jenwren's blog

Alas, the Roza's Sock are truly destined for the frog pond - I don't like the pattern enough to continue, and my books have all finally arrived from Amazon. Sensational Knitted Socks reached me on Monday (it actually arrived on Friday the week before, but as I went to the pub after work, I didn't go to the post office), Favorite Socks arrived on Wednesday (five days to get here - impressive!) and No Sheep For You arrived on Friday. Between writing fifty reports and marking 132 exam papers, I haven't done much more than glance at them so far. And once I've finished this post, I have to make a start on another 27 reports and class preparation for the coming week. And go see to Oscar the puddy tat up at my sister's place again. I just don't have enough knitting time at the moment.

I made it to Rubi and Lana yesterday, and actually did some knitting on the Alpaca Bolero. I'm nearly at the top of the first sleeve, and despite initially working from the wrong pattern instructions, actually made some progress. David and Elaine were there when I arrived, and Sally, Kate, Lien and Candy all gradually turned up as the day progressed. Elaine and I were even working with the same colour of the same yarn - Jo Sharp Alpaca Silk Georgette in Dusk. Before Rubi and Lana closed and we moved on to the cafe (which has changed owners - hopefully an improvement) I bought some Jo Sharp Soho Summer DK Cotton in Putty for a bag I want to make with a flannel flower fabric lining. I've been meaning to buy the yarn for some time, but kept forgetting to take the fabric swatch with me. I really needed that swatch to get an appropriate colour match.

I will be missing from SSK (is it on?) and World Wide Knit in Public Day next weekend. (Sydney is missing from the site - go here for details) I'm off to see my parents and go to Tocal for the Back to Back Challenge. Mum's in one of the teams. It should be fun!

I was supposed to be at Port Stephens, but my plans changed earlier in the week when my parents caught one of the lurgies going around. So they're coughing and feeling miserable, and I don't want to catch it too. So that was the end of any idea of going away for the weekend. And just as well, because as things turned out, Sydney and parts of NSW have been affected by severe storms over the last 48 hours. Part of the Pacific Highway collapsed, and a ship has run aground at Newcastle. Not a good time to be on the roads. And Tocal, where the Back to Back Challenge was to be held tomorrow, is flooded, so the event has been cancelled.

So instead I was left with the opportunity to go to the Sydney WWKIP Day event at the Sydney Opera House. I took the bus into the city as I didn't want the stress of driving in the appalling road conditions, or the expense of parking in the City. Even though I missed a bus (by mere seconds), I made it in time to pop into Tapestry Craft for the sale and to Haighs Chocolates for a few treats. At the TC sale I picked up some double pointed needles in 1.5 mm and 1.0 mm to knit new linings for my leather gloves. Elaine gasped when she saw the size of them!



I caught a bus down to Circular Quay since the rain was pouring down, then walked to the Opera House. We were a big group despite the awful weather, and at our peak had 27 of us kip-ing away.



There was Kris, Mary-Helen, Sandra, David, Lara, Kate (and her son Lucas), Ervi, Madoka, Gemma, Catherine, Melinda, Helen, Helen (yes, two), Veronica, Charisse, Erin, Rachel, Rebecca, Merrin, Amy, Andrew, Judy, Michelle, Patricia, Yasinga, Elaine and myself. The weather alternated between okay and totally miserable. We could see groups of climbers up on the Harbour Bridge - I can only imagine that it would have been freezing to be exposed up there. Lots of photos were taken - including by passing tourists. Many stopped and looked at the sign we had put up, and a few asked questions and were keen to know of regular knitting groups. I was working on the second sleeve of the Alpaca Bolero and made a lot of progress between consuming coffee and cake and seeing what everyone else was working on. I think I've fallen in love with a Socks That Rock colourway that Charisse was using, and I was interested in the gloves Mary-Helen was working on, now I finally have the needles for my glove linings. There was a great diversity of projects in progress too.

I've put up an album of my photos on Flickr since I still haven't got my photo albums to work here.

I finally left about 5pm. There were still some hardy souls sticking around, but I was starting to get cold. My timing was good - there was break in the rain that lasted until I was nearly at my bus stop in Clarence Street. It poured with rain while I was on the bus, but again I scored a break for the walk from the highway bus stop to my home.

