Another week has flown (and almost another year!!), and I have been busy doing all manner of things once again.

The History Room Garage sale garnered $580 for our depleted kitty, and I have finally found the relevant grant  but am struggling to fill in the online form as I don't have anyone's contact details here at home, and at the History Room I don't have internet connections - quelle horreur.

Still it does not close till 20 December so plenty of time to sort that out.

I am now in there Sundays as well as Tuesdays and managed to spin two bobbins of yarn between interruptions yesterday. Tomorrow I hope to be knitting something. The cloche style beanie seems the way to go as it is easy to knit, knits up rapidly and does not use excessive quantities of wool. And now I have once again found my pattern book, I can vary it with different edgings and cables which, in combination with different fleece colours will provide variety and interest. The other beanies I knitted - one I gave to a friend to inspire her to get going with her own spinning, the other will need someone with a rather large head as it does not appear to have come out quite the right size despite using commercial wool on the bit that really had to fit. Oh well.

So spinning, doing the washing, keeping busy in the History Room and generally running around like a headless chook have occupied yet another week.

Annie called around with the spare bobbins and two large carding combs so I am well set at this stage despite sharing myself between two wheels. I have even loaned two bobbins to said friend who is being lagardly with her spinning as her present excuse is that she has run out of bobbins and doesn't know how to ply...... So now she can fill two more bobbins and we can sort her out on Saturday when we all come together in the same room once more (and I can learn how to ply rather more scientifically than my present approach that involves holding the two strands apart and letting the tension pull them into the orifice, which works, but unreliably so).

Sorry - I have been busy - not productively busy by and large, but busy nontheless.

Highlights!

After spending a nervous Thursday in the History Room with a forecast of 28 and high winds (fortunately an inaccurate forecast), I spent much of Friday attached to the whipper snipper reducing the firehazard in the back yard. More to go, but at least it is no longer near the house.  The bottom end of the back yard is still rather soggy, so any attempt to slash that resulted in pureed tips and flattened lower sections and was abandoned as not really a fire hazard just yet. Actually not much of it is as it is still  green, but a few days of heat and wind such as we are enduring at present will soon change that. We seem to have skipped Spring and moved straight into summer and today it is so warm I have a fried face (forgot my hat).

The reason I was in the History Room was because another volunteer was not available. But as the President has resigned (she is moving to Longford), we no longer have someone for Sundays so I will be taking that over as well as Tuesdays. I quite enjoy my time in there and now my spinning wheel is in residence it gives me a good excuse to knit or spin to my heart's content.

The spinning ground to a halt as Jo/Rowena was away one Sunday, and was sick once she got back so it was only today she re-opened the shop and I was able to restock. She is impressed by my progress and even bought the second beanie I had knitted to on-sell in the shop!

The plan is that I will now sell my beanies via the History Room, donating that part of the proceeds not required to cover my costs as I am using their space to do the work (well some of it). I will be happy with that, and given the price Jo is charging for them, it will be a good little money earner for the History Room too. We agreed I would not undercut her prices as we are all on the same team.

Yesterday I was in the shower when Seb started barking. Turned out there was someone at the front door. Since it was seven in the morning and I did not recognise the caller so decided to return to the shower and finish dressing. But she was persistent which turned out to be a good thing as it was Round the Bend from ALS. So I reluctantly invited her into my dirty smelly kitchen (I had cooked a lamb roast the night before and you know how that nasty smell of lamb fat lingers on) and we had a catchup chat. She was off on an expedition, having sold up on the mainland and moved to Tassie. She lives up north, so hopefully I can catch up with her.

The obligation to be social at that hour in the morning rather threw me off for the rest of the day, so once my work obligations were dealt with I came home for a nana nap.

Today was the whole town garage sale and the History Room had a stall (hence my sunburn as we are on the sunny side of the street) and made some good money in the process. I personally bought (at another sale I found yesterday quite by chance) a set of china which looks rather more appealing on my dish rack than did the motley collection of cheap modern stuff (this is also cheap modern stuff but a little more cottagey). And today I also purchased two more dinner plates (Meakin Ware) that will complement it and make up the numbers. Motley is good on such open display racks, but it does have to be marginally aesthetically pleasing.

Getting back to spinning, I was spinning in the History Room the other day when two Chinese tourists spotted me and became enthralled watching it happen. They clamoured for things to buy (which I did not have, of course) and so clearly this will work well all round.

Tonight I have been asked to draft up a grant application, but the information provided has failed to find anything on Google so I will have to find out a bit more (the search did turn up something of that name but it does not appear to be targetted at what we are applying for, so further discussion will be necessary).

