Roy G Biv : green

My new pincushion. A birthday present from a friend.



How gorgeous is that? Squeee!-worthy in its gorgeousness I'd say.



And the first lime of the season. Unmolested by birds, possums and wallabies thus far. It's wonderful to see some greenery after the hot crisp months of summer.

ps. is the new background too blue?

Roy G Biv : yellow

Balloons at the festival last weekend ...



... and the yellow apron I wear for spinning. Protects the lap from fleece n' grease doncha know.

Roy G Biv : orange

A little cosy for my mobile phone.

I dropped my phone the other day and as I put the pieces back together I mused that I ought to have one of those little cushioned covers for it. Being a lazy crafter brilliant recycler I snipped off the cuff from the sleeve of an old jumper I'd bought from the op shop and attempted to felt. (The felting failed miserably). Sewed up the bottom and voila!

And in orange too, just in time for the next instalment of The Rainbow.

I slipped in my phone, whirled around to show it off to the dog (the nearest person to show off to) and my phone flew across the room like wet soap and smashed again. Drat, it needed some sort of closure. A button and elastic loop I thought, cleverly.



I got as far as the button. Until I get around to making the loop I'm just being very careful to not move too fast. Or show off.

In other news, I'm having fun over at Twitter. Care to join me?

visitors

Guess who came to my house yesterday?

Oh boy it was fun.

ps. the rainbow continues soon, I promise. I'm looking for orange ...

Stitches & Craft Show round up

But not with pictures, as I left my camera in the car by accident, so you'll have to go to other peoples' blogs and flickrs for all the colour. Suffice to say it was excellent, and I wish I'd been able to nick off from work even earlier so I could have seen all the stands, and the outside stalls and the film, and spent more time talking with kooky craft people hahaha sorry Jodie and and and ...

Well next year, right?

After the Show, Sooz had organised a blog dinner that grew like topsy until we were threatening to take over the restaurant. However some people piked out of the dinner at the last minute (you all know who you are) and sadly some others couldn't make the trip from interstate, and numbers came down to something a little more manageable in the end.

A particular highlight was a very special guest from Sydney, the one and only Eleanor who is as delightful as her blog suggests and who was astonished and impressed by everything she saw because [she claims] she is not crafty herself. (She has other talents, don't you worry. Keep reading).

I did remember to take my camera into the restaurant and although I didn't get photos of everyone, I did manage to capture, for your entertainment, Eleanor bellydancing. Stomper had warned Sandra, Eleanor and I that we were sitting in the prime position to be nabbed by the [Lebanese] restaurant's belly dancer and she was right. We were careful to avoid eye contact but it wasn't enough. Eleanor was forcibly dragged to her feet and despite her protestations that she is actually very shy and introverted, ended up dancing rather impressively and with gay abandon. Viz.:



Here she is shrieking with laughter as Sandra tucks money into her cleavage.


That's the professional belly dancer on the right, not Sandra.

See how shy and demure this dear creature is? She kept trying to tell me how she's really an introvert, No really I am! she would say indignantly until I had tears of laughter pouring down my cheeks.



Some more pics from the evening ... sorry for the atmospheric graininess but I hate flash. Here are Stomper and Frogdancer looking rather lovely ...



and Sooz and Sandra sporting their matching woollen berets ...



Part of the festivities of the evening was the arrangement that everybody had to take a small gift, either handmade or craft supplies with which to make something handmade, hence the knitted hats. Frogdancer ended up with the skein of hand painted sock wool that I donated, Stomper received a book of Eleanor's poems (I know!), Janet received an owl toy and some felt from Sandra, and generally it was just like Christmas except every present was in excellent taste. No loud ties or elderly bottles of dodgy vintage port.

Me? I received a fabulous package from Ellie at Red Seed Studio.



A tea towel, two cards and two little skeins of hemp beading twine in glorious hues.

The tea towel in particular is perfect. You all remember the kitchen, right? Well it needed a little ping of warm colour. I was thinking ... RED.
Behold!



Thank you so much Ellie, I love it.

Thanks also Sooz for organising a wonderful evening, and to everyone who made it so much fun. And to those of you who were absent, you were missed. See you next time.

Roy G Biv : red

Michelle over at Green Kitchen is going to blog a rainbow. What a brilliant idea; I'm joining in and I'm beginning with red.



My friend's kettle. It makes me happy.

And something red that I made ages ago and was reminded of the other day ...



There was this too ...



I even have an entire 'red' set on my flickr stream, here if you're interested. And here's my original 'red' post from way back when, when blackbird used to host Show and Tell. Wow, look at that post - that time seems like eons ago. I miss that house sometimes.

the autumn, she is here

sail the ocean blue

In the shop now.
150grams of hand dyed fuzzy blue and purple wool/acrylic/mohair.
Approximately 450 metres
Light worsted weight (7 ply)

Buy it here.

ps. Thank you for all your lovely birthday wishes. You are a pretty special bunch.

