Washed Away

Below is a pic we took of the water rushing through our backyard , during the spot of hail/ torrential downpour we had last Tuesday night….just insane!


Apart from that, I've been busy learning how to crochet, did a class with mum on Saturday at Tapestry Craft. My first out of class attempt wasn't too bad, if you don't look at the weird bulging edge. The pointy sticks have nothing to fear, there's no way the ol' crochet hook will every become competition. The whole craft still feels a bit awkward, but I’m getting the hang of it.


There might be a scarf or two produced but that might be the extent of it. Guess I really wanted to learn how to do it for knitting, where they use some crocheting tricks to finish things off. I did manage half a granny square and I think I’m ok with them too….just going to have to practice a bit more. After the class I’ve even developed an appreciation of acrylic yarn….only for practice crocheting purposes though!


I finally made something out of the Cute Book. Truth be known, Bunny is a couple of weeks old, I just haven’t got around to posting anything about her yet. I had grand plans of making heaps of these lil critters for people, was even toying with the notion of making a wall hanging from them, but man are they fiddly and time consuming to make. Still, very very CUTE!....however I'll be sticking to knitting for now.

I know I've been quiet

I’ve been a bit remiss lately with my lack of all things bloggy. There’s been no particular reason, except for laziness and knitting.

Caught up with some friends Friday night and one of them mentioned that they’d found my blog and was now cyber stalking me….well more like asking how the garden was going and I felt that I’d better post something!

So what’s been happening?

The garden’s a bit of a mess after all the rain we’ve been having, the cucumber and bean seedlings all rotted off and all my tomatoes have split on the vines because of all the extra water. It’s herb madness though and I’ve had to chop back the basil and mint. And the weeds have been loving it too.



You can see a couple of sad bird pecked tomatoes hanging on the vine in the pic....so my dreams of living on nothing but salad fresh from garden of the McLaughlin household have been dashed for this season….I’ll just have to start again next spring.

I did add a blood orange tree to my citrus collection so now the lemon has a friend.

Knitting has been going well, in the last couple of weeks I’ve gotten back into wielding the pointy sticks with gay abandon. The Clapotis is finally done, just the ends to weave in. I’ve managed to knock off the balls of Noro Aurora I had laying about, only thing is I really need another ball, so I’ll grab another one at Tapestry Craft when I do the beginners crochet class next weekend. I’ve started 2 other scarves as well, one with some sock yarn and the other is the Noro Stripe Scarf, that I’ve been obsessing about for a couple of weeks now. Also a baby blanket has been started for Eliza, my new bubby niece who will be making her way into the world sometime in June.




There are few other unfinished objects in the knitting basket that have been languishiung for a while, so once I finish off these couple of projects I’ll sort them out too, so there are few less WIPs on my Ravelry page!

I photographed the last of the undocumented stash the other week, bringing the total to about 63, which is slightly scary. I know I did make a pledge that I’d only knit from my stash a while back, but let’s face it as every knitter knows, that ain’t going to happen anytime soon. And besides, I need to buy more pink baby yarn to little pink things.

It's all over!

The Festive Season has just whirled by in a blink and miss it kind of way. I didn’t take any time off work, so this just added to the speed at which it all happened.

Christmas time with my nieces and nephew is always lovely, they have such a great time playing together and they love getting presents, so it’s all very exciting. I love getting together with mum, dad and my sisters and brother-in-laws too, seeing as everyone’s left me in Sydney and lives on the Central Coast now, I don’t see them as much as I’d like.

Working and having days off mid-week completely throws me, I kept thinking it’s Monday or Friday, even though I’ve only been at work 2 days, or had one day off. Hubby asked me when we’d done something….and it felt like I had no concept of time.

There was a first this Christmas too....I decided to try my hand at making truffles and I’m pretty chuffed with the way they turned out, seeing as I didn’t have a lot of time in the lead up to the festivities to dedicate to making them!!....I made pistachio and orange in white chocolate, violet in milk chocolate and raspberry in dark chocolate (even found some freeze dried powdered raspberries to dust them in, very decadent.)



