Not Toesday

No toes today. Only boobs. Happy Boobsday. Here are boobs parading a great new finished object by an un-named Stitch n Bitch member (owner of said boobs). I have been instructed to mention that the item was made in Katia Mississippi - the same yarn I am using for the green Spring Top (which is soon to become the inappropriate green Winter Top as I still haven't re-cast it on smaller needles. I will do this as soon as the Wolf Rat and Secret Knitting are done.)

And hey look a bum shot...if I keep going at this rate I will get more hits from creepy old guys googling for pR0n than knitters.

Glamour, glamour.

It's all hot and sticky and gross in Sydders today. And the air con to my floor has up and died - as per usual. But to save the day my crazy colleague Cathy nipped out at lunchtime and bought me this little beauty - a fine feathered fan to flip! Thanks Cathy - now I am right up there with Miss Piggy in the glamour stakes!

Here's something else feathered but totally unrelated. An Aussie raven who wanted our lunch on Saturday:

Happy Yesterday

Happy Australia for yesterday everyone! We had a relatively quiet one full of sums and finance woes. I am sorry to say that the housing dream has died. For one shining moment we thought the Garden of Eden house would be ours. But after further investigation we decided that we would have to give up so much other stuff that we would end up sitting in the fabulous house and doing absolutely nothing else for the next 30 years! As far as places-to-get-stuck-for-the-next-30-years go it was a pretty good one, but still, a girl needs yarn and a boy needs bicycles (yep...don't ask) and we both need holidays (boy, do we ever). So, goodbye fabulous house. Goodbye great balcony. Hello doer-upper. Back onto the Saturday housing trail we go.

We did do some slightly more Aussie Day type stuff than this though. We went up to North Head to the Royal Australian Artillery National Museum and went on a tour of the underground tunnels and rooms where World War II soldiers stored and carried artillery during the war to feed the massive guns used to protect Sydney Harbour. Here's a spooky tunnel:

Here's a left over missile all on its lonesome:

Here's sick bay...in the tunnel:

In true Aussie style I am having another day off today and making a four day weekend of it. Hope you're all having fun at work. I'm off to the shops for a coke spider :)

Torment

Hi all - I've been a bit quiet over the past few days. Hubby and I found, and I'm not kidding, the house of our dreams! It's a higher price than we wanted to pay and we are going over the sums again and again and again, trying to figure out whether we can do this thing and still have a reasonably comfortable lifestyle. We've had conferences with the mortgage guy who is OK with the price rise, but basically it's up to us now. How much are we really prepared to spend every month for the rest of our lives?! That's such a tough call! And how can we completely know how we will cope when circumstances change in the future? And how tiring it is looking ahead at the years of toil and saving - no more of the crazy spend-all life we've been living! It makes it all so much tougher when we look at the bait that's drawing us further into this lifelong entrapment/bliss - check out this pic of the garden. Trust me, the house is even better!

Unravelling the mystery

Damn, damn, damn. After the Green Top Debacle I didn't need this. While knitting a piece for the Hard Rockin' Mystery Item, I realise I'd trotted along without changing colour when required. Not my fault - the pattern is a bit vague about where to actually change and I chose the wrong one of several interpretation options. Silly me. I tried to rip back just to the row where the change needed to be made, but the needles are so teeny for the wool (4.5mm on 12 ply) that I had a spack and couldn't get the stitches back on the needle. Yes I know I could have done the fandangled thing where you put the needle through the row where you want to rip back to, and I tried that but the end stitches were just too dang tight to get into. So instead I decided stuff it, and ripped the bugger back completely and started again....at 6.30 this morning. The things you do when you can't sleep.

But it's great working on a mystery item like this that's made up of lots of teeny little pieces coz you can rip right back when things go wrong and have that same piece reknitted again in an hour. So I hopped on this "little pieces" bandwagon and picked up a project that I can do at work in my lunch hours. Isn't he the handsomest :)



I'm not doing him as a wolf though. I will be changing the tail (I'll do an I-cord) and the teeth and turning him into a brown rat (Hey I like rats, don't knock them! And what about native marsupial rats? Now they're nice.). I have only just started, and the pattern starts at the bottom of the body, so all I have so far is this rat crotch:

Mmmmm...nice rat crotch...

Buggeration.

AAARRRGHHH...I have been chugging along pretty well (for me) with the green spring top, but have just discovered a big fat pooey problem. Even though I checked my gauge when I started the first piece (the back) and it was fine then, I have discovered that at the top of each piece the gauge is TOTALLY OUT. It seems that as though the weight of the cotton is dragging the piece down and stretching the piece out. So much so that the arms are ridiculously long.

So now I don't know what to do. Do I redo the entire jumper in a smaller needle? but then how will I know whether the gauge is going to work out over an entire piece, given that I have discovered that gauge at the bottom of a piece is nothing to go by. Do I just have to give a smaller needle a whirl and see what happens? How many times am I going to have to knit this damn thing? I mean, really. Is this something that is always a problem with large cotton items or does it only happen when it's being knit on oversized needles?

Here's the offending arm upon which I discovered the problem.

