There comes a time ...

It's the little things.....

Our American cousins celebrated Thankgiving last week with roast turkey and  trimmings. They gave thanks for what they have and truly appreciate within the realm of today's economic climate.

Apart from the family that I dearly love, my own good health and that of my family, and my beautiful happy grandies, there are many things that I am thankful for..... just little things that mean so much.

Love my old doll Dianne. She is an English Pedigree that Santa gave me when I was 4years old. Her old saran wig fell to bits so she now has a lovely new one... and a newish red and white floral dress. She sits on the very old dresser (given to me by Les' mum) with her friends, all 16inch hard plastic dollies that I have gathered along the way, except for baby Eve in the middle - a Kader doll. The fabric bucket and the runner are sewn from a pattern by Janelle Wind.

Each year I like to make a few of these before Christmas. I love their simple look. They are also very popular at our local Christmas market held in mid December .

 

 

Those who know me well will not be surprised at my picture of fabric from my extensive fabric collection!!!

 

or my magazine of the moment!!! Just love Molly Makes ...and yes, I made that little mouse from a pattern in a Molly magazine.

Blue and white china makes me smile...

...and so do these pieces of my old cherry-wood doll-house furniture.

I am truly thankful for friends and family who give me bits and pieces to strike for my garden.

Nature provided this lovely carpet of cocky apple flowers for me to snap in this morning's early light. I love the form and colour of these blooms... not a garden plant by any means. In fact it's a pest, but this one provides great shade and bitter tasty morsels for horses and cows in the night paddock.

I'm thankful that this little bloke will be ok. Hurt in the process of being born. he can now get to his feet on his own and walk around... the last in our line-up of fostered calves.

I'll be thankful if the beastly lorikeets leave any of these for us!

They are just beginning to ripen

The garden is a refuge for the birds and me on a hot day.

Thank goodness for the beds downstairs for napping on during the Country Hour on the ABC. Failing that because of impending noise levels, reading stories to little grandies!

While I was cleaning up after breakfast this morning, I thanked myself for having the foresight to prepare these bottles for the next batch of tomato relish!

 

 

Finally, my beautiful Bobby... I need him to be quiet and dependable and I think he will be.

...the dairy herd...

Much to the astonishment of many country people around us, we still milk a cow (sometimes cows) for our household needs. We once separated the milk and made butter from the cream, and I would love to get back into that, but that's another story.

There is a management issue and a time factor.It is much easier (and much more economical) to feed cows that will foster calves, than it is to poddy a calf that for some reason has lost, or become separated from its biological mum. Some cows wont feed another cow's calf but luckily ours will.

This brown swiss cow has reared seven calves this season, and none of them belonged to her. She is a wonderful mother and a great asset to the herd.

Marsha loves to be petted and fed the odd apple or carrot.

She is presently rearing three little babies, including one of her own.

This little bloke was recently separated from his mum and lucky for him, found in the nick of time.  He now looks forward to life with the dairy herd until he goes out to the weaner paddock.

Little calves love to socialise. It's a great feeling to see the little ones that are rescued and fostered, become part of the family of dairy mums.They race, buck and play chasey around the paddock just as children do.

Part of the socialisation includes learning to feed from a feeder with the rest of the herd. These mums are so gentle with the little ones.

Dairy bulls are  never welcome in brahman herds, but maybe this little fella will sire some heifer calves from our dairy cows in the future..... if he behaves himself.

 

Well... that's the intention anyway.

...of Pentas and Pumpkins...

I love October. It brings the promise of rain and early storms and there is a definite change in the seasons all over the world.

I love to walk around the garden early in the morning, probably because the flowers are at their best and I will make discoveries, good or bad.

I have been tending to a few pentas plants that almost didn't make it, but all seem ok now.

