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.....