I hate you, arm. In fact I hate knitting. I hate it. I hate any pattern that tells me anything more challenging than knit one knit one knit one. I'm sorry, I just can't deal with it. Go to hell, arm. YAARGHHHHHHHHHH...........

A Thousand Toesdays. Okay, three. Shut up.

It was bucketing down today, so this week's toes are clad in the funky wellies I got from the UK. It's fair to say I have a shoe fetish... Even though the rain was coming down pretty thickly this morning I still braved the morning commute on the scooter. I have all the wet weather gear (of which the wellies are a part) so I come out pretty much dry except for my hands as my gloves are the only thing not fully waterproof. It's really no worse than going bushwalking in the rain in a goretex jacket. In fact, better! And the bonus of rainy day riding is getting a parking spot right up close to my office as all the other riders are in bed or on the bus. The view from my office is normally this (looking through the buildings to the city end pylons of the Harbour Bridge):

But today it was this:
If the above toes weren't enough for you, check these two Toesday displays out. Meg's toes on the back of a jeepney in the Philippines, and Libby's offering of both human and animal toes.

Secret knitting

I can't tell you what these mysterious pieces are. I can tell you they're mysterious. And rockin'. In a hard, take-no-shit kind of a way.

And I can tell you they are going to a friend of mine who has not yet received any homemade goods from me. Are you that lucky little vegemite? Can you tell what these pieces will become?

Does this extra bit give you a clue?

These enigmas of modern knitting will be at Sydney Stitch n Bitch tonight at 6pm, Hart's Pub in the Rocks. See Meg's site for a list of dates for this year.

Singed but smiling!

I stayed inside at lunch today to knit to avoid the heat they were predicting:

I've finished the back and front of the green Spring Top I started before the holidays, and am now halfway up the first sleeve. I had just finished a repeat in the pattern and thought it was a good time to break away and get back to work. Lucky I did too as 2 minutes later the fire alarm went off. If I'd been stuck in the middle of a repeat with no records taken of where I was up to I would have just had to stay there and burn - my memory is so rotten I would have forgotten by the time we got back. So I bundled up my little pride and joy and followed the throng down the stairs. Run people, someone's burnt some toast. Run for your lives!

Ooh, a fire engine:

But never fear, the precious booty made it out alive and in tact. And I will live to knit another day :)

High hopes

Over the past few months (it seems like forever actually) Hubby and I have been hunting for a house and have pinpointed an area that we really fancy. We put in a couple of offers on a place there a few months ago but got outbid. For a while, mainly to get over that loss, we convinced ourselves that that area was not for us. Now that we've had some time to think, though, we are back on the trail to find something for sale around there, and to just get to know the area better in general. Over the weekend we did a bushwalk and a bit of mountain biking in the bushland near where we want to buy and came upon a fabulous view only a 10 minute walk from the house we put the offer on.

There's a cave right on the edge of the cliff there where I took these pictures from:

And this one of the cave ceiling :

It's an amazing spot. I can just imagine having a house on that ledge and listening to the wind buffet against the walls at night. Although it seems there's a family already moved in there:

Coffee corset

Thanks guys for the nice words about the apron. I'm really glad you liked them. I guess it's true that we see the faults in our own creations more than others do. I will try to be less critical of my creative offerings in the future - even though I do like to have a bit of a joke at the expense of my hand-makes sometimes. When you spend a few intense hours on something it's nice to be able to have a laugh about it - kinda like a debrief! And in that light, here's an actual finished knitted object that I would have otherwise probably made fun of but which I will now quietly present with a smug smile and a deft flourish :)


This one was a last minute Chrissy present for my mum, just for a bit of a laugh. She's a very proficient knitter - you know, the kind who can knit a whole jumper in a week without looking down at the needles! I often want to knit something for her, but feel that I should make something for her that she wouldn't make for herself. So, because she tends to make big, difficult, traditional things, I always feel inspired to make her small, easy, wacky things!

This particular wacky item is a cosy for a coffee plunger (or French press as I think the Americans call it). Tie the ribbon at the top while it's brewing then undo to pour.

I started calling it a coffee corset rather than a coffee cosy because the colours made me think of saucy French lingerie. Here it is post gifting, in Mum's kitchen:

Looks right at home.

Pieces of history

Every time I visit Mum and Dad they have a little pile of things for me to take back with me. This time my Dad, after hearing us lament the recent downfall of Gowings, had added something to the stack. It's a little piece of knitted history, a ski jumper he bought from Gowings in the 1960s. He reckoned it was the best ski jumper he ever had because, and I quote, the water just "bounced" off it!

It kinda reminds me of the things you see now in surfie clothing stores, under labels like Billabong and Roxy.

Other things in the pile included some mismatched tea cups and saucers that my grandmother left for me, knowing that I was a collector of that sort of thing.

I always coveted these cups as a child. Children weren't allowed to use such things in my grandmother's house. They were only to use sturdy mugs or plasticware. Maybe that's why I collect tea things now - from all that wanting them for so long.

Warning to those who know me. And anyone else too.

