A couple of things to make a bad day better

I havent felt much like blogging.
It was our grandsons funeral on Friday, So many people, so many young ones, his coffin had photos of him all around it. I think one of the most touching moments for me was one of the boys who had to leave early lightly ran his fingers over the coffin as he left.
He was sent off well and the burial site on the property couldnt be better, overlooking the valley and their farm,  but I was at the end of it all exhausted, I have had the family from Melbourne here since Wednesday night, they left on Saturday morning so a rushed trip to see as many people as possible. A dinner for 9 here on Friday night, so yesterday I put my feet up.
Today I drove a bit over an hour to a foal show to see our lovely cream colt take out the Supreme Welsh foal of show which is lovely but now I am tired again.
This book of Maggie Greys arrived on Friday and is a delight and the fingerless gloves I finished one day last week, they are a lovely silk and wool mix but as you can see I need to make two more to match the tops.
I think I have enough to make the next pair.
It has been drizzly and damp interspersed with a bit of sun, the sun has been lovely, as has the drizzle but it is not helping me to get my washing dry.
Off to read my book and perhaps do a bit of knitting while I wait for J to come home from fishing.
Hope this doesnt sound too incoherent.

Wet, cold and damp

 Seeding is in progress, I walked out early this morning, it is ANZAC Day, a day to remember all those who fell in wars and in particular for us to remember when our country became a nation.
so I walked and thought and the sun came through the clouds. I hope this is a portent but I am sure there will be more wars.
We never seem to learn.
Seeding has begun, we seed into untilled soil, although the cows do a pretty good job of churning things up a bit.
You can see the drizzle across the valley, and here another sign of autumn, the many dairy heifers we are raising, we seem to have had a good early crop of heifers, the early ones do better than the later ones.
It seems so odd that in the Northern hemishpere they are seeding too, but here where our winters are relatively mild and it is when we get the rain, we seed now in autumn, and usually around about Anzac day.
I see I am repeating myself, well I am getting older but really there is no excuse, but I am cooking, making beds, preparing for the Melbourne family to arrive sometime today, in preparation for the funeral on Friday. Perhaps I am a little stressed.
I am off to do a bit of knitting and to try not to overcook the cake that is in the oven!

Sunday and Monday

 This is the glory vine on the pergola by the house, it has tourned such a glorious colour and suddenly the days are cold and damp and windy.
The palm trees were really blowing in the wind.
We went to lunch yesterday, friends who own a property at Parawa and this is R's magnificent tagine before we ate it, full of home grown figs and quinces from their covered orchard, I wish we had one of these, the birds ate everything so early this year, but due to their generosity we came home with enough figs to turn into dried figs and this is the first stage in the drying process.
Then! disaster as I left the rock buns to hang out the washing, and was caught up in just a few other things and there they were, incinerated.
I have made some more!
Looks as if the funeral will be on Friday, so the Melbourne family will be coming over on Wednesday I think, got to get my skates on and tidy the house and make beds.

Presents and this mornings walk

While I was at Ballarat Julia and I swapped, me a doll and her this wonderful needle case, all hand dyed and felted.
Yesterday a lovely surprise arrived, some African fabrics from Robyn in South Africa, again we did a swap, a mad owl and a few other bits from me and these from herf.
I love it when the mail brings parcels.
This morning we were up early for the market and then for awalk along the cliffs at Petrels Cove, a few drops of rain and dquite odd looking sky, threatening, yet the sea was flat with the odd big roller.
I loved the new arrangement of piled rocks, there has been an on going collection of these at the beach they call Deplidges.
As we walked there were sheep on the hill by the path, and this really odd look to the sea and sky.
John and I did manage to get the work bench together, fishing was off because of the forcast winds and rain (no rain doesnt stop them but wind does.)
We got hot and bothered and of course the final screw wouldnt go in, so we re drilled the hole.
It now looks much like most of my other work rooms, full!!
I am slowly working out what else I need and what I can get in there. The thing by the back door )wooden dressing table I rescued from the side of the road) may have to go up there, it has drawers that work and I need drawers.
But what will I do with the stuff on it?  Obviously a re think. 
Off to dinner with Millie and Mason, should be fun.