We have many Northern Hemisphere cousins and friends who email and blog about Halloween. As children, my siblings and I along with the kids on the farm next door, celebrated Guy Fawkes night, spending the whole day building and stuffing old Guy Fawkes only to see him meet his firey end amid loud bangs and cracks as we cheered excitedly. Catherine Wheels spun to their glory on the back fence. Roman Candles shot pretty firey streaks and baubles into the air. Rockets flew high into the sky then exploded into colourful shapes and penny bungers frightened the daylights out of everybody... and what about those Snakes that jigged and jagged all over the lawn. My dad had the most fun of all as he became a pyrotechnic expert (enthusiast) for one night in the year.

I have never celebrated Halloween as our northern cousins do! No tricks or treating for me! In fact, the very thought of witches, spooks, goblins and cobwebs scare me well enough. The strange thing is, I decorate my house each year - well the kitchen area anyway - and I attribute that to my blogging friend Sharon, from Red Geranium Cottage. I have followed her blog for some years now and much of her decorating spirit has rubbed off on me.

Mine is the Aussie form though, with pumpkins and harvest springing to mind along with the associated colours. I even find myself singing Neil Young's Harvest Moon while I sort among my October treasures to display them once again. (any excuse to play Neil Young is good with me!)

This is how our dining room table will look until December, when it will all change miraculously to reds and greens.....

.....as will our Welsh dresser.....

..... and our Oregon pine unit!

I do love the seasonal changes so I quietly went through my stash of pumpkinny fabrics, dreaming up my next pumpkinny project, maybe for the top of the piano next year.

I will keep you posted.

...Spring promise...

Each October I look forward to hippeastrums popping up in my garden. Mum always called them October lilies and they largely looked after themselves in her garden. Nobody used sprinklers on country gardens back then. I am the daughter of a dairy farmer. We considered the water intake of our milkers above all else!

But time and circumstance have brought about welcome change.

Lots of buds have appeared since  a fall of 12mm of welcome rain last weekend.

Some are already in full bloom...

... with the promise of more to come.

Gymkhana Fun...

 

The fun began when Nan and Pa, with horses already loaded on the truck, drove off into the early morning light. Excited children greeted us at the venue, and so the primping and shining began in preparation for the march past...

checkerboard rumps ...and...

... shiny hooves for everyone ...

... with beautifully braided tails...

... at last everyone was ready.

Pomp and ceremony over with, everyone donned their school sports shirt, ready for action. We were very proud of our second place in the march past. Let's see what else we can do.

Wasn't long before Sam and Meggie showed off their first ribbon of the day.

They combined well in the time trial...

...and won more ribbons.

Paddy and his old mate won their first gymkhana ribbon together.

Tired but happy kids and ponies. Look at all our ribbons!

Yeahhhhhhh! First in the Primary School section. Well done kids.

Happy Birthday Grannie...

Today is my Grannie's birthday.

She would have been 129 years old. I always remember her on her birthday because it was something we always did as children, living on the farm.....We remembered our Grannie who lived many miles away, sometimes arriving on the train with Grandad to visit us for a week here and there.

 Mum would show us the birthday card she was sending, and she'd write a letter telling Grannie about how we were doing at school and how many races we had won at the sports!

Sometimes a parcel arrived in the post and with great excitement we would carefully open it to find new dresses.....

 .....or beautifully knitted jumpers. My chocolate brown school jumper with its doggy applique is vivid in my memory and Mum still has my school photo with me wearing it.

My grandparents were married in London in the September of 1906.

 

They were an outgoing couple, travelling around England on a  motor bike with a side-car.

In 1924 they decided to move to Australia with their five children, sailing on the Oronsay from Tilbury, London in the February of 1925. I can't imagine what that would have been like, leaving all the family in England to arrive in the unknown. Grannie did not see any of her English family ever again. However she does have lots of descendents - and we have made contact with the families of the sisters and brother she left behind.

Happy Birthday Catherine Charlotte Nellie... I have always loved your name. Your spirit lives on through us as we honour the 87 years of your life.

