tow general grumblings about the postal service

I am desperately waiting for my final swap package to arrive. The mod said it was mailed out last week Saturday. It’s not that I am worried my partner didn’t mail out the package. I am worried that the Australia post will lose the package. I was thinking if this was any other company or service people would not put up with the way the post office works. Think about it. You pay this company for a service. There is no guarantee that they will provide you with this service once you paid them and trusted them with your package. If they lose your package, though luck. If you need them to tell you how they screwed up you need to pay extra ahead of time so they can tell you what happened to your package. Even then there is no guarantee that they will find your package. Tell me if this is madness or not?! Maybe if it was just money I was losing I would suck it up and deal with it. But these are packages, important items, hand made things –irreplaceable if lost. Can you tell how irritated I am with the postal service?!
I don’t have pretty pictures of my swap to show, so here’s a photo of the sock I am working on.

I am using one of the handspun yarns I recently bought. It’s from “Bizy Hands” on etsy. The pattern is from my favourite sock book of all time, “New pathways for sock knitters.” You can’t really see the pattern all that clearly but I really dislike knitting plain socks –it gets too boring too quick.
I have finished the Soy Scarf I was working on.

It’s the same pattern I used for the “I wear high heels in winter scarf” My winter jacket is gray so I will be able to wear it in the winter. Hard to imagine winter right now with the air conditioner on, but it’ll come eventually.
I also got around to photographing a scarf I made ages ago. It was the first thing I’ve ever crocheted. It’s the One Skein Scarf. I recently frogged the scarf and re-crocheted it. It was just so poorly done that I would never wear it. I kept it for two years for sentimental reasons but then I thought better of it.

I went to Gisborne this past Sunday for the knitters meeting. My dear friend Mel once again had me over at her house then drove us to the meeting. It is all sorts of awesome to talk about knitting and crocheting with people other than my hubby. Poor guy he only listens to me because he loves me!
Mel had a surprise gift for me! Look,

She dyed this yarn for me! It is a very nice merino laceweight yarn from the knitter. Isn’t it lovely?

tow dervish

My yarn winder is here, my yarn winder is here! I’ve been chasing a reasonably priced ball winder on ebay for ages. And this time I wasn’t outbid! When it arrived a couple of days ago I spend an entire afternoon winding left over balls of wool into purdy little cakes. Like these

I named the ball winder “dervish” because the motion of it reminds me of the whirling dervishes in Turkey. It even has a long white cap!

My father-in-law has promised to make a swift so I can use it to make the skeins into cakes as well. Though I like storing my yarn in their original skeins so I’ll only ball it when I am going to use it immediately.
Speaking of pretty yarn in skeins, my Wollmeise order arrived the same day! Look how pretty!

I was so happy to finally catch an update, an update with lace weight to boot! These skeins are huge, 300 gr each! I have projects in mind for the two of them, but I think I will end up trading the green one. It’s just too green for my taste.
I am also the proud owner of four handspun yarns! I bought them from a Ravelry destash. I never used handspun yarn before so I am very excited to make things out of them. I forgot to take a group photo of the yarns and I am too lazy to go dig them out of my stash so I did a quick (albeit bad!) collage on photoshop.

Lovely aren’t they? And if anybody is laying awake wondering what my stash looks like, well here it is!

The top bin holds my sock yarn, the middle one lace weight yarn and all else goes to the bottom bin. I also moved the yarn I bought to make sweaters to one of the back rooms. They were just taking up space because it’s too hot to make sweaters right now. I will move them to the front bins when I am going to make a sweater. So here’s the “hidden stash”

Don’t look at home next to the computer parts of ACA?
I took out the bins to organise them and to get the odd and left over balls wound on Dervish. Hermoine loved the new hiding opportunities this provided.

Can you find her?
I have one finished object to share. I made a scarf for a friend. It needed to be done quickly because I need to mail it out next week along with the other swap stuff. I am always amazed what a difference blocking makes.
Unblocked (also in progress)

And after blocking (using my awesome blocking wires!)

Nice huh? I named it the cherry scarf.
Yesterday ACA finally got around to fixing our bed. The bottom wood planks were not screwed on so the long woods kept sliding off and falling to the ground. After he finished fixing it we left the mattress off because we needed to flip the mattress later. We took a break to eat dinner. Hermoine came in from her daily night stroll of the neighbourhood. From the corner of my eye I saw her go into the bedroom. When she didn’t come out for a long time I went to check up on her.

She managed to squeeze herself underneath the wooden planks, but she couldn’t come back out. Laughing I called ACA to help to get her out. We needed her to move to the other end of the bed to where there was a larger gap.

She was mildly interested in ACA’s hand but not enough to get her crawling to the other end of the bed. She didn’t have enough room to stand up so she had dig her claws into the carpet and slide her body forward –commando style! I went and got her favourite toy to lure her to slide.

It worked! Once she came to the end I gently held on to her neck and guided her out. Crazy kitty!

Still love her to bits!

kelebek