The Bear is home! Or rather he was, but went to Sydney for the day today. He will be home for dinner which makes him home. At right is the Imp posing next to some fruits of the garden, lovely raspberries (I am so glad I tried for autumn berries this year) and silverbeet (swiss chard). For some reason both cats demanded very vocally for access to the silver beet. I don't know why because they never have before and when I let them at it it was more along the lines of "let's taste this and act demented" rather than "this is what I have been waiting for!" I never ate swiss chard in the US but "English" spinach supply is erratic and bunches of silverbeet got for $1 in season. They were planted in our garden at the end of the summer. After picking the Bear up from the airport Sat AM, he went to sleep and I went grocery shopping and now I remember why he does it usually. After scrubbing the griller (broiler) on Friday (which I think has never been cleaned because I leave such things to somebody who can actually see dirt, which ain't me) and then trumping thru Woolies, my legs were not happy. Add to that Sunday having a 3-hour weaving class and then a footy match and I literally almost fell asleep at the wheel on the way home yesterday. I came home and fell into bed and slept for 2 1/2 hours.


My weaving project will be a thing long enough to use as a scarf, even if I don't wear it as such. I am doing blocks of twill samples (from Twill Thrills with bands of plain weave. My warp is a variegated wool in light blue, grey and pink and my weft is pink. I was up quite late trying to figure out what to do. So many of my ideas required 8 shafts. My attempt to find a used 8 shaft failed. I was disappointed when the course description for next term was the same as this term but our teacher said that the University had printed the wrong description and it will really be about block weaves including overshot and summer and winter. I now want to take it very much and am trying the Chinese water torture method of nagging to let me spend another $500 on a weaving course. I don't think we are going to get anything done on the land anytime soon and I didn't buy a loom so, pleeeeez?

The Footy: The mighty Swannies thrashed the Bulldogs, there was a sellout crowd (14,550) and we yelled and cheered and booed (especially at umpires who really get a serve from the Bear). I could bore you with zillions of people in red and white the size of ants but I'll only post 2, one of Adam Goodes and Barry Hall in the goal square. I think the person behind the post is Nick Malceski but I'm not sure. The other is a very enlarged photo of Mick kicking one of his 4 goals for the day. I am pleased to report that Jason Akermanis has zero effect on the match playing for his new team, after being booted out of the Lions for flapping the mouth to the media.





To include some fibre content and reduce my backlog of unaddressed items, I'll say a few words about Annie Modesitt's Twist and Loop which I purchased because, in a weak moment at the last crafty things fair, I succumbed to a couple of spools of wire thinking a pattern was included. It wasn't and I don't know if I am brave enough to try to knit beads on wire in a house where a grey furry object is possibly going to hurtle through you at high speed. When I first looked at this book, I had a sinking feeling that I would never be clever enough to make anything in it. That's because all the projects are in the front and the how-to is in the back which it seems really helpful and gives a number of hints in how to deal with wire's peculiarities. I am still a bit leery about all the beads but I feel a tiny bit more confident having looked through the back. I am not one of the knitters who reveres Annie as some kind of knitting goddess. The Knitting Heretic was not so much empowering to me as trying to insist her way was "better", not just equal to the standard. I wished I had someone at hand when I was learning who could have said the equivalent of "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" and let me figure out my own alternatives. All the instructions that warned of terrible outcomes if you used different knitting materials scared the life out of me and I wondered when these horrible things would manifest