Our Pikachu family - Baby Pikachu, Mummy Pikachu and Daddy Pikachu.

It's Raining

That's good. Living in a dry continent like Australia you learn never to sneer at rain. When I lived in Gloucestershire in the UK it rained so much that everyone complained - though the gardens looked great! - but here people who complain about rain get glared at. And we live in Melbourne, where it is comparatively wet anyway, though we are in an extended (like, 10 years!) dry spell. Many other parts of Australia are in SERIOUS drought conditions and may not recover within my lifetime. Unfortunately today's rain is the wimpy sort that makes the ground damp but doesn't do anything else worthwhile.

We are in the tail end of winter at the moment but all the spring flowers are appearing. One of my great joys right now is watching the daffodils and jonquils pop up in unexpected places all over the front garden. Last autumn we gave Baby Bear and her friend E a big bag of bulbs and told them to plant them throughout the front, wherever they liked. At the time this felt a bit dangerously laissz-faire, but now I am really pleased that we did as it is so much fun seeing them appear everywhere! Pics at the weekend when the digital camera comes home from George's office.

Wombat has been off the last few days with a bad cold and I am starting to feel brain meltdown. Lovely kid, but so clingy when sick! Combined with the inevitable Aspergers thing of KNOWING you are the centre of the universe and thus the most important thing in your mother's life ... by bedtime last night (his bedtime) I was so exhausted that I just wanted to flop in front of the TV and not talk to anyone. (OK, that's actually my typical evening anyway...!) Of course I then had to field two phone calls from very nice people who really wanted to talk to me. R and J, I hope I didn't sound too away with the fairies when I was talking to you last night! I then attempted to watch what was probably a really good documentary about the end of the War in the Pacific, but having missed the first half and being so tired I couldn't really concentrate. MDA was good, though. A pity that it is obviously jumping the shark - why does dross like the appalling Big Brother do so well on the ratings but excellent, high quality Australian drama like MDA has an audience of three tired housewives and their pets?

Started reading Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake last night. Brilliant, scary, post-apocalyptic stuff. Not the kind of book to give you pleasant dreams, admittedly. Fell asleep haunted by the thought of it.

I managed to write the scrumbled hat pattern yesterday - taking all day in between requests for sandwiches and iced drinks and cuddles. It's difficult to know whether the instructions I have written down for various things are sufficiently easy to understand. Part of the construction technique sounds really hard when it's written down but when you are actually doing it, it is quite intuitive and obvious - I hope so, anyway! Over the weekend with get George to take appropriate model shots with Baby Bear (he does that so much better than me) and apply his desktop publishing skills to making it look more polished. I have decided that I am good at the designing and can write the instructions down, but he needs to pull it altogether - I tried on my own but he is much more talented than me in that direction.

Will try to take other pics at the weekend too - daffodils, progress on the scarf exchange scarf, that sort of thing. Speaking of which, I am now suffering a crisis of confidence over that - I fear it is far too frivolous and not at all practical, having looked at progress reports on other blogs.

I've discovered Etsy! Another selling forum, goody. It's still in its Beta phase but looks like it might turn out to be rather desirable. Ebay has its good points, of course, but I will definitely be keeping an eye on Etsy in the future.

Big Purple Thang

We spent the weekend down at Moe with George's mum, going over paperwork - I seem to have become the official filler-in-of-forms because I can, when required, write in large clear capitals. Rather surprisingly exhausting. Baby Bear was off on a church youth group camp down on the Peninsula somewhere, where apparently she had great fun and has come back apparently full of a desire to be baptised and confirmed. Good for her, we always thought it best to leave it up to the children to decide whether they wanted to do this sort of thing for themselves, not impose it on them as babies. My only real concern is whether she will want to be baptised in our own pool in a sparkly bikini, and if this would really count as Sacred Space!!

