Skip to main content

Bendigo!


On Friday I caught the train to the Bendigo Sheep and Wool show, the country's largest celebration and exhibition of all things sheepy and woolly.


I had fun from the moment I got the Southern Cross Station. Joining me on the hideously early 7.10am train were Sonia, Susan, Debs, Patricia and Sophie - who we hadn't met before, but she lives just around the corner.

The first thing I saw when I got there (after the coloured sheep!) was the people who make Majacraft wheels - not the people who sell them, the people who actually make them. I had a chance to spin on the Little Gem, and fell in love. I nearly spent the rest of the day sitting there spinning... But I'm glad I didn't. I bought fibre, and yarn and only three balls of sock wool. Everything I bought was on my list of things to buy, and I bought everything on the list, except a Turkish spindle, and that was option.

Sonia, Deb and Patricia bought spindles, so I may have companions in the spinning obsessions soon.


We had lamb burgers for lunch and looked at sheep, goats and alpacas.

Fibre on the hoof! Sheep don't like being stroked, but alpacas like it when you rub them under the chin.



At the end of the day, I picked up my wheel, my overlarge, over full hand bag, and my three bags of purchases and with the generous assistance of my knitting friends made my way back to the train, and so to Melbourne.

Now I am off to see my new niece. I knit a wee jumper and hat in Ixchel Angora/Merino in purple. Super pretty.

Comments

  1. It was such fun to watch you douse yourself in fibre and sheep. Totally mesmerising to watch you spin… that's probably why I walked away with a spindle… there is no other logical explanation!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Unravelled wednesday and WAYRN - the one where I prepare

We are heading off for some camping and hiking and general R&R on Friday, so I'm currently in planning and preparing mode. Of course that mainly means deciding what to knit - I'm going to make the Old Romance cardigan by Joji Locatelli. The yarn is wound and I'm ready to go. I completed Leon's Winter Set (2023) just in time, and it's currently blocking. I'm reading Georgette Hayer's Fredrica , which I am enjoying very much. Regency romance is so sweet and, unlike current romance offerings, I know it won't suddenly tumble into gynaecological territory!  For unexplained reasons, NetGalley is offering some Georgette Heyer books at the moment - (maybe it's re-release?) and I'm taking this opportunity to read a few more of them And that's my week in knitting and reading.  To read my all my book reviews, and to see everything I knit, you can find me on Ravelry as  Sharondoublekni t and on GoodReads as  Sharondblk .  I'm joining in with Kat ...

Yarnalong - the one with the final bit of transport

Remember how I took every form of transport known to man a fortnight ago? Well, I was missing just one thing, suburban trains. But today I got to remedy that, knitting my way to Dandenong for work. Yay? My Char jumper has been knitting up ridiculously fast. It's easy, pleasant and a well written pattern. I'm reading Rachael Herron's latest book The Ones Who Matter Most . It's a good read so far, family centered fiction, easy to read but still emotionally challenging. I'm listening to Evelyn Waugh's Men At Arms . I'm enjoying it, I didn't really know what to expect, but some of it reminds me of Catch 22, in that it catalogues the absurdities of war and bureaucracy. The narrator has the perfect upper crust English accent and I'm very pleased it's the first of a trilogy.   And that's another week of reading, knitting and catching trains everywhere for me. Do pop along to Ginny's blog to see what she and the rest of the yarnalong ...

Why Andrea Mowry, why? (A rant and a rather nice finished object)

As mentioned, prior to our hiking trip I suddenly, and rather randomly, decided to knit  Andrea Morwy's Traveler Shell . It's basically an open fronted rectangle in a knit purl pattern. The pattern is FOURTEEN pages long. Why is the pattern 14 pages long? Because, instead of explaining the ten row repeat and then putting the shaping on top of that (e.g. decrease while continuing to knit in pattern), she writes out the entire ten row knit purl sequence every time something changes. Additionally, most of the time she starts with even number being the right side and wrong numbers being the right side,which is just plain odd. It's confusing and it's like she wants to keep you looking at the pattern for every row, rathe than following the very intuitive stitch pattern, which I had memorised after one repeat.  The instructions for the band just say 'pick up x number of stitches'. No ratios, no acjnowledgement that different bits of the band have different ratios. Afte...