six and a half stitches

THE LAST DAY OF THE YEAR

Things that have bought me joy for the last day of the year::

The magnolia flower on the dwarf magnolia a friend bought me for christmas in full open bloom :: white sheets drying in the heat :: storage containers for the overflow in my study :: a hot tired sweaty child asleep :: the breeze from a fan :: RY Cashsoft yarn :: the back wall of the garage now painted.

I would like to wish everyone a happy new year, full of promise, creativity, indulgence, and joy. And I'd like to thank everyone who stops by here, for your words and thoughts of encouragement, your participation, and your friendship. I hope only that next year brings more of the same.

Happy New Year!

MAKING AGAIN

The urge to make has returned, which is a bit of a relief because it had well and trully dissapeared there for a while. The material which has been stealthily calling me for the last week is this Liberty print light cotton in a beautiful fresh pattern full of reds, browns, oranges, teals and light duck egg blues and gold. I've been wanting to try the pattern below for months, for no particular reason than I can and want to. And now the material has called...

It's from one of my japanese craft books, and the book is full of simple little tops and pant combinations. I'm going to do the pants in the printed cotton, and the top in a light white cotton. I'm experimenting with French Seams as well, having decided overlocked edges were too much for the smallness of the outfit, and it needed something more tailored. If I get it right, I'll do another complete outfit in the whole printed fabric, and carry on with some other fabrics I have lying around. I want desperately to create outfits for children using bold patterns and interesting colours which just don't seem to be around at the moment, at least not in Australia. I saw so much beautiful clothes in the UK and France, and so in the next year I plan to try and replicate a lot of what I saw - either sewn or knitted.

And then pray somebody has a little baby girl who would wear this during summer months. In additon, I'm going to make a little knit top to match in the green RY Cashsoft yarn I got at Liberty as well. The colours go perfectly, and it will make a great set.

PARTICLES OF REAL

I love this time of year for the light which gets cast across the house throughout the day. We are lucky to live in a wonderfully light filled house which we can open out during the summer to the garden. At about 6pm, the light changes, and becomes deeper, warmer and more intense before it creeps behind the houses to the west of us, leaving behind trails of fabulous shadows and cuttings of light through the house, turning everything into abstracted particles of the real.

NEXT YEAR

A challenge was set. Husband suggested, that if I posted in the right way about this:

That next year you would all be making trees that look like something you've pulled off the back of a dump truck. There is nothing, I repeat, NOTHING, redeeming about a broom stick handle with holes drilled in it and some tinsel covered pieces of, dare I say it, child unfriendly shards of metal, rammed into it at odd angles. This is not a christmas tree father-in-law, no matter how abstract you want to believe it is, nor how sentimental you want to become about what the tree used to look like.

Give it up. Now.

And while we're at it,

Faceless Santa Claus is a little creepy.

So what do you think - next year we'll be doing minimal trees, hmm??

IT'S ALL OVER IN 24 HOURS

Christmas this year was about relaxing, and letting Max enjoy his first year of kind-of-sort-of-understanding-this-concept-of-christmas-being-something-he'd-like-to-be-involved-in-a-little-more-and-by-the-way-are-there-any-more-presents-I-can-open, please?

Food figured predominantly on the agenda, and I contributed with a molasses, orange and verjuice glazed ham, recipe courtesy of Vogue Entertaining (current issue). Max had fun at Questacon - a huge science place with a toddler and pre school section which is brilliant fun for children. And I finished the Monkeysuits Red Set Go cardigan for a friend.

No major life decisons were made, although the back garden is looking slightly like it's about to be ripped up...

Christmas has been late hitting the scene around here. We have no tree, no decorations, no made objects (except for large quantities of shortbread), no cards were written, and no presents on display and little festive food. We will spend Christmas with the grandparents in another city,and because of that, it's been hard to forge our own sense of what christmas is to us as a family. I have hopes next year we'll do our own thing, and create traditions for ourselves, in our house, doing things our way. I have read with pangs of jealousy everyone elses blogs and their decorating, and cooking, and festive spirit making, but this year, to be honest, I'm exhausted more than anything, and my end of year period has been one of rather indulgent anxiety ridden soul searching about what happens next. There are so many things lined up for next year already - and I hope over the next few months I can divulge more, and include you all in on some of my plans.

Till then, be merry, enjoy, fill your homes with love, and let the sugar and present highs begin. Have a safe christmas everyone.

IF YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE HEAT...

...Jump into many activities all at once, especially those involving the heat of an oven, particularly if they involve:

a. Lavender and Mint Shortbread, Apricot and Coconut Bread, and Mixed Mushroom (oyster and wood ear fungus) and Parsley with Pine Nut Ravioli

b. Beginning new knit projects (wool is cooling, right?)

and

c: Consumption of said food.

I can feel the veil of workloads lifting slowly, and holiday mode creeping into the recesses. I have wrapped presents, I have been acupunctured to calmness, and I'm ready now to relax.*

* Which means somewhere between here and New Year I will make a life changing decision, and we'll start tearing some part of the house or garden apart and frantically attempt to finish it, in the heat, and then return to work slightly frazzled....and start dreaming of next christmas...