Some random for your weekend

• So this morning I opened up my computer and saw not a single email or comment and I thought Thank heavens, no one saw that pathetic whiny full-of-self-pity post that I wrote last night while under the influence of that large glass of merlot. Whew, I can take it down and no one will ever be the wiser and I can pretend I am perfect and an excellent writer who never splits her infinitives and knows how to put on the happy face when she receives body lotion instead of a camera for her birthday. And then there was a clunk as the modem whirred into life and boom, 32 comments exploded into my face so I guess that means I'm sprung.

• Red wine usually makes me a) sleepy or b) slightly whacko but never c) maudlin so ... note to self, don't drink that crappy Mclaren Vale stuff again stick to the Mornington Peninsula.

• Thanks for the birthday wishes. It's tomorrow. International Women's Day.

• Mother Nature, I have had enough of you. First, three weeks of fires, now a freaking earthquake. All the windows rattled and everybody looked accusingly at the dog. Then Facebook went wild with people in Melbourne saying "Caroline just felt the earth move" and "Abigail is Holy f*%k what was that?" and I reported to the husband It wasn't the dog, it was a bona fide earthquake. So yeah, go away for a while Mother Nature.

• I have almost finished another pair of socks but just at the last minute I decided to sabotage myself by casting on for a red scarf. Seventeen rows in! Hooray!

• The garden is sporting that Scorched Earth look, which is depressing as I have some very important guests soon. That's what happens when you have four weeks of MOTHER NATURE ATTACKING YOU.

• The GST tax paperwork is overdue (oops) so I am at home doing that (right after I finish blogging, priorities people) while the others are all at the local hippie market. I told the husband that they don't sell Pentax DSLR cameras at the market but he didn't show any signs of hearing me.

• I am reading Lauren Groff's The Monsters of Templeton on BB's recommendation and enjoying it thus far. I just finished Kate Atkinson's When Will There be Good News? - jeez Louise she is good isn't she? I have listened to The Picture of Dorian Gray on audio tape and it was read by the same actor (Stephen Crossley) who also narrated my previous audiobook (Kate Atkinson's One Good Turn) so that was odd. Jackson Brodie with the same voice as Dorian Gray; it makes the world tilt sideways. And now I'm listening to DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little by a narrator with a strong Texan accent. I don't know who he is because the library stuck their logo sticker over the narrator's name. They're good like that. The last audiobook had the sticker right over the bit that says Please check for xx discs. Ten discs? Seventy two discs? DBC Pierre's protagonist has a bit of a fixation with underwear but he is only 15 (the protagonist, not DBC Pierre). My eldest son is 15, hmmm.

• Okay, you're all caught up now.

maudlin tonight

Yes, we are back home in our own dusty little space with the great view. My dear darling friend who lives deep in safe well-upholstered suburbia took us in like the straggly bunch of waifs we were, put us up for the evacuation day, fed us, left beautiful magazines lying around for me to read and then got my birthday wrong and gave me the most delicious present and ice cream cake and everybody sang happy birthday. Only it wasn't my birthday which was hilarious.

And now we shall not talk of fires any more 'kay? Because, hallelujah, it is cool and there is wet stuff falling from the sky. Small children all over Melbourne are asking their mothers what it is because they haven't before experienced its damp delights in their lifetimes.

So. I have been doing wonderful things, but not blogging about them. I went to a bloggy dinner and met a lovely quilter and received a love chicken. And the following day I rose in the milky dawn and spent the entire day with likeminded friends travelling on trains and viewing the most exquisite couture exhibition and discovered that there was a time when Princess Margaret was in possession of a very tiny waist and that the queen once wore a dress featuring embroidered bees to a reception in France. Inspiration and ideas spun their gossamer threads around my mind and left me exhilarated.

Also I started semester two at Uni and the amount of reading I have to do overwhelms me and it's only Week One. Homework, at my ripe old age; it kills me. I have spinning homework too from my new class in Panton Hill (Spinning for Beginners Who Don't Know How the Hell their Spinning Wheel Works).

But I have not been coming to this space and telling you about these things and I don't know why. I am tired, so very tired. And maudlin tonight here on the eve-eve of my forty-fifth birthday. I feel old. And what I would really, really like for my birthday is a DSLR Pentax camera but I don't think it is going to happen.

I also read a quote today: "There is this deep, hilarious chasm between people who love to write and people who love to write and do it well." That really is depressing although I don't think the author (someone whose blog I adore) meant it to be. It's just my state of mind.

Enough with the self pity. Time to put on the happy face, not the old, tired face.

up and out

Schools around here are closed tomorrow, dire warnings to LEAVE NOW have been posted on the websites and received via text message (did everyone get that message, or just those in bushfire prone areas?), the car is packed, and we're out of here. Again. And can I just say, I am totally fucking over it?

See you on the other side.