Wombat coped well with the weekend - it was fun for him to be the only child, and he had free run of the TV and DVD player, but he also had to do a lot of sitting around waiting for grown ups to fill in forms and photocopy things. He lasted very well, really, and was rewarded on Sunday morning by a nice long visit with his big cousins D and L. They all played companionably on computer games and watched The Simpsons. He's got another heavy cold now, though, and is off school. We gave him a Gamecube for his birthday (second hand) and he has played on it all day today.

I decided that I wouldn't do anything that involved concentration as he is clingy and constantly wants attention, so I've caught up on reading emails, done some scrumbling and played altogether too many games of Snood, in between providing drinks and the occasional snack and very frequent cuddles.

No progress pics of anything, but plenty of knitting progress to report. The socks that were excelklent car knitting on the trip to Albury have continued to be car knitting, with the result that I am about ready to do the heel on the second sock. I am using a very jolly Regia in the predominant colours of red, white and blue, with flashes of green and black - George calls them the Tyrolean socks.

The Big Purple Thang of the title is one the three designs I am working on for the next Sheepeasy Patterns. It's a drapey vest knitted in a myriad of, mostly, purples (with bits of pink and green and orange and a little glitter here and there). It is designed so that you can pin it on either side, or allow it to drape - at least I hope that's how it will work out! I am nearly three-quarters of the way through it, though admittedly I haven't worked in any ends as I go so that will take extra time at the end! I have been tossing up edging ideas - it is mostly stocking stitch, with generous ribbing on the fronts - and am still thinking about that.

The other two designs that will be appearing sometime soon are a scrumbled hat - completed ages ago but still waiting writing up - and the scarf I am doing for Celia's Scarf Exchange. I am well on the way with the scarf. I have knitted the body of it - a relatively narrow and plain scarf in a K2 P2 rib, in a Bendigo Woollen Mills 5 ply Rustic in a dark teal (more green than anything else, really) - and have been working on scrumbles to embellish it with over the last couple of days. It will be ready in time for the deadline and I hope the recipient appreciates it!! As it is an original design I thought I may as well write up the pattern for it to sell on the site.

I have numerous other ideas for original designs that will follow in due course - there will probably be a scrumbled bag and shoulder shawls coming out next, plus I am toying with some scarf ideas.

The scrumbled hat would have been done by now if I had pulled my finger out, but for some reason writing the patterns seems to be so much harder than thinking them up in the first place!

Scrumbling

Thanks, Lee, for the lovely compliment! (In the comments).

Scrumbling is my true obsession. Legal, too! It's also known as freeform crochet (or freeform knitting and crochet, or just freeforming). There are some disputes as to who originated it and its connections (or otherwise) to modular knitting/crochet. I came across it when browsing the Net about three years ago and found Prudence Mapstone's site. It wasn't quite as exciting then as it is now, but even then it was a moment of perfect synchronicity for me. I had been looking around for a new knitting challenge, having got bored with Kaffe Fasset (sorry, Kaffe!) - I'd signed up for a knitting class that sounded interesting, with lots of embellishing, but that was cancelled - and I found this site. I immediately ordered her book and set to work. There was a fair bit of crochet in it. I could crochet, but tended not to, so that was a bit of a learning curve!

Not long after I had started scrumbling, we all went up to Sydney for two weeks while George did some urgent work, instead of having a summer holiday. I did my best with the kids on my own, but Wombat was at his autistic worst and it was hard. We spent a lot of time sitting in our air conditioned apartment, and I scrumbled while he watched cable TV. It saved my sanity and gave me an enduring love for what is, essentially, a form of patchwork.

How do you do it? Well, any way you like! One of the things I love about it is that there are no rules and you cannot make mistakes. Some scrumblers are more rule-bound than that, and their work is lovely. If I want to follow rules, however, I use a pre set pattern. When I scrumble I like to go with the flow.

When I make a scrumble I do this - I make a centre piece, in either knitting or crochet, about an inch or so across - a square, a triangle, a rectangle, a circle or something misshapen. Then I work around it, adding bits here and there, either knitting or crocheting straight onto it, or doing separate pieces and sewing them on afterwards. When the overall piece is approximately the size of the palm of my hand, I stop and make another one. What I do with them depends on what I think I might make out of them - for the cape I made lots of scrumbles and sewed them together at the end, and then added some bits and pieces here and there to fill in gaps. I deliberately left some gaps because I liked to effect they gave. I sewed some beads on in various places, just for fun.