Not sure about you, but I am beginning to wonder if a bunker in the back yard (fully stocked) would be a good idea. What an astonishing result in the US! Mind you it was a choice between a rock and a hard place, but at least with Hilary we would only be facing more of the same......

Stunning sunny day today - warm and light breezes. All the washing done and dry and most of it put away already. Just in time as it turns out. I did notice that my sheets have a tear in them as I put them on the bed. I have already repaired this set once, and I suspect they are now to thin to bother repairing again. Still, I have had them for at least 12 years so I guess I shouldn't complain. This is why I buy high thread count sheets after all. That will leave me with two sets for the queen size bed, but I will not buy more as I plan to retire it, albeit in rather longer than planned.

Council has decided that my application should be a notified application with associated increases in costs and delays in decision-making. I have paid so they can get on with it but will be lobbying one of the newer councillors who has a background in planning law and also writing formally to Council to request a reimbursement of the on-costs. Why? Because they are solely due to the heritage overlay on the place - the application itself would otherwise be a straight forward tick and flick. I may even seek permission to address Council on the unwisdom of this approach - it goes against the advice I have been giving to Councils for decades - those who listen find that managing heritage places is rather more relaxing than those who ignore me as their ratepayers feel their contribution to maintaining heritage values is recognised by Council.

Have finished knitting up the second beanie and as suspected, it turned out several sizes smaller due to the reduced girth of the wool. The first one fits me perfectly, the second one will suit most other people (I have a ridiculously large head).

Time to go work out where to start digging that bunker.

Yesterday we went to the Brighton Show. I have not been there since I was a child and we were exhibiting goats. Oddly enough we found ourselves sandwiched between the winning fleeces and the goats so I had a chance to catch up with the latest breeds. There are two I have not seen before - Australian Brown and Australian Black which look remarkably like solid-coloured Toggenburgs and British Alpines respectively. Not sure what the point was as their milk and  butterfat production seems pretty consistent with the black and white/brown and white versions. Unfortunately the handlers were not terribly forthcoming in response to my inquiries, so I am no wiser than I was before.

Six hours of spinning seems to get through a heck of a lot of wool, and I am now bereft of tops. In desperation I got out a long sausage of fleece that was a very early failed effort, and have respun it into something a little more 'like'. At least all that spinning seems to have ironed out a lot of the issues I was having, and we got to meet fellow-spinners from South Hobart who were good company.

Between us we had electric, traditional, and various other wheels so it was a good display. And one of us was knitting up home spun and dyed wool also.

Today being overcast, showery and windy I decided to skein up two more bobbins worth of yarn - the earlier of the two will be set aside for use in that distant future time when I am no longer able to spin chunky yarn without trying extra hard, the other will be knitted up using the same pattern as last time to see what changes are apparent. I will probably do that tomorrow while at the History Room.

All good fun, but it seems to be a little  bit obsession-making.

Glad you like the beanie - not quite the snug chic image of the original but it is certainly good at keeping your head warm - it tucks down well over your ears as the band section is shaped to be a snug fit.

Today was supposed to involve trimming grass, but as it was a very strong wind I stayed indoors and messed around with some minor chores instead. The dishwasher was purged, and some of the pots and pans examined to assess their future use. Unfortunately the latter good intentions were sidetracked a I realised that throwing them out was a bad idea when I might want to use them for something crafty in the future (boiling dyes, melting beeswax, that sort of thing), so they remained in their shelves for another day.

I also rummaged in my knitting patterns, discovering to my great surprise that I had a duplicate of a 1930s pattern book for scottish fair isles (in 4 ply!!!). I took it into town to the local knitter to see if he could use it as inspiration for some of his designs. There is at least one pattern in there that I had previously knitted but I doubt my body shape these days would make them look quite as perky as they do on the models!

The strong wind seems to have blown the warmer weather away as predicted, and tomorrow we are heading for around 10 degrees, so I also cleaned up around the heater and installed a stockpile of wood to keep me cosy then. Today I suspect a jumper will be all I need to keep going for the evening.

And having packed up my sample bag for the Show, I gave the wheel a good oiling so it is no longer making dry scraping noises, and one push on the pedal keeps it going for a surprisingly long period of time (not that I am spinning, I just pedal away to distribute the oil in the more remote parts of the machine). I am told I should oil it every time I change the bobbin, and I am afraid I have been a little slack in that department.

