Hot and humid for the last two days. I went out to dinner last night which was nice. All a bit spontaneous - the artist who opened the gallery had friends who needed entertaining and so I was hauled out from my bunker to do it for her - nice people, nice meal, good thing the cop at the corner did not haul me over on my way home!

Today was stormy as well as hot and humid, so I spent it indoors as much as possible, doing some spinning and generally messing about on facebook (where I seem to have been involuntarily joined to a revolutionary site!! I am suggesting that communism may not be the answer. Some disagree. Presumably very young someones who are in love with the Cuban fantasy.

Two cottages, sewing (well, knitting) and cleaning the bank - so not much done today. It has been raining on and off all day and the tank is already full, so tonight's heavy rain will be wasted (again).

Have almost filled the bobbin of merino - hopefully by tomorrow night.

Christmas Day, in case you didn't notice, was rather warm. In these parts it was forecast for 30 and exceeded that. Luckily I was in Hobart which kept its cool and was closer to 24. It was still 29 in the bedroom at bed time which I had deferred as long as possible. And yesterday was rather warm too, if cooler overnight.

I do hope you all had as good a day as I had sharing food and friendship.

Meanwhile back at the spinning wheel I have been beavering away with my various dyed locks which, as I watched the Dr Who Christmas Special turned into laceweight spinning. A bit disconcerting when the bobbin started off with a yarn that would have plied nicely into an 8ply equivalent. This caused something of a conundrum as I would hate to have to start knitting up such fine yarn.

Fortunately Rowena loaned me some holiday reading in the form of Sarah Anderson's The Spinners Book of Yarn Designs (hoping to wean me from my obsession with Jacey Boggs' Spin Art), and after some consideration I have decided to try for a crepe yarn. This involves plying the yarn together, then adding a third yarn and re-plying. Fortunately I read the instructions before heading into the History Room today so I now have a bobbin of s-twist merino-alpaca to serve that purpose.

This is the yarn I have been spinning and dying

And this is the s-twist yarn I spun today at the history Room. As it contains alpaca it will shoosh up a bit when plyed, which will provide some nice texture over all (it's the same stuff as the orange stuff I  spun a few days ago).

Since it will take me forever to fill the bobbin at the rate I am going, the idea of spinning another for the plying process is too horrible to contemplate, so I will just fill this one up and then ply it end to end. For that purpose I have ordered a yarn winder on ebay which will create centre-pull balls of yarn so I can draw from the outside and inside for my two yarns required to ply.

On the subject of books - while I agree the Sarah Anderson book contains a broader information base and greater selection of art yarns, the Jacey Boggs book contains instructions that are easier to follow and which seem to suit my logic processes better, being laid out as a logical progression that builds skills as you go. So I will probably get both. Sarah is coming to the Bothwell Spin In in March, so I will get hers there and save on postage.

The next few days will be warm and humid, so I am not looking forward to my increased work load at the cottages, but I expect I will survive.

Our Asian guests have an unfair (I think) reputation for being messier than our non-Asian guests. Yes, some of them are messy, but so too are some of our 'john smiths'. Anyway that being the case, Her Next Door took one look at the roster, saw there were seven Asians in last night and called in sick.

I was in the middle of making mud pies with dye and wool when the call came through, so I finished off what I was doing and left it to cool while I went in to see what needed doing. Apart  from some neatly stacked but dirty dishes, they were the perfect guests - they even took their garbage out for me! Nevertheless it was three hours of work once I had dealt with the linen order that had also been delivered (lucky me). Since it was rather warm today, it became a bit of a laborious job, but it was finally finished and I came home to deal with the wool. Another side effect of the warm weather was that the wool had dried out completely and stuck to the pyrex dish I had microwaved it in. Finally worked out that if I added water it would  come free which it did. So it was all dunked in warm water to rinse out excess dye, and set to dry which it seems to be doing at a remarkably rapid rate once more.

The boss had left me a Christmas present. Not the usual fruit cake from his mum, but some jars of home-made preserves. I can not imagine his mum feels much like cooking this year so soon after her husband's death.

I have been debating with myself when in the next four days I will clean the bank. I have decided to do it tonight as per the schedule simply because that frees all of tomorrow up for spinning. And since tomorrow will be at least as hot as today, I think sitting in a darkened house sounds pretty appealing right now.

I have opened the tops of all the windows, and it is amazing the difference having that side window installed has made in terms of achieving cross-ventilation. What was threatening to be a nasty hot night seems to be moderating now, and will hopefully cool down further before bedtime.

