A Is For Australia Day

We celebrated Australia Day in our typical Australian fashion:
Visitors round for lunch - ham, cheese & tomato melted onto ciabatta, with avocado;
then a trip to a bayside beach, a little bit of snorkelling - saw the usual toadfish, many silvery little fishies, starfish, sea urchins and a beautiful grey-purple stingray - a small one, only about 40 cm across;
then a relaxed evening meal at the nearby cafe - king prawns & salad, greek dips and sourdough*;

while being treated to a spectacular lightshow put on by mother nature - lightning, rain squalls moving across the Bay, godrays and orange sunset skies;
then watched the Australia Day fireworks in the distance while we sipped coffee. They used the top of the Eureka Building (Melbourne's tallest) as a platform for some of the fireworks - spectacular!

*Australia's multiculturalism has its ugly side, for sure, but I love what it has done for local cuisine. And in typical Aussie fashion, cooks and chefs happily mix and match elements from all cultures. I love it. I can remenber as a child being thought of as really weird because I had salami sandwiches for lunch.

We didn't have a barbeque - it's not compulsory. On the way home, the Nylex sign showed the temperature at 10.00pm was still 27 C.
It was a lovely day.I reckon Australia is the best country in the world!

The Easy Life

Ah, don't you just love it when you can roll over in the morning, reach for the camera, snap off a shot of dawn like the one above, and then roll back over for another few hours sleep!

I didn't even have to get out of bed for that photo!

After Christmas in Hobart, we took a few days holiday on the East Coast of Tas, and that was the view from our room. Spectacular.

The day before, we had a little snorkel at the beach in the picture below. It's just a tiny cove just south of Spikey Beach, which is, of course, near the Spikey Bridge.


The water was a bit cold, as it usually is in Tas - we would have had hypothermia without our full length wetties.

Oh, you want to know what the Spikey Bridge is? Well, it's a convict built one, from 1830? 1840? I should have paid more attention to the information board. Doh.


And now you can see why it's called Spikey Bridge.


And yes, there has been knitting, even while away, even in the hot weather. No photos yet.

Swatching for Seashore

I can’t resist a bargain, so when I found this cotton blend at only $2.00 a ball, I succumbed to temptation rather quickly.

I had in mind a jumper I had seen in my vintage pattern book. When I say vintage, I mean from the mid-1980s, which is the last time I had done knitting.

I have to finish Crocus first, but I just had to try a swatch, firstly to see how it feels to knit this yarn, and secondly to see how the stitch pattern comes together.

The colour is impossible to photograph accurately. It’s called Oxford, and it’s a bluey-greeny-grey. My photos don’t show it right, and I’ve no idea what colour it will show up on other people’s monitors.

The yarn felt nice to knit up. The pattern was fairly easy once I got the hang of it. It seems to be a row of moss stitch in between rows of knit, with rows of purl as ridge rows.I have to decide whether I want to follow the pattern as it is, or do these pattern rows spaced further apart. Decisions, decisions!