Should auld acquaintance be forgot . . . . .

A few weekends ago, I attended a Cousins Reunion.  It was a get-together of the offspring of my Dad's extensive family, held at South West Rocks on the mid north coast of New South Wales.

It was so lovely to catch up with cousins I hadn't seen for literally most of my life.

How to have a long conversation with your cousins - sit along a long log!

One request was that family members bring along any memorabilia in their possession that other family members may find interesting, and my goodness, there were some absolute gems come to light.

My Dad was the baby of a large family, in fact when he was born in 1916, his eldest brother had already marched away to that great adventure, the Western Front.  I imagine my Grandmother, nursing her baby son and worrying about her 19 year old far away.

He was a member of the 1st AIF 33rd battalion, and by June, 1917 the battalion was part of the assembled throng waiting for the detonation of the massive landmines which signalled the beginning of the Battle of Messines.  Anyone who has recently seen the movie 'Beneath Hill 60' will kind of know the story.  It was the biggest explosion ever witnessed on earth up until that time, reputedly heard by the British Prime Minister in his office in London.

Zero hour was 3.10am on the 7th June, 1917.  Those baby-faced adventurers could have been in no doubt that their lives were about to change.  How do you think you would cope at that moment?  We could not have been sure how our uncle felt, until one of my cousins brought to the reunion the following letter.

How my Grandmother must have wept when the letter arrived, presumably some time after the telegram which informed her of the Army's great regret that her son had been killed in action on 9th June, 1917, bravely serving his country.  He is buried with 77 of his brothers in arms in a Belgian wood.

War is such a waste of life . . . .

Okay, this is better

That photo of the Dutch Iris was troubling me so much that I have edited it and here it is again -

Yes!  Better!  Now I can relax about it.

Look at this, sitting on the edge of my grey water drum.  Don't go swimming in there, will you!

Sniffle, sniffle . . .

I have again succumbed to a cold, just what I didn't need.  Excuse me while I blow . . . .

So many things are happening in the garden, but my photo taking has decreased to an alarming level.  The Avalon daffodils all flowered, beautiful, delicate, lemony petals - I haven't a single shot to show you!  The roses  are all leaping ahead with leaves and buds - and aphids!  I have permanently stained fingers from squashing them, I'm sure it doesn't really do much good but I try to avoid the toxic sprays.  I have discovered that shaking them off the leaves onto my hand and then shaking my hand over the fishpond works!  Those fish, I swear, could eat aphids all day.  Speaking of fish, there is much chasing activity going on in the fishpond - spring is obviously here and there is a lot of lurve dancing going on in there!

I sat out in the sun this morning with my large box of large tissues and marveled at the fact that I have done absolutely nothing in the garden except pull out a few weeds and trim a few roses and yet everything is going way above and beyond to reward me with loveliness!

The white iris are flowering, even the ones that I moved in the autumn.

I have a sea of lavender - can you have too much?  I think so, some will be dispatched when the flowers are finished.  In the meantime, the bees are going crazy.  There is some delicious honey being made somewhere around here.

Most of the lavender is this -

and some is this -

Okay, one lot is English and one lot is French, but my befuddled head doesn't let me work it out at the moment.  I ought to know . . .

There is even a clump of the last one in white - and that's certainly not something that I planted!

Underneath the westringia by the path is this dear azalea who, despite never being watered, bravely flowers it's little head off at this time of the year.  For the last two years, I have promised it that I will trim back the westringia and give it some space and some care - this I will do this year!  Yeah right, says the azalea!

Bluebells and umm, something! ( I only know it as Society Garlic).  Note to self - a nice combination of colours to be encouraged.

Dutch iris in the western bed.  My goodness, what an odd angle my house is standing at!  I should learn to edit my photos and straighten things before publishing.  I should also pick these flowers and enjoy them inside.

Not a good photo, but in the foreground on the right is a sweet little white violet - excuse me, how can you have a white violet??  Should it just be called a white?  And the normal violets called violet whites?  Oh please!  I think the antihistamines have gone to my brain.

Anyway, the white violets self seed everywhere, particularly in the gravel path and I have learned to recognise them coming up when they are just tiny and move them into the garden where I can enjoy them without walking on them.

I inherited these two pots from Mike's mum when she went into the nursing home.  She had had them on her front verandah and had never planted anything in them, because nothing seemed to go with the colour of the pots.  On Monday, on my way home from Castle Hill, I called into Bunnings to get some potting mix to repot the pelargoniums on the verandah and found this geranium - supposedly the first one bred to flower in deep red.  I thought it would match the pot beautifully.  The other one in the background is hot pink - and doesn't match the pot at all!