I'm with the four year old. Hot today and getting hotter tomorrow, and worse still on Christmas Day. I am a cold weather kind of gal, though at least the two loads of washing I got out after all the whipper snippering managed to get dry in plenty of time. In anticipation of a hot Christmas Day and me being absent, I trimmed all the grass from the fire break up to the house, around the house, down the side of the lane and so forth. So now if a fire breaks out I have some chance of returning to an intact house.

Before I did that, in fact last night, I dyed some more locks. This time I got serious and  mixed up the dyes in batches of 100ml. Since it goes a long way, and I am dying small batches, that was quite a lot of dye. I used the Sun Orchid (blue), Alfalfa (green), wheat (brown) and maize (yellow) but the blue and green dominated the batch this time.

 They look like peacock feathers don't they! Of course I was dying to have a go at spinning them up and fortunately today's heat dried them out rapidly, so they were ready to spin by lunch time. I have tried a variety of methods with them, straight spinning, blending (semi-blending as I seem to get merino all knotted up if I brush it too frequently), co-spinning with plain white and just spinning straight from the lock.

 As a result i am getting a self-striping yarn in various subtle shades which I am rather pleased with. Just one lock before switching to another preparation approach and  so on. The stripy bits are where I have co-spun with the white.

This is the second pass on the bobbin so you can see how much variety is coming out of it all! Now for the challenge of how I prepare the yarn for plying. I am thinking I will dilute the dye, focus more on the yellow and brown with just a dash of blue and green and only use white where it occurs naturally in missed bits as I dye.

Feeling rather chuffed (and tired, the whipper snippering in the heat has done me in!

You'll see I have added a new blog off to the right. It is someone on downsizer forum who clearly is rather more advanced than me. She does have some good patterns, as well as suggestions on dying with natural plant dyes which is something I have on the list for some future happy time when I don't have work to do on the house.

My current attempts at dying are commercial dyes - Landscape is the brand.

I played with it (with a fine disregard for the instructions) yesterday. It comes in powder form, so I took pinches of the powder and sprinkled them lightly on the latest batch of merino I have been washing according to Fran's instruction. I used five colours - lucerne, wheat, mountain mist, heather and something else that I have forgotten. The green happily distributed itself through the fibres but the rest was more reluctant, so I out with a squirrel hair brush dipped in hot water and spread it around a bit. That did not work terribly well so in desperation I sploshed a bit of the water on the various staples and that seems to have achieved a happy result. Once they are flicked and spun it will look quite different of course, but it's a group of colours I am happy with. Not sure at what point I should try to exhaust the dye and cook it, but think I will do it once it is spun and skeined and still wet from the 'finishing' process.

Today, as I was at the History Room once more I did another batch of the bought coloured tops from Ashford. This is called Rowan, and combines that lovely orangey colour with white, beige, green and plum which gives a nice tweedy result.

Here it is plyed. It combines baby alpaca with merino and once plyed is a glorious soft cloud of yarn. I have a pack of their green (moss) fibre also which, in combination with my merino (white and coloured) will go well with the vortex beanie pattern from the new blog methinks (and since I have tail ends of various brownish grey yarn from beany knitting I will probably throw that into the mix also),

My days at the History Room are enlivened by the company of geese. Council  has recently sown seed to create a lawn (they of course waited till after our steady rain was finished and no more was in sight, so it is a bit patchy). The geese are doing a fine job of keeping it mown which is a good thing as by now it would be well overlength due to the weather we are having still.

The last two days have been chilly enough to warrant a fire at night, but today was shirtsleeves weather and no need to even contemplate a fire. Christmas Day is apparently going to be a scorcher, so my dreams of a white Christmas are shot down in flames.

The NBN may provide a far superior service in regards to speed and download but it seems to disappear from time to time - hence my absence.

Today was spent doing a variety of odds and sods - clearing wood out of the path of the truck that will be delivering the gravel, trying to cut some reo up so it fits on the back of the ute (no such luck - will resort to the angle grinder as I am apparently too feeble to use the bolt cutters), washing wool according to Fran's instructions, a bit of spinning, reading my newly arrive book on spinning (The Spinners Book of Fleece), bringing the bottom half of the future dresser in from the back of the ute (it was heavy so I left it there till I felt a tad stronger), and generally messing around.

I took my free fleece in to Jo yesterday (apparently Thursday is her day in town so I just caught her, but as I had brought up her bin from the street she gave me a few seconds). She took one look and said to throw it out but being the stubborn sort, I have not done that. She did give me the end of a bag of fresh Corriedale to play with, however, so I did not take too unkindly to her frankness. What I had actually wanted, but failed to get was a bottle of Unicorn wool scour so I could play with washing it, but that will have to wait until Sunday now.

Now for the boring spinning bit, so if this does not interest you, switch off now. I will try to explain what I am doing and why.

