Cushion

I figured in my six days of unemployment I better make a cover for the nekkid cushion that had been on the couch for months. I was feeling a bit ghetto, what with the holes in the couch and the white polyester nekkid-cushion. It's some of Lara Cameron's fabric. Copying off her pot-holder, I put batting behind the fabric and quilted down the lines of the trees. I'm like, totally a quilter now.

Just before blogging this I read Aunty Cookie's blog, which linked to her photostream, and... damn. It seems she got to the birds-in-trees-cushion-cover-thing first... unless her cushion cover is also less than a week old? I really dig the squirrel decals above the cot too... maybe I should just give up on independent interior decorating thought and go all stalker-like.

It's also kind of embarassing to be posting this about 1/12 of the way into 2008, but this year is officially the Year of Finishing Stuff Up. I got a little bit stash-y on the knitting front in 2007, and want to clear up the boxes and my Ravelry queue a bit. I'll be seaming together the Rogue hoodie today. I've started Gretel (she can't be finished until after my birthday, as that's when I get the necessary needles...). I've made one of the six socks I want to make. I'm ready to go on Badly Coloured Boy's hundspun Stripy, and the only other thing to do is finish blocking and seam together Babette. And if I manage all that, then the tangled yoke cardigan is next on the list.

(And just finally - oo, check it out! Another indie fabric designer! Not only does she live in my state, she actually lives in BCB's hometown. Jeebus. And he tries to to tell me that the creative ones leave in this sudden we-finished-high-school diaspora).

WWJD?

Or not so much. Because I'm guessing that Jesus is not so much down with the LYS.
So what would you do with a hundred dollar voucher to Calico & Ivy?

I finished up working in the bookstore yesterday. No longer am I a bookpimp. It had its less-fun moments (corrugated cardboard cuts, carrying heavy stuff, cleaning, customers, being a data-entry monkey) but on the whole it was a rather nice place to work. I think evidenced by the fact that I, as a mere 'unskilled' casual worker stayed on for six years. Potentially a record. I worked seven Christmases, which was as many as the store owner had. And it certainly beat being a kitchenhand, which was what I was prior to my bookshopgirl incarnation.

Anyway, I was showered with flowers and afore-mentioned gift voucher, softening the blow a little. Plus I have to return, because I forgot to hand over my keys. I didn't take my name tag. I figure when another casual is hungover and surly they can wear my name and give poor service with impunity, knowing complaints can't be tracked back to them (that's actually pretty unlikely, as only six people work in the store and all are very physically different. A quick check of sex and hair colour would likely reveal the offender). But still, the thought is there.

Leaving me just to ponder what I should spend said voucher on. I'm leaning towards yarn rather than fabric. Ideas? Suggestions?

Tomatoes. Um, maybe the smallest tomatoes you've ever seen, but there are quite a few of them.


Round my way 'soil' is actually sand. No, no exaggeration. We've been trying to build it up, but there's that niggling 'Gosh, we just put two hundred dollars worth of soil into a rental garden' feeling that stops me from doing anything really worthwhile. Next place round I'm building no dig beds, for sure.


Two. You do know how to sew a button on, right? Sewing over a matchstick, or a heavy darning needle, means that the thread is loose enough to allow you to pull the button out from the shirt a little and actually, you know, button the thing up.

Christmas, socks, pretty lettuce.

Christmas present. Ashford swift and Royal winder, from Bilby yarns. Given to me because I told Badly Coloured Boy I wasn't knitting his jumper until he bought me a swift and winder, or wound the skeins himself. He's seen me swearing over skein-winding. I hate it. Least favourite knitting-related chore ever. But now it's fun! It's all, like, neeeeeeow! Whoosh! Look at the awesome yarn-cake! I wanted to take an action shot, but, um, I was enjoying winding the skeins too much to pause.
I'm also a weeny bit partial to the swift, because Ashford made the rocking-horse I had when I was a kid. There ya go. Incidentally, I haven't named the swift yet. Any ideas? Or an opinion that naming a swift may in fact be the stupidest thing you ever heard of? The rocking-horse was called Ashley, for what it's worth.


Start of a Charade sock, with Verb for Keeping Warm's logwood dyed sock yarn. More subdued than I normally go for, but pretty, I think. I finished the Red Vinnlands I was chugging away on. Have to admit, I don't especially love them. They'll be the subject of another blog post.


And just because I can, here's what a sink full of radicchio leaves looks like. Must try growing my own radicchio sometime.

Summer Garden

Listada di Gandia eggplant flower. Isn't it beautiful? Hopefully it will soon look like this.


Dwarf red fig tomatoes. This cherry tomato vine is my most productive by far. It started cropping well before the romas, at the same time as the Grosse Lisse. But while I've had one (not very grosse) lisse I've harvested about twelve dwarf red figs. They grow in little bunches of up to six at a go. We had eight little tomatoes to eat on Christmas Day.

I am a complete convert to heirloom seeds. The Listada di Gandia and Dwarf Red Fig are heirlooms, as is the chocolate capsicum I didn't take photos of. When it ripens it's brown on the outside and red within. Beautiful. I was also given some heirloom seeds for Christmas - a selection of things in a pillbox from my mother's friend; and a packet of Minnesota Midget rockmelon seeds from my Stitch'n'Bitch secret santa. I cannot wait until it's time to plant a winter garden. Carrots, beets, garlic, broccoli - whee!


