jenwren's blog

Since I finished up at school last week I've been very productive.  I had a lot of my own books and resources that had to come home and have a place found for them.  In the meantime, they got stacked up in front of one of the bookcases.  I forgot to take a "before shot" so here's a "during" shot of me trying to put more things into already-full bookcases.

In the course of this exercise, I decided the DVD collection needed a new home, since it was taking up a whole bookshelf, yet still didn't have enough room.

For the first time since the last school holidays, I found the living room floor!

And it got a good vacuuming, along with the rest of the house.  The DVDs look much better too.  I added several more to the group with the white spines - they're recorded on my DVD recorder.  The Set Top Box hard drive was almost full since I hadn't had time to record off anything in over two months (if the ratings period had not ended, I would have been stuffed...).  Eight hours of MythBusters, six hours of Catalyst and two hours of miscellaneous Science documentaries came off the drive, and I finally watched a few programs that were only on there for time-shifting.  The drive is now almost empty.

The downside was that the knitting/spinning/weaving books and magazines had to be relocated to a small bookcase in my bedroom.  I tossed out a heap of old cooking and computing magazines I hadn't referred to at all in so long that they simply weren't work keeping (I checked eBay first, and issues of the same magazines weren't selling).  So out in the recycling they went.

I've made more progress on Icarus, and have completed the requisite number of repeats of chart 1.  As silk won't block to the same dimensions as the yarn the pattern calls for, I'm doing an additional repeat of chart 1.  Thankfully there is no danger of my running out of yarn since I bought a second skein some time back, just in case.  I'll use any leftovers in weaving.  I have come across the fact some pattern corrections now exist for chart 4 (not on Interweave's site), and that the pattern (which is from Interweave Knits Summer 2006) is now available from the author as a downloadable pdf.

And I've even had the chance to dye some silk hankies.  This was a new experience, and I'll probably do it differently next time.  I'm looking forward to starting to spin them.

I forgot yesterday to say I've finally added my contribution to the Spinners and Weavers "Something New" challenge over here.

I'm still making progress on Icarus.  The extra repeat of chart 1 has turned into a second extra repeat of chart 1 after some careful measuring and mathematics with the assistance of Margaret at Spinning and Weaving last Saturday.  I've just the last half-repeat of the monotonous chart 1 before I can move onto chart 2.

I've finally had the spinning wheel out and have been spinning the purple merino I dyed back I-don't-know-when.  It's to be plied with the silk/merino blend I was spinning back in March according to my blog archives...  Unfortunately, the wool was slightly felted (just a little, but enough to be annoying) during dyeing and is being a little difficult to work with.  I have one bobbin and one half-bobbin of the silk/merino blend, so once I have a half-bobbin of the purple stuff, I'll do some plying to see how it's turning out.  I haven't tackled the silk hankies yet, mainly because my hands aren't smooth enough just at present thanks to some eczema, and the silk catches really easily.  The wheel is coming with me to Mum and Dad's over Christmas, so there will hopefully be some productive output.

I started and finished my Christmas shopping in one hit yesterday.  Hardly some great feat since I had only four presents to get.  We only give the children presents in our family (one nephew and three nieces at last count), which I really like.  There is far too much stupid consumerism at Christmas time.  To me it is more about spending time with my family.

I've been tidying up around the blog sidebars.  I've updated my "Blogs I Read" list since it only had 11 sites listed, whereas my Bloglines account has 37 feeds subscribed...  I haven't thrown all of them up there since some are covered by the Links list or for various other reasons.  I also fixed a few out of date links and noticed that the Fibre Arts Bloggers Web Ring image had gone missing.  After searching about I discovered that the ring had "moved" and the image now needed to be stored on my own blog (which is the usual set up anyhow).  It seems many haven't realised this and still have broken links (and missing images) on their blogs - and the change seems to have occurred back in July!  I know it is hard to manage a Web Ring (since I'm still stuck with managing a small one in addition to one of my web sites), but it would have been nice to have been informed there had been changes.

It seems the local post office finally did a bit of tidying of their own and placed a 'final' parcel notice in my post office box this morning.  It was a package of beads I ordered over a month ago, and reported missing three weeks ago...  I suspect the first card (which, according to the parcel, should have arrived on the 23rd November) either went in the wrong box, or the parcel arrived on the same day as another, but they decided to put only one card in the box and then failed to notice both parcels when I handed in the card.  I'm a bit miffed that it took nearly a month to get around to the second card.  In that time I've collected three other parcels!  When I went away in July, I got a first and final card for a parcel inside a week!  Anyway, I'm jolly pleased to finally have obtained the beads!

