our travel blog

Rather than fill this blog with details of our travels, WM and I have created a new blog called Our Travels Around Southern WA.

So far we have only posted about our first two and a bit days. The blog was created as a journal for us to remember our trip but several people have expressed interest in reading about it so we have made the blog publicly available.

In case you're wondering why we've chosen to use Wordpress, I already have an account there and there app is far easier to use than Blogger's!

Feel free to drop by and admire WM's cropped photo of Wave Rock which we have used in our header.

This blog will resume normal posts when I have something craft-based to say! ;-)

(June 1) ETA: we have now published the first five days (seven posts)

the last time

Today was the last visit to the Renovation Project for WM and I.

The painter finished today and we did our final clean up, hung the curtains, removed the last of our possessions (cleaning items, handyman tools, coffee, tea bags, etc) and closed the door for the last time.

It has taken us many hours over a period of eleven weeks, with at least ten full days included. Yesterday we were there until nearly seven o'clock. We were back there this morning, returned home for lunch, and went back in the afternoon when we knew the painter would be finished.

Who knew how hard it is to clean up old paint flakes from all around the house where the painter had scraped down the old paint under the eaves?

who knew how hard it is to keep little bits of old paint flakes off our shoes and out of a clean house? It didn't help that it started raining on Wednesday afternoon, poured much of Thursday and couldn't make up its mind today! So we trekked in mud and little bits of grass as well as the paint flakes. Being an empty house in terms of occupants, there was no doormat on which to wipe our feet so we had to use an old curtain in the laundry so we could wipe our feet (and stomp them too) as we came in the back door.

Look closely at the very dirty floor!

Anyway, it's all over now -- we've handed the house over to the property manager that DD and SIL have chosen. We hope there will be (good) tenants in soon -- I don't like the idea of the house standing empty, especially as it has a lane down one side and a reserve at the back.

It's not the house it was when they bought it!

In the meantime, I am typing this while sitting on a bed in a motel room overlooking Sydney's Kingsford Smith airport. Tomorrow morning we're leaving on a jet plane bound for Perth, the capital of Western Australia -- nearly 4,000 kilometres (about 2,485 miles) from here for a well-deserved three-week holiday.

I hope you'll join us as we travel around some of the southern parts of Australia's largest state (2,500,000 square kilometres -- 965,000 square miles).

Bloglovin or Feedly

With the demise of Google Reader at the end of next month, I started to look for a different reader in which to view blog posts.

The reader found in the Dashboard of Blogger only shows posts from the newest post -- this is not helpful to me so I looked elsewhere.

It seems that most Google Reader users have chosen to go with Bloglovin or Feedly. 

Bloglovin asks new users to "claim" their blog, Feedly does not.

Both Bloglovin and Feedly are free to access.

Both Bloglovin and Feedly ask for permission to access the user's Google Reader in order to copy their reading list -- too easy, especially when I have a list of over 150 blogs (which means about thirty new posts a day).

Both Bloglovin and Feedly have apps for use on iPads and can also be read in a browser on a standard computer, whether desktop or laptop.

Both Bloglovin and Feedly present new posts with a picture from the post and the first fifty or so words of the post.

Both Bloglovin and Feedly offer the option of reading the post on the reader or going to the original post in the browser of choice.

Both Bloglovin and Feedly present the information in one of two formats: by blog, or by date.

By default, both Bloglovin and Feedly present the newest post first if the user chooses to read by date.

Both Bloglovin and Feedly allow posts to be marked as read so the user only sees a list of unread posts -- well, in Bloglovin one can still see the read posts but they are faded and obviously marked as read.

And in my experience, that is all the choices that Bloglovin offers.

But Feedly has so many more options. They recognise that they have gained a large number of Google Reader users and therefore have redesigned their software (or so I understand) so that features are similar to GR.

The most important of these, for me, is the ability to read from the oldest post first. If I fall behind, as I did over the Mothers' Day weekend when I was away for three days, I want to read the older posts before the newer ones, particularly on the blogs that have new posts every day.

And so, for me, Feedly has become my Reader of choice.

Are you a Google Reader user? Which reader will you move to and why?

works in progress

It’s nearly the middle of the month and I’m way behind with some of my projects but right on target with others.

No progress has been made in turning a flimsy into a finished quilt for Gift of Hope quilt #2 or in completing the flimsy of my Scrappy Log Cabin quilt.

There has also been no further progress on my Earth and Sky quilt – I plan to rectify that today! As my friend Debbie at Stitchin’ Therapy said in a recent post: “boredom leads to UFOs” and I am so over this project! (Some self discipline is what is needed here! )

I had some time over the weekend for some knitting and some further time yesterday afternoon so Emily’s Blanket is moving along – slower than I had hoped but still progressing. The colours in the photo below are not accurate but they’re the best I could do – the yellow is much more lemon and doesn’t look so obvious!

