I thought I should announce that another pattern of mine is in Australia’s own Creative Knitting Magazine. The flowerpot hat, which you can check out in this “scanned for your convenience but it’s blurry so you still have to buy the magazine” pic. It is my favourite hat ever and I’m constantly wearing it when I’m cold! The teeny brim also protects my glasses from rain, when it does rain.
The magazine came out this Friday and is available from pretty much all newsagents. Rock.
Also, if you’re in Sydney, be sure to check out Screamfeeder as I have it on Tim’s word that he will be wearing his very special Kittenlicks inspired guitar strap, that I made aaaages ago for him, because you all go to rock shows to check out people’s guitar straps, right?

I am half asleep and it is probably not a good time to update this thing, especially when I feel like putting the above picture up without explanation seems like a good idea, but I was thinking about Australians and blogging. Blog sounds a lot like bog. When americans say it, it sounds cooler, like BLAAAAAARRRRG but when I say it, I feel like it’s a word you wouldn’t use in mixed company. I was just looking at my blogroll and thought instantly of “bogroll”. I couldn’t help but think chiko rolls and their suspicious fillings.

At Spinning, the other day, I was wandering around the room, (after having taught a class of kiddies how to knit, feeling a bit dazed after having half a dozen rug rats wanting help with knitting and making pom poms and daisy wheels, it was very fun, though) knitting a Ravenclaw scarf for my Blythe on my Clover Takumi DPNS(TM- these are the super nice and shiney bamboo needles, not the crappy ones), when I was called over by Henny, who is a rather old Dutch lady with big glasses and she always wears bright hand knitted shawls and jumpers, and she asked me if I was knitting with meat sticks, and how one time she was at her sons house and they were eating chicken on sticks and she asked if she might have the skewers to knit on and she couldn’t understand why everyone was outraged! Brilliant! Now, obviously, I refer to my favorite dpns as my meat sticks.
At any rate, I present, Daisy May as Luna Lovegood. I am an uber nerd.

After whinging to my dear friend Tiki the other night about ‘everyone has a gocco but me’, I was in the new Salvos shop in Sutherland, waiting for Clinton to look through the zillion mens tshirts when I looked up and saw a couple of board games on high shelves around the walls. “Oooh, I like board games” I thought as I quickly scanned the room until I saw GOCCO! The box was beaten up and taped up, but it was $5, so I couldn’t say no(was planning on thinking of it as a donation if key parts were missing, which they weren’t). Turns out everything is there(including nearly full, useable ink tubes) and all I need to buy are globes and screens, from either online or there are suppliers listed on that website, and there’s one right near me!
Gocco is a Japanese small run printing system, it has been described as “screen printing’s craftier cousin”(you can check out this tutorial at craftster, if you wish). You can print on paper AND fabric. I’m so chuffed!

Although it is quite a feat when commercial television screens local programing, other than the usual american rubbish, it is something close to a miracle when New Zealand programming is aired. Motorway Patrol is a gem, as I would expect. It’s a reality tv show, as you could probably gather from the title, which follows the extremely polite motorway police squad around the motorway into Auckland.
As an ignorant and obnoxious little bugger, I like to imagine that New Zealand only has the one motorway, and I do enjoy commentating along. “If this were in Australia, they would have used capsicum spray on that lost hippy!”- the police are so damned nice, even when helping somewhat lost causes, for example, afore mentioned hippy is hitchhiking along the highway, here, in little America, our police would have spray them with capsicum spray, bludgeoned them and then hauled them off to the lockup to see what else they could get on our hapless hippy friends, who just wanted to get to a Hari gathering for a free feed, but the Motorway patrol police pick them up and explain to them that they can’t hitchhike on the motorway and drop them off and show them a safer place to hitch from.
Awesome.
My NZ friend, Elisabeth, told me about this other show, To Catch a Theif, wherein “ex-theives” are hired to break into people’s houses, to illustrate how easy it is. “It makes me want to break into people’s houses, afterwards” says Elisabeth.
New Zealand is the coolest country in the world.

Fenella Dead Records
Originally uploaded by spycore.

Fenella at the launch of Ritchie (ex-Tumbleweed)’s new record label, Dead Records last Friday night.
Yeah I took my doll to the pub.
Though the bands were quite truthfully not the sorts of bands that I’d listen to, Ritchie is one of the nicest blokes in Australian music and it’s great to see someone getting behind non-city based bands.

Pictures:
Daisy May has a little sleep.
Fenella hams it up with Uncle Kram Read the rest of this entry »

You may or may not be aware that Clinton grew up in a small country town called Berrigan, which is in the Riverina, on the border of NSW and Victoria. Like any Riverina boy(who didn’t plan to or actually move to Melbourne after they left school), he hates Victorians with a passion. He will never drive me across the border when we’re on holidays and visiting a border town. We went to Albury(I typed Alblury get it all blurry *ahem*) but not Wodonga, same in Mulwala and Toc for their respective border towns. We got to visit Cobram, which was pretty exciting. I made such observations as “Those Victorians have long arms!” and “Victorians have weird hot chips”. But I digress..
I’m not sure why, because he likes AFL, dim sims and called deep fried scallops “potato cakes”, and more recently I’ve discovered HE HAS A VICTORIAN ACCENT(on top of a country people accent).
Here is a short list of words he says funny:
TACO (T-haaa-co, whereas NSW folk say tee-ko)
SALAD(s-haa-l-haa-d as opposed to se-led)
MELBOURNE(m-haaa-lbo-hourne to melbin)
SYDNEY(S-hyd-kneee to sinny).
I had no idea. I speak like a dirty Queenslander! I used to make fun of the Victorian accent with another friend who grew up near where Clinton did, and how her mother and other admirable riverina people their age were often sent away to boarding school in melbourne and came back with affected fake british accents, but I think it’s a Victorian thing! Oh my.
Now Clinton wants to eat tacos all the time just so that he can make fun of my bogan accent. The shame.