What I made, by Sharon

 In 2011 I made my mother-in-law a tea cosy . She drinks even more tea than we do, so it's had a lot of hard service.  You can't see it well in this picture, but the openings are stained with tea and starting to fall apart. I did attempt a new one for her in 2020, but that disappeared into history. So, when word came to me that she needed a new cosy, I got out my hook and got to it. I found t his basic pattern  and adapted it for her smaller pot. I can't explain what I did, it's crotchet and I free formed it.  I used left overs (of course) and fuzzy alpaca. I think it's quite ugly, but it fits her odd shaped tea pot well, and she seems to like it, which is the point.  I find making tea cosies very satisfying. They have a great return for effort, perform a useful function, are a fun crotchet project and make tea so much better.                                

  Last week I announced that I was going to read  What Happened to Nina   by Dervla McTiernan next. I read the prelude on Friday morning, and then the vet came for her monthly visit to give Princess Daisy her arthritis shot. Unfortunately there were other things going wrong with my 19 year old cat, and that was the end of that. Vale, sweet Princess Daisy, you live on in my heart. Princess Daisy has been with me for a very long time, since she was a kitten and I was a single lady about town, so I was feeling quite fragile. Even though I'm not usually a mood reader, I decided not to read a tense thriller, and settled instead for Charlene Carr's Behind Our Lives .   Charlene's books are like chocolate pudding - delicious and comforting, and this was no exception.  Then Kate Davies announced her new Summer of Mystery club, which includes a book club component. We are reading 10 golden age detective fiction books by  Margery Allingham . Even thought the club hasn't started

  This is part ten in a series of non-fiction book reviews, based on the idea that the books I request tell you everything you need to know about me. Today we have an authorised (uncritical) history of Barbie, comics about anxiety and abandoned houses in Japan. Worry Lines: You're Doing Really Well Given the Circumstances   (Releases 7 May 2024) I am old enough to remember when they started releasing books made up largely of blog posts. Now we've reached the stage of releasing books made up of instagram posts. Worry lines is very cute and has some lovely and sometimes profound things to say, but (with the exception of the introduction) it feels like each page is a direct lift from an insta post. So each page is a self-contained thought, which makes it all a bit hectic. The introduction is great, a whole uplifting story over multiple pages, and shows how much better this could have been if it was an original concept, rather than an instagram account. That said, this would be a n

 And just in time too, the chill has arrived here.  For Leon's 2024 winter set I decided to knit the Winding Road Hat and Scarf pattern by Teniana Ortuta Designs. I don't really know where I came across the pattern, but it looked interesting, but not so complicated I couldn't knit it in public, because I knew I was knitting the whole set while travelling. Full trip report here if you would like to hear about things other than the knitting. I started the hat before we left, I wanted to check that the needles and yarn worked well together. I'm glad I did, because I decided I liked it better all knit on 4mm needles, so I didn't have to carry extra needles.  I made up a pair of mitts - cast on 36 stitches, 12 rounds plain rib, start a thumb gusset and hat chart at the same time. reverse the pattern for the second one: When we went to The Yarn Trader I bought a "matching" skein of sock yarn, from local dyer  Colagirl Collective .  I finished the mitts before w

I was numbering these, rather than naming them, but then I went on a three week holiday and now I don't know whether the numbers should refer to my posts for the year, or the number of Wednesdays in the year so I've gone back to my very exciting names for these posts.  The title pretty much says it all - the book I've (nearly) finished and my next two books are all from NetGalley, and I've almost finished one of my famous Non-Fiction Book Review posts (where I review three NetGalley non-fiction books), which will be published on the weekend.  I'm within sight of the end of A Short Walk Through a Wide World by Douglas Westerbeke.  It's got big The Invisible Life of Addi LaRue energy, but is a completely original concept. The central conceit is of a young girl who has an illness / curse so that she cannot stay in the same place for more than two or three days, and she can not go back to anywhere. So she wanders, and she meets people and she learns to survive. Pa

We got back from our holiday yesterday, and what a gloried and various trip it was. We started with The Warbuton Trail Fest. unfortunately it was a very hot, total fire ban weekend. Leon's run got rerouted, which meant, instead of doing 50kms in the relative flat, he did 46kms, including running up and down Mount Donna Buang. My 14 km run started a bit earlier than planned and was quite pleasant. We spent the rest of the weekend eating and drinking and  and sitting around talking glorious nonsense with some of our favourite people. On the Monday Kris, Leon and I headed for the airport, where were flew to Adelaide to see Fringe Festival shows and go to breweries.  We averaged two shows a day and two breweries, so it was a good time. We had a good mixture of stand-up, circus and musical comedy. As a bonus, Trevor Jones, our favourite cabaret singer, was performing nightly in The Garden of Earthly Delights, so there was singing as well.  Also, Adelaide is mad for strawberries, and I a