Thanks for the great t-shirt Carla! For anyone else who wants one, go to ThinkGeek.com.

From CravE with love

At long last I can show you one of the pressies I was making for fellow bloggers Carla (who provides piccies of her modelling hers) and Meg - behold the Funky Apron :

A couple of things I would do differently with this one:

1. It's a wee bit long. Just above knee length would have been better and less silly looking. Reminds me of aprons from the early 1900's that went nearly down to the floor for no particular damn reason (except perhaps to hide those unseemly knobbly white knees). Will be handy though for really major spills. Noone wants raw eggs in their socks.

2. I made a crazy pocket to go on the front but decided it was too crazy and left it off. Need to make a less crazy pocket for it. Definitely needs a pocket though as it just looks unfinished or something. Maybe a plain white pocket to balance out the spotted craziness?

3. Picking up an iron and actually using it to get those bulging crinkly bits out wouldn't have killed me either!

The first of the Christmas cheer

Finally I am starting on the parade of Christmas gifts that have abounded this year. First of all, a look at the things that came my way before I went away for hols:

Very cool vintage knitting bag from Meg. Thanks Meg! Note the little hole for the yarn to pass through so you can knit "discretely"!

More very cool things from Meg! A whole bunch of vintage knitting patterns. One in particular will be very useful - it's for the very yarn I recently bought 2 kilos worth of, Patons Caressa!

And there's been a little self-gifting too!:

It's a pretty good book - it gives you instructions for each of the different techniques. Although some of the descriptions are a bit mind-boggling for the absolute beginner. The good thing though is the book opens your eyes to new ways you can use quilting. For example there are patterns for a pair of slippers, and ideas for things that can use "quilting-related embellishments" like these gorgeous stuffed cats (The pattern is called the "Three Faces of Steve"!):

And yes, there was even more self-gifting...I just couldn't help myself. The latest Vogue Knitting, which of course has some great stuff but nothing I can make right now in the summer heat. Nice for people who are having those white wintery Christmases though! Mind you they had a nice section on cushions by different designers. They're definitely do-able in summer.

And that's it. No more purchasy. I promise.

It's Toesday again

Honestly, I don't know how I would have coped with today being the first day back at work if it hadn't been for a little bit o' crazy - yes it's time for Toesday.

Here is some toe art from our trip up to Queensland. Hub's toes and mine out having coffee with my Mum and Dad (whose toes preferred to stay incognito this time):

And here are some very cute mini-toes I met on my journey, belonging to the sweetheart of the baby modelling set, Charlotte, admired by so many on "A-type personality":

"Tsk, not more boring toe photos".......

.......*snore*.

That's it. We're moving to Antarctica.

Well yesterday was our first day back in Sydney and my oh my what a welcome we got. Walked in on the end of a power outage to our block that must have been going for days because the fridge was leaking its contents onto the floor and making the whole flat reek. And we are meatatarians so there was blood dripping from the freezer and making a puddle on the tiles. Looked as if someone had been murdered in there. Will check for bodies just in case.

We think our place must have been hit by lightning or something because our phone also won't work...just won't connect anymore. Thankfully the modem seems OK (that was a big phew for a blogger!). We lost every bit of food we had, but couldn't replenish our sources as, yep you guessed it, it was New Year's Day so most of the shops were shut. Like that wasn't enough Mother Nature kindly decided to throw us a doozy - Sydney city temps got up to 44.2 degs C in the city (that's 105.5 for you Farenheit folk). The weather dudes say that this was because strong winds were coming in from the Central Australian desert. I hope this never happens again. It got to 41 on our balcony and 36 in the flat. We shut ourselves in the bedroom with a bunch of Lost DVDs (our eternal thanks to Carla and Dave!), the few bits of food we could find at the local corner store and a portable air conditioner (and rang out for pizza which was a challenge with no phone - haha), but even that only gave us a bearable 31 degrees. It's funny now to think how we thought we were suffering in 35 in Queensland! We had a brief moment of insanity where we thought it might be a good idea to seek refuge at the cinema. We hopped on the scoots to go down there but the wind was so much hotter at 60 kmph - it was like climbing into a too hot hot-tub and putting your head under for 5 minutes. Seriously, I thought my eyes were going to melt. And the trip was wasted too - when we got to the cinema it was stacked to the rafters. People were still lining up to buy tickets for the movie that had started 15 minutes before so we gave up on that idea. This morning we woke up to 20 degs and gentle rain and no temperature forecast above 27 for the rest of the week. Nature's just feeling a little moody I think - though it seems things are only get worse as temperatures warm each year.

Anyway, on a happier note, and going back to the previous evening, we had a nice New Year's Eve. We went to a party at a friend's place who had this as the view from his balcony:


It's right opposite Luna Park on Sydney Harbour. Excuse the dodgy wobble. My photography skills have gotten even worse with the new camera as I'm not used to it yet - it is so fabulously teeny weeny that my gumby hands can't seem to grab it! Here's a much more professional pic of the Harbour Bridge fireworks from CBC World News:



Anyway, still to come is the Christmas wrap-up - I'll get to that in stages over the next couple of days.