Rememberance Day

At the 11th hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918 Armistice was declared in the First World War.

Both my grandfathers were in WWI - I posted about them on ANZAC Day.
Eric Bogle wrote a mighty fine song about WWI - "And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda"...

This is a vid I took at Maldon Folkie this year with my little camera. The beginning is missing cos I wasn't paying attention (but then I would have missed out on the end as the camera ran out of memory anyway...):





Maybe I shall try loading this video later. This is the first time I have ever done one of my own and there is a possibility I have done something not quite right because it is already more than an hour since it started...

If you really lack patience you can google Eric Bogle and "And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda".



But November 11 is also famous for other momentous Australian happenings.
Ned Kelly was hanged at the Old Melbourne Gaol in 1880. I love his Jerilderie Letter.
Paul Kelly and Mick Thomas wrote "Our Sunshine" but I can't find it for you to listen to.

Redgum have a great song about Ned ("Poor Ned") but I can't find that on Youtube either, only this pub session with an unknown but lively lot of Wesburn Pub Allstars:



Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was dismissed in 1975. It was a very tough time in Australian politics - I reckon The Dismissal was the closest we have come to a revolution since Eureka Stockade:




The Whitlams wrote a song about Gough:




Here is a photo of the shady bits I made for those plants I put in on Monday. Whipped up from some shade cloth which was too small so supplemented with a worn out sheet, and lovely bamboo sticks.

I really really want to grow some bamboo. I don't think there would be much chance of it getting away and going feral here.
Does anyone have any plants, corms, sproutings, shoots - whatever they grow from?
Especially that great big enormous bamboo that I could use as an instant garden to hide from the horrible neighbours and then make a four poster bed from at the same time. Or shortly thereafter...

And here is a quilt I made a while back for wee Jarvis. Using Anjii's Angles which is an immensely clever thing to do with Half Square Triangles. Just to show that I do make quilts occasionally...

Gardening

It is such a battle to get anything to grow around here. I am right on the edge of the alluvial gold mining area (from the 1850s) - just a couple of kilometres away are deep shaft mines.
In the alluvial mining areas where the gold was close to the surface the easiest way to get to it was to wash all the dirt away and pick up the shiny leftovers.
Consequently, I have very little top soil.
Even after 160 years...

When I bought this place there was a LOT of rubbish around - we took 8 or 10 big tip-truck loads to the tip, and had a great bonfire that burned for weeks, and there are still some mounds that need setting fire to when (if) it rains again.

There were lots of falling down, white ant ridden goat sheds and the dirt from them was pushed into a mound to rot down, along with some other compostables.
After 7 years it is getting good enough to do things with. It is still pretty sandy but my neighbours have offered me their alpaca poo which will be yummy garden tucker!

The last few weeks I have been gardening.
The top photo is a long shot of the garden, with The Chook Palace in the background. It was once a wonderful, functioning Chook Palace until the little bastard delinquent youths across the road kicked down the walls (they also stole thousands $$$ of my stuff before being caught (and then getting only a slap because they were children, and their mother saying it was my 'fault for leaving windows open'... at least they don't come around any more).
I am slowly rebuilding The Chook Palace, Smellie 4 came up a few weeks ago when we did the fencing, and did some more on it. Have to get industrious tho because my Nearly Cousin Neighbour is soon giving me some of her spare chooks. Mud brick building is hard work and no fun on my own.

There are two rows of potatoes. I planted them in trenches and have been mounding up the soil around them as they grow so they will have more spuds. I planted corn in between those rows the other day.

And today planted out boysenberries and strawberries, 4 artichoke plants and transplanted some sunflowers I started from seed.

Lots of sugar cane mulch and some good soakings, and hopefully they will survive the heat wave. I did all this at the crack of dawn, and then came in to the radio telling me that it is going to hit 40* in a couple of days. Bugger. (That is about 105*F).

My most successful plantings are in four concrete well rings (the circles that line wells to stop the walls falling in) along the front of the house, and lots of pots:
Herbs, snow peas, lettuces, mint, strawberries, cucumbers, flowers...


And tomatoes from seed in toilet roll tubes. The kindest way to sprout seeds because the roots are undisturbed when you pot them up. These are only ten days old. You are meant to plant tomatoes on Melbourne Cup Day but there is still a danger of frosts after this (tho not now with this heat wave I suspect). Actually not all tomatoes I now remember - there are are chillies and capsicums sprouting here too.


The Sweetheart and I finally put a gate across the front gateposts - The Mighty Erections.


Screwing in the bottom peg that the gate swings on - hard work just to scratch a little hole so the peg could be turned! You can see what the soil is like - not much growing here.



And clever Trevor slithered under the gate as soon as it was hung... Never mind, another load of gravel on the driveway will fix that problem. So long as it also keeps kangaroos out of the garden. That will be the biggest battle. Just keep sprinkling blood and bone around - they don't like the smell too much apparently.