And I finally finished clearing off the set top box hard drive, removing the last four episodes of Mythbusters to DVD.  The hard drive is now empty for the first time since I first bought it in May last year.  But not for long - The series Teachers, that I mentioned back in September has been screening at a ridiculously late hour on Wednesdays, so the box has that to time shift for me again tomorrow night.  It gave me the chance to use the "erase disk" function though - with everything deleted the disk was still only 99.9% available until I did the erase function, so now it is at 100%.  I haven't a clue what the 0.1% being used was about!

Yesterday afternoon I sat down with my newly arrived beads, and didn't look up again until 7 pm.  I had finally gotten up to make some dinner when Mum rang at 7.30 pm.  Oh yeah...  It's Tuesday and I forgot again!  Here's a close up of the necklace I finished.

Today I've been baking.  I've made Honey Joys for the choir party tonight (sob!  My last time at choir), and Chocolate Shortbread Stars which are coming with me to Mum and Dad's over Christmas.





Yum!

Peter came over today and we sat around knitting and chatting the morning away.  Later we went into town and I picked up my mail including a new umbrella swift I purchased on eBay last week, browsed the second hand bookshop, lamented that Interweave Knits Winter edition still hasn't arrived at the newsagent and had some lunch before popping over to my local yarn shop.  We nattered away there with the owner for quite some time, then noticed a storm was approaching.  I think I said several times over ten minutes that I really wanted to get home and bring the washing in...

It was sprinkling lightly as we left.  It started absolutely bucketing down when we were half way (and it wasn't more than a 1.5 km trip) and then it started hailing as we turned into my driveway.  And hailing, and hailing and hailing.  There was no cover for us or the car so we had to sit it out for what must have been at least 5 minutes in the car while everything around us turned white.  Finally it eased off a bit and I opened my garage door so the front of Peter's car was a bit protected.  But it had pretty much ended by then.

I got out the camera and took numerous pictures - I've put some in a photo album Peter shovelled up a handful - it was fairly bountiful.  The largest stones were about the size of twenty cent coins and it seems at least some of them did dent Peter's car lightly.  Bummer.  Even now - two hours later, they haven't all melted.  The south side of the house was flooded with a good ten centimetres of hail stones and water.

After Peter left, I finally went to survey the damage to the washing.  The east side of the house really copped it.  Only half the washing stayed on the line.  Many pegs were snapped.  You can barely see the half load of washing on the ground, and I also unearthed my back door mat - it had been carried down the stairs and it's a plastic/rubber mat and is all cracked!  I gathered up the washing and it's had to go back in the machine, complete with hail stones and mashed wisteria vine and have three rinses.  My laundry now looks like a bomb hit it.  The parsley, beans and tomatoes on this side of the house were both shredded and buried in ice.

Thankfully most of my plants, including a much cared for tomato plant, are on the west side on the sheltered veranda, so they were all okay.  The ash tree on the roadside has a carpet of shredded leaves under it - the neighbour's empress tree is also sadly shredded.  In fact the road is carpeted in green along much of its length.

I didn't realise the other day following the hail storm just how severe it had been to the east of me.  It seems I was towards the western edge of the area affected, so I was pretty lucky.  I left town on Friday morning, having seen the centre of town (which was hit about as hard as I was I think) and plenty of SES and council workers about, but on the east edge of town the Exhibition Centre collapsed under the weight of hail stones, and many people's homes were badly damaged.  While on the road I heard on the radio that Armidale had a State of Emergency declared.  Bronwyn has a picture of what it was like trying to travel home, and her husband Gordon, has a photo of the Exhibition Centre (I think - I'm on dial up here and the page won't load).

On the knitting front, I finally obtained a copy of Interweave Knits before leaving Armidale on Friday but haven't finished looking at it yet, and my Icarus shawl has finally reached Chart 2.

Christmas was nice.  I think I avoided eating too much.  I came home on Wednesday to a still messy house.  Yesterday I did a big clean up - raking branches (the Ash Tree lost small branches rather than leaves!), sweeping the mud off the windows and from the brickwork, and cleaning up all the muck that came inside with the washing and littered the laundry floor.  Some of the roof tiles look a bit chipped (I might ask my landlord to have the roof checked), but there doesn't seem to be any leaks - I was very lucky.

I haven't managed to summon the energy to get on with a whole lot of yarn dyeing I want to do.  I really want to finish Icarus first.  I'm really a single project at a time kind of person, and I've been working on Icarus since October.  It's finally up to the interesting part - the edging - and I'm nearly at the end of chart 3.  I'm really glad I bought a second skein of the silk yarn as the first ball doesn't look like it will make it past the middle of chart 4.