Creepy Crawly Alert

I thought I'd put the non-bug type news first, so the faint-hearted amongst you can avoid it if you don't want to see what goes on in our garden.

I've finally dug out the beautiful fabric I bought in 2009 from here to make a tablecloth for My Best Friend, whose birthday was yesterday - Happy Birthday Deb! and I'm busy sewing french seams on the cloth:

 (Sometimes I hate blogger.  Why won't it put these in the middle?)

I really like these materials & hope MBF does too!  The first print is for the cloth, and the second print is for the border - there was much swearing yesterday when I was trying to work out what size to cut the border to acommodate the whole length (108" X 2 + 43" X 2) but I think I've got it.  I think.

OK, bug alert.  Stop reading now if you don't want to see spiders, half-eaten beetles and insect wars.


We tend not to call them 'critters', down here. They're just the local wildlife. We have an inordinate number of them, see here for details.  But don't look if you're faint-hearted.  We have the White-tail, Wolf, St Andrew's Cross, Redback and Huntsman in our garden, and the daddy-long-legs in our house.  Of all of them, it's the daddy-long-legs that annoy me the most - they make webs in the house, which attract - shock horror - dust.  And then we have cobwebs.  Once you've got them, too, it's almost impossible to get rid of them.  When we were first married, way back in the 17th Century, we didn't have them, then we moved into a rental apartment (which I hated, but that's a whole 'nother story) which had them, and bang!  We had them.  And we've had them ever since.  


Anyway, yesterday morning, Gentle Readers, I was hanging washing out in the garden, as we do here in Australia.  Out in the sunshine, as you will see from the photos.  The St Andrew's Cross spiders have started making their amazing multi-dimensional webs, and there's one right on the clothesline.  I don't mind this at all, because they catch flies and mosquitos, and as I'm still scarred from the sandfly plague, any help I can get from Mother Nature is fine with me.  I don't much like walking into the webs at night, particularly when they try & run over your face to get away.. but I digress.


The St Andrew's Cross spider had just shed its skin.  I didn't even know they did that.  But there it was, an empty skin, and a newly limp spider, just... hanging... there, waiting to warm up, or cool down, or whatever it is they do.  So I whipped back inside to get the camera.


It took me a few goes to get the camera to focus on the spiders and not the roof, the garden, the sky, but I finally achieved it:

Garden

Roof

More Garden

Yet more garden and finally...

Spiders.  Before and after!

Weird, huh?


Then, in another entomological moment, a beetle bit the dust just outside our back door, and made the ants happy for about 300 ant years:

This morning, there's only this left:

And the ants valiantly trying to drag an anntennae down the hole to their nest:

And last night, the battle of the bush spider versus the hornet - I'm not too fond of these little flying orange bundles of nasty, so I try to avoid them at all costs - which is why this was taken from behind my screen door (I'm not that brave!):

The poor paralysed spider is just outside my front door, being eaten alive by ants.  Ick.

And now, Gentle Readers, I must go & get in the shower (11.40am, just about time) & work on the tablecloth!

Have a wonderful (bug-free) Sunday.  Ciao!

Greetings from Conchita

Today, Gentle Readers, has been all about enjoying the coolish weather, the cricket and Conchita the Chicken.  Some of you may remember that Mr Golightly bought me "Sew It, Stuff It" for my birthday, and taken as I was by the Owl, I wanted to try making Conchita first, just to see how the patterns were.  


You know how it is, sometimes you jump into making something & it turns out the pattern is incredibly complicated, or it just doesn't work, no matter what you do - my first biased cut skirt was like that.  I had no idea that it would drop so much, or that it mattered that I left it to hang for the time specified - but it made me look like a sock money anyway, so it was consigned to the recycle bin PDQ.  


I did not want this to happen to Conchita, and it was pretty easy to make, but I didn't follow the directions exactly - he recommended 1.2 cm/12mm/1/2" seam allowances, which would be fine except the lace I was using on the top, for the Chicken's comb, would have been completely swallowed up by the seam allowance, so I changed that one to 1/4".  I cheated and filled the bottom with sand, so she could be used as a doorstop if required, and my hand embroidery round the eye is completely different to what was recommended in the book, but hey, it's all good.


She came out OK, I think:

As for the Cricket, I got all inspired to make an Etsy Treasury about the Cricket, given that us Aussies are well represented in the Etsy world, but after finding a disappointing number of '"Rare" Cricket Cages', fabric with the word 'Cricket' in the name, or toy crickets, I've given it up as a bad job.  Nobody outside the Commonwealth really cares anyway!


In other Cricketing News, Mr G is very lucky to be going off to the SCG Members Stand tomorrow to compete in the Paddington Gift for Day Three of the Sydney Test.  He's a bit peeved because you have to wear long pants & a collared shirt to sit in the Member's Stand, but I think he's quite happy about being able to ignore the Mexican Wave, in traditional Member's style.  If any of you lovely Gentle Readers from non-Commonwealth Countries want a translation, let me know.  Also, I'll let you know if he gets arrested.  And if I bail him out.


And finally, the other thing I found today was this, which I've printed out & I think I'm going to make some up as a birthday garland for My Best Friend, whose birthday is in late January, and I might try enlarging some non-copyrighted letters to make some to sell - I usually get my fonts from AlphabetPatterns & they don't appear to have any copyright or usage restrictions... please correct me if I'm wrong here. 


And that, Gentle Readers, has been my day.  I also got in a bit of tidying up, reading, ran the dishwasher, removed the colony of ants that appeared to have taken up residence in said dishwasher whilst we were away, and I am about to prepare fabulous food for Az, who is going to the Cricket with Mr Golightly tomorrow.  I apparently volunteered to drive them in at 7.00am, so they could get good seats (see reference to Paddington Gift, above).  What was I thinking?  


Ciao!