The Facinating Flinders Ranges

What am I doing organizing this on Christmas
Eve.....not a care in the world have I...
Yet it bothers me that I have created this textile fibre book about the Flinders Ranges and want to convey how fascinating these ancient , eroded
and strikingly beautiful mountains are...
how they were invaded by a people two centuries ago, who were frankly not the least bit interested in the people who were already making a living there without destroying their habitat.

Yet the intrepid white people, with a philosophy
of needing to settle the land and make it productive, did an amazing job of exploring and
recording what they found.
Their  attitudes two centuries ago were so different to our present day of being aware of the delicate country side they were in. Of the delicate balance that keeps the ancient Australian eco systems from being destroyed....

The Ediacara ranges have revealed the most ancient and unusual fossils dating back to the pre Cambrian times....
In lake Callabonna in 1892, Fred Ragless found an amazing amount of scattered skeleton bones which proved to be a Diprotodon , the largest of the Marsupials and was mounted as a complete skeleton in the South Australian museum.

The Flinders Ranges were also explored for copper but none of the mines ever produced a great deal of copper and the arduous trek by bullock wagons didn't make it a worth while effort and so most of the mines which may have been started could not go on.
Still, the Flinders has the most poetic of name places ,Angorichina.. Wirrealpa..Umberatina..
Ical Icala..Moolooloo..Oratunga..Witchelina..
Wertaloona..Oraparinna..Hollowiliena..
Ediacara...
Here is my Christmas gift to you...I hope you will enjoy the spirit of it all.....

Textile/Fibre Artist book on Words

Words... We all use them, write them,
speak them, whisper them, shout them,
draw them, think them, imagine them,
invent them, organize them, forget them
dream them and wonder who on earth started them...... at least I do, wonder who was the first person to say something in words rather than
grunts
and who was the first person to draw a picture to represent a detail of the surroundings and objects they lived with...

What were the earliest hieroglyphs ever used?
A little bit of research on the web and you are inundated with information about the history
of the alphabet and how it can be linked back
to before the end of the 4th millennium BCE.
The Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian
hieroglyphs.
By 2700 BC the Egyptians had developed the
hieroglyphic writing system. The logogram
represents a word denoting an object pictorially
depicted by a hieroglyph.

The phonogram represent the sound of a word.
The thing is though, that human kind drew images of the animals they were hunting on rock walls in caves before they could write. It was their way of letting others know that hunting was good in this area.
I was intrigued to find that the oldest rock art is in India at the Auditorium cave and this is very similar to the Acheulian rock art in the Kalahari desert in South Africa.

Our indigenous Australian aboriginal rock art is a little later at approximately 25 to 30 thousand years old.
I was given a book years ago, on the Lascaux Cave paintings which has wonderfully lively paintings of bulls and other animals which go back to the Palaeolithic era when Homo Sapiens was living and hunting in these areas of France.
It is fascinating to think how writing evolved from these early depictions.

The subject is really too huge to condense into a few sentences here and I am in no way qualified to do so anyway, but it is intriguing all the same.
Remember to click on the photos if you want a closer view. It contains a few sentences written in my mother tongue, relating a few of the sayings with which our parents would quote at times when we needed to think about what we were doing......
The covers are again knitted to fit, in mixed cotton yarns using a fair isle pattern....

November Sunday Soiree

 We had a great afternoon last Sunday, playing music for a small gathering of friends and family in our Studio.
The weather wasn't crash hot, well, it was humid and warm at times which is inclined to play havoc with string instruments as they are inclined to go flat...
But we managed and played our pieces with aplomb if not always in tune or in time...the audience was kind ,bless them....

 We played "The arrival of the Queen of Sheba"
at a sedate pace as a warm up.
Next we played Bourree by J S Bach in which we left out  the repeats as that would have sent the audience to sleep.
Then Three Trios by Haydn which Ken had
re-organized for us so we only played the charming bits.
Bach's Prelude 22 is quite tricky as we all play different parts and the timing needs to be spot on

 However we all finished together in the end....
Relief , relief...
After a bit of a breather, my cello teacher Catherine Finnis played the duet part of  Willem de Fesch's Sonata op.8 Nr 3 with me as I have been studying this piece for quite a while...bless her, she supported me in all the right places and I managed to complete it without too disastrous a
result. Catherine does a brilliant job in keeping me enthused and motivated....

