for all the Kathie Winkle fans ...

I'm completely indulging myself and other Winkle fans with this post so anyone else reading can log out now, you'll be bored witless.

It's just that a post I wrote in November is still getting lovely people commenting, literally from many corners of the world, so I thought I'd put up a few photos for the obsessed.

Below, Mexico bowl, 1970. From Lakes Entrance op-shop so by rights it should belong to Sue M. Sue, if you ever come and visit..... you can eat from it. Aren't I generous?



Romany plate,1975. I didn't like this one for a long time until a very groovy friend asked specifically for this plate at lunch one day. Yes, I'm a sucker for the opinions of cool people.




Below:Romany - 1975, Eclipse - 1971, Indian tree - 1971 and October - 1974

Eclipse is the only piece I've ever bought on Ebay. My friend Neeny bought it for me. It was nine dollars. I've never seen it anywhere else in Australia.



A picture of dirty breakfast dishes chez nous. Ascot - 1962, Roulette - 1971, Rushstone - 1965, Geneva 1970 and Mexico - 1970.

patchwork and me

I started making sheety when I was 13 after reading about how to do English style patchwork in this book:



It was my sister's book and I just adored it. All those cool girls doing surfing and rounders and bushcraft and collecting butterflies. I found a copy in an op shop a couple of years ago and had to snap it up.

Anyway, it took me about four years to finish queen sized bed sheety, all sewn by hand and then I sewed cotton lawn on the back. It is a really nice thing to sleep under in summer and now thirty years later is faded and tattered and I look at all the hexagons and see bits from dressmaking projects I made at school, a bit of my old high school dress, material from my grandmother who made so many of our clothes when we were growing up. Much of the fabric is from the seventies and very, very groovy. It is completely the opposite of the beautiful, technically perfect quilts people make with new fabric all matched and sewn on machines. My kids want me to make them one each for their beds and I think I'll start this winter. I may have finished by the time they leave home.

This funny old piece of my history really is the thing I would grab in a fire.

I've also made cushions with this method and in 2008 a crazy enormous tablecloth with a square for every day of that year. It looks like a bed quilt but is nice covering the dining table on occasion.This is not used every day for eating, (maybe once a week though when we have an extra one or two) but largely for storing things I should have put elsewhere, and sometimes for homework. I have been meaning to clear this table since Monday morning, yes now it is Thursday. This is what it looks like:


Not very tidy, that's me.

bring it on

I do love a promising grey sky.
Cheers me right up!

hot at night

We are having what seems to be unseasonally hot weather for the middle of March and I'm hoping the Autumn equinox on March 21 brings an end to this sorry state of affairs.

Going to bed becomes a huge production for me. First, put the air conditioner on upstairs while I'm reading, to get the room cooled down - it faces west and despite the lined curtains becomes a furnace. Fall asleep while I'm reading ( under patchwork sheet, pictured) and wake with a start after about 15 minutes (the light is still on). Turn off air conditioner, open door to roof, put fan on low to keep air circulating. Turn off light.

About two hours later wake up when the temperature has dropped and turn the fan off.
Possibly pull doona over me and pull sheety off and throw on the floor. Otherwise wake again in another couple of hours and pull doona on when I feel chilled. By now it is about 5.00 a.m. and hopefully I go back to sleep.

My husband is oblivious to all this, goes along with anything that's happening, can be in the bed, out of it, watching television, asleep, awake. He doesn't care and isn't bothered.



The patchwork sheet, known as sheety, I made when I was a teenager. Over the winter I need to do some serious repair work because some of the hexagons are wearing out completely:



I want to write a little more about sheety and my bits of patchwork tomorrow.
Now I need to make dinner.

latest books

"When you reach me" by Rebecca Stead was a great read, much more so than "A wrinkle in time" which it makes loving reference to on more than one occasion. I am glad I read the L'Engle though, it's not essential but the plots of the two books do have connections. The Stead novel is very clever, with sly similarities to "Back to the future" and "The Time traveller's wife" in some ways. (Incidentally, I saw the film version of TTW on the plane to Paris and thought it really soppy). I would recommend this book as a gift for a clever grade 5 or 6 girl, very different to something like "Twilight."