 

Christmas in July

Each year Sarah from Quilt Fabric Delights runs an online Christmas in July. What fun it is for we stitchers and sewers. Besides the fun, I use it as a spring-board into my Christmas gift giving stash.

Rachel Measham Pywell designed these little gift bags, and these are my version.

Thankyou Rachel.

  This very Christmassy pincushion was designed by Rachael Merrick and made by mwah...

Great idea Rachael.

... and this beautiful design is by Janelle Wind of The Janelle Wind Collection. My version is in colours similar to Janelle's original.

It fits our table really nicely.  Thanks Janelle for your great designing.

Janelle also designed a smaller table runner but I tweaked the original design a little so it would fit my biggest tray.

I love these matching coasters too - Janelle designed them to be Mug Mats.

This little stitchery wallhanging is my version of Gail Pan's Christmas Delights. I love the way it turned out. The original has hand-quilting, but as I am not a hand-quilter, I chose to reproduce the stars with machine quilting. Thankyou Gail for this design.

There are other beautiful designs by Cheryl Goss of Willowberry Design, Natalie Lymer of Cinderberry Stitches, Amanda Bergamin of Seabreeze Quilts, Melissa Grant of One Day in May and Janet Rowe of Wildcraft Farm. I intend to make up their patterns before Christmas and am so looking forward to next year's event.

Life's Snippets...

Bits and pieces of everything are woven together as threads of our lives...

...pansies soaking up the rain...

... the need for a new compost heap...

... aided by our friendly kookie...

...manuring and mulching the fruit trees...

...educating a very green pony...

...sewing Christmas in July projects with my online friends all around the world...

...watching a grandbaby learning to walk instead of eating his lunch (most of which is down the front of his coverall)...

...shouting "Run" and "Tackle" to other grandbabies on the footy field...

...and watching the veges grow.

Celebration of an Inspirational Life...

Twelve days ago our family and friends said our goodbyes to Bunny, my husband's mother. It was truly a lavender day, her favourite colour.

Her ninety-one years were celebrated for one who loved life, her family,the bush, dancing, mustering cattle, eating ginger, whistling tunes and helping others. 

Sadly missed.

I love to travel.

Travel expands my knowledge of farming, food/fibre production and animal husbandry. It makes sense that I  love  stitching, knitting, cooking and gardening, and that I was organic before the rise in popularity of that word! People the world over have the same needs and want the same things for their families, so there are many similarities. But the tyranny of distance has created differences which I studied in my tertiary studies and am only now applying to  different cultures and communities because it's only now that I have the opportunity!

On one of my recent overseas adventures, accompanied by my youngest sister and my mum, I drove (rather nervously at times) all through the UK and Northern Ireland. We went to France on this trip too but I sanely decided not to venture out in a car there - not trusting myself to approach roundabouts from the right hand side of the road!

The weather was beautiful, it was September/October and we decided to cross the bridge to the Isle of Skye. (I was driving so no picture from the top, though I would have loved one.)

All three of us being knitters, of course we looked for sheep and places that sold spun fleece of the local farm animals. The scenery pretty much resembles the rest of Scotland - heather on the hill-sides and bracken dying off at this time of year.

We had left Australia at a very dry time, feeding lick and needing to watch every watering point carefully, so I was not prepared for scenes where riverlets run down every hill-side in several places. Fortunately it rained at home in the meantime! Having only one day to explore, I did find a lovely hank of local wool and I am annoyed with myself that I didn't take its picture before this...

...and this...

So the unravelling and the winding took place, all 250grams of it, but not without some snarls and crossovers for a patient husband to help untangle!

 Such persuits are always fraught with danger, particularly  when the spool pops off the winder or one stray turn sends the yarn around the cogs twice!

There is enough yarn for a bolero type vest for which I have a trendy pattern, but I have learned from past disasters to knit a tension square first and measure carefully.

Cool nights, a favourite chair and that vest is just around the corner.