The highlight of the afternoon though, was Catherine and her husband John Gray playing the only Duet for Cello and Double Bass ever written by Rossini, it was just fabulous . Catherine has played her cello all over the world and John played the double bass  in the Academy of St Martin in the Field for many years but he also played in all the film music for the
James Bond series.....how is that for fame.....
but as we know, fame is a fleeting thing and here they are playing in our humble Studio...what an afternoon..... We finished celebrating with a few reds and coffees......and everyone went home happy

SA Machine Knitting Weekend @ Camp Willochra

View of the hills from the back of the building

On Friday the 24th October we left Willunga at about 11am and traveled via the Adelaide hills to Gawler and from there via Roseworthy, Auburn, to Watervale where we decided to eat our lunch.
The Watervale oval has a quaint old fashioned grandstand. In the 60ies we used to go to the CFS fundraisers  held on the oval there and buy interesting old fashioned picture frames people had donated to the white elephant stall.
Refreshed, we headed for Melrose which claims to be the oldest town in the Flinders ranges, 1853.

All set up in the Chapel

It is a little town just under the huge Mount Remarkable which suddenly looms large in front of you as you do a left hand bend, and there it is,
typically Flinders Ranges blue and mysterious in its huge, silent presence. As you enter the town and on a bit, there is a sudden right angled turn in the road which takes you on out of the town towards Wilmington. The majestic old gumtrees on the flood plain line the road towards the Willochra camp site which is a few kilometers out of  Melrose and just past the monument for Goyder and his Goyder line.      We arrived tonguing for a coffee but unloaded the car first and set up the bedroom which has bunk beds but fortunately there were lower bunks for us. Then set up my Brother 860 and knit leader in the chapel where some of our members were busy starting the projects already. The chapel is quite spacious and we all found a spot that suited us.

Roma and Sylvia

In the evening we had show and tell so everyone who had brought along a completed garment or project got a chance to tell everyone about techniques and yarns used.
The next morning was an early start with our most experienced Passap knitter giving a lecture on the ability of the machine to do wonderful patterns without necessarily having a card device on the machine. Roma said it was her Swansong.
(I have another friend who did her Swansong as an artist by having a SALA exhibition in August)
I am having the most awful trouble with this cursor not doing what I want it to do......... So you are getting a very different blog to what I had intended.

Wendy, Jill, Brenda, Mary, Mavis

What Wendy is showing Jill and the other girls ,is anyone's guess, it may have had to do with a trim at the bottom of the garment....
Wendy demonstrated the making of a glove later in the morning  and then Jill talked about her many interesting patterns of gloves, hats and beanies, baby and dolls' garments.
In the afternoon we all got stuck into our projects. Mine started off as a disaster as the cone of yarn I had brought for project 1,was broken yarn, so on with project no2 .
The evening was spent with entertainment one of which was a horse race in which some "volunteer" members painfully stepped heel to toe to the number thrown by dice... not sure which horse won but it wasn't me. Try walking heel to toe and see how tricky that is at our age.....

Joan reading her last Will and Testament

Sunday was spent in completing our projects. We did have meals of course, prepared by some wonderful country women, morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner, how good was that, not having to think about food prepping or even thinking up what to have for a meal
I did have a photo of the horse race but somehow it has vanished into the computer sky.......
Remember to click on the photos to get a closer look.....

Mare Atlanticus.....

My next project has been inspired by Simon Winchester's book" Antlantic". He tackled a huge subject and must have done amazing amounts of research for this.
I enjoy his personable style of writing, none of this "my writing is as a result of Creative Writing courses I have attended".
The book is full of interesting words and interesting ideas and wonderful asides...

It is inspirational to read about, to me, obscure scientific research...Dr Penny Chisholme and her
research colleague Rob Olsen discovered a tiny,oval- shaped living entity in the Sargasso sea which they named Prochlorococcus. There are trillions and trillions of these and they were found to  convert carbon dioxide into oxygen. They only live in the warm parts of the Atlantic and drift along to be eaten by the tiny shrimp which are eaten by something bigger and so on, the trouble when you are the bottom of the food chain....

 The signatures I created relate to the amazing large creatures that swim about in the Atlantic and the history of the intrepid seafaring ancient peoples
who dared to set forth in their fragile crafts to explore and find new treasures on far away coasts.
The Vikings were an intrepid but marauding lot of men who lived in the northern parts of Europe and  visited most countries within the reach of their longships. They raped and pillaged most of the northern European coastlines.

There is actually a connection with my very own family and the Vikings. The Dupuytren's syndrome is known as the Viking's disease and my oldest brother suffered with it. It contracts the sinews
of the hand and causes the fingers to start curling in. My grandmother came from Friesland which is close to Denmark from where the Vikings would launch forth on their raping and pillaging forays , so who knows what went on in the dim, distant past...... The other bit of historical information I gleaned, was the fact that the Dutch navy were the first to adopt a formation of lining their ships up in a naval battle and systematically firing their cannons into the Spanish navy and so defeated them.
Now for something entirely different......

The greenies, a honey eater , had made this beautiful nest in the Pandorea vine last month.
It is beautifully woven and one can only marvel at the architectural creativity at work here. It is lined with delicate little pink Galah feathers and soft grass. They have since built another nest in the patio vine and are busy hatching another lot of babies.

