Who's A Gorgeous Girl Then

Here our baby - Asta Cat. Well, actually she's Meshell's baby. She's a blue tortie Burmese and we adore her. She rules our dogs with an iron fist.
And she is an evil fiend, with a mouth.... if you tell her off, she does this mouthy meow at you, which I swear is cat for "Get %$&^ed"!
But she is also the cuddliest most people orientated girl and she shares her love around with all the family.



She is an inside cat, but we take her into the back garden on supervised outings occasionally. She and I were hanging out together yesterday on the lounge chair under our enormous fig tree. Which is the local drop-in centre for about 15 wild rainbow lorikeets. Who all arrived while Asta and I were there. You have never seen such a motionless pussycat, except for the enormous eyes that swivelled back and forth, incredulous that these feathered things were dropping bits of fig on her.

You Gotta Watch Those Tongues

Isn't it wonderful, the unconditional love of a dog...
Their joy at your return, excitedly wanting to tell you all about their day...

Yuuuuck, dog pash!

My Back Garden

My mind is not on crafty stuff at the moment, not sure why. Perhaps because I know that there are spring chores to be done. Have a look at this.

Hideous eh. This is what happens to our paving bricks at the end of each winter- slippery, green and disgusting.

That looks a bit better eh! I've been brick cleaning. And weeding. And cleaning out fish ponds. And Steve is painting the pergola - if you look at the top of the photo you'll see the new lighter colour on the right, as opposed to the dingy and dated Mission Brown on the left. He's also taking off all the small wooden slats and replacing them with a glorious golden shadecloth. It gives the most beautiful glow.

I had a go at doing a panorama photo of the back garden, from just outside the kitchen window. On the right is the new paint job of the pergola with the new shadecloth. The big green thing is our barbecue. Mid photo is the old in-ground spa which we are now using as a rainwater storage tank, for watering the garden. I cannot begin to describe the thrill that using our own collected free water from the sky has given me! :-)

I also clipped, bathed and groomed our dogs, as it's time for their annual vaccinations. Every year I slink into the veterinary clinic, knowing that I'm going to be told off because the girls are a little bit porky, so I take the opportunity pre vet visit to remove any excess hair to make them look as slim as possible. :-)


Pepper likes to sit like a bear, possibly because it's the easiest way to hold up her stomach. Pepper is the quiet dog, which distracts from the fact that she does whatever she darn well feels like. She is her own woman. But she gets bossed by the cat.

And this is Maxie, she is my special girl - she follows me everywhere. Pepper on the one hand is quite content to snore happily on her own wherever she is most comfortable, but Maxie is my shadow. She has attitude, does Miss Maxie. And she doesn't let the cat boss her.

A Word From The Overlord (or is it Overlady?)

I look down on you inferior humans from my bastion of cardboard.
Bow before me and do my bidding

A Year Of Colour - midnight blue. And all about a marron..

These are the three photos I submitted to the Flickr group A Year of Color. The colour for this week is Midnight Blue.


If you are a reader of this Blog, you will have heard about Mr Blue. He is the blue marron that lives in our back yard fish pond. He is at least 6 years old, which is very old for a marron I believe. He keeps to himself and is fairly amiable amongst his fishy friends, unless they get too close, at which point he waves his claws about menacingly and will nip the Koi unless they get outta his way! And you may remember that I mentioned about some nocturnal wanderings before Christmas? How I found him tapping on the back door after he went for a walk one night?

Well, the reason for his unrest has been revealed.
I found this, upside down in the pond a couple of days ago.

You may well be horrified as I was, that our dear Mr Blue has gone to that big pond in the sky. Well relax dear reader, I too thought the worst as I was removing this beautiful blue object from the pond. As I was inspecting it, I squashed one of the claws and it cracked. At that point I realised that it was EMPTY! Yes, it is an empty shell, Mr Blue has moulted!!

Can you imagine how much work that must be, to bust out of a hard exoskeleton like that? It seems that the shell splits from underneath somewhere. Isn't it incredible that he can extract every little bitty part of himself from all those little nooks and crannies. But he has, and he is alive and well. And feeling a bit scared as his new shell will be soft for a bit so I guess it's a marrons most vulnerable time. I must admit that when I realised this was his discarded shell that maybe he'd crawled out of the water and the dogs has found and eaten him. But I saw him with my own eyes just a few minutes ago. But now he goes by the name of Captain Hook Blue, as he has lost one of his claws. He is a one-clawed boy for now (they grow back), well actually, he could be a one-armed girl - I have no idea really. :-)

I just think this is the most amazing thing!!