I made a hat for Baby Bear recently, in which I did separate pieces and attached them as I went, using a hat block for shaping. I am writing up a pattern for that which will be on sale by the end of the month (hopefully!) at Sheepeasy Designs.

Anyone interested in scrumbling will find lots and lots on the Net - Prudence's site gives some interesting links and a Google search will come up with lots of things too. Big warning, though - you either love it or hate it, no-one seems to be lukewarm about it!!

And for anyone who thinks it is a great way to use up your oddments of yarn - well, it is, but I guarantee that you will end up buying twice as much again, because you keep seeing things that would be perfect for it. I can rarely resist buying a multitude of single balls of new and novelty yarns, because they will be great for some freeform project or other.

Amazing what a child can do with craft materials. Wombat under a couple of metres of wadding. It was never the same again.

A pair of socks I made for George last year. I think the yarn was a self striping Regia. Yes, he does wear them to work under a suit!

A close up of some of my scrumbling. This is the cape that is too warm to wear most of the year.

This is the last pair of socks I finished for George. They were knitted from a Lana Grossa sock yarn and we think they look great! Taken in an Albury motel, hence the rather motel-like bedspread.

We spent a weekend in Albury in July. Sirius was boarded out with a loving family and an active lab cross to play with. This is how exhausted she was when we cam ehome! she slept for the best part of two days.

Why I haven't blogged recently

George's father died a couple of weeks ago and it has been a rough time for us. He was old (86, I think) and had become increasingly infirm ove rthe years - the last three or four years have been in a nursing home. He had suffered many strokes over the years and developed a particularly cruel form of dementia, that robbed him gradually of all his motor skills but left his other faculties pretty much intact but trapped - for the last 18 months or so he could not walk, talk, do anything for himself, but you could see in his eyes sometimes that he knew everything that was going on and hated it. For a once fiercely intelligent and active man, it was a living death and it was awful to watch. So his death was a relief in many ways, but it hit George a lot harder than he expected. I must admit that my first response when I heard the news was that his spirit had finally flown free, butI don't think George could quite see it like that.He died peacefully, painlessly, with one of his daughters and his wife (and his favorite dog, smuggled into the nursing home by sympathetic staff!) holding his hands.The funeral was a lovely celebration of his life, which had been happy and eventful, and afterwards (after the obligatory sandwiches, etc!) we spent a family evening looking at old photos and sharing stories.I'm now completely exhausted from being the calm, stable centre of the family while George grieved - of course he is still grieving but is functioning more normally now.

Normal service will be resumed shortly.

Knitfest!

OK, I haven't blogged for so long that I would be in mortal trouble if this was a confession box.

The last three months I have had my head down preparing the inaugural patterns for Sheepeasy Designs. Yes, I've decided to launch my own little pattern company (can it be a company when it's just me and nothing legal?) and have been knitting my fingers to the bone. everything got done in time to be launched at the Mt Waverley Knitfest a couple of weeks ago. During the Knitfest I taught two scrumbling workshops and was one of three 'designers' (well, that's what it said on the program, so we must be designers!) who took a wrap designing workshop. Plus there was a fashion parade for which I allowed myself to look stupid - see photos below!!!

Much knitting was done on the World's Longest Scarf. Personally I would rather commit hari kari than sit down and knit a metre of wide garter stitch. but it is a worthy cause. There were other workshops, including Non Traditional Knitting and Slipper Knitting, which I couldn't attend, and lots of people in and out. Much fun stuff for sale, though sales were slow this year - the weather only just turning cold as Knitfest started. We've had a weird winter, very mild for a long time, though colder now. (Although I hated the long grey months in England I didn't mind the cold - I feel the heat and it is rarely cold enough to wear the things I like knitting here!!)

