random happenings

1 + 2.  Th Emu Plains Market on Saturday.  It was a great way to spend the afternoon and evening, a big crowd and fabulous stall holders, my sister the florist, made some little jar posies for my stall this time and they really added some lovely colour.  Lovely to meet a few readers of this little blog too! :)

3. It's been pretty hot here recently, so I like to give my chooks a little treat to cool them down.  They adore cold watermelon from the fridge, their heads were in a pecking frenzy! 

4. Close up of one of the jar posies my sister made, I got to keep this one! :) 

5. Great thing about Summer - cherry season!  So delicious and shiny. :) 

6 + 7. Some of my recent crochet makes, I haven't been showing much crochet over here because I seem to always be making the same things and I don't want to bore you silly! lol.  I promise to make something different soon! :) 

8. A bit of colourful yarny love to put a smile on your face, so cheery and bright, this Nikkim Cotton is so lovely! 

9. Earlier today, bushfire in our town, this is looking over our back fence.  A lot of huge smoke clouds that would billow up very dark and dirty, then billow up very white and fluffy, it was weird and scary. A bit too close to home for my liking.  One house was burnt down, but it could have been a lot worse, we have fabulous CFA and fire brigades around here, and the community really pulls together and looks out for each other. Makes me proud of our little town!  Heres hoping there are no more fire dramas for Crib Point this Summer. Fingers crossed.

How has your week been?  

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Colour and some other things.....

Hello there!

How was your weekend?

We had a long weekend here, so it kind of feels like a Monday to me today.  We had a fairly relaxed couple of days, I got quite a lot of crochet time which is always nice.  Our middle son had a bit of a party on Sunday night, just because he could, so we had a dozen or so 16 year olds at our place, needless to say it was a late night!

I have been making washers for my market in a couple weeks, you are probably sick of seeing pictures of these heart washers, but they are what I am making at the moment. :)   I decided that little heart flags made into bunting might be quite cute, so have been using up left over bits of cotton to make these little rectangle heart pieces.  I hope it looks cute once I have crocheted them onto a string and done an edge, in my head it does!

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I saw something on Instagram that has really inspired me to want to get my knitting out again.  One of my favourite blogs is 'Do you mind if i knit' by the amazingly talented Vanessa Cabban, I was so sad to hear that she died tragically late last year, and there have been a few projects I have noticed pop up in her honour and remembering her.

One of these is the totally gorgeous Remembering Vanessa Cowl KAL by Christina Wall.  I am so inspired to give this a go!  Vanessa's beautiful fairisle knitting always caught my eye and I think this is a lovely way to pay respect to such a creative multi talented woman.   

Definitely putting this on my to do list.

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Another beautiful colourful  project that I 'd like to try is this very cute baby cardigan by Vicarno, so rainbowy and sweet!  This is crocheted too, so should be a fairly quick make.  

Also on the to do list. :)

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I am also thinking I should make a bunny for the Mirabel Easter toy appeal, I only have a few days left so have better get cracking!  Pip has lots of info  over at Meet me at Mikes if you have time to whip up some cute bunnyness for some deserving little person. 

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Sorry for the bitsy post today, I kind of feel that is how my brain is working at the moment, hopping from one thing to another, I am a bit all over the place! :) 

Anyway, have a great day, talk soon! 

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A quiet day...

Hello, how is your day going?

My day here has been fairly productive, with a crafty flavour throughout.

Since my little life restructure earlier in the year where I freed up a lot of time, I have been able to be a lot more creative and put more ideas into reality.  The down side of this is I find I am starting lots of different things at the same time, so have now got about  9 projects at various stages of completion!

  And I still have a heap of new things I want to start !  

No! I must finish some of the stuff I am working on, I seem to have lots of 'works in progress' type posts, and not so many finished 'tadah' moments!

The other thing I am finding with all this daytime, peaceful crafting, is that I have lots of time to think about things in my life, and that is not always a great thing!  