On the other hand, the world's crappiest giant sunflowers. Two to three metres is a big, fat lie. Any ideas why I have managed to grow dwarf sunflowers? Do they need really rich soil or something? One of the pumpkin vines damped off and died, meaning I'll have to be really careful to hand pollinate the flowers. There's been a run of bachelor boy-flowers, and a couple of little lady-flowers that have wilted off, but one big fat lady-flower looks promising. Cue my yelling across the garden "Oo! She has big stripy ovaries, so she must be easy to impregnante!"

Whah! Snowed under!

Which is funny, because it doesn't snow here. See, there's a combination of my working Christmas retail hours and my partying Christmas period style that means, no exaggeration, I go to my house to sleep, change clothes and have breakfast. I had some excellent photos for you all of a pudding in a can, and this astonishing spider that built a web in my tomato plants, and my beautiful, beautiful, Asian-glazed free range ham. But in the middle of all this Christmas capering (carols by candle light were such a highlight. A lot of my friends from highschool were well into choral singing. One is now has the university degree to prove she's an opera singer. So my darling friends were of such strength and tunefulness that they attracted attention from the nearby picnickers) I lost the cable for my camera. So we'll have to go with a web image.


Not quite so festive as you might have expected, but I did have the girlishly blushing pleasure of saying "Um, all the bank eftpos lines are down - could you pay with cash? And did you want these giftwrapped?" to the gentlemen above today. That'd be one Mr Heath Ledger, kids, if you couldn't tell through the makeup. Definitely added interest to Christmas Eve retail (along with aforementioned inability to accept any kind of electronic payment). I'm afraid as far as serving famous people goes it probably does beat Ben Elton, who stuffed $500 worth of coffee table books in his backpack and asked where was the nearest place he could buy a record player.

Christmas wrap

Here's my giftwrapping from this year. How cool is the snowflake ribbon? It's from Calico&Ivy (they really do have awesome Christmas stuff). The brown paper is the last of my Ikea brown paper. And um, just in case you're confused, that brown mottled thing in the upper right corner is the vase for my Christmas stick.
Easiest wrap job was definitely the little box with the brown ribbon and bells. It's just the box that this Adorapop pendant came in


Plus the ribbon leftover from two Lindt Easter bunny chocolates. They stretched over the box (one in each direction) perfectly. I didn't even have to retie the bows or anything. Knew I kept them for a reason. See, despite buying my uber-fancy snowflake ribbon I also obsessively hoard things that might in any way be used to wrap a gift. The gold tissue paper above is recycled, as is the red box and the wide silver ribbon. The narrow silver ribbon was $2 for a haberdasher's size card/ roll/ thing (you know, the flat cards from which you buy trim by the metre) at a market stall selling vintage haberdashery.

Sewn gifts

A bag from a Martha Stewart online pattern, made in Amy Butler fabric. True to form, the pattern was missing handles. So I had to kind of make up my own. I was going to make a few more of these bags, but sewing on the bias binding was rooly difficult. I also shrunk the pattern a little - as given it would've made one very large bag! This is still big enough to fit A4 documents with plenty of room to spare.


A Lotta Jansdotter pattern for a full body apron. Half aprons are cute, but I always find I get food spatters above my waist when cooking. I like this pattern a lot. Can you see it actually, very cleverly, has slight shaping in it? Tricky, huh? Hard to tell, but that's the Michael Miller Eiffel Tower print. The reverse (because the apron is reversible) is in a of black and white barcode-type stripe. It's going with a cookie cookbook and a set of cookie cutters.


And a third apron, in feedsack prints. This is my favourite, I think.

Next post: giftwrapping. Oh, just you wait. Three words: laser-cut; snowflake; ribbon.

Vintage knitting

I went down South for a couple of days, to visit Badly Coloured Boy's mum. We rode horsies and fed orphaned possums and met the new dog and were offered an unwanted kitten (see orphaned possums above) and I saw a very interesting frog in the lettuce patch, so it was an excellent visit all round. And of course when we went into town we did a run of the op-shops. I was really disappointed that someone has cleared out all the vintage sewing patterns. Last time there were heaps from the sixties and seventies. Now they're all late eighties or more recent. I did get some fabric remnants and some excellent vintage knitting booklets. These are my favourites.


A beginner's knitting guide for teenage girls, from the 1960s! But what might a teenage girl make?


Why, a sweater, to catch a beau! (Guess the boyfriend sweater curse is a fairly recent superstition). There was a pattern for a hat and booties 'to show off baby' a couple of pages earlier, so methinks knitting wasn't the only things the girls were doing to snag a guy! Which is a pity, because


in ten years time those women will look up from their needles and realise the handsome beau they snagged/ married with the aid of a shotgun and a baby bump has turned into one of these four men. Hirsute, wearing clothes too tight and apparently interested only in other men (I do like the brown and yellow number on the far right, though).

Boys, knitting and tragedy: some thoughts

What is it with people connecting personal difficulties, boys, and knitting? My friend J learned to knit off his mum a little while ago. When his ex-housemate dropped by and saw knitting on his bed, apparently her immediate reaction was "Darling! Are you knitting? What's wrong?"

And today BCB's very close friend, who's having a bit of yuck time with his (ex?)-girlfriend asked me to teach him to knit. Actually, technically he asked me to teach him to knit a gun so he could 'shoot happy b*stards'. I'm thinking the Mochimochi-land gun may not be quite what he's after. We might start with a garter stitch scarf, I think.

So it seems that both boys and girls assume that if boys knit they're knitting through tragedy (or that knitting through tragedy might make said tragedy easier). Where on earth does this come from? Ideas, anyone?