After that all finished last Thursday I was left feeling severely anticlimactic. Of course Wombat was sick YET AGAIN so I got to feel anticlimactic in the company of someone small and cute who wanted to talk about the Simpsons 24/7. Good thing I like the Simpsons. When he talks about YugiHo I want to fling myself off a cliff.

So far I have designed a poncho pattern with suggestions for embellishments, and a shrug pattern that comes either as a properly written pattern in three sizes, or a measure yourself and take your gauge and make it fit whoever you are. Knitting them was only half the job, I discovered. (Though that took long enough - knitting ponchos takes longer than I thought!!) Transforming scribbled notes on the backs of envelopes into presentable patterns was fun.

Then the photos. First of all we took everything down to Moe to take photos in the gardens there. But George forgot the camera, and it poured with rain all weekend - which they needed badly. So I took some snaps in the back garden. Then George appointed himself as the David Bailey of the outfit, and spent all afternoon taking arty shots of Baby Bear in the bushes. I have to say that his photos are gorgeous and well worth it - even if I was still picking vegetable matter out of the pink poncho while it hung on display in the gallery!! (It went unnoticed on the Noro poncho - colours to die for but I wonder that it is allowed in the country, what with Australia's strict quarantine laws and the amount of plant matter in it!!!)

The patterns are now being sold on a rudimentry web site (the cheapest possible for the moment, until we see how things go) and on Ebay as well. We shall see. The next couple are also in the pipeline - a scrumbled hat that is already made but not written up, and a multicoloured drapey vest thingy that I haven't started, though I have had fun gathering purple yarns for it!!! I decided to treat myself to some Addi Turbos for it, which I had to mail order as I was stuck at home with Wombat.

Now it's the school holidays. Baby Bear has gone down to Moe to stay with Nana for a couple of days - something that both of them seem to enjoy. I sent her with several skeins of yummy yarn to wind for me - I decided not to buy a wool winder and swift as I could use the one down there whenever I wanted, but also decided not to bring them to Melbourne as I was offered because M, my sister-in-law, also uses it.

Wombat is 'camping' with his friend L over the back fence. That involves a sleeping bag, a bowl of popcorn, some peanut butter sandwiches and some chocolate. I hope they are not scaring the chickens too much!!

It is Baby Bear's birthday on Friday and I am going to take advantage of her being away to finish off this which I am knitting for her (the one on the cover). It is looking gorgeous! Plus a Vegan Fox is hopefully going to be rushed to life before Friday. (In pale pinks).

And no, Karen, I haven't so far knitted a viola case, but you never know ...

Me in typical pose - wine glass in hand - at the Fashion Parade held at Knitfest at The Highway Gallery in Mt Waverley. The scarf is not knitted, it is woven from ribbon yarns and some silvery novlety stuff. Cute, glamorous and sadly not mine, butborrowed!!

I look too wierd in this picture, but it's the only picture I have of my scrumbling actually being worn.

Diva diva!!

We all went along to Baby Bear's play the other night and she was magnificent! I know every parent thinks their child is the most talented and wonderful, but she really did bring the house down with her Scene 1 performance of a spoilt, punk princess. Very funny and scarily convincing! In the second half she had a much smaller role which she did well but wasn't a standout. It's a little community youth theatre group that makes sure that all the talented kids get a part that showcases their abilities, so as a general rule half of them get a starring role in the first half and the others in the second half. Other kids who are enthusiastic but not so talented get nice little bits in both halves. Everyone was excellent and the audience thoroughly enjoyed it. There were two matinee performances on subsequent days and now it is all over and done with until next year. That might leave her some time to practice those four instruments she plays (clarinet, flute, piano and viola), spend some time with the Church orchestra and the school concert band, and maybe join the Church youth band (she has been invited to join but hasn;t had time so far this year!!)