I always enjoy the latest Cliff Hardy tale by Peter Corris. This one (Torn apart) was short, fairly light on plot,but it must be hard now Cliff has lost his private eye licence.
I think I've read every one he's written.Had a few years when I was lost in Babyland and I missed a few but I've caught up now.

The other book I'm finishing off currently is Mia Freedman's memoir called "Mama Mia". This is not my usual sort of read at all, and I think I'm probably ten to twenty years older than her blog fanbase/ readership.

I read a piece about her in The Sunday Age magazine last year which got me interested in reading her book . I had vaguely heard of her over the years and read some columns here and there but she was apparently the editor of Cleo and Cosmopolitan magazines ( which I did not read much even at my most magazine obsessed - maybe in the late teenage years), nor do I watch Channel Nine or daytime television (which she featured on, apparently) so had I no knowledge of her as a tv personality.
Well, I am quite liking her book despite not knowing much about her. It would be a good one for a long haul flight because it's a breezy read, very entertaining, despite some sad family stuff and some very personal disclosure that I do find is in the "too much information" category . The parts about the magazine industry were eye opening and should be required reading for teenage girls (everything you see in the magazines is faked to the nth degree, and the advertisers really control everything). As I said, I feel too old to be reading it - too much fashiony/magaziney/baby focus for me, but hey, this was her life and she relates it all most entertainingly.

I do feel the need to read something a bit substantial after all the fluffiness so when I'm finished with Mia I'll be looking through my unread pile for something with some substance I think.

endless summer

This is the "orchard" planted at the bottom of the garden.
No - not "Each peach pear plum"* but "peach,apple,nectarine,apricot."

There are also 3 old plum trees, a newish lemon with bright green fruit like golf balls on it, and a feijoa, all growing in other parts of the garden. The rosellas are eating all the feijoas this year.



The white cockatoos are making their usual mess eating the berries on the Hawthorn tree and breaking off little bits of foliage. This was swept clean 24 hours ago:


I work about five minutes (in the car) from The Biggest Hardware Store in The Southern Hemisphere, so during my lunch hour on Mondays I sometimes become a middle-aged man and go and mooch around in there looking at things. Today I bought some seeds to get going in some seed raising mix in trays on the back verandah.



Summer seems to be going on and on and on so it's too dry and hot to plant soft little seedlings or divide and move anything so I'll get some seeds going instead.


* much loved children's picture book by Janet and Allen Ahlberg

r and r

I've not been feeling like a happy camper since Friday, so this weekend was about rest and recreation and trying to get my groove back, as they say in the classics.

The lads kicked the footy yesterday morning, I walked some circuits of the soccer field, even breaking into a Cliff Young shuffling jog/run at one point. ( I haven't run anywhere in years. Actually, decades, I think).



I saw this little bird house on my walk. I was expecting a Pixar animated creature to stick its head out and start talking to me.



I drank a couple of pots of this to try and lift my mood a bit.



Listened to a variety of music. Lots of it daggy and fun.



Made some honey joys - fun cooking, not obligation cooking. Didn't cook dinner (oh bliss).



This morning we went to the City Square to check out a Digger's display of edible plants, as part of the Melbourne Wine and Food Festival. I was underwhelmed by the size - should have been five times as big. I was expecting something like the old Spoleto - Paul Bangay gardens which were around years ago during the Melbourne International festival held in the spring.

Nor were Digger's selling seeds, only memberships, which I already have. There was some $100 a head lunch all roped off, hosted by Stephanie Alexander, who was there, looking a bit grouchy. Maybe just nervous, I shouldn't be mean.

Below, climbing Malabar spinach, I have a packet of these seeds to plant.



The heirloom vegetables looked gorgeous.





I'm not sure why Joan of Arc is in front of the State Library?



Haven't eaten in Lygon Street in years, but stopped and had chinotto and a delicious flatbread - ish pizza. Just garlic, mozzarella and parsley.



Followed by gelati. I had blackberry, the lads had caramel and lemon.



So back to work tomorrow, feeling not brilliant but at least not ground down by housework and cooking. Fish and chips for dinner tonight, and a cold white wine. Yay.