Speaking of deep red, and of repotting the pelargoniums, look at the colour of this -

Is that delicious or what!

I went to Castle Hill on Monday to check out a new sewing machine for the quilting frame.  The present machine is rubbish (in my opinion) and weighs sooo much that it makes it almost impossible to use.  What I looked at was a Nolting machine from America, it was so beautifully engineered, with every feature you could want and weighs about 15 kilos.  I am totally in love with it and want it so badly - Mike came with me to look at it and totally gets how much easier it would be to use and how much I want it - I am holding my breath that all my birthday and Christmas presents for the rest of my life are about to materialize!  In one box!

And speaking of sewing, it is starting to mount up!  I have my sister-in-law coming up on Friday to work on the quilt for her son's wedding, to which we received an invitation yesterday.  Yay!  A trip to Tasmania!  They have lovely gardens in Tasmania.  As well as that, the Fedex man banged on the door not ten minutes ago with a roll of fabric that I bought online to recover the sofas in the lounge room with.  It's a sumptuous green to go with the sumptuous green that I want to repaint the walls with!  And to top all of that off, there is a parcel in the cupboard of the sewing room which contains the most delicious silk which will become a wedding dress for my son's fiancee, hopefully well before their wedding in April next year!

So what am I doing here, typing on the computer!!  Have another nose blow and get yourself off to the sewing room!

August

My winter hibernation is at an end.  My garden is the scene of total neglect with weeds and things that desperately need pruning and yet all the things I love about it soldier on to reward me, even if I deserve much less.

Actually I should rename the blog Kurrajong Sewing Room because that's what's been happening these last few months.  My sister and I have been working on a quilt for our older sister's 60th birthday, which was yesterday.

As well as that, I have had a cupboard clean-out which resulted in my making 35 pincushions from charm squares of fabric which were anything but charming - I haven't got a photo of them all, will post one soon.

 I finished piecing a quilt top made entirely of 2 inch half square triangles done with jelly rolls and Thangles - once begun, it quickly became known as the 'Thangle your way out of this, woman' quilt -

 I have had a super weekend away on our annual Stitch n Bitch with my sister, my daughter-in-law-to-be and a bunch of super ladies who have become dear quilting friends -

I came back from that weekend all inspired to sewing the sort of interesting things that these girls make, and from the jelly roll scraps left over from the Thangle quilt and some handles bought years ago at the Craft Fair, I created myself a bag -

And I'm about to start a new quilt in conjunction with my sister-in-law to celebrate the wedding of her son, my nephew, who is getting married in Tasmania in November.  It will be very similar to the birthday quilt above, but in completely different colours.

In the meantime, August is upon us and with it comes the winds - I'm sure it is nature's way of blowing winter away.  Trouble is it's blowing everything else away as well - I'm constantly recovering the dogs' bed from anywhere in the back yard and returning it to the verandah.  Today I will give my sore stitching fingers a rest and go pull out some weeds and prune some roses.  The new leaves are coming out quickly, even early blooms are appearing - here's DA Graham Thomas and its clear yellow flowers - can you spot the stick insect?

 So off out into the wind I go, hmm, wait, maybe a cup of coffee would be good first . . . .

Neglect . . .

is a very bad thing.

There's scarcely anything in my life that I haven't neglected badly in the last month or so.  I have neglected the housework, the vacuuming hasn't been done, dust lies thick on every surface, the ironing basket is as high as it can be without toppling over onto the floor, the laundry baskets are overflowing, the kitchen floor desperately needs sweeping.

I have neglected the garden, weeds haven't been pulled out, nothing has been watered, the roses haven't been pruned.  The fishpond has been neglected, and the fish are swimming around in pea soup.  The dogs have been neglected, even though they all went to the vets last weekend for their annual shots, their winter coats are knotty and matted and need a good brush.

One place I have been busy is in the sewing room.  A quilt has been loaded onto the quilting frame, a process which takes some time and causes a lot of aching back muscles, and an attempt has been made to creatively quilt.  To a point where I had achieved 20 'elements' strategically  placed on the quilt top.  That took a frustrated day and a half to do.  It's now taken me three days to 'unsew' it all, stitch by stitch. How completely unsatisfying.

I neglected to pick the mandarins from the tree.  Our neighbour swears you have to leave them there until we have had a frost, which somehow sweetens them.  I looked at them a fortnight ago, loaded onto the little tree.  I looked again a week and a half ago - about 99% of them were on the ground with a little bit chewed out of each one.  The white cockatoos had been busy!  This is what I ended up with -

and a whole bucket of chewed ones went in the bin!  Bad, bad birds!