She and George are over at the primary school spreading mulch right now. Wombat is at his friend's place. Even the dog is out (also spreading mulch). Later on we have to go to the shops to get some scripts filled, have icecreams, and for me to check out a skirt that George wants to buy Baby Bear at Urban Angel. Then home to make a pavlova for tonight - big cousin L is coming over for dinner, a refugee from uni where he is living in college and they don't feed them on Saturday nights.

I just sat down to skein four balls of wool I dyed the other day. The intention was to put them on Ebay. I decided to dye them in the ball to see what happened, and wanted to skein them to show off the full range of colours. (This is commercial yarn that I was never going to use - four 50g balls of cream 5ply that I've had hanging around for years). As I started skeining I decided that the colours were so gorgeous that I was going to keep them and turn them into something for myself! I used turquoise and hot pink Landscape dyes and the result is a scrummy purple in different shades with spots of turquoise and fuschia here and there. Maybe a lace scarf or something. Definitely too gorgeous to sell! I will try to photograph them this weekend.

I escaped for the day yesterday. George took the day off work and I ran away. Actually I went to Chadstone (large shopping mall) and spent the day mooching around there. It was a good place for people watching - as it's the school holidays it was quite illuminating to watch the teenage mall rats and decide that my daughter is never going to look as tarty as that! I wandered around, considered buying some clothes and eventually bought two very fine cardigans (one pale pink ballerina style, one black with pretty floral embellishment), spent hours in Borders and bought some books on special and Belle Armoire magazine, wandered around some more and finally caught the bus back to our neighbourhood mall, where I did the supermarket shopping and was finally collected by my loving family in time to go home and cook dinner for them. (Which was frozen pizza and an apology for a salad - hey, it was my day off!) I was then too tired to do more than a few rows of ribbing on George's sock.

Looking back through this blog I seem to write a lot more about my family than ab0ut knitting. I guess I am not the fastest knitter, plus is seems boring to say 'I did another X rows on such-and-such a project today'. The truth is that knitting is what occupies most of my waking thoughts. I;ve always knitted, but I'm sure I;ve only got this obsessed over the last couple of years.

Prima Donna

Baby Bear has spent all day Monday, all day yesterday and then three hours last night rehearsing for the play, which opens tonight. She spent yet another night with our friends making props, but slept at home last night - wonders will never cease! But this morning she woke up overhyped and overtired and did a really good prima donna imitation for a couple of hours, which wound up Wombat to an unbearable degree, and they were at each other hammer and tongs for some time. Fortunately I eventually managed to separate and calm them, and then after she had had some breakfast and done some vacuuming (not as punishment, it's a weekly chore that I often do for her but decided it was time she did something round the house!) I let her go round to her friend E's place for the day. They are both in the play (in important roles - E always gets the ingenue, Baby Bear gets the character role) and probably both as bad as each other right now. But E's mother doesn't have an autistic child in the middle of it, as I do, so I figure will be better able to cope with them both being prima donnas than I would.

We're all going to the play tonight. Wombat should be OK, with some meds and his Gameboy - and he'll like the second half which has lots of circus acts in it.

I took him to see The Son of the Mask yesterday, which we both thoroughly enjoyed. He pointed out that it was like a cartoon, and he was right - it had a very similar feel to the old Loonie Tunes cartoons, plotwise and everything, and was a good laugh. Then we did some shopping - he wanted the Spongebob the Movie PC game, which he spent his pocket money on, and I bought the original three Star Wars movies on DVD, which we are working our way through not. (We only bought the DVD player just after Christmas, so buying DVVDs is still a bit of a novelty!!)

I photographed some dyed wool yesterday that I am going to put on Ebay but forgot to download the pics, so they are at the office with George. I love dying my homespun but haven't done any spinning for ages, so I decided to dye some commercial yarn that I had. Will post pics when I remember to download them. I LOVE dyeing, it is so much fun!

Steaming ahead on the sock that has been taking so long. And now to sit down and knit something which cannot be revealed yet.