Here is my bit of stitch.

 blogger has changed me so I dont quite know what i am doing, might be easier for them, not for me when I am in a hurry.
I have been working on this for a while, may be a prayer flag eventually.
John and I have spent half the day trying to put a work bench (flat pack!!) I bought today and have at the final stage discovered it is not right and we will have to re do the whole thing. Not tomorrow, that is fishing, not Sunday we are out to lunch. Oh well the idea and the price was right.

This and that

I have spent most of the day still cleaning out the room I hope to convert into a work shed.
I have moved stuff out and washed the floors twice and swept down cobwebs, still more to do but it does look better.
I found these few cosmos flowering up in the vegetable garden, it is so dry things are not looking very good,
A few more pages of my book, the first is thumb and finger prints on a long sheet I folded into an accordion style booklet, then another page, the first was using 2 nails and a hammer to make marks and texture, and that was put next to an exercise in making repeat marks, I chose grasses.
The third is a piece of black fabric that we stamped using soy wax as a resist and then using bleach to see what came out underneath, in my case, green!
I bought several pieces of black cotton from all the local fabric shops and they all came out a slightly different colour, one almost a peachy cream, interesting. I think you really need to have the bleach fresh as sometimes I have had no reaction at all.
The weather man is forcasting rain, I hope so but they havent often been right lately and we need it so badly.

A special book and some I made

 I bought this lovely book from the very clever Jen Crossley, and it is filled with names and messages from all my frineds at Fibre arts. The cover is distressed and stamped metal with lots of lovely bits and pieces on the spine and inside there are all sorts of pages made from different papers. Such a lovely momento.
In Dorothy Caldwells class we made books, this was a little one to practice on making our signatures and then weaving a nice sort of pattern on the back to hold them all together.
It would have been better if I had got my knots in the right places! Never mind the beads covered up most of my mistakes.
We also made a larger book, which I will perhaps put up tomorrow and another that I will put on my other blog.
This was the two sides of the stitched wrap I made for the larger book and took quite a long time to stitch. I made it a bit short so had to add a bit on the ends.
I loved doing this class, we did so many things and all the sort of stuff I like to do.
I have decided to turn the old laundry , well seperated from the house where junk has been stored, into a work room, for metal and hammering and wire and stuff.
Today I began cleaning it out.
There is a large amount of 'stuff' that now needs a new home!
It will be good if I can get all of that together in one place. At least the floor is level and it is quite light and has several power points.

Part of my day

I walked over to see how much water was in the dam this morning, it was cool and a bit misty. We are getting very dry again, I do get a bit sick of waiting for the break in the season at this time of the year.
Max found a delicious cow pat to eat.
We have been having interesting clouds and this is the valley from a different direction.
Our big Welsh Cob stallion has been moved into a paddock from his summer yard, all very well but there are two delicious looking fillies over the double electric fence!
I had to go in to do some shopping so we decided to walk around the bottom of the Bluff, forgetting it was school holidays, but you can see how misty it was this morning, and at the end of the road, where there was quite a bit of confusion as a car and campervan came along and there was no room to turn around. There is a sign saying not to but there is always some one!
Any way there I found this young tern who wasnt terribly afraid of all the children who were fishing there.
I have been busy but still having a few down moments, which is understandable.
Again thank you to all those who have sent lovely comments and encouraging words. I think it is times like this that you actually realise there are people out there who read my blog and who care.
(dont forget to click to enlarge any of the photos.)

I have been away, now I am back, sort of.