And of course, straight after that, we got the frost we'd been waiting for.  Not one but three on consecutive mornings.  Here is the heliotrope in the driveway bed.

I had admired it's vanilla-secented flowers only the day before it looked like this.

Here are the hanging pots of 'Nodding Violet' on the front verandah -

There are some cheerier things to be seen in the garden.  The new Snowdrops, 'Galanthus elwesii', have come up in the bed near the front steps.

Funny how they almost come through the surface with a flower already there.

The mulberry tree is already getting new leaves.

That's a fuzzy looking Merlin in the background.  I hope we don't get any more frosts now that the leaves are coming.

And to add to all this doom and gloom, tomorrow is my birthday and I will be a whole year older than I am today.  Woe is me!

It's Winter Solstice!

Which is a funny old-fashioned way of saying yay! today is the shortest day of the year.

Here's how to know it's winter at Kurrajong -

There's smoke coming out of the chimney above the lounge room fire.  In fact, there's smoke coming out of everyone's chimney above the lounge room fire.  There's so much smoke in the air that if it was summer and this smoky, we'd all be cursing the bushfires or the pyromaniac neighbours for destroying our air quality.  But somehow, because we are making the smoke and are inside warming our toes in front of said fire, we don't seem to worry.  Note the wire netting to keep the mynahs from falling down the chimney.  Which they have done.

Meanwhile, inside, we're actually lucky if we can get close enough to the fire to warm our toes.  You have to be quick to get a spot.  Here's Merlin, our new rescue dog, who seems to have worked it all out.

Outside, the wattle is flowering,

and the leaves on the Japanese Maple are beautifully red.

After all the rain last month, the roses came down with a universal dose of black spot and they are all, without exception, basically nude of leaves!  Here's Brother Cadfael, with no leaves but one sweet, enormous bloom.

These are some of the violets that arrived here around the roots of the irises I brought from the previous garden.  Such pretty flowers but so invasive.  Behind this clump is a little rabbit dig which appeared a few nights ago.  This probably explains how Ewan McGregor can be sound asleep on the end of the bed one moment and, a fraction of a millisecond later, is wake, has leapt off the bed, torn up the hallway, shot out through the doggie door, down the back stairs and is barking madly at the side fence.  How does he do that?

The jonquils are the first of the bulbs to flower.

Meanwhile, inside, other signs of winter are very evident -

One day soon, I hope to stop coughing my lungs out and blowing my nose.

More rain!

This weather is starting to make me laugh.  I read on the SMH website this morning "City has it's wettest May in seven years, with more to come".  I wish that meant more May to come - this is the last day of the month and next month, i.e. tomorrow, means that the year is as good as half gone.  :o< (that's meant to look like the face of someone who's just heard some news they found quite appalling!)

This is what happens at our house when the nasty weather rolls in from the south.  And has it ever been rolling in - I wake up in the morning to the sound of rain on the roof, okay, no walking this morning; by the time my cereal is in the bowl, it's sunny; finish my breakfast and open the door, it's raining - I can watch the next shower of rain sweeping in from the south over the village, along past the Heights, disappearing to the north over Wollemi National Park and turn around again to see the next shower sweeping in from the south.

The bulbs are all coming up!

The jonquils in the front garden even have a bud.

I'm sure these are snowdrops, but they must be multiplying because I sure didn't plant nearly as many as this!

The persimmon tree is starting to lose it's leaves.

And because it is raining, that means I am washing.  Who else in the wide world washes their clothes when it's raining?  My craziness comes from only having tank water.  When it's raining and water is going into the tank, then I can happily be taking water out again.  And to add to the completeness of my lunacy, when I am washing, I am also watering the garden!  Do you get this picture?  It starts to rain, so I start to wash, I collect my washing water and I water the garden.  But it's already raining on the garden.  The neighbours shake their heads.

Have I ever explained that my garden is only watered with rainwater and greywater?  I have never had the luxury of hoses and sprinklers in this garden.  My wash water is bucketed onto my plants, suds and all.  Consequently some plants in my garden are never watered.  My only exception is my herb garden and my bay tree in a pot.  They don't get watered with greywater for fairly obvious reasons.

The next shower of rain has just rolled through, pitter-pattering onto the glass of the back door.  There's not much else to do but sit by the fire and knit, or maybe google some waterproof blinds to hang outside the back door to keep the rain off.  That is, until the next load of washing is finished and it's time to water the garden again!