Hot hot hot

At least in Melbourne we always have a topic of conversation if we are stuck ... the weather. Unseasonably hot this weekend, more like midsummer, and rather unpleasant. I spent Saturday flaked out in front of the fan, knitting (on the project that cannot be named right now). George was running around with the kids taking them all over the countryside, and was exhausted when he got home. They all seem to have enjoyed themselves, though, which is good.

Yesterday felt like trial by stifling heat. We don't normally go to church during the school holidays, as there is no Sunday School. (OK, I don't got very often regardless!). But the minister was leaving and it was his farewell service and informal thingie afterwards, with lunch, so we rolled up. Well, it ranked up there with the pope's funeral and Charlie's wedding in terms of overcrowded and long. We got there twenty minutes early and still had to sit at the back of the foyer, rather than in the church itself. I reckon I'd have seen and heard more if I;d stayed at home and watched it on the telly (so to speak). It was incredibly hot, we couldn't really follow the service, and Wombat was having a bad morning. Not that I blame him, under the circumstances - I would have liked an excuse to behave the same way! I took him across the road for a cold drink for half an hour at one point, which helped a little bit. The service went for 90 minutes, which is about par for the course. Then the farewell bit - which went for another 90 minutes and was FAR TOO LONG. By the time we got to the lunch I;m surprised we didn;t all get food poisoning because it had been sitting out in the hall for an hour in the heat. (Actually I don;t feel too well today but I think that is a general reaction to the heat of the weekend and being far too tired).

Baby Bear had been playing in the Church Orchestra so had spent all that time, plus an hour's rehearsal beforehand, dressed in long black pants and a long sleeved white shirt - and then after a hasty lunch the orchestra had to race off to another gig. She was very hot and bothered by the end of it all!

I then sloped off to the local mall to chill out (literally, it is well air-conditioned!) and do the grocery shopping, among other things. Mostly I sat down and had a very long cold drink and read a beading magazine, then went and worked my way through pattern books at Lincraft. Anything to sit down! At least it was fairly cool. And the cool change had come through by the time George came to pick me up afterwards.

It's a lot cooler today. Much nicer. Baby Bear is out doing final rehearsals for the play she is in - rehearsal and costume fitting today, rehearsal and then dress rehearsal tomorrow, performances Wednesday night, Thursday afternoon and Friday afternoon. She is a busy girl!! She spent the night with some friends last night and they apparently spent a lot of time recording each other on the computer and downloading songs. Sounds like fun. She assures me she has had enough sleep - I hope so!!! She's spent one night here this week, what with Moe and then last night's sleepover, but I got a chance to talk to her briefly this morning and she seems happy and relaxed.

I almost finished short-rowing the heel on George's sock - the second of the pair that it has taken me nearly four months to knit!

Peace, Perfect Peace

George has taken Wombat down to Moe to pick up Baby Bear, who has been spending some quality time with Nana for a few days. Leaving me ALONE!!!! Can you hear me cheering!!! I did one of those Myer Briggs tests once and it confirmed my suspicions that I actually NEED time alone to recharge, that being with other people drains me of energy (no matter how much I like them and enjoy their company) - and I definitely need some time out after a week of school holidays. Not that I don't like my children or being with them - actually it was only Wombat for most of the week - but Wombat can be very exhausting. In fact that's the main reason why Baby Bear went down to Moe, because he had a very bad day on Monday and things were getting quite fraught. He's been OK for the rest of the week but rarely quite relaxed. A doctor's visit confirmed our recent thoughts that he might have had a chronic sinus infection for some months - he's now on antibiotics and hopefully that will whack anything nasty out of his system. (No, I don't support the indiscriminate use of antibiotics, but he hardly ever takes them and I know from experience that sometimes chronic infections really need this to get rid of them).