A Year Of Color - Tangerine

This week it's Tangerine for The Year of Color/Colour.
I borrowed this cool fluffy scarf from Meshell and draped Asta in it, who obligingly snuggled down - I wanted to call the photo Tangerine Dream so she was a very good girl to go back to sleep. Then I got a bit trigger happy and grabbed Daisy the stuffed cow and posed her like a film star. :-)

I love Rasant thread to machine sew with, and I was a very lucky girl to receive 8 more reels for Christmas. This photo is my Rasant stash. Next we have some beautiful banksias that were for sale as cut flowers at the Kings Park wildflower festival in 2005. They looked so gorgeous in a great big bunch. And finally we have a relic from the past, peace sign candles, complete with dust.

Knock Knock Knocking on My Door

Our animals went crazy, whining and barking the other night, about 3.30am. I staggered out of bed to find them all standing at the glass screen door that looks out into our back garden. Fearful of burglars and murderers or rodents even, I switched on the outside light and peered out. At first I couldn't see anything, until I looked down. There on the ground outside the door, tapping on the glass, was the blue marron that lives in one of our fish ponds in the back garden. Silly bugger, he had decided to go night time wandering, and was sitting there waving his little blue claws around. I had to (carefully!) pick him up and plonk him back in the pond. Why they wander about I don't know, perhaps he was hungry - I think they do forage a bit out of the water. The pond he currently lives in is a good 8 metres from the door, so he'd had quite a trek over brick paving.


This is what a blue marron looks like, they really are that colour. I could be wrong but I have a feeling that they are native to South West Western Australia. This particular marron in shot isn't ours, I was too brain-dead at 3.30am to be taking snap shots so I nicked this photo from an educational website so you can see how beautiful they are. He lives quite happily under rocks in the bottom of our Koi pond and doesn't bother the Koi and they don't bother him.

Anyway, with Mr Blue back in his pond, dogs and cat calm once again, me happy there were no nasty people outside, it was back to bed at 3.40am!

A Year Of Color Mosaic - Gray

This week's contribution to the Flickr A Year Of Color group. Lucky for me we have grey pets otherwise I would have been struggling for inspiration. Why can grey/gray be spelt two different ways I wonder - I should Google and find out. I love those kangaroo sculptures, particularly the one appearing to drink. And bad Asta the upside-down cat. And Maxie and Pepper the newly clipped and looking spiffy Mini Schnauzers. I have no emotion for the Education building at Curtin University however, I just happened to walk past it today and thought "Wow, grey!"

PS - I Googled. Grey is British/Australian spelling, Gray is US spelling. Now I know.

Tra La La La - La La La La

Well, it's done. The tree is up, the deckies are out and all the hand made Xmas things from over the years get to be fondled and reminisced over once again. Meshell and I have patted ourselves on the back for doing all the work while the boys slobbed on the settees and watched. Actually, to be fair, Steve brought the tree in and I made Paul fix any dead globes in the tree lights so I suppose they did help, a tiny bit. Meshell has put together and been given some fab new Xmas mix CDs which were lovely to listen to as we bedecked, so nice to have a change from The Chipmunks singing Xmas songs as that was the only Xmas CD we have ever owned. Tragic eh.










Here we have the Nativity scene. Mum gave it to me as a present, she brought it back from holiday from I've forgotten where. I like the fact that it is a bit different. And on the right are some things I made a quite a few years ago. I had to touch up the top corners of the green frame with a marker pen as it appears to have pussy cat teeth marks in it. Asta!











A collection of Xmas balls I made about ten years ago. Ones I've made since then and given away don't have lace around them. I use a gold rope trim nowadays which I like better. I'm gobsmacked how long ago I made these actually, where have the years gone? And my Xmas quilt made from a block swap.

And there is the devil cat herself, who has been sauntering around the lounge room, just taking it all in. Plotting her evil deeds. Which decoration to kill first?





The Advent Calendar, which I made about 4 years ago. I'm in a bit of trouble about this cos I forgot to put it up before the start of the month. And more importantly, I forgot to buy lollies for it! I'm a bad mother. So, here it sits, forlorn and empty, until I hit the lolly shop tomorrow.








Pleeeeeease can someone take us for a walk?
We are soooooooo bored, everyone is ignoring us with all this Xmas business. Pay us some attention or we might have to resort to peeing on the tree....