At least the days off have given me a chance to get in and work in the garden a bit. The weeds pop up so quickly and everything becomes a carpet of green, just not all of it a good green. Although, the herbs are going mad and we’ve had a few handfuls baby tomatoes off the vine, wrapped in fresh basil and tied with garlic chives….YUM!!!

The babies above are going to be tossed through some pasta with fresh basil, garlic and pine nuts for dinner tonight.

Planted some bean and cucumber seeds a couple of weeks ago and they’re big enough to be planted on for hardening before hitting the garden. And the repeat harvest lettuce kind of look more like leaves than just sprouts. I’m hoping for a late summer, seeing as it’s been pretty non-existent so far, because I’ve taken a punt and have sewn some more tomato seeds as well, very late in the season!

As for New Years Resolutions, well….pfft, I’ve never really made them before and if I have I’ve never come close to keeping them. You don’t know how many times I’ve vowed to clean out my wardrobe, or knit more or bead more or even go for regular pedicures. So sod it, the only thing I’ve decided I’m going to do this year is learn how to knit socks (oh and get back to pilates/yoga) :p

It IS easy being green!

Planted out the garden last weekend and have already harvest a wee bunch of herbs or two. Every time I’ve gone into the grocers this week I keep thinking “Won’t it be awesome when I can just go and pick some tomatoes or capsicum and don’t have to buy it?"....I even scoffed at paying $4 for a bunch of basil and picked some leaves from my wee plants.

I’m out there pondering my garden most evenings when I get home from the orifice. Looking at how things are going, lamenting the fact that the wandering jew has reared it’s ugly leafy head again around the brickwork....damn, damn, damn I hate that stuff!!

The tomato plant that mum and dad bought down for me revealed some a few wonderful surprises….not only is it covered in flowers, but there were already some happy lil green baby toms happily growing, hiding under the leaves.

Then things got green again during the week, I received my Rowan Yorkshire 4ply Tweed, in this amazing green with flecks of gold and turquoise in the mail….and this afternoon, I decided to sit down and start stringing some of my green beads into a necklace, like I’ve been meaning to for ages!!....so you see it is easy being green!

Lemons on a stick and a blank canvas

It was a weekend full of gardening goodness, Mum and Dad came down on Saturday and blitzed through the backyard, fixed the front gate, put the bbq up. Well, ok Dad did all those things, Mum and I went to the nursery and purchased greenery for the getting there garden. Biggest hugs and kisses to them both for doing so much around here too....helping us move as well as the garden!!

Hubby’s long time buddy Dave unearthed a little Lemon tree on his farm for us, after my drunken ramblings on Friday night about wanting citrus, bless his little cotton socks. Ok, at the moment it’s really just a stick with a few leaves, but with a bit of TLC, we’ll be harvesting lemons in no time! I can feel a batch of lemon curd coming on. There are plans for a lime and maybe a blood orange too, nothing like sipping a good vodka, lime and soda whilst munching on a straight out of the oven piece of blood orange syrup cake....but I can’t do everything at once!

So the mushroom compost has been dug through and there’s been a bit of daily watering happening, the newly created blank gardening canvas will start to get planted out this coming weekend, weather permitting. Now the thing's empty, I have a whacking great 1.4 x 3.3m to work with!!

Can't wait to start harvesting all the fresh herbs and getting my hands dirty again....I’m getting a bit excited!

Our House

Tomorrow marks 2 weeks since we moved into the new place and it’s been all go, go, go ever since, not only are we unpacking, but there was so much cleaning and fixing and tidying up that has to be done to get the place more livable.

Living in brand new units has cocooned us in certain ways, but it’s also raised our expectations when it comes to the state of where we live….and let’s just say this new place wasn’t entirely up to scratch when we moved in! It’s getting there though, and it’s been great actually getting up and doing things.

Today we got out and cleaned the front out of potential roach motels and mowed our “lawn” (well, hubby mowed), as well as tidyed up a bit in the back yard and getting about 4 loads of washing out on the line….that fresh smell of sun dried clothes is something I’ve missed dwelling in stacked concrete boxes.

