Trip to the Grampians

No craft updates this week as J and I escaped away to the Grampians National Park for a little getaway! We stayed in a little (very basic) cabin in Halls Gap, right near Lake Bellfield for 4 nights and had a lovely time. It was very cold and quite rainy, but we had fun exploring various walking trails, including the 'Balconies', the 'Grand Canyon', Clematis Falls, Turret Falls, Lakeview Loop, and Sundial Peak. A lot of the other famous walking trails and some roads easily accessible from Halls Gap have been washed out in the floods in January, but as we had already visited some of these areas on a trip in 2010, we just used it as an excuse to explore a few unfamiliar trails. We also drove around the nearby areas a bit, visiting Lake Wartook and Lake Fyans (we unsuccessfully went fishing for trout at Lake Fyans), Ararat and Stawell (on the Gold fields route). There was plenty of wildlife about in the Grampians in general and also around our cabins in the evenings; kangaroos, wallabies, emu, cockatoos and heaps of little parrots and rosellas. Also although winter is nearly here there were still a few pretty native flowers sprinkled in the bush on the various trails we walked along. It was a lovely holiday and a much needed chance to relax together without the usual accompanying V8 motorsport events!

In progress...

I don't have any finished projects to describe since the last post. However I have started making a baby cardigan using some of the beautiful merino-silk yarn I bought at Purl Soho while in New York recently. It is the most lovely yarn to work with, so soft and silky and easy to knit. I am making a 'garter stitch cardigan' using a pattern from 'Simple knits for cherished babies' by Erika Knight. The yarn is called Olivewood, by Manos del Uruguay, hand-dyed...a mix of blue and brown shades.
Also, in other news...our passionfruit vines have just produced their first fruit...I counted 10 this week. Very exciting. I had planted two varieties and they are intertwined so I'm not sure if the fruits are all from the one variety or a mix of the two. One is the typical black passionfruit, the other was a Panama gold, so now I just have to wait for them to ripen and find out which variety the fruit belong to :-)

Buttons

After a visit to "the button bar" in Adelaide Arcade this morning, I have now completed the little pale blue and brown speckled baby vest. "The button bar" is a small shop crammed full of almost every kind of button you can possibly imagine, plus other knitting and sewing items. It was very hard to make a decision when there were so many to choose from, but in the end I chose some little wooden flower-shaped buttons.

In the last week I have been working slowly on hand-stitching the binding onto my quilt, but I have only completed about a quarter of it so far, with some "help" from Puss as usual. I think she thinks I'm making the quilt for her, as soon as she spots it she runs over and lies down on it, even if it's on my craft table (a kitten-free zone when I'm not supervising them due to the presence of pins and threads etc).

Easter crafts

It was lovely having a 4-day weekend over Easter. We spent time with J's family, saw "The best exotic marigold hotel" at the movies (very funny), and there was even some time for craft! Starting off on Good Friday in an "Easter" mood, I baked some gingerbread biscuits and painted them with melted chocolate. I used some cute cookie cutters bought in New York last month to cut them out as little Easter bunnies and Easter birds.

In the last week I finished knitting a baby vest/dress using the 'plain vest' pattern bought from the Pickles website (www.pickles.no) using pale blue wool with brown speckles. This was a project I started in September last year, and now I just need to find the right buttons to finish off the outfit.

Over the long weekend I had some time to do some more work on my quilt...I used iron-on pellum for the padding layer, then cut out the backing fabric and sewed that onto the reverse side of the quilt. Then I cut out strips of my contrasting binding fabric 2 and a half inches wide, and ironed them to turn them into something like bias binding tape. I stitched the binding onto the front edge of the quilt, and have pinned it on the reverse side. Apparently attaching the binding onto the reverse side of the quilt requires hand-stitching rather than speedy machine stitching, so I thought that was a good place to take a break..Hopefully will have time to work on doing a small amount of hand stitching each night over the next week or so and get it finished. I had been doing a little bit of crocheting in the evenings lately (up to granny square # 21 for my crochet blanket now), but I'll give that a break for a bit and focus on finishing the quilt. Once it's complete I'll post some pictures of my first quilt project :-)

I can now also include photos of a purple scarf I finished last month, as it was a present for J's mum's birthday, and I didn't want to put photos up before I'd actually given it to her.

Fangorn forest scarf & another baby beanie

I have finished knitting a new scarf for myself using 2 skeins of thick chunky wool 'Moda vera Fiammone' on 8mm needles in garter stitch. I've decided to call it my Fangorn forest scarf (See below for photo of the scarf).

Recently I also made a baby beanie using the first of the lovely yarn from Hannah: hand-painted 100% merino wool in a light blue colour (Koigu Kersti Merino Crepe) using the pattern 'baby beanie hat' from 'Simple knits for cherished babies' by Erika Knight and 4mm and 4.5mm needles. I am thinking of making some matching booties to go with the beanie as I still have more than half a skein of this wool left over.

Photos above are of the finished baby beanie, also Boots caught in the act of trying to steal my knitting needles while the beanie was in progress.

New York!

I have just returned from a fantastic week in New York! I have never been to NYC before, and I was quite surprised how much I loved the time I spent in this city compared to any other city I've visited in the US before. The city is full of amazing architecture - old buildings and cobbled streets mixed in with ultra modern skyscrapers. It was the perfect time to visit too, as all the spring flowers were just starting to bloom - terrace gardens, curbside flower boxes and parks were full of daffodils, tulips and many other bulbs, and there were numerous streets and parks lined with gorgeous trees covered in magnolia or cherry blossoms. I spent most of the time in NYC attending and presenting at a science conference which was amazing, followed by a couple of days free time to explore the city. I spent a lot of my free time walking the streets, sometimes with a specific destination in mind, other times just wandering where ever my feet took me, taking in the general feel of the city. Some of the highlights for me were: Central Park (beautiful place), the view from the top of the Rockefeller building, seeing the Lion King in a Broadway theatre overlooking Time Square, the Chelsea Markets (gourmet cheeses, breads, meats, chocolates, coffee, seafood....mmm food heaven), the Highline (elevated old railway line converted to walking path and gardens with views over the city and the dock lands), the Met Museum, the Explorer's Club headquarters....I also visited one of the most awesome craft shops ever, "Purl Soho" (associated with the Purl Bee blog), which was just full of every imaginable colour of beautiful hand-dyed wool, and quilting fabric etc. I could have spent all day (and a lot of money) in that shop. I selected a few really lovely yarns (merino and silk blends) which I can hardly wait to start knitting something special with.
The time passed so quickly in New York, leaving me with still many things to see and do and eat, so hopefully I will return there at some point and take up where I left off this time. Here's a few photos from my wanderings in NYC.

An outfit for baby Eliza

Over the last few months I have been working on a couple of knitting projects to make an outfit for my friend Hannah's baby who was due early March. Baby Eliza has now entered the world, and hopefully both Eliza and her mum will like the little shoes and matching beanie :-)
Now they have received the outfit I can share it on my craft blog :-) The shoes were made following an online pattern: Saartje's bootees www.saartjeknits.nl and the beanie was made following a pattern in a book I have called "Simple knits for cherished babies" by Erika Knight.

Since my last post I have also finished knitting a scarf for a birthday present that I will be giving in the near future, also started making another scarf (this one is for me), and also started knitting some little baby projects using some of the beautiful hand-painted wool that Hannah sent me earlier this year from Purl Soho in New York. Pictures of these projects will be posted soon. :-)