We have a great extended family, and we spend lots of good times together, but over the last couple of years one relationship in particular has become quite dysfunctional, and is taking up a lot of emotional energy from the rest of the family.  

I am really a pacifist, confrontation is just not my thing, so there is a lot of head shaking and wondering what can be done to improve the situation. 

 I am thinking a lot about how easy it is for relationships that seem like they will always be there to change into something else entirely. 

 About how people can change, how actions can be misread and twisted to fit an agenda, how what looks like a molehill to me can look like a mountain to someone else. 

 How do I comfort other members of the family who are especially 

hurt by this relationship breakdown?  

How do you explain your views when there is no want to listen?  

How do you stay strong in the face of self righteousness and blame?  

What would I even say to this person if I did have a face to face? 

Do I push on giving the benefit of the doubt, or just call a spade a spade and face the reality that you can't maintain a relationship when it is only wanted by one side.  Cut your loses and move on.  Easier said than done in a family that used to be tight.

Crochet time gives me plenty of time to mull over this stuff, but it hasn't really given me any answers other than you can never really know what makes other people tick!  

I'm sure if I think long enough about this I will come up with a happy ending for all of us, but I am just not sure if the feeling will be reciprocated!  

Anyhoo, you don't really want to hear about my family dramas, but sometimes it is good to write things down just to get them out of your head.  You know what I mean? 

Please feel free to ignore the babble above! I won't go on about this anymore, but it is just something that is on my mind a fair bit at the moment!

Back to the crochet, I have to say I am loving the diamond pattern!  I think I have found my quick, user upper of left over yarn pattern,  and I have visions of a beautiful harlequin blanket at the end.  I tried the hexipuffs for a quick make, but I found the double pointed needles really fiddly and gave up after a few.  These diamonds are really easy and quick and are turning out quite lovely. I will post more about these I am sure!

 We have started the school holidays today, so I am hoping to get a lot of crafting done over the next couple of weeks and knock a few of my half done projects over.  

We are having a quite Easter this year, just mooching around here, so it will be nice to have a bit of chilled out family time.

Have you got plans for the holidays?

Are you making anything fun at the moment?

Anyway, that's probably enough from me tonight!

Have a great Easter break!  Don't eat too much chocolate! (is there even such a thing?) :)

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Crazy World.....

I woke up early this morning to a grey sky and rolling thunderstorms and rainy downpours.  I didn't need to be up for a few hours, so I thought it was a perfect time to do a bit of in bed hooky, such a luxury!  

Then I put on the radio to hear what was happening out in the big wide world, and I hear of the terrible massacre of little children in America.  At a school, little children just going about their young lives, sent off in the morning as a normal everyday happening, and then a normal day turns haywire.

One can only imagine the pain and grief that the families and community are feeling at the moment, I feel so sad for them all, it is really too much to comprehend.

In this day and age of the internet and our global community, tragedies like this feel much closer to home than the geographic distance that separates us. 

We are all in this life together after all.

Sending big hugs to all you lovely readers, especially in America, I think you'll all need an extra one today.

xxxx

Yarn Along and a bit of babble.....

Hello!

I am joining in with Ginny's Yarn Along today, and am still hooking away at the Cutie Patootie Pants.  

I am not sure if stripes were the best thing to do for these pants, as I didn't realise the pattern changed stitch widths within the rows, so my stripes are going to be thicker on the backside than the front.  

Oh well, I will see how they turn out anyway.

It was my birthday last week and I received a couple of lovely books, one of which was this one, 

'Whole Larder Love' by Rohan Anderson.  

(I seem to be reading a lot of non fiction, practical type books at the moment, ones you can dip in and out of as you like)

This cookbook is full of gorgeous photos and lovely little snippets of story telling about his food love affair.  I am not sure if I will actually cook a lot of the recipes, they are quite adventurous for a house of fussy, plain eaters, but I love where he is coming from with the food he makes.  