I was thinking about what we would have been doing if we were still over in Wobbly Creek and the short answer would have been sitting on our arses, on the computers or knitting in front of Foxtel….well, I would have been knitting, hubby would have still been computering. So even though the place is a lil tired and needs lots of TLC, it’s so good shaking off our sedentary states and getting out in the sun for some photosynthesizing and vitamin D.

I’m really excited about having a garden again. I’m still in the planning stages of what I’m going to do, mostly because our bins keep getting filled up with “unpacking” things and there’s no room to piff the manky plants that are taking up precious space. I’m going to go mad with the herbs and some smaller growing vegetables, like tomatoes and capsicum, oh and strawberries!!! Joined Diggers Seeds finally (been meaning to for about the last 15 years now!) so I’ll be giving some of the heirloom varieties a go. My sisters (and their niblets) are keen veggie growers and Dad’s never without a tomato plant surrounded with basil, so it means I’ll be able to share all the seeds with them too!!

Above is a shot of what the garden looks like now, I’m going to use that big empty terrible-cotta (sorry, that’s a dad joke) pot for the strawbs, just dig the pot down into the soil a little and I’ll get a similar pot for a couple of varieties of mint, so it doesn’t take over. The plot’s about 1.5m deep by about 2.5m wide (once I dig out the mystery plants) so of course my heads going a million mile an hour thinking of all the herbs I can plant. I mean, do I really need things like lemon verbena or bergamot, possibly not….actually they’re only on my maybe list at the moment. I’m going to be sensible to begin with and get things that I’ll use plenty of established first, like thyme, marjoram, oregano, rosemary, parsley, chives, basil, chillies, etc, etc, etc….all the obvious culinary things. There are also plans afoot to get a multi-graft citrus going in a big pot, oh and I just thought, a bay tree might be nice.

So once I get things going out there, I’ll post some more pics….and I’ll have something other to talk about other than the knitting. (I’m not even going to bang on about the ball winder I finally went and purchased today, or the fact that I’ve picked up the pointy sticks again, getting 2 whole straight repeats on the Clappy done last night. Yay, I’ve got my knitting groove back, oh and I bought some teeny knitpiks needles for the Baby Casmerino project, but enough of that!!)

One gorgeous thing though, is that our neighbours have been very thoughtful at some point and have planted a Frangipani, Jasmine and Murraya alongside the shared fence, so I can’t wait till they’re all in bloom and their heavenly scents are wafting through our back door.

Anyways, I’m off to carve up the rack of lamb, that I just happened to stud with fresh garlic and lemon thyme….playing house is starting to agree with me.

Moving Sucks....but at least it's over!

Well, almost! We've been in our new place now for about a week, cute little house that it is!

It's a bit of a reality check moving from shiny and new where we've been living for the last few years into an old cranky terrace that's been severely beaten with the DIY stick. There's also the becoming reacquainted with nature that's proving to be a bit tough, because nature comes in the form of GIANT black cockroaches that have a habit of scampering across your path in the half light or come flying in through open windows whilst your pouring yourself a stiff whiskey to recover from the last altercation with a 6 legged beast sibling!

I got all evil on their arses during the week and went postal with a can of fast-knock-down-lure-and-kill-till-dead-dead-DEAD roach spray and we were greeted by a sea of carnage the next morning, all over the front yard, all over the footpath and up the street. There were corpses strewn everywhere, I felt so happy surrounded by so much roachy death. I'm having to watch my back though, I know they're plotting revenge most foul!

The whole knitting thing has gone by the way whilst I'm still elbow deep in boxes. I had all my WIPs set aside all ready for the move so I could find them straight away, but I just can't get into anything that it contains at the moment (including the clappy). I've tried, but while I'm still surrounded by chaos and it does my head it trying to count rows, it's just not going to happen. I need everything in the right place before I can feel at home enough to knit again.

I'm looking forward to getting the sewing machine whirring and the needles clicking and the beads a'beading....and everything shall be as it was, just in a different location.

Oh....almost forgot the best bit....I have a garden, it's only small, but there's plenty of room for all the herbs I could ever want to grow!!