These Mighty Erections were a dead tree overhanging the house when I bought it. We planted them at the front with the help of a bobcat and anxious sweat.

Even if there isn't much rainfall, and even less soil I do like my home!

Friday Flaunt

My Friday Flaunt



Remember those two drawers I got at the clearing sale a few weeks ago? I added a painted door across the top of them so I now have desk in the corner of my room. Right hand drawers have all my beads and shiny things in them (some of them). And lovely papers to make cards with are in the left hand side.
I also made a linen curtain to hang up over the window - just old linen with hand stitched top and bottom and an ancient brass curtain ring in the top two corners hooked over brass cup hooks screwed in to the architrave. Simple but effective.


And I made some more Log Cabin blocks for The Sweetheart's Dad's partner for her Christmas present. Eight blocks done, six more almost done, another 16 to go. QAYG with Pellon in the centres, and the same lovely Japanese print cut into squares for the backing as I am using cut into 1" strips for the logs. The lights are about 10 different creams. The centres were a panel I got at Melbourne quilt show back in July. They are about 3.5" square, finished blocks will be 8.5".



And in between all this work I have been dreaming of some little summer dresses for the Moo from perhaps these bits of old things:

Squishy Day!!!!!

Today I got armfuls of lovely squishies at the post office!!!



First, 36 (but two of each) more Sister's Choice blocks from Trish.
18 of them are for my Best Sister - because over the last two years we have each made about 100 blocks for each other.
So we will, in theory, have identical quilts. But of course we wont because we have been playing with them as well as whipping up Sister's Choice quilts for our other sisters and sister in law for their birthdays last year.


Here is Trevor checking out the blocks that I just got - laid them out on the bed, went downstairs for my camera and came back to find the Self-Appointed Quilt Expert making himself at home!!!

I have about 100 blocks now, I think - they are real Magic Pudding blocks cos I seem to have far more than I made!




And then there were the ten Barbie dolls I got for cheap as chips on eBay to make more clothes for and give away as Christmas presents to various younger members of the family...


One has some weirdness happening round her back. It may well be normal but then - I am not aBarbie expert at all!!!
Apart from a weird hypo-thermic look to much of her skin, she has a screw in panel on her back that maybe contains a battery but I haven't yet looked. Her hypo-thermic skin is also rather translucent and she seems to have some robot wires in there. (If she is a little alien thing I hope she knows how to do ironing...).


And then a big bundle of material from Miss Vikki Frou Frou who was having a stern clean-out of stuff she didn't think she would use. And I thought I could.
I think Mum's Christmas present is in here...


And I had to get the Mary Engelbright jelly roll for two very good reasons.
Firstly, I haven't ever bought a jelly roll before, and secondly I have a sad old ME t-shirt I bought in Ann Arbour when I was there in 1990 which is falling to bits so I need to replace it...
Actually THIRDLY - they were so cheap it would be rude not to help Miss Vikki out!


I took a photo of the lake that is the septic tank, but I wont post it today either...

The rest of the day was too lovely!!! Lots of material to fondle!

The Race that stops a Nation!!!

Melbourne Cup Day!!!!!

The Melbourne Cup really is The Race that stops a Nation!!

Everyone stops - at school it was even broadcast over the PA so we could all listen to it.
And everyone runs a Sweep - in offices, at schools, even quilters on the Net...
Shocking won. MUCH nicer than if any of the foreign horses had won, especially that one owned by the murdering Chechen bastard...

I didnt win any of the three Sweeps that I had horses in but owe three FQs to the winners. They will be in the post tomorrow!

Back in the Eighties I worked in Thailand, and the Aussie Embassy in Bangkok didn't even take off Australia Day - but they DID take off Melbourne Cup Day!! And Qantas flew in slabs of Fosters, crates of Seaview champagne, 4 & 20 pies and the secretaries all dressed up in jockey silks and there were all sorts of shenanigans. I scrounged my way in somehow - needed some Aussie company after months of working on the Cambodian border in refugee camps, as well as in Burma. We had a lovely day. He he he!!!

Anyway - you can find HEAPS about Melbourne Cup on the Net but start here at the website for Flemington Racecourse. You probably got to see it even if you weren't in Australia.

Hope you all had a lovely Cup Day.
I didn't - we found why the sink isn't emptying promptly. The septic tank has 2' of water on top of it, The Sweetheart dug up some of the absorbing thingie trench and it isn't absorbing. Mostly cos the pipe is chockers with tree roots.
It is going to need the septic tank pumping out, and then new trenches and new pipes with slits in them settled into gravel so all the water can seep out after the septic tank has done it's work.
That is very very depressing.
I have got a photo of the small and neat lake in the yard, but I am too depressed to depress you.
Bugger, wish my horse had come in. And that I could have afforded to put ten bucks on it.