I took him to see Robots the other day - quite good fun, lots of cute background details and enough movie references to warrant taking a notebook and pencil along with you! I then somehow ending up being persuaded to by him a new pair of pajamas (Simpsons), a Gameboy game (Banjo Kazooie) and two new DVDs (The Incredibles and the Spongebob Squarepants movie) - it sounds awful, but anything to keep him happy. Yesterday he had a friend come round to play - this went very well for the first three hours but when R's dad was delayed coming to pick him up (waiting for a washing machine repairman, poor chap!) they both got increasingly bored with each other over the next hour and a half. When R finally left, poor Wombat had a nasty meltdown, which wasn't a lot of fun for either of us. He did calm down and I only have a few extra bruises, but I'm afraid I was quite glad to see the back of him later on! Mind you he phoned me when they got down there - he'd obviously slept on the journey - and hearing his sleepy little voice saying 'I love you Mummy' made my heart melt all over again. He should enjoy today, he likes going to Moe and then they are going to cousin D's dairy farm afterwards, and Wombat LOVES going there!

I had a gloriously slobby evening after they left. I put on some videos of stuff I'd recorded and watched an eclectic mix of programmes, which when I think about it pretty much covers the range of stuff I like to watch - a Real Crime programme, a documentary about the development of the English language, Jerimiah and CSI. I made some progress on a new knitting project that I cannot go into in case the intended recipient reads this blog, but although slow going (enough K2P2 ribbing to stretch around a football field!) it was peaceful and harmonious to knit - I use that word specifically because I am using, for my first time, Bendigo Knitting Mills Harmony (also known as Heirloom Breeze, if you buy it in the shops rather than direct from the mills) - what a fabulous yarn! It is a mixture of wool and cotton with some lycra in it, and it feels like heaven to knit with. It is soft and relaxing and I just love it. It knits up beautifully evenly and the finished fabric is just gorgeous.

I need to wash the floors (yuk!) and hang out some washing, then it's back to the knitting and a day of peace.

And this is a completely gratuitous shot of Sirius looking lazy and smug. Note the red under her nose - she is half Pharoah Hound and blushes when she is happy.

i took this photo in January of the then half-done denim cotton shawl. I finished it last night (photos to follow at the weekend when George is at home with the digital camera). I knitted it in Elle denim cotton, hoping it would be a good substitute for Rowan denim cotton - it's half the price. I wasn't sure until I had washed it three times in hot water and tumble dried it, but now I love it - it had a terrific soft hand to it and has faded just nicely. I have to put a button on it and then it will be perfect for wearing with jeans. I particularly want to wear it with the new jeans I just bought - which have silver embroidery and sequins on them!

I Know I meant to Blog More Than Once a Month...

but things just got away with me recently. Easter was great, though it felt odd having it before the school holidays rather than in the middle of it. We went to George's mum's for a couple of days and hung out with the family and the family dogs. Sirius had a ball and wore herself out.

The Great Easter Bunny Hunt for the year went off brilliantly. It's a good place for it, as G's mum lives on a small bush property and there are lots of cunning hiding places. The kids were thrilled to find the trail finally finished with a proper rabbit scraping and pile of rabbit poo. I have visions of us still doing this when they are both grown up!

It's the last day of term today and Wombat is, true to form, sick. I really wondered if he was putting it on when he collapsed with a severe headache five minutes before we were due to leave, but I realised that he had a nasty sinus headache and it was genuine. Now it's after lunch and he is feeling much better after dosing with paracetamol and decongestants.

Unfortunately this meant I had to miss the Box Hill S'n'B meet that I wanted to go to, but hopefully at least two other people went along. I was going to teach Linda to knit socks but she is happy to wait till next term. It's an unpleasantly hot and windy day today so staying inside isn't such a bad thing, though. We might even swim later on in the hottest part of the day. I thought I'd had my last swim for the season about three weeks ago but today and tomorrow are both forecast to be 30C so the water might have warmed up enough for me to enter without dying of heart failure!!

On the needles - well, I finished knitting the pink cotton Summer Poncho over Easter though I haven't sewn the (very small) seam that is needed - I suspect it will be too small for me and will end up being worn by Baby Bear, who will look better in it than I ever would. Still working on the denim cotton shawl though not too much to go on it. Also still working on George's socks, which have taken forever this time because I have been doing too many other things.

Plus two other projects which will be revealed in good time!