When I first started, my main aim was to get some twist into a continuous thread. This did not work terribly well, but I seem to have got to the point where I am not often creating non-viable bits and if I do, I seem to manage to catch them before they head into the orifice and over-spin them (core spinning) with a bit of extra fibre so they toughen up. As a result my yarns now look like this once plied and finished.

 The different length skeins result from using the chairs at the History Room for three skeins, and the niddy noddy for the fourth one.

 Here's a close up so you can see I am still fairly variable in thickness, but the overall thickness is certainly up to knitting up the jumper that is the goal of this particular spin (200g each of this and white, 800 grams of a lighter grey colour).

 This is the result of using new greasy corriedale wool, flicked and spun - I am rather pleased with the result and it is certainly a lot easier than the older wool which, as you will see below, did not respond well to flicking. My goal is to have this bobbin full by Sunday to show off to Jo. This bobbin is being spun from the tips, the next will be spun from the cut end to see what difference it makes.

 This is the older wool, greasy. First I tried flicking it to no avail, then I used the carding combs and rolled it into cigars rather than rolags so I could spin from the ends. Carding fine wool I discovered, results in lots of noils, and since some of this has very short staples (as little as one inch), and double cuts it is all a bit messy - but an interesting process nevertheless (and no, I will not be persisting with this particular bobbin).

 Here are some close ups of the older fleece - as you can see the staples are sort of glued together with the lanoline and poor handling, but there are many in there that retain their shape and which have adequate length. which is why I have persisted with them.

 I gave the instructions Fran provided a go today. The first time I did not hold onto the staple and as a result it ended up looking as if I had swirled some cotton balls in warm water until they disintegrated. Oddly enough, despite the wastage when I flicked them, they do see to spin rather well (I tried one that was almost dry).

The others I hung onto them individually, so they have retained their shape and have come up well. I have left a little dirt in the tip end so I can tell the difference and this will come out when they are flicked. Since I am flicking each staple as I spin, I will not lose track of myself.

The soap bar in question has previously been used for the purpose of lubricating screws so had a little 'scrubbing board' effect on the surface that worked rather well. And now it is washed, the wool is as  good as new, so I am a happy person. The really matted tangled stuff I will not bother with, but I am thinking I need a bucket lined with one of the many spare pillow cases I own, so that sort of thing (and left overs from flicking etc) can go in there, get washed when it is full, and felted into weed mats for the garden plantings rather than wasting it.

I think basically Jo and I are on a different page to some extent. I like experimenting and am  not bothered if I have to discard failed attempts. She is of the view you need to get a useful product from your effort. A material one that is. My useful product from a failure is a learning experience so I don't see this as a problem.

This is an example of the more tangled bits with no discernible start and end. They will end up in the pillow slip for gardening purposes.

The man with the digger finally arrived yesterday and set to work with a will. I now have two level spots for rainwater tanks - one up by the house and the other down the back beyond the site of the shed. These will be screeded with crushed bluemetal closer to the date of the tank arrival, to limit the risk of the surface being disturbed before the tanks to on it.

 This is the area up by the house. As you can see in this image, the end of the fence will be the near end of the shed (set 2 metres from the boundary, but in a line with the fence end) so I can install a short section of fence and provide some privacy to the back door. The yellow tank will be emptied into the two new ones and then relocated to the second site (see below).

 This is the area I enclosed with the retaining wall some months back. I now need to build a second retaining wall this side of the cleared bit, so that the shed site can be levelled after Christmas. Since a fair amount of what was removed was actually the stub ends of vegetation and therefore not suitable as fill, that (including the heap in the middle foreground) was dumped on the other side of the retaining wall to provide a bit of back fill at its base - once it has rotted down.

A happy side effect of all this work is that I now have a three metre wide firebreak between the house and the bottom end of the yard - now all I have to do is wrestle the undergrowth under control on my side of the break!

 The whipper snipping below the retaining wall revealed that all my natives are doing well, and the banksia is even setting flowers! This is all the more surprising as I discovered that while I acquired it legitimately, it seems Heather had dug it up from the Landcare plantings along the side of the road! I gather she was seen there industriously removing her plants of choice. I did wonder how she could have possibly afforded the number of plants she put in her garden!

Other gossip acquired courtesy of the digger man is that the man who used to own this place, Dessie, passed away three weeks ago. We were discussing the work I had done, and he asked about the fireplaces which I assured him had been long since repaired (bar one). And now I know where the hole came from that was in the back wall of the place. Apparently Dessie was not averse to pinching his neighbour's firewood, so one day said neighbour drilled a hole in and inserted a detonator......

