What music would you put on when your Monkey 2 (just turned 5) asks for the song called "Alleluia", but doesn't want the "Hallelujah" from Shrek?

She gave me these lyrics to go on

"Alleluia, ina chiser, your messiah"

Now we aren't a religious household, and I thought it unlikely that she would have heard these Christian type terms in a song around here.

Turns out she was after "Venus" by Bananarama :)

I have been trying to post on this blog more often, but one thing and another and another (monkeys one two and three...) have been keeping me from typing. And then I got lost in the new blogger system. So here I am and happy to be back. I am really really going to try harder to post more often! I seem to have so many things to rant about and to celebrate, that I need to get them off my mighty chest somewhere else than in the face of the most wonderful man in the world.

went to visit mum, dad uncle bick and Harchie the Dog. Went to the beach, swam in the ocean, cleansed my soul. Missed out on a naught walk in the sand dunes with the love of my life, but you can't have everything.

Went to Sydney via the coast road with new funky over ocean bridges and through the national park. Breathed the forest air, cleansed my soul.

In Sydney met up with Aunty Toots and Bike, went and pigged out at Yum Cha (ooooh yeah...), then left Monkeys 1 and 2 with AT & B for an aquarium excursion while the Love of My Life and Monkey 3 firmly mounted on my back (Monkey 3 was on my back, LoML was on his own 2 feet, surely you knew that) went down and had a Max Brenner feast, as if you could ever have any less at Max Brenner.... then we went to Lush to stock up on lovelies, then to walk the sunny streets of Sydney. In an attempt to remember the name of and find the street with all the campling stores in it, we stumbled upon a large and wonderful shop with crochet hooks, yarns and all things marvellous, so I got a bamboo hook and some luverly cottons in case I had a few idle minutes on my holiday.

Then we found the street we were looking for, and shopped just in case we could find a sleeping bag for me that would be compatible with his. Lo and Behold! Angels trumpet and a sugar high from Max Brenner, we found the exact right one, sitting there in Snowgum. So we got it. Mr Visa wasn't expecting to be tickled like that, but what they hey, that's what holidays do.

On to Squires brewery for a wee dram, then home again home again jiggety jig to AT&B's for pizza and sleepy bo bos.

more to come as I can get around to it.......

it is harder to crochet with videotape than it looks... don't ask how I know this...

classic quote from Monkey 2

"I'm in the naked!"

everyone here loves being in the naked!

Well, not in the traditional take your clothes off sense. I have been working on a cloth baby that is newborn sized and realistically weighted, to use when teaching people how to use a baby sling.

I started with a basic pattern from nuno doll in Japan. The instructions aren't that clear, so let me tell you what I did to sew the doll.

Stuff I used

• pattern from nuno doll
• some fleecy tracksuit kind of material from the op shop
• some soft t shirt kind of material also from the op shop
• sewing machine
• pen
• pencil
• pins
• thread
• hand needle
• doll needle
• about 4.5 kg of wheat. I got mine from a produce shop, cost about $12 for 25 kg. What I don't use in dolls I will feed to the chickens.
• a cotton ball
• a cotton ear cleaner bud thingy cut in half
  
• funnel
• chopstick
• tiny bit of doll stuffing
• craft glue
  

What I did

1. after much fiddling around with the pattern sizing and making a baby that is more premmie than newborn sized, I saved all of the patterns from nuno doll to my computer, and then pasted each one of them into a new word document. Then I set up the document to print on A4 paper. If you are reading this and you don't use A4 paper, then I suggest you lobby your government to adopt the standard that most of the world uses. Then I cut out the patterns and stuck them together with sticky tape. Took me back to my preschool teacher days!
2. I dyed the white t shirt fabric with tea to make it look like caucasian skin. Next time I do it I will leave it for longer, but this was the first time I have dyed with tea so it turned out ok considering.
   
3. after much fiddling around with cutting out the fabric and making a huge mess, I figured the tracing and cutting out. I traced out with pen two arms, two legs, one front head, one back head, then one of each head piece reversed and one body onto the unfuzzy side of the fleece fabric, leaving enough space between each shape for a 1cm seam allowance.
   
4. then with pencil traced onto folded tshirt fabric two leg skins, and one head skin.
5. made a sandwich of the arms and body with the traced fabric on the table (fuzzy side up), then one layer of tshirt fabric right side up, then tshirt fabric wrong side up, then another layer of fleecy (unfuzzy side up). Flipped it all over so I could see the traced shapes, then pinned all 4 layers together and cut them out adding seam allowance.
6. sandwiched the traced leg pieces and head fronts and backs with another layer of fleece, fuzzy sides together. Pinned the 2 layers together and cut out adding seam allowance.
7. Using size 1 stitches I sewed around the 2 arms on tracing line, ditto for legs, body, head skin and leg skins as per pattern markings.
8. put the head together as per instructions on nuno doll. or more instructions here
   
9. trimmed all seam allowances and then turned all the bits inside out.
10. filled the legs, arms,head and body with wheat using the funnel and a chopstick to poke it all through. Paid particular attention to stuff wheat hard into each individual finger, and to make each limb feel babylike. It helped to fill the part up to the top, then pinch the top closed hard and swing the limb around. This settled the wheat down harder, and made more room to fill it up with more wheat for maximum weight.
    