Until Emily’s Blanket is finished, I can’t work on the sleeves for my Westall cardigan so it may be a travelling project (ten more sleeps until ).

My hexagon project bag is coming along well and, I hope, right on target. I finished the hand-piecing in class on Monday. I would have finished it over the weekend but I didn’t take the pattern away with me and I had six hexagons I didn’t know what to do with. Turns out they were surplus to need! Ah well, there’s always another project, right?

Anyway, here is the project as it was when I finished class on Monday after the piecing was completed and some of the papers removed. The other photo shows the fabric I have chosen for the lining; the lining has been cut and the two pieces (not shown here) are ready to be gathered and joined. The base of the bag has lots of green in it so the lining makes more sense if you could see it!

I hope to get it completed in class next week. I’d like it done before we go away on 24th May!

I do have plans for another hand-piecing project but that will be the subject of another post.

The biggest project of all, the renovation of DD’s former home, is almost complete. The painter is there but there are still a few odd jobs (mostly that WM had to attend to) to be completed before we call it done – such as ordering a skip (and filling it of course), painting the garage (I’d forgotten about that and have lost enthusiasm now – we decided not to pay the painter to do this “simple” task), washing of floors and hanging of curtains.

Here are some photos of some of the work that has been done:

1. A new stove top and oven were professionally installed. WM replaced the doors and handles on either side of the oven. I scrubbed the tiles at the back and cleaned the glass of the range hood. MIL washed the filters before I re-installed them.
2. WM installed a new vent where there hade been a hole covered by a sheet of MDF held up with duct tape.
3. When DD and SIL moved in, the laundry tub was covered in paint. It had always been their intention to buy a new tub but they never got around to it. MIL turned up one day and decided it could be cleaned – between her efforts and those of WM the tub looks pretty good!
4. Some of the vinyl tiles on the laundry floor were damaged – WM lifted them and replaced them (hurrah for being able to match the tiles; thanks Bunnings! – a large hardware chain in Australia)
5. There once were shelves and unused brackets on the laundry wall. All the shelves have been removed (for painting) and the holes filled and sanded. Not too much can be done here, the walls are made of a fibro that contains asbestos and would need professional removal.
6. 79yo MIL washed all the windows and venetian blinds in the family room. This photo shows slightly more than half of them! WM has installed a new light fitting on that bare wire!

There will be more before and after photos in a later post!

Right now, I’m off to have lunch then trim my quilt sandwich, press fabric, cut and join binding strips, attach binding and stitch it down – it doesn't sound like much if I type really fast!

Happy Mothers’ Day weekend

WM and I arrived home at 8:45pm yesterday, exhausted but happy.

We had a great trip north; we left home at around 3pm and arrived at our motel in Quirindi at 8pm after stopping for a meal at a truck stop in Murrurundi.

We had FaceTime with our DD and grandsons on Friday morning (hurrah for accommodation establishments that have free wi-fi) and arrived at my niece’s place just after 9am. Baby Emily (then seventeen days old) was happy to cuddle with us and WM took quite a few photos. Here’s one of them.

After staying longer than we intended, we met my sister for lunch in Tamworth before travelling to Bingara where my mum lives, a total distance from home to mum’s of 560km (according to Google Maps). Here’s the map of our route.

Saturday was the most exciting day. We travelled east towards the coast to a town called Glen Innes where there is a monument of Standing Stones to the Celtic people who helped establish this country. At the monument there is a fully fenced playground and picnic table – and it is here that we met up with DD and the Grandsons for a picnic and some much needed cuddle time! Yay!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thanks, DD, it was a great idea and a fabulous Mothers' Day present!

The map below shows the route we took to drive 142km (88 miles). The circle on the right is the town where DD, SIL and the Grandsons now live. As you can see, DD had a slightly further drive than we did – but she had to do it alone (SIL was working) with two toddlers.

Here are some photos of our day (including a very rare one of me with Older Grandson)!

On Sunday we had FaceTime again with DD and the Grandboys then took mum out to lunch before making the long trip home.

Seeing DD and the Grandsons made the trip extra-worthwhile and has lifted a sadness that I was growing tired of carrying! I hope it will keep me smiling till we see them again in July!

I hope you had a happy Mothers’ Day weekend too!

away from home

WM and I will be away for a few days.

This afternoon we will drive to Quirindi where we stay in a motel tonight and meet baby Emily (my great-niece) tomorrow morning -- and wish my niece a happy day for her first Mothers' Day.

my niece, my great-niece and my former brother-in-law, Emily's grandfather (taken from niece's Facebook page)

 Then we will travel to Tamworth to take my sister (the new grandmother) to brunch before she starts work at 2pm. I'm sure Mother's Day is extra exciting for her too as Emily is her first grand-child!