We seem to have a new gallery opening too, which will house local products, so if I get ambitious and it is still open by then, I will see if I can sell some beanies through it as I work my way up to being a competent spinner - if I can cover the cost of tops, then I will be a happy woman.

I have finally worked out how to download images from the new phone, so will provide a little entertainment for you. Basically I had filled pretty well all my bobbins with spinning of various quality, and the last two bobbins actually looked marginally good. So I felted them, rather than plying them (they were way too thick to be plied), and knitted them up.

It was a salutary process as using the yarn gave me a better feel for how things were progressing. The last spin is considerably more even than the one before, and so forth. These two skeins were the third and fourth last spins.

 The first challenge of course was getting them off the bobbins. I do not yet have a niddy noddy (a long stick with a short stick attached at right angles at each end off set from each other also at right angles).

I tried a long stick with some screws in it, but it ended up being a bit too tight, so the second one I wound around the handles of the grain trolley I used to cart stone and other heavy objects with. Worked much better and will continue in that function for some time I suspect.

Then the wool was soaked in warm water for half and hour, with occasional proddings on my part, then microwaved for 8 minutes till it started steaming (at which point the kitchen started smelling like wet dog).





This is the pattern I chose - it is from the same book I have been working out of for other jumpers. As you can see, the first (most recent) skein knitted up surprisingly evenly.

Not so the second skein which was considerably more over-spun, and had large sections of unspun wool worms that became a little lumpen. Oddly enough, all the lumpy bits ended up in the same quadrant of the hat! And the overspun, ultra-skinny bits turned up in the Irish moss stitch at the crown of the hat!

The other side looks quite respectable, so will become the front of the hat!

The current bobbin is actually building on the abortive attempts to start spinning on the two-pedal model (Kiwi2), but seems rather more respectable again. I do have a bobbin with an even better spin on it, but no photo, sorry.

On Sunday we are heading down to the Brighton Show where we will be parked in the Sheep Pavilion to spin for the mob. Such exhibitions provide an opportunity to chat to other spinners, and perhaps to amuse passers by, but i realised that a we are all spinning 'natural' tops, it would be a good idea to have some more brightly dyed ones on display also, so today I took advantage of a day off and headed to the Moonah Wool Shop (the owner of our local shop is en route to Deloraine for the craft show), and bought some tops that have been dyed in other colours. I won't spin them till I am better (one is a luscious cinnamon blend of alpaca and silk from Ashford), but they will make a nice display. I also picked up some catalogues for wheels (the Moonah Shop is the Ashford dealer for Tassie) so anyone who is interested in taking it up can see the variety of wheels and looms available.

Tomorrow we are headed for 18 and on Saturday for 10, so clearly the weather has yet to calm down into anything resembling Spring.

My plans for Wednesday went agley when I found that in addition to three cottages, I also had a load of clean linen to stack away, so by the time I got home at three in the afternoon, all thoughts of cutting grass had fled.

Thursday being rainy, I headed to Hobart and collected prescription cat food, catalogues from Bunnings and K&D on kitchen options and visited the pellet fire shop to check them out. You can get ones that fit into fireplaces and would look fairly appropriate in the house, so I am thinking (funds permitting) that i will get one put into the spare room/office space as a back up for those occasions when weather, funds or health limit my access to fire wood (and for chilly mornings leading to hot days, chilly evenings when it is too late to light the fire etc).

The kitchen catalogues provided hours of amusement redesigning the kitchen, then working out the most cost efficient solutions. Of the two suppliers, the Modina corner pantry from K&D is far superior to the Kaboodle one in terms of internal layout (and it does not come on legs, so you can actually step into it), so that will be the first purchase. The rest can be done incrementally if needs be, though of course, the blind corner unit is also an essential when I refit the kitchen, to avoid having to mess around once it is all in place.

Yesterday I discovered we have a new art gallery in town, landscapes and seascapes mainly, and some rather nice (though not all). I spent a happy two hours in there chatting to the owner and picking over the offerings.

Our spinning group has been asked to amuse the mob in the sheep pavilion at the Brighton Show, so I got the wheel out and had another go, producing two bobbins of marginally acceptable wool - overspun, thick and thin, but generally hanging together. I have skeined it and lightly felted it rather than plying it together, and will knit it up in to a beany once it is dry.

After two rather lovely days (if a little windy today), we are heading back to Antarctica tomorrow with snow forecast to 600 metres, and similar on Tuesday, then back to Spring for a few more days before another descent to the pit. I have the last of the firewood indoors now, and will get the docking saw onto some of the longer bits i have lying around the yard to supplement supplies before that second chilly spot.