Decisions Decisions

I have made a self-observation - I am not good at random. Symmetry is my middle name. This (extremely!) multicoloured mitred knitting experiment has been interesting-frustrating-fun-hateful-kinda quirky. Just trying to decide where to place the squares has just about killed me - too many choices!! I've ended up using the one on the right, although I don't think I like it all that much. And yet I'll wander past on occasions and decide that it's actually ok and quite interesting. In hindsight I should have used a lot less colours. Anyway, it was an experiment and mitred knitting is cool fun so I'll make it up into a cushion just to say it's completed.

Well, it's not quite there yet. I'm a very raw beginner knitter and know nothing about such things as "knitting in" yarn when changing colour etc. Apparently it's good to do this as you go so you don't end up like me with HUNDREDS of little tails of yarn hanging off the ends of the squares. I guess I could just leave them, as they will be hidden inside the cushion, but as I've mentioned before, I'm a stray thread hater, so they have to go! I sat in front of the tv last night with my crochet hook and did some deft weaving on the backs of the squares. Much better!

Then there's the questions of how to join the squares together. If I'd known at the beginning, apparently the easiest way to do this is to pick up the stitches on one side of a finished square then cast on the same number and knit the next mitred square to that finished one. To be honest that sounds very scary to me! I googled yesterday and read about crocheting seams, mattress stitching seams, kitchener stitching seams and other such choices. Flipping heck, I'm just making a daggy looking cushion! In the end I'm just 'ordinary' sewing them together - whip stitch I think it's called. As it's such a multicoloured wonder it really doesn't matter if I can see the seam yarn. It's coming together ok.



Speaking of knitting, see this scarf? We call it "The Cat's Mother". That's because Asta loves it so much. It lives on the end of my bed just for her. She goes all goo-goo over it, she puts her bum in the air, stretches out her front legs and kneads it with this dopey closed-eyes look on her face, then collapses into it and falls asleep. Never before has a knitted object of mine had such devotion.


Steve's fabulous little vegie patch has been spoiling us with spring abundance. This was part of lunch yesterday. Yummo. Steve has found an easy way to cook beetroot. Just give them a wash and trim off the leaves then wrap each one loosely in alfoil and bake in the oven for about 45 minutes. Let them cool a titch then unwrap and you'll find the skin just slides off. The only cleaning up to do is to throw away the alfoil!

What I Covet plus Madame Cat

I'm talking about cross stitch, I have coveted this particular one for a long time. If I win Lotto I'll buy this cross stitch kit. It's the coolest pattern I've ever seen. It's a series called Handmade Houses by an English artist named Michael Powell, his website of wonderful things is HERE

Here is a photo of Asta.
It pretty much epitomises her attitude to life, "I'll do whatever I want" basically.

That's it for today, I've nothing else to report. It's been nothing but wake up-go to work-come home-fall asleep all week. I've been working extra days to cover for a sick colleague and boy am I glad the week is over - I'm beat!

I've Got My Eye On You

And I bet you can't do clever twisty things with your head like I can.

Lady Muck

Bonjour. I am so cute, non?

Brain Drain and A Walk in the Park

I thought I'd be a smarty pants and streamline the knitting of the tiny mitred squares that I need many of. After discussing with Meshell how circular needles work (I had no clue) a plan loomed in my mind. Instead of doing one at a time, why not have five on the go at once! It did actually work but wow did I have to think hard so as not to tangle things or knit extra stitches on some and not others. Now I'm all cocky with success I think I'll try doing 5 medium size ones at a time too.

Bottlebrush (genus Callistemon)

I came across this little beauty whilst out on a walk in the local park today. The pollen on the ends make the flowers look like they've been dipped in gold dust. I love spring, flowers are popping up all over the place.

Maxie and Pepper

And this is who accompanied me on my walk today. Maxie has no respect for photographic genius, she'd wait until I had the camera trained motionless on the bottlebrush, then she'd decide to wander off, yanking the lead in my hand. Not good for crisp focus I can tell you.

Craft, cats and other unmentionables

I've discovered mitred knitting. Melody Johnson mentions it on her blog and it was one of those 'wow' moments for me that incites scurried activity. A shopping spree was in order so my wool bag is bursting at the seams with yummy colours and I'm all enthused.

Look who followed me into the bathroom.
This is Asta.
She is an evil fiend.
But we love her anyway.

What is this? - you may well ask. This is "Poo tea". Fabulous stuff, really it is.
Steve is very pleased with himself, he's put together bits and bobs and made a neat, tidy and smell-free way to brew yummy liquid fertiliser. Basically it's a teabag of chook poo suspended in a water container with a tap at the bottom. Quarter fill the watering can, top it up with water and the pot plants are smiling. Meshell on the other hand, is puking. She's not a gardener.