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......