After that we will travel to the small town of Bingara to stay with my mum. We will take her to lunch on Sunday then make the long trek home again -- all in all over 1,100 kilometres (688 miles)!

I have knitting and a hand-stitching project so I'll be okay. Most of the journey (both ways) will be in the dark anyway!

I'm also taking my iPad with me but mum doesn't have a wireless router and I can't very well spend hours on a desktop computer in another room while I'm visiting my mum, can I?

So, I'll be way behind in reading blogs... again. But I'll catch up with you next week.

In the meantime, Happy Mothers' Day to all you mums and grand-mums out there.

And, if you're a grandmother and you see your grandchildren this weekend, give them an extra big hug from me -- I miss mine so much!

taken in January before I knew I'd be "losing" them!

a blanket for Emily

If you’re looking for the May post for 2013: The Year of the Finished Project, it’s over here.

As you may know from this post, my eldest niece (my sister’s eldest daughter) had her first baby on 23 April. Being just two days before my own birthday, you could say she was an early birthday present.

This is the same baby I made the Very Hungry Caterpillar quilt for (because it is her mama’s favourite childhood story).

But I’ve gone a little less bright and a little more “pretty” for her baby blanket.

I didn’t start the blanket until the day after she was born, and then I ripped it out (too wide and wrong colour combination) and started again two days later. It’s not that I didn’t know she was coming, of course. It’s just that I didn’t know she would be a girl (although I had a feeling she might be!)

I was also being true to my own rules – no new knitting projects until others were finished – but a new baby is exceptional! They don’t come along in my family every day!

I have not been in the mood for knitting between saying goodbye to DD and the Grandsons, being sick, and working over at the “renovator’s delight” (henceforth known as “RD” -- there will be a post soon, I promise)!

But there’s nothing like a new baby to bring out all those craft-y tendencies!

I looked through my stash and decided to use up my Fiddle De Dee cotton (by Cleckheaton, sadly discontinued) because it’s a heavier weight (10ply/Aran/worsted) than the other cotton in my stash (we’re coming in to winter) and, more importantly, it’s machine washable and dryable! I don’t know that my niece knows such a thing as hand-washing exists! It knits up very softly although, being cotton, is quite hard on the hands when knitting for extended periods. I only had small amounts of each of four colour-ways, three skeins (150g) of lemon, and six skeins (300g) each of mint, a lemon/blue/white variegated yarn and an lemon/mint/pink/white variegated yarn.

The right combination and the right pattern were going to be important so an entrelac blanket it must be (hi Cindy! LOL). My first choice was to use the two variegated yarns but I didn’t like the combination so I settled on the mint and pink variation (of course! LOL)

Anyway, I hope to see Emily next weekend and wish her mama “happy mother’s day” for the first time. But I doubt I’ll have the blanket finished. This is where I was up to on Saturday afternoon; I’ve done part of the next tier since then!.

(Thanks Diane for the photo taken by iPhone during our workshop on Saturday)

If I had time to knit all day I might have got it done …

But there’s no way that was going to happen!

It will be sweet when it is, don't you think?

Linking up with Barbara at Cat Patches for the New FO challenge (on the last possible day!).

2013: The Year of the Finished Project – May edition

Here I am; a little bit late given that it’s already evening here in eastern Australia but it’s still the first Thursday in May – so really, I’m right on time!

How did you go in April? What are your plans for May?

The work at the “renovator’s delight” (DD’s former home) is slowly being done, and soon I hope to have more time to get more done on my crafting projects.

WM and I are going away for our annual vacation on 25 May , plus we are taking a weekend off to travel 538km (335 miles) to my mum’s for Mother’s Day (the second Sunday in May) so this will be a short month for me in many ways! However, the travel may give me a little more hand-stitching time!

But first, let’s have a look at how I went in April.

This was the month where DD and family moved away and I lost my desire to craft, instead I lost myself in reading fiction for a few weeks! Then I got sick with an upper respiratory tract infection!

WM and I have also spent much of our free time at DD’s former home working to turn it from a “renovator’s delight” to rentable accommodation, however we took a day off to celebrate my birthday in style. Therefore April, like February and March, is not looking too good. Perhaps I’d better only have one project a month in future! LOL

This is my April list:

1. Earth and Sky quilt – finish
   It's nearly finished; it just needs the binding done. Of course that means pressing the fabric, cutting and joining the binding before I can attach it to the quilt!
2. Scrappy Log Cabin quilt – at this stage, an unfinished flimsy
   This project remains untouched as yet, I really can’t decide what to do about the border. I think I’ll leave this for another post and maybe seek some advice!
3. Scrappy Strings II quilt – finished 11 April 2013; you can read the post about this quilt here
4. at least one quilt for Gift of Hope
   This one didn’t get very far: I joined four blocks (made by someone else) into a flimsy and that’s as far as I got. But there is a reason – the Big Box Store had no white or cream flannelette (for wadding) when I went there so I was stalled until I could get some. That happened on Monday this week but I haven’t had a chance to work on it since then.
5. Westall cardigan – WIP – finish ribbing, knit sleeves
   I finally finished the ribbing on 5 April but just haven’t been in the mood for the concentration needed to pick up stitches around each armhole to commence the sleeves!  Instead I broke my own rules and started a new knitting project – but that’s a whole other post!
6. hexagon project bag – WIP – my “slow stitching” project
   I have done a little work on this project. WM and I worked both days of last weekend at DD’s house and we were extremely tired; too tired in fact for me to lift my sewing machine in and out of the car so I took this project to class on Monday – and now I find it hard to put it down!

Sorry about the shadow over the photo - I had to take it at night under fluorescent light, using my iPad -- but at least you can see there has been some change since this post. And yes, it does curve up like that -- it will be a bag so it needs shaping! See those yellow star pieces: pentagons, not hexagons -- that's where the bag gets it's shape. What you're looking at now is the base of a drawstring bag turned inside out!

So, what do I plan for May? Well firstly, ease up and take some pressure off myself! The list is the same length (six items) but the goals are not so ambitious!

1. Blanket for Emily
   I had hoped to get this finished in time to deliver it in person when we see her for the first time on 10 May but there’s no way I could do it! I estimated that if I knitted for six hours every day until 9 May it would get done – but I don’t have that kind of knitting time, nor do my hands like knitting with cotton for long periods of time! So Emily will have to patient! (That’s a big ask for someone who’s just nine days old! LOL)
2. Westall cardigan – WIP – sleeves?
   This should be my #1 priority this month, it’s been hanging around for too long. It’s a cotton/acrylic blend so if I don’t get it done soon I’ll have to wait until spring to wear it. But Emily’s blanket somehow seems more important!
3. Earth and Sky quilt – finish including label!
4. Scrappy Log Cabin quilt – finish the flimsy!
5. hexagon project bag – again, my “slow stitching” project for the month.
   This project will go with me on my travels so hopefully the end of June will see it done!
6. Gift of Hope quilt #2: Now that I have the flannelette there can be no more excuses! 

Projects 3, 4 and 6 are my goals to be included in Nothing But UFOs in 2013 (although we all know that I will work on things that are not UFOs, right?) which is hosted by Carrie over at A Passion for Appliqué.

So, how about you?

Write a blog post detailing your progress (or not) in April and your plans for May. You can be working in any craft – please don’t feel it has to be quilting, knitting or hand-piecing; they are just the crafts on my list at the moment (later there could be cross-stitching, embroidery or even crochet!) .

You can make your own rules or follow mine, it doesn’t matter: what is important is getting those UFOs out of the pile/closet/basket and getting them finished!

You don’t even have to have a blog to join in – post your photos to Facebook or Flickr or Picassa or Pinterest – wherever. Just come back here and link up so we can visit and see what you’ve been up to and what your plans are!

Good luck with deceasing the number of UFOs/WIPs at your place during May.
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a follow up to my post about replying to comments

Happy May Day!

No, the photo’s not relevant to anything but it was taken in May last year when Older Grandson was a a little over two – he doesn’t look like that anymore; he’s lost that chubby baby look and is a proper boy (albeit a pre-schooler) now!

For we Australians it's the beginning of the last month of winter but the weather here in Sydney is still gorgeous -- a great day to be outside!

So why am I still inside?

I have been catching up with (86) blogs, leaving comments and answering emails (including comments).

Didn't my last post about responding to comments left on blogs open a great conversation?

So, I have found a time consuming way of keep this particular conversation going. I may not do it for all blog posts but for this one it seemed like a good idea!

Firstly, I have written fairly lengthy replies to some of the poeple who left comments on my blog regarding the last post. Why only some of them? Because I can only type about 45 words per minute and I've been in front of this computer on-and-off for almost six hours (lucky I'm retired) so I haven't replied to everyone yet -- but I will!

Then I cut and pasted the relevant part of my reply to my own blog as a direct reply to the comments! So now the conversation can be followed by those who so desire -- you're welcome to add further comments if you have time to go back and read all the comments and replies there.  Just give me another twenty-four hours or so to go back and finish my replies!

Personally, if I was one of my followers, I don't have time to read all the comments and replies and I rarely of back anyway so this may be a total waste of my time. But let's see how it goes (as a social experiment)!

Tomorrow's post will be on a whole other topic -- the linky party for 2013: The Year of The Finished Project. Are you getting your UFOs done?