Busy Hands

The weekend was filled with lots of lovely for me. Saturday included shopping for fabric to become crawling clothes, visiting Zac in his new house and working on my socks on the trip down. I was surprised by Zacs first rental, it's a lovely very old house complete with some lovely character pieces of furniture, some as old as the house. The house once had a beautiful garden which is now a nice interesting wild garden, with lots of beautiful flowering plants and a fig, an apple and a cherry tree. From the open bedroom window we could hear the little creek that flows though the bush just below the house.

Sunday after church where I caught up with my precious sister, we had a quite inside afternoon in front of the fire. I sewed Thomas a pair of crawling trousers, the first clothes I've sewed in way too long. I cut around a pair of trousers that fitted him, it's sew nice to make something that doesn't need a pattern and can be completed quickly. The little ones all got them selves busy with felt keeping themselves occupied for quite sometime, creating interesting and pretty things. I love it when they start some craft activity of there own accord. I'm also learning that they are more inclined to craft if I am, which does encourage me to find more time to work on my craft interests. I hope to join with a local spinning group tomorrow so I must make time to have some fleece carded, the children like to help with that.

Spinning

I have been inspired to start spinning again after reading http://farmama.typepad.com/ and seeing her lovely work. I borrowed my mums old wheel which is wonderful to use. I also bought a cheap drum carder but I'm not finding the carded wool very easy to spin. It maybe be simply lack of practice, I hope to be able to get the wheel out again today so will see if I can improve my attempts. I am intrigued to see farmama spinning roving, I'd love to know how that is done. It looks to me like it might make the job a whole lot faster, a major consideration when I find so little time to do any craft. The children would like to try spinning so as soon as I sort out the carded wool issue I'll give them a go. The wool I'm useing at the moment is black alpaca from friends alpaca. It's lovley and soft, very dirty though. The children and I watched the alpaca being shorn and bought the fleece home with us, so they will get to see the whole proccess.

This morning Serena will take the little ones to a reading program at the local libraray. They look forward to going each week and Serena is so good about taking them. It's a wet old day today and after a night of very little sleep I'm thinking a crafting/ audio book type afternoon sounds pretty cosy. Maybe with scones and tea.

Pumpkins and saffron

We harvested our pumpkins recently, it always an occasion we look forward to, and there are always pleas of "Pumpkin pie for tea please!" This year we didn't have many pumpkins to harvest but those we had were pretty large, all between 10 and 8 kgs.



This pumpkin was just too heavy for James he fell over with it twice but did want to hold it and have his photo taken with it.



This one grow over the fence on a broken stem, the stem healed and produced a large heavy pumpkin, amazing us.

My big girls are earning money plucking saffron, what a lovely job. Josh has also had a few days picking the flowers from the field under the mountain and is looking forward to more. The flowers are bought into town to the back of the cafe Talithia works at and have the stamen plucked out and dehydrated ready for sale. The plucked flowers are sprinkled outside over the steps to the back room of the cafe and look so lovely. Passers by often follow the flower trail to watch the plucking for a moment before moving on.

A celebration and an occasion.

We celebrated 17 years of marriage over the weekend. 17 great years. Marriage has been easier and richer than I had feared. We are very blessed to have a home filled with love.

Josh made soy wax candles for the table, one tea light candle for each year! He also made some larger candles one for each child. There simply wasn't room on the table for those so they are sitting in the background waiting there turn shine there light for us.




Serena prepared breakfast of mixed berries, cinnamon toast, yogurt and orange juice. The table looked lovely and it was a great start to a full and lovely day.

Much of the day was spent at Taste of the Northwest http://www.tasteofthenorthwest.com.au/ and Mural Fest http://www.muralfest.com.au/. Both wonderful events and well attended despite the lack of sunshine.

The beginning.

Yesterday began with the sound of rain, the smell of hot millet and date fudge and the usual morning bustle and chatter of 7 children and two adults getting ready for the new day. It also began with my decision to begin this blog finally.


I'd been reading about making wax crayons and since we had plenty of bees wax we gave that a go yesterday. It is always good when trying something new to follow the directions! I mixed the bees wax and soap together at the beginning and it took hours to melt down enough to spoon into the mould. We did end up with blue crayons that work just as they should but it will be a little while before I try that again!

Homemade Bees Wax Crayons.
1 part bees wax
1 part soap
dye of your choice, we used soap dye.

First melt the grated bees wax, when melted add the grated soap then the dye and pour into your greased moulds.

Sounds so easy, I hope you have a better time with it than I did!

Serena made us two lovely quiche for lunch using home grown tomatoes and basil, it's so nice to still be picking basil in April.

Ella-Grace did some more sewing, I love seeing her use sewing basket. She loves the independence of having her own materials and being able to help herself to them whenever the mood strikes.