NUMBER THEORY

60 seconds in a minute. 60 minutes in an hour. 24 hours in a day. 7.5 hours in a working day. 4 hours from 9.00am till lunchtime. 1 hour for lunch. 20 minutes on the bus. 10 minutes walk from the train station to the office. 5 minutes to grab a coffee. 2 hours for each detail. 1 trillion joinery details. A deadline. Another deadline. 1 hour to wait. 20 minutes to present. 5 minutes to buy presents. 20 minutes to drive to the airport at 6am. 3725492645 pages to a document. 16 drawings to correlate with the document. 60 crisp plastic notes to hand over for a ham. 3 hours to drive home for Christmas. 38 the temperature on Saturday. 5 cases of wine to pick up. 4 custom wrapping papers by Max to dry. 9 pieces of sticky tape on average. 3 coats of paint. 1 giant scale rule hung on the wall.

Not enough hours, days, minutes. Frantic. Swamped. Exhausted.

WITH FOR AND ABOUT

It wouldn't take too much to guess that I spend a great deal of my time devising ways to do things with Max, for Max, about Max. I feel pressured to be constantly developing alongside him, but some of my most precious moments for my child are the ones where I've stumbled amongst his play,

caught him doing something so uniquely Him, that at times it takes my breathe away, or makes me laugh out loud, or he'll look at me with a cheeky grin and say Hi, in a way which would make butter melt.

Right now he's obsessed with trains, train tracks, and the Thomas The Tank Engine 60th Anniversary Completely Unjustifiably Expensive Catalogue Of Everything You Need To Buy For Your Child Obsessed With Trains If You Really Love Them. He'll play for hours with tracks, putting them together, and then building his train carriage sets and taking them back and forth across the tracks. It's even better if you get down low on the ground and watch them close up.

Right now I'm obsessed with Charlie and Lola, having been a huge fan of Lauren Child's books for a while now. What I should write though, is that more importantly I'm obsessed with one particular jumper of Charlie's.

This red and orange jumper has me smitten. And Max needs to have one for next winter. Needs. Totally. His life will not know completion without one.

Hence was born the complete obsessionally frantic need to knit Max a Charlie Jumper. A simple jumper, made with love, kindness, patience, mania.

I thought I would look for, and find, the perfect wool for this jumper while away. I wanted something specific - a slightly felted, perhaps, even 'rough' wool, leaning towards the unprocessed side, in a natural dye kind of red and orange. It seemed an easy idea, because I know the wool exists because a  hell of a lot of commercial knitted stuff is made from this wool. But it appears you can't actually really buy it for hand knitting. I kind of thought this, about half way through my obsessionally frantic stage, and so decided on Plan B, which was to get as close as I could, and go for the right colours, and see what I made of it from there. Hence the purchase of Opal gems in red, and an angora in orange. The colours were right. But when I cast on, the red yarn just disintegrated in my fingers and I hated it. I frogged, I wrote long emails to Cari moaning into her poor morning sickness induced tiredness about bloody red yarns and unprocessed wool, and textural challenges, I recast on, and I frogged.

So now I'm searching for a substitute yarn which will be much closer to what I'm after. I'm looking at Tierra Wool yarns, specifically the Apparel wool and Organic Knitting wool selections, but I've never heard of this company before and have no real idea what they're like - anyone heard of them or used their wool? I'm also looking at Peace Fleece but fear it might be too thick for what I'm after, although it's got the perfect consistency and graininess and unprocessed feel - I just need a 4ply version. Is there a perfect yarn out there waiting for me? I'm hoping yes, and that any guidance anyone can give me, will lead me to it. Please...

ONE MAMMOTH POST

The only way I will ever catch up, is to make one long post. And given the change in direction of my weekly workload from this week, which means now taking in a scenic day trip to another city once a week for a day of meetings indefinately, I think it would be a great thing to do that long post right now.

1. This beautiful selection of goods was the third and final package sent through the Better The Pal secret swap. I've already revealed Anne before, but, hell, why not reveal her again, because she has been incredibly kind and sweet, and sends really lovely funny emails, and I've enjoyed being her pal enormously. The last box contains some beautiful slate grey alpaca, sweets, note cards and pencils, and sock yarn. The alpaca just calls me everytime I touch it. Beautiful.

2. A joyous package from Nebo Peklo with one of her beautiful pen and ink drawings enclosed. I fell totally in love with these when I first saw them, and have a deep admiration for her style, and feel very lucky to have this flower sketch on my wall. She sent along with this, other little goodies for me, and Max, and I've put those additional photos over at Flickr.

3. Afternoon Tea has finally been packaged and will be sent this week to most of the people on the list. A select few will have their goods hand delivered, and some get their boxes a little later because I only have so many hands, but all should go out this week. Sneek peak:

4. And some finished pieces ready to send out to new homes. The finished sewn pouches I started before I went away. Again, more photos over at flickr.

And so draws to a close about 2 months worth of posts, and a huge sigh of relief at getting everything down finally, even if I haven't done it all as much justice as I should have. Pictures are sweet though, No?