Mayday! Celebrate the workers! White rabbits!

 

Tuesday knitting group brought a new member, and the announcement that we're expanding our range to include any needle arts. So everyone there said, lovely, I'll bring my embroidery! Turns out we all embroider.

No pictures, but talk ranged over Maryland Sheep and Wool next weekend, rare breed sheep, (human) newborns, Shave em to Save em (rare sheep breeds),  spinning, and other vital topics.

Home again and handsome son arrived to visit, bringing a car load of stuff for me to free cycle, several boxes as well as these, 

all of which were requested right away. Haven't checked  what's in the the boxes yet. 

He declared the ANZAC biscuits terrific, and did I only make them once a year? 

He also approved the chocolate covered almond bits. I may make ANZAC biscuits again soon.

And earlier I was thinking about the next page of my fabric book, maybe that Indian free form quilting, so I took a look at my collection of silk stitched stars and found I had a whole lot of completed cotton stars, too, that I'd completely forgotten

This is only some of them. I must have been on a starmaking tear.

So my next page may not be quilting, but applique, we'll see. 

I organized the drawers of floss, lovely visual experience, and it will be better than rummaging every time I need to change colors. 

One drawer is what Marion calls her tangle, a mass of threads to pull out as needed, and now it's not concealing the other skeins.

Happy day, everyone, whether it looks more like tangle than skein. All good.

All the pieces  I found are stitched and finished, ready to use. I must have made them when I made those English paper pieced pillows. The silk stars were hanging in the kitchen window as a mobile, until I moved on.  As you do.

White rabbits, Mayday, missed them both 6WS

Pipped at the post again yesterday,  with a dawn's early light white rabbits text, thanks to early bird K, missed out entirely on May Day, the workers' day, or Feast of St. Joseph the Worker, depending on your affiliation, noting the carpenter aspect of his life,  and all that. My late husband, Handsome Partner, was the son of a carpenter who worked in the Glasgow shipyards, and one of his jobs as a young boy was to take out the splinters from his father's hands when he came home from work in the evening.

But I've  been working up a storm on a secret project, pics later when its been safely received. Taking a leaf out of the Mumbler book here...and I'm experimenting with the spoken voice function of my tablet to avoid the keyboard by speaking my emails and this blogpost.  

Some mild drawbacks: it can't understand me very well, and keeps on suggesting wildly wrong words! such as "facebook" when I said "taking a leaf".  So I end up editing a lot in order to make any kind of sense.  

But it does explain the occasional mysterious email I get from people I know are using the voice function of their smartphones, and are not realizing what gibberish they're sending out!

Yesterday saw the last of the cucumber sauce, used as a dressing for baked sweet potato.  That makes a full meal, just the usual microwave for ten minutes, easy last minute decision. 

And I baked bread yesterday having put it off a few days while I rationalized that chocolate cake was a fine stand-in for bread.  This batch is five cups of wholewheat, two of all purpose, half a cup barley flour.  The crust is great, and the texture of the crumb very nice.  Not too crumbly.  My favorite recipe from the Healthy Bread book.  Haven't bought bread in five years, ever since I discovered this great method.

Tomorrow I teach a workshop on paper jewelry so today is devoted to feeling all nervous and worked up about it.  I've been teaching for over forty years and still have not found the magic formula for just doing it and not being all racked up over it.  Which I then rationalize as: high nerves mean high energy for the workshop, which means a fun afternoon for participants.  At least that's the plan.  Pix later, if I live through it.