This season the Tawny Frogmouth has hatched two chicks. They do seem to take more than three weeks to hatch. Now though, they are getting quite big and if you click on this photo
you will get a better look at them
It is keeping so dry, we have not had any rain of consequence since August and we are having to water twice a week now
You soon forget how cold it was some weeks ago now we are already experiencing temperatures in the high thirties....

Heteropoda hauntings....

Well, doing some dusting last Friday ( ready for the week-end... in case.....) what should I come across but my little friend the Heteropoda, sitting comfortably on the wall above the front door.
Was it really the same arachnid as the one I photographed in the rain gauge some weeks ago now, or was it a cousin or even a sibling?
Had it followed me into our house, was it trying to tell me something? I left it alone of course, thinking it is quite safe inside.

 What should happen this morning though, when I lifted my hat off the table , there in a flurry of legs, frightening the daylight out of me with its sudden movement, was Heteropoda , looking somewhat stiff and undernourished when it stopped to look me in the eye.
I went and got my spider catching glass rectangle
and kept him captive for a while to take more photos of him.
Interestingly, my little Nikon Coolpix took better photos of it than my super duper Nikon 80.
It posed beautifully, standing on its eight legs
looking well.....like a spider. I took it outside afterwards and freed it into the Clivia patch near the Holm oak and hope it will find plenty to eat.

What was also a surprise and joy yesterday was seeing we still have the red water lily flowering in our pond.
I found the white faced heron standing on the pot the other morning gobbling up one of our goldfish. It doesn't matter a great deal as there are still about thirty goldfish left, but it is interesting  that the bird will take flight the moment we come into the kitchen but will stay when it knows there is something to eat in the pond.

 There is also a white waterlily and it is exquisite and so pristine in its whiteness.
The frogs are not as numerous as other years and that is because the goldfish will find all the frogspawn and gobble it up, so in a way I would be quite happy if the Heron eats all the goldfish......
We have had a very dry Spring and the hay was cut last Saturday which is quite early in the season .We are already watering some of our plants, especially the new roses.

This clump of gerberas is a surprise too, as I thought I had killed them when I sprayed the soursobs which had smothered the clump completely....
The garden is such a pleasure... the Blue tongue lizard yesterday, was able to find shelter in the Kiss-me-quicks by the Studio wall, as the wattlebird was attacking it , not sure why a wattle bird would tackle it, as a lizard does not climb tree.......The Tawny Frogmouth has hatched its young also, two chicks possibly, and the Greenies are building a new nest in the patio vines, this will be their second batch of chicks, the first lot fledged two weeks ago......

Buttons through the ages

Well, when I get started on a project it seems to take over somehow.
This one started off about the Atlantic Ocean
as I am reading Simon Winchester's fascinating book on this very subject but somehow the signatures I was doing wouldn't jell. I had introduced a button to represent Christopher Columbus and it just didn't work out. The other
signatures also decided, nope, this was not a book about the Atlantic ocean.....

So I plugged on, and at this stage I had used up the wooden buttons I bought in Tasmania years ago intending them for one of my knit-woven
garments.
So, there was nothing for it but to make this a book about buttons , how old the oldest button ever found was, and the psychology involved in buttons through the ages.
It turned out to be a very interesting subject which could be expanded into a major work...

 I did  these signatures in landscape form, as there again, the way I had positioned the painted Bondaweb looked better to my eye than the usual upright page.
I ran into more technical problems as well, as I had decided to use some velvet as backing for the pages. Velvet of course has nap and also a mind of its own when being stitched as the nap will resist in some areas ans want to slant off on its own trajectory

 Then I had also forgotten to allow for a flange on the velvet and this had to be added on after
as the signatures have to be visible but bound into the covers. Putting the flanges together in between the covered cardboard, and then piercing the lot to get the binding thread through was quite tricky and they are not all lined up as they should be because of the resisting nap of the velvet...... So I will return to recycling more cotton denim jeans for backing the signatures....

Last Wednesday, we went to the Mt Lofty Botanic Park to see the rhododendrons and azaleas flowering, but they were not quite at their best I think another ten days or so.
I loved the ornate flowering cherry tree, next to the steps they created last year so you can go down to the dam and feed the ducks.
We always come home via the Balhannah and Hahndorf  towns
and Hahndorf was an absolute nightmare to come through as the
road is so narrow and the sides crowded with parked vehicles,
where do all these people come from.......
The garden too, at the moment is taking quite a lot of time but it is good to see it emerging less like a wilderness. Whats more, the Tawny Frogmouth is still sitting on his nest, meanwhile the greenies have hatched and fledged their young and life goes on
amongst the gumtrees.......

