am not sure that we have a big dataplan - I might have to hie me around to the PiLs and upload stuff from there (they definitely have a big limit cos hello, BiL plays online games...). Hey, speaking of BiL, did I mention that I am going to have a new SiL? BiL proposed to his girl a few weeks ago. No longer will I have a SiS (sister in sin), nope she will be a SiL! Not much is happening here. Yesterday was deucedly hot - 100F on the old scale, today it is 11C at the moment after a cold change and lots of rain blew through. Ah Melbourne, how I love your weather. Tomorrow I have to go have some medical tests. I am hoping that it isn't bad news but well I gotta do t...