Yarnivorous

G'day all! Oh the glories of peppermint tea! Oh blessed tea! Y'see the indigestion's got me bad, even with the new medication. (I am contemplating going off this med when things settle and trying the other one again cos I had EXACTLY THE SAME issues with this one as I did with the first and it is generally less effective as an anti-indigestion thing than the first one I tried.) If I drink peppermint tea, things settle to some degree. Maybe even enough that I can sleep! After all, it is only quarter to one in the morning as I write this and I really really really want to go to sleep. So hopefully the peppermint tea will keep setting me right enough to get some sleep. Oh blessed sleep! And next time stomach says it wants munchies at 10pm, I shall bravely ignore it and sally forth to bed instead. I never did show off Travelled Woman, did I? She wraps around my neck quite well, mostly because the tips are bent like (folded) bat wings. But she is not for me, no no. I am...

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! The days are just flying by at the moment. I have more things to do than you could poke sticks at, even if you had a very large number of sticks! I just sat a library page exam. A library page shelves books at the library. Not the world's most high-falutin' job but I've always loved books, love hanging around in libraries and being paid to do what I do quite often (which is put books in the correct order rather than the way they are on the shelf) would be great! Anyway, I show up with a couple of moments to spare (got a phone call at a *very* bad time!) and show my id and hand over my application. There were over FORTY people applying for TWO positions. Two positions of between 8 and 20 hours per week in four hour shifts, positions paying $11.04 an hour. There were school kids, business men and women (well dressed, shiny shoes, sleek hair), accountants (I reckon the guy opposite me was an accountant - note that I put them in a different basket!), house wi...

G'day all! I think this will be my last hurrah for March. I bought some merino:bamboo blend from Tactile Fiber Arts at Stitches West. Only two ounces of it. In a spinning frenzy, I spun it up - half on 28th I think and the rest on the 1st of March. Then I worked out a pattern I wanted to knit. A shawlette. I only had roughly 400m of yarn. I used the Rose Trellis pattern from Barbara Walker's first Treasury of Knitting Patterns along with a ladder/faggoting stitch. I even made a chart up! (But I have to finish editing the chart and show what I did with the last few rows). Even more amazement - I crocheted the edge to make something like the side edges and it sorta even worked! (That was the nine hours of edging for 200-something stitches - glad my handspun was up for the workout!.) The final result? I am quite pleased with it :-) It could be bigger - it only measures roughly 70cm (28") long by 1.2m (say 48") across. But it was fun to knit with the colour c...

G'day all! Finally we have a day with some sun! Hooray! This means photos. I was given a lovely book for Christmas. I started knitting a scarf with a pattern based on one of the jumper patterns as a reciprocal gift. Whilst I was sick sick, I took a break from knitting anything for others. I figured that it was yucky to infest gifts with my germs. Early this week I finally finished the scarf. It seemed to take ages, though when I got stuck into it, it flew! I used two strands of lace/fingering weight handspun that I . The fleece is grey merino from a sheep named Sarah. It is lovely to work with. I originally used the yarn for my mystery stole 4 but well, let's just say that pattern was not for me and was frogged. I can't say how much I used - I spun up about 800m and used a good 2/3 of that, though remember I used it double stranded. The pattern is very simple - multiple of 4 + 2. You can add a selvedge stitch or three if you want. Row 1: Knit. Row 2: Purl. Row 3:...

G'day all! I don't think I ever posted pics of my pinwheel sweater - I finally finished it in autumn of last year. It was mostly done before we left Oz but something needed to be fixed. I can remember knitting it whilst watching Dr Phil (and one or two eps of Oprah, but that was all of Oprah, honest! Dr Phil was more fun to watch). Anyway, I finished it ages ago, it went to Rhinebeck and was commented on there but let's facwe it, whilst it is very me colours, it is not fashionably dark and sophisticated. Do I care? Do fish ride bicycles? I *love* mermaid colours, and this jacket falls right in that definition. (OK I also love rainbow colours and aquamarine and ultramarine and magenta and royal purple and electric blue and cobalt blue and that wild violet colour, and pastel rainbows too!) Here it is resting on some fallen leaves A closeup of the pinwheel swirl. These are the most accurate colours - th rest are a bit overexposed on my monitor. The join between body and d...

G'day all! (Any other Melburnians remember "Compradez de Franco Cotzo? In Norda Melabun and Foodiscray.") Today's post is brought to you by desperate and dollar-less. Things are rumbling along here today. DH is playing in the bathroom with a friend and managing to get up and down reasonably well. It seems his back is easing up some more now. Being in a good temper helps a LOT too! Interesting how the mind-body connection works). I'm getting over the cold quite nicely now. It has rained some and has gone cooler (annoyingly now that I can wash more fleece but hey we need rain. Even the 10mm we've had so far makes a big difference!). Everything looks lush and damp outside, which means I'll have to cut the nature strip soon (is that what other people call the strip of grass between the footpath and the road outside your house?). I have heaps of plants to plant and stuff to do but for the nonce? Gran' sale time! I'm putting up some of my hand...

Come up to the lab and see what's on the slab. I see you shiver with antici...........pation. I've been making a man, with blond hair and a tan... G'day all! I give you pictures of my current obsession. Lots of pictures. They are not really of a man with blond hair and a tan (and a little pair of gold shorts - gosh I wish I had the money to be able to pull a comment out of the hat and send a prize to the person who identifies who sia dthe quote and in what). No longer up to date pictures, since these were shot when I had 125g of yarn left and now I have mm, maybe 25g. I still have no idea if it will work or not - the circumference of it is now about 3 metres I'd guess (actually if I remember my algebra, it apparently is about 4.5m around - no wonder each row takes a while now!). In the mean time I must really update my website with new dyed yarns and also some handspun! Lots of handspun! Here's a little hint of what will be going online hopefully in the nex...