I am passionate about growing as much food in our garden as we can, and just love knowing I have been able to provide parts of our meals from outside the backdoor.  

We are a long way from self sufficient, (and am happy to support our local farmers for things that are beyond our capabilities), but I think there is so much satisfaction and sense of 'worthwhileness' in food gardening, I really don't know why everyone doesn't give it a go!!  It makes me really happy!

But I digress, back to the book, there are a lot of recipes for wild game 

(rabbit, hare, venison, duck, yabbies)

which is something I don't cook (or hunt, for that matter), but you never know, maybe if I'm feeling a little wild I might give the duck risotto a crack!  

Speaking of books, I have gone a little crazy recently on Book Depository, and seem to have parcels arriving every few days with lovely, interesting books for me to pour over, so I thought I might do a 'book sharing' post one day a week till I have shown you what I have bought.  

Trust me, there is a lot of lovely, colourful, inspiring, booky goodness coming your way! 

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Well, it has been a rather emotional, draining and long couple of weeks around here, but we got through the funeral and gave Jack a send off I think he would have loved. 

 Some positive things come from such a stressful time too, the strong bonds of family and friends, and a deeper appreciation of how lucky we are to have one and other,  and the great lives we are actually living right now. 

I'll be stopping to smell the roses of life and giving thanks for just being here in this moment, in this family, in this place.  It is a lucky feeling.   

I was feeling a bit nihilistic, the other day, you know, 'what's the point to doing anything, nothing really matters in the big picture, our lives are so fleeting, why bother with anything, there is no meaning to doing anything....'  that kind of depressing thinking.  Not like me at all.

I lost my purpose briefly, and so now I am trying to make sure I focus on the good, lucky life I have, and that the purpose of life is to actually get out there and live it, see where it takes you and make the most of each new day. I am sure that is what Jack and my grandpa would want. (my grandpa died on the morning of Jack's funeral, how's that for timing!) Lucky for me Gary is a very positive husband and keeps reaffirming all the good things we have got going for us.

Ok, getting a bit deep (morbid) there, time to finish up I think!  Sorry about that little tangent, I don't usually write about this sort of thing, but it's kind of how I am feeling at the minute, I am sure I will be back to my happy self shortly, I am going to crochet my way to happier days!

Oh, and thank you all for the fantastic response you gave my Christmas decorations, you are all so nice and supportive in this crafty bloggy community.

And yes, I will put together a tutorial on how I made them so you can all have a go at a bit of

 Crochet Christmas Cheer. Keep an eye out for it soon.

Um.... I think that's all for tonight, 

see yay later!

Things I have noticed this week.....

1. It is lots of fun shopping for little girls.  There are so many seriously cute things around these days, it is hard to choose what they would like best!  

 A new toy shop has opened in our town and it has 

soooo many things that  I would have loved as a child, I bought my niece a super cute marionette puppet ( I loved puppets when I was little) and quite an ornate heart stamping set and a few pretty erasers for her birthday tomorrow, but there were so many things I could have chosen!  

Oh, and I came home with these Russian dolls for me, just because I love their colours and couldn't resist!

2. I think we are going to have plenty of apples this year if the amount of blossom is anything to go by. I can't remember the trees being this laden before, they are really stunning.

3.  The scent of lilac is starting to be noticeable as you walk in the front door, so lovely!  The bushes  are flowering above the roofline, so you don't really notice the flowers until you look for the source of the scent.

4. My craft space is in need of a big clean up again!  I am not really using it to make anything in, just to dump materials and then whinge that I can't find anything!  Must do something about that!

5.  There are lots of interesting swaps around blogland at the moment, many to do with Christmas.  I think I will join up with a couple maybe.  Do you do swaps?

Ok, I could go  on and on with this, but I had better stop there and go and do something constructive, like clean up my craft room!   Might do some more tomorrow....

Have a lovely weekend!