11. Sewed up each limb with the sewing machine, triple sewed the top of each one. I am really not interested in any of the wheat escaping. I used size 1 stitches to make sure.
12. Using a doll needle, I put a few stitches through the knee in each leg from the front to the back to make the leg likely to bend a bit at the knee. Gave a nice dimple! Ditto for the arms at the elbow.
13. Covered the legs with the leg skin, and the head with the head skin as per instuctions for legs and head. I made a nose with the ear bud, glue and cotton wool as per head instructions. I decided not to do any more face work, I kind of like the surreal face of the baby with just a nose and ears. I might embroider a few stitches to look like sleeping eyes, might not. My leg skins look a bit wrinkly, but a newborn baby is a bit wrinkly so I am not really worried. My head skin looks better than the original pattern, so I am not going to bother putting hair on my baby. I might add a groovy beannie if I feel like making the baby look wintery.
14. traced with pencil the ear pattern onto the tshirt fabric doubled over (right sides together). And then did another one. I then sewed right around the ears, cut a hole in the back of each ear, turned the ears in the right way and stuffed them with a tiny bit of doll stuffing. I sewed the hole up, then sewed the ears to the sde of the head.
    
15. Poked the neck into the head, added enough wheat to podge the body out and fill the shoulders, and then hand sewed the head to the body with tiny little stitches, making sure that the shoulders are all sewed up as well. I did 3 or 4 laps around the baby's neck with doubled thread and little stitches that went through the body and the neck, and then for added security I did some big hefty stitches right through the body and neck to the other side with doubled thread and a doll needle. Maybe this is overkill, but the head is heavy and I really really don't want this baby springing a leak or decapitating, especially if I am using this baby to demonstrate one of my slings. It wouldn't be a good look.
16. Held the arm to the shoulder and sewed it on as per the head. Repeated for other arm.
17. Attached the legs to the front of the body so that the baby will cradle nicely in a sling, and to give it a bit of a bum. See the position on the nuno baby instructions.
18. I might give the baby a belly button just for fun. Wait and see!

This baby weighs a little under 4kg, roughly the same as my daughter's birthweight.

When I make another baby (I am going to need quite a few for our upcoming babywearing classes, stay posted!), I will make the head slightly bigger and the body slightly smaller.

I had an experiment with Dye the other day. Watch out, could be a new addiction...

I dyed some hemp/cotton and some hemp/silk with blue dye. Cant' remember the kind of dye, starts with P......

Anyhow it turned out really really cool. The hemp went a dark sky blue kind of colour, and the silk went gorgeous dark blue on the silk side and a lighter blue on the hemp side. Photos when I get around to it.

And then a large shipment of dye turned up from the co-op the other day. Can't wait for the weekend!

well, I went to visit a friend the other day, and noticed her containers and beading magazines, and asked her to show me what she was doing, and then we went out to the op shop and the beading shop...

So I have spent the past day or so relearning how to knit and trying to teach myself to crochet. I bought the funkiest book at the op shop, I can only hope that one day I might look like one of the crocheting goddesses in this book.


















or not.



I couldn't remember how to cast on and the instructions that I had previously downloaded didn't make sense to me, or it could have been the yahooing kids in the background. However my wonderful sister was able to coach me over the phone from her desk at work (I can only imagine how that would have sounded to people walking past her desk "Now that you have the knitting needle between your knees, use your thumb to do a quick anti clockwise whirl and then with your other hand..."). So I have done a bit of knitting and then unknitting with beading cord, and then knitting and then snipping it off with beading wire. Maybe one day I can put some of these on slings, time will tell.

This is a little bit of knitting with bead cord threaded with purple glass beads. Started off with 15 stitches, I think I might have gained a few on the way! Threaded the beads on to the thread before casting on, knitting each row plain (don't know how to do purl) and on every second row, sliding a bead onto every second stitch. I think this might look cool on a black sling, along the top where the rings join on. I am not quite sure how long I will make this, but am enjoying seeing it grow!

Well, we have a new chook and a new chook/duck (chuck???) home. The new hen is called Penny and she is a Bantam Pekin. Cute hey?
And they have a new home, called Duckingham Palace. It is a permanent fenced off corner of the yard under the fruit trees. I dug out a trench for the fence to get buried in, so that Naughty Dog can't easily get to the tasty poultry. Our Alpha Male did some fencing, I did some fencing, all the birds got a wing trim and then into their new home.

I am finally doing a course in bra making. It is pretty involved, there are 17 separate pieces and each seam has to be sewn three times and trimmed twice. But 3 weeks into it, it is going pretty well. The cups are sewn, and are sewn to the bit technically known as the Middle Bit. Pix to follow when I get a spare 10 seconds.