Artist book...on the Riverland, introduction by Forebears

 The Forebears, in their exuberance, climbed all over the Rooster and wanted to be in this blog also before they all leave home to go out into the wide and wicked world.....who knows where they will end up....they were wanting to give their opinions too on my latest effort in the artist book line, but being too full of themselves I was not prepared to repeat what they said.....

The next artist book is about the Riverland and that of course is our own beautiful Murray river which we visited and stayed at in August.
We stayed in the Loxton Community Hotel where we had a very good deal with free breakfasts and beautiful dinners at night at a special rate as well.
Country people are so much more in tune with people than city people and the staff at the Hotel were very friendly and attentive.

 Again I chose a fairisle pattern for the cover
and tried to get the Riverland colours  by mixing the fine yarns of various hues to give the impression of the richness and diversity of what the land can produce under irrigation.
The orange trees were absolutely loaded with gorgeous orange fruit and while the vines were bare of course and resting , the soil in between the rows is this fabulous red and the weeds a lush green.

 We did a bit of touring as well and had a look at some of the SALA exhibitions in Renmark and around the town of Loxton as well.
There were some excellent nudes in soft pastels
in the Touries information center, but my walls are pretty well covered in paintings now
so resisted buying one.....

We took some photos of the Kingston  bridge,
Brian being particularly fond of trucks thundering towards him or going away from him out of the photo, on that bridge.
I found an amusing plaque there describing how
Captain Charles Sturt in 1830 when he was exploring the Murray near that area, had an exciting experience with a tribe of local tribesmen .....luckily no one was killed.....

For the back of the cover I reversed the colours and it is quite interesting to see how much clearer the grape pattern appears there...
Don't forget to click on the photos to get a better view...or am I starting to sound like the announcer on the new train??

Concertina Book

 My next artist book is a concertina form.
The cover is again a knitted fairisle done in a long strip . Having cut the core for it
and scored it so they would fold, the fabric was then sewn around the long strip with enough room for the signatures to be comfortably encased and folded into a booklet.

 Next I wrote the individual verses and sewed the
the antiqued fabric onto the knitted fairisle.

Because the verses were placed on both sides of the individual signatures, I had to find a way of closing it so the book would be read from the beginning ( where else would you start.....)
So I came up with the rolled front and attached a cord which then wraps around the whole
folded book and the cord slips around a nice wooden button I have had in my stash for years.

It was fun to make and though it presented a few
Technical problems it keeps you thinking and finding solutions.
My next book is on a theme of the Riverland
and while the signatures are ready, the cover is not as yet on the go.....

Heteropoda in Spring and the Tawny Frogmouth on his nest

 This morning I went out to measure the wonderful rain we had during the night and Lo! and Behold, there was heteropoda, sitting in the rainguage and politely got out of the way for me while I took out the tube with rain to see how much we had.
He sat outside on the rainguage looking decidedly relaxed and well fed, unlike the first picture which I took at the beginning of winter, where he looks all scrunched up with the cold and the wet.

I had been tipping him out onto the ground and weeds but he persisted and climbed back each time. I had worried that he would starve in there, not seeing what on earth he would be living on in such a barren space.
 however he obviously managed to find enough to eat and he is looking fit and well.

The Tawny Frogmouth has started to sit on his nest since last Thursday. It is the same nest as they used last year and the Ashtree is starting to sprout so he will soon have cover .
The greenies too are nesting and the Murray Magpies are gathering mud out of the pond.
I could hear a baby Magpie squawking and we did find a dead baby Magpie on the edge of the road the other day so Spring  has sprung......
PS. When I measured the 1ml of rain this morning September 3rd, no Heteropoda....has he left home or was he a meal for a bird? Oh , I do so hope he is off on an adventure.....

Artist Books- a new beginning

Suddenly there may be a need to do something different, to create something other than garments, something which can be held in the hand, like a book....
So what is an Artist book you may well ask....
Who knows...some one suggested it is a book made by an artist but a better description may be that it is a creative expression of a person intent on amusing themselves using the skills acquired over  a lifetime of attending art/craft workshops......

There is a huge amount of yarn collected over the years so it was decided to do a tuckstitch cover in a mixture of fine yarns. This presented a technical problem because how many stitches and rows were needed so as the knitted piece would fit without having to cut and sew it.
It worked well in the end and fitted when stretched, a quality knitted fabrics have in abundance...

The signatures, as the pages of the book are called, were done by transferring the painted Bondaweb to Vilene old sheeting and then embroidering , stitching, writing and finishing them by backing them with recycled jean material to give a neat finish and hide all the knots and threads created by sewing and embroidery.
They were then all bound together between the covers and held in place by a stick with lichen on it.Remember to click on the photos to get a close up look
The next book is on the go.......