Update: I'm sorry if you keep getting this post come up in your feed aggregator, but I've been editing the post to add more links to people's blogs as I've become aware of them.

This is my blog home page represented as a graph using a nifty tool I heard about some time ago, can't remember where, but the site was down for a while so I've only been able to play with it over this weekend. The colours are for the following HTML tags:
Blue: for links (the A tag)
Red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
Green: for the DIV tag
Violet: for images (the IMG tag)
Yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
Orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
Black: the HTML tag, the root node
Grey: all other tags

I could spend hours looking at them all on Flickr. Especially as they have similarities to the inflorescences I have studied in my botanical work.

It has been another wet and miserable weekend. I expect the miserable weather is what kept people away from Rubi & Lana for knitting - only Taryn and I turned up. And I had to go to a work thing that was on from 12.30, so we really weren't there very long. I had a very unpleasant drive home in the middle of a thunderstorm that dumped lots of water on the roads late in the afternoon

I have started restarted the black socks as beaded rib socks (stitch pattern from Sensational Knitted Socks) rather than the Roza's socks I was knitting before. The black is still driving me nuts, but it's getting easier to see now the pattern is established.

And I'm pleased to be able to claim victory over the multitude of problems I was having with installing the photo albums. They're now up and running here and in the left sidebar (I may yet change the colour scheme!). This finally finished duplicating all the content I had on Typepad, so I can now move towards closing my Typepad account - please check any links you have are pointing here and not there.

School is out for me this week so I've been busy doing things before school holiday madness kicks into gear properly (government schools don't start their hols until the end of this week) - things like finally replacing my CDMA mobile phone with something that won't go flat in under 24 hours (I'm pleased to see the end of that problem), going to see a movie (Driving Lessons - it was good) and visiting Ikea to buy more bookcase parts (Ivar system), only to find that "in stock" on the web site didn't quite convey that only one side piece was in stock, and you can't build a bookcase with only one side piece... And still I came away having spent $180. When I go back, I'll be going straight to the warehouse to get the Ivar parts only.

Today's outing was to the Craft Fair at Darling Harbour. I arrived at about 10.45am, and spent about 3 and a half hours there all up. There were several yarn retailers - Bendigo, Touch, Prestige, Colinette, Yarns Galore, Ecoyarns and Belisa Cashmere just to name some. Certainly enough to keep knitters happy, but the majority of stands were quilting or beading oriented, with scrapbooking also represented.



I was particularly taken by the merino fine wool boucle at Touch Yarns and how nice it was for both knitted and woven items (particularly the blue shawl on the wall in the picture above). I contemplated buying some Tofutsies yarn at Ecoyarns, but didn't like any of the colours, so went away satisfied that I had at least seen the stuff in person. I came across the Knitters Guild stand and found David and Kate on duty.





I also visited the Spinners and Weavers stand and saw some lovely woven articles.



Then I visited the quilt show where I found this crime against Flannel Flowers:



Then I ran into Elizabeth, who was on duty down the back of the quilt display. She told me there was a Flannel Flower quilt, which I duly visited, but it turned out to be Daisies (and pretty good ones, botanically speaking).



Before leaving, I went back to the Colinette Yarns and chatted with Sarah, whom I'd never met before, but know through her blog and the Justdoitknits Yahoo! group. It had been much too busy in the morning to try chatting earlier on. That was pretty much it for the day and I headed back home.

By the way, all the pictures above were taken on my new mobile phone, which has a 2 megapixel camera. I was trying it out, and some pictures are a bit grainy, but are okay considering the convenience of not having to carry around an additional gadget. The following pictures, of what I bought, were taken on my regular digital camera, which is 3 megapixel, and is now four years old and showing its age (and a tendency to gobble batteries and an ever increasing rate...). Sunlight is in short supply at present, so these aren't ideal photos.





In the first photo, from left to right is some Colinette Jitterbug (copperbeech colourway), Addi Turbo Lace needles (I do hope they will be bringing them out in sizes larger than 4.0 mm - I wanted 4.5 mm, but ended up buying some 3.5 and 4.0 mm ones) and a Touch Yarns scarf kit (that contains a skein of the merino boucle I admired in a nice blue colourway). The second photo is of some charms I bought. I couldn't go home without the sheep or the dragonfly in particular.