Stitching By The Sea

It seems that you often find me here when the wind is howling.  Outside the rain is bucketing down, which is good, but the wind is so strong that the rain is sideways which is not good.  Yesterday I excelled myself and spent about 3 hours washing all the windows and the flyscreens, more sparkly windows you never did see. 
But now the sideways rain has plastered itself over half the front windows and I confess to being a tad pissed off about it.  Needless to say I am really pleased with the Enjo window cleaning paraphernalia I invested in, does a great job.  I can't believe I am rabbiting on about washing windows, let's move on... :-)

 

Speaking of the rain, since some heavy rain a couple of weeks ago, we spied this.  Were we looking at death in the fields, disguised as lovely fat field mushrooms?  We mulled over this possibility for quite some time, delving into fungi information to see if we would both die painfully if we ate them.  All appeared okay so we picked them.

I volunteered to be the guinea pig and chowed down on half a small mushroom, with explicit instructions to Steve that if I went weird on him that he was to toodle me off to Albany Regional Hospital.  Happily, all was fine so the following morning we had our very own field mushrooms with bacon and eggs for a delicious breakfast. :-)

 

 As you know, I am a member of the South Coast Embroiderers group, to where I trot every Tuesday with  20 or so other ladies for a day of chit chat and learning a thing or two about the trillion different types of embroidery.  It's fun.  There is also a Denmark Embroiderers group and once a year we have a Saturday workshop called Stitching By The Sea, hosted in turn by us or them.  This year was Denmark's turn and we arrived at their chosen venue, the delightful Ocean Beach Surf Club.  The hosting group sets a small sewing task and on this occasion we were to do canvas work stitching, to make a small box.  It was a terrific day, about 45 of us rocked up for a day of chatter, stitching and delicious food, the Denmark girls did a great job.

 One of the guild members brought down from Perth a display of embroideries for us to drool over.  I am a particular fan of what is called blackwork, and thought this cat was cleverly done.

 I really like samplers so this blackwork sampler really captivated me. 

 More blackwork, this time a scene.  Different stitches are used to give the light and shade to the piece, but all done in black.  Traditionally blackwork can contain a bit of red or gold too.

 And this is redwork.  I liked the design of this one.

Our tables were covered with instruction sheets, wool and visual aids as we industriously started on our box bases.  The idea of the workshop is to get started on something and then we take it home and finish it at our leisure.  Most of us almost finished our box bases and went home to design our own box tops.

As I quite enjoyed this task, I finished my box in a couple of evenings and like how my design turned out.  Have no freaking idea what to actually do with it but there you go.  :-)  The Denmark girls suggested rolling up ones tape measure and keeping it in the box, but my tape measure gets no such royal treatment, it is usually found scrunched up in the bottom of my sewing bag and that is just fine. 

 

The Denmark group have been working hard this year on a collaborative project and between them stitched this fabulous tribute to Denmark and its treasures.  I wish I could have photographed it closer but alas the reflection on the glass made that impossible.  The girls did sausage sizzles in the town to raise money to have the embroideries mounted and framed, and they are going to present it to the Blue Wren Lodge, an aged care wing at the Denmark Hospital, to go up on the wall.

 And here are the Denmark ladies and their masterpiece.  Well done girls.

 While I have been gallivanting around, Steve has been a busy boy in the shed.  This is what it used to look like, crap absolutely everywhere, nowhere to walk and nothing to be found.  Very frustrating and so hard to get started with tidying and organising as there was nowhere to move anything to.

Since then, Steve's mate Mel very kindly gave us various useful pieces of angle iron and some metal fencing amongst other things, and Steve has build himself two fantastic rack systems that store an amazing amount of stuff.  It's great that he has been able to put seldom used things right up high, out of the way.  Steve has also started using the leftover gyprock from the house to make walled areas, and attached many hooks to hang tools up.  It is amazing to know exactly where to find a thing, and Steve was amazed to find that he has nine adjustable spanners, considering he could never find one of them, he was a tad surprised!  Anyway, he is to be found in his shed for large parts of the day, happily organising things.  Doing a good job my dear xx

I've mentioned before that autumn is, in my opinion, the best season for sunsets and this week did not disappoint.  I had the absolute pleasure of driving home from Albany towards this, it was magnificent.  Luckily there was still enough sunset to photograph when I got home.  So pretty.

 As it shone through the living room windows, the setting sun cast a beautiful copper hue down the flue above our fire.

And danced through the glass in our front door and sparkled on the wall.  That's the sort of thing that makes my day, ahhh.  :-)