My day in the History Room was spent spinning and plying. I borrowed the Lazy Kate from our display as I do not have one (the wheel at home has a built-in lazy kate). I have to say the freestanding one gives a rather more balanced result, so I have two balanced skeins, one slightly overplied and one yet to be inspected as I have not wound it on, due to subsequent interruptions.

There is a woman who often comes in for a chat when I am there. Her daughter is working at the local school, so she is somewhat at a loose end during the day. Still, she is good company and we often have quite involved discussions. She had not previously seen me spinning and was enthralled. Our conversation turned to various crafting adventures and my desire to spin some greasy wool and my frustration (well, that's a bit strong, my annoyance) that I have been discouraged from venturing into fleece land just yet.

Since her daughter will not be at the school next year and they are currently in a School residence, they are in the process of moving. Much to my surprise she turned up again ten minutes after leaving and handed me two bags of fleece. Plastic bags. Saying she had been carting them about for years and would never use them.

It was with some trepidation I opened the bags as poorly stored fleece can do nasty things if left too long, but both bags smelled lovely, and the wool is nice and clean! The fleece seems to come from three different sheep. One a superfine merino, another from a fine merino and the third from a sheep of unknown breed, but a rather lower crimp count (thank heaven) than the merino. This last lot is not quite in staples any more, so I have washed it with a view to practising carding with it. The merino is apparently a nightmare to wash and prone to turn into felt at the slightest provocation, so it will be spun in the grease after flicking. As my new book on wool and spinning arrived from ebay today, I will be able to refresh my memory of these methods as I go along. And I have a brush that Seb refuses to let me use on him (fine coat, sensitive skin, metal teeth - who can blame him) to do the flicking with. I do not, however, have a canvas apron so will have to ad lib on knee protection.

So a good day was had, despite the heat and wind. It will be 14 tomorrow fortunately, so I will complete the whipper snipping on my side of my new firebreak and then I can relax a little when it is like it was today.

It's almost 12 months since I accepted the offer on the UK house. How time flies. And me with no progress to show for it bar a waterproof roof and a fancy paint job.

Fortunately my lurgy (the allergies segued into a flu and I am still coughing like a choked up motor), seems to be on the mend, though tomorrow's exertions may well change that once more. What exertions I hear you say. Well the planning permission for the shed has finally come through so now I have to get a wriggle on and sort out the rainwater tanks so they have open space in which to build said shed (long story, yet to come). So I chased up the chap who was going to give me a quote three months ago and he turned up just now to say he can start on Monday.

This means between now and Monday (despite a full day in the History Room) I have to clear the long grass away from the area of operation, find a home for the various things stacked on the site to be cleared for the tanks and move them there and generally run around like a headless chicken. I have left a message with the local yard man to see if he can help but if not I will need to don a breathing mask and get stuck in tomorrow (not today - too cold and windy today, so I am staying firmly inside bar walking the dog and cleaning the bank later on).

Also called Council to see if they had made any progress regarding my request they share the cost on the neighbour's tree removal, but no, they had not yet discussed it with higher up, and promised they would do so today (so another phone call on Monday may be in order).

And checking out tank availability for delivery - another task to be dealt with - so an email to them too.

As I mentioned, it is blooming cold today, but it is the first cold weather in a while so I shouldn't complain. Fortunately I remembered to buy a bag of wood when down in Hobart last week, so the fire is going, albeit at a slow rate to ensure the supply lasts the distance.

The shed approval is through - no objectors to my great astonishment. We did not lodge for building approval as the rules change on 1 January and theoretically at least, approval will not be necessary. But we can't start before than as the current rules will apply to anything started before that date. And after that date it still has to go to Council's building inspector to determine whether it is an exempt development (the new, 'simplified' approach) and so forth and so on. The kit can not be ordered till after Christmas anyway, so it still looks like a February start for building the shed. Not such a bad thing as progress on the earthworks, tanks, tree etc has lagged somewhat and given the impact of Christmas, the tendency for Australian companies to use Christmas as an excuse to close for a month etc, I will still have to stay on their cases.

Meanwhile I have been doing my usual stuff and doing it slower and slower due to the progress of the allergies/lurgy and running out of energy to do anything other than turn up where I am expected to be, doing what needs to be done and staggering home to walk the dog before sagging into a chair.

That and pandering to the more peculiar behaviours of guests at the cottages who apparently can not find their way to the Reception area (three signs directing them there) and once there, can not find the envelope with their names on it which contains check-in instructions, or who get huffy because there is a power outage of 2 minutes duration which was clearly aimed at them personally. It is actually quite hard to explain this one convincingly as half Oatlands is served by one power source and the other half by another. Given the location of the cottages at the intersection, they do find they are surrounded by dwellings which still have electricity, but I know what is going on as I too am affected by such outages on that particular line.