 Thank you to every one who sent such lovely thoughts our way. I have appreciated it.
Stewies body was recovered on Easter Sunday so at least we had closure, his parents had been out of communication for a week but are home now.
I was already organised to go to Ballarat Fibre art week, and in the end the decision was to go, we knew that even if he was found there would be a coronial enquiry and that a funeral as such would not be happening in a hurry. His parents needed time to recover where it happened on their own.
We are all now home but still not sure what will happen.
I think I would have gone mad wandering around the house in limbo. As it was I had the most supportive community of fibre friends that apart from a few, I see once a year, they kept me busy and I was so tired at night I only had a few bad moments.
The friend I went over with was worried that on her own she wouldnt go, but it was nice to chat about our art and other much more mundane things on the 8 hour drive over and then back again.
My class with the wonderful Dorothy Caldwell couldnt have been better, we stitched and made marks and told silly jokes and kept ourselves very busy.
I think the support of those friends was a great eye opener that will stay with me forever and I had bought a book that the lovely Jen Crosslety had made and every one wrote in it, a treasured momento of those few days.
the collage above is made up of part of the journey we made,the first two and the last one which is a double of the first, were of the the morning after we had heard of the accident and John and I walked the cliffs here. Then on Easter Sunday in one of the small towns we passed through there was this wonderful display of rabbits. From there to the Ballarat Grammar school, some of the lovely little things we would find around the school in the mornings, the sheep at Kaniva and the broad plains on our way home.
Again, thank you to all who posted, I know that this week I have to come down to earth and face reality.
This was the grandson I really didnt know, a bit of a bad boy, but to go at 17 is far too young, when I think of the risks we took and managed to get through them, the only way I can think of this is, and it is something I have always thought, if your time is up, then so be it.
As a grandparent I can say it, as a parent, it is far harder to come to terms with.

dreadful day

To all my blog friends. I wont be posting for a while. One of our grandsons is missing presumed drowned in a boating accident.
To say we are devastated is an understatement.

This mornings clouds

 I was up early this morning as I had to go and do my morning 'sitting' at our exhibition over at Yankalilla.
So Max was walked early and the clouds were quite interesting. We made it to the top of the hill this morning too.
The weather now is horrendous, I went over the back way with a slight breeze, and came home on the bitumen in gale force horror. Trees down, luckily not badly over the road and branches and leaves every where. It is still blowing, no rain and dust every where.
I forgot to take photos of ourt exhibition, but we had over 100 people through for the morning which was very good considering the conditions, and had lots of sales, not much of mine but that was to be expected and it was the first morning of a 4 day show.
I am now home feeling decidedly battered and I wish this wind would drop, the shade house we had moved onto the orchard lawn and which is huge, but we hadnt dug it into the ground has blown over, I couldnt believe it. Not sure what other damage but dry and dusty paddocks are losing topsoil. Please send us a long gentle rain soon.

My new (to me) toy.

 We were in Adelaide yesterday for haircuts and a few other things and to go and look at this sewing machine. My old Bernina was a very basic 1006 heavy as lead and I was having a few problems with it. This one probably scares me as it is a computerised and much more modern one, but also rather exciting.
I just hope it does what I want and is as easy to use as they assured me. No time to play at the moment which is annoying but who hoo a new machine to play with! Cant wait, perhaps this afternoon but things are pretty chaotic here at the moment.
Any one else use this machine?

This mornings clouds from the back gate.

 I do like getting up when I want to and not when the govt seems to think I should.
J had a meeting in Adelaide today so we were both up when we would have been last week.
The dogs are still confused though, the old pug gets earlier and earlier with his demands for food.
I have fought, first with the hoses that my lawnmowing fellow tangled terribly, not what I needed, ( still hot, blowing and the garden needed watering).
Then with the vacuum cleaner. I swear the thing hates me. I take ages as I get such a back ache doing it but it wasnt helped by something blocking the hose. I put the water hose down, wouldnt budge it, found some wire and something moved, but it is still making a noise so I think something is still in there, just waiting for next time!
The clouds were lovely.