New stuff, some made, some bought

Every Monday night this term Adam has been taking himself off to pottery classes. Tonight, on the way home from the Discover Mahler concert we stopped off at his teacher's home to pick up his finished pieces.

1. Decorated tiles, 2. Frog on a leaf, 3. Wol, 4. Dragon lidded pot, 5. Pot and lid with sleeping baby dragon, 6. First attempt using the wheel

He has also made us a chesky so that we don't have to hide our esky in the tent when we're at reenactment events.

It's a chest that's large enough for our rather large esky to fit inside. Which means it's kind of huge. So it's probably a Good Thing that we also got finally got this:

My new VW Multivan

I had been planning on calling it The Blimp, Adam was putting in a vote for using The Zepplin instead, but as it turns out I'm leaning more towards calling it The Loungeroom (on wheels).

It even has a table - it's between the two seats there and can slide out and open up to a fairly decent sized top.

Let's take a closer look at that back seat shall we? Not even a week old and look at all those paw prints! Clara is completely confused by my sudden insistence that she sit on the floor of the van, not to mention being very put out that she can't see out the windows from down there. I feel mean, but then I think of those great big black claws on the leather upholstery and cringe.

Those paw prints happened on the way to the dog park where Clara has been playing while I weave. I decided to try something a bit more interesting and threaded up a kivrim pattern and gave it a go. I think I ended up with the threading slightly wrong but decided it didn't really matter for the purposes of a test piece, I'll get it right next time hopefully.

First attempt at a kivrim pattern

I finished that piece and am now working on a simpler (and really rather boring) pattern which I'll probably use to trim one of the kids' tunics. Then I'm going to focus on getting some lengths done to sell at reenactment events, I need to choose patterns that look interesting but are relatively quick to weave. Hopefully the wool I've ordered from Bendigo Woollen Mills comes in time for me to use - I'm getting pretty fed up with the colours I have at the moment.

The lounge room smells of varnish

Adam has been building stuff again. This time it's DVD shelves and we've just moved the first new shelving unit into place in the lounge room.

Adam doing some high speed re-shelving of DVDs

He's made two of these, to fit one on each side of the fishtank. The bookshelves that were there before, that had been bursting under the load of our ludicrously large DVD collection, will be relocated to the kids rooms where they will hopefully have some tidying influence on their rooms (I'm an optimist).

I estimate each unit will hold almost 500 DVDs. Wonder how long it will take for us to run out of room again?