Handmade

I have been having some fun fiddling around with my new(ish) camera and the computer. The photo on top looks to me like something from a hyper-exaggerated Willy Wonka world with its bursting colours while the second one looks like an old photo to me - 60s or 70s - taken on a Polaroid. My husband thought it looked like something taken on another planet!

I have to show you this beautiful neck adornment made by my grandmother (I think) many, many years ago. It's made of black beading to look like (I presume) the popular Victorian material, Jet. Having said this, I wonder if it isn't in fact older since my grandmother was not even an embryo, let alone making jewellery in the Victorian age! I'll never know for sure now but I found it languishing in an old tin in the sleep-out. I now have it on display on my dressing table.

News from Nowhere

We are still having some very wintery weather here at the moment, though I suppose this is fair enough given we still have a couple of weeks of winter to go. There was a tornado a couple of hours north of us yesterday. A tornado! Apparently they do sometimes happen in Australia but I had assumed this was pretty much an American phenomenon. Strong winds here today too apparently, and lots of rain - the latter of which we can't complain about given that in a couple of months I will probably be telling you how hot it is!

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Even though spring is coming (I think), I have decided to embark on a fairly wintery knitting project. Having immersed myself in Little Dorrit and more recently Return to Cranford, I have decided to knit myself a very simple shawl. Not terribly large, just to go over the shoulders as seemed to be the Victorian style. And being the novice knitter that I am, I think it will all be in a knit stitch. I know - potentially not the most exciting garment in appearance - but potentially nice & snuggly warm.

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You may have noticed the lack of my own photos on here since my trusty point-and-shoot digital camera died and I got my schicki-micki Sony a300 for my birthday. Well, I basically can't master the bloody thing! There, I've admitted it. Every time I try to load photos from it onto the computer, it tells me they're too big and it jams the computer. What do I do? Any advice most welcome.

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Every time I go into an thrift store these days I seem to find a good book. As I result my bedside table and living room coffee table are bulging! Currently I'm reading Walking in Pimlico by Ann Featherstone (a Victorian whodunit), Wintering by Kate Moses (about Sylvia Plath) and Pride and Prejudice. Crazy Aunt Purl has set up a virtual bookclub over at her site and the latter is our book to start with. I've got Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook and Emily Perkins' Novel about my Wife lined up to start on next. What are you reading right now?