The Museum of Sydney

(Re-titled post since it appears no one wants to read this one under the misapprehension that it is the same post as yesterday! )

If you want Part 1 of this story, you can find it over here. It tells of our first night in the city, with photos of the fantastic views from Sydney's tallest building.

We woke up late on our first morning in Sydney. We had eaten very well the night before so neither of us was particularly hungry. We hung around in our hotel room for a while, enjoying the view and deciding what we wanted to do. Meanwhile, WM took more photos (using a zoom lens)  from the balcony.

We finally decided to visit the Museum of Sydney, which opened in 1995 but neither of us has ever been there (I told you we don't get into the city much). The museum is built on the site of the original Government House, which was build during 1788, the first year of British colonisation. The museum was fascinating (both of us love this kind of history). We were allowed to take photos of most of the exhibits inside the museum so here are just a few of WM’s collection!

This full size replica of part of the facade of the original Government House is in the foyer but doesn't make any sense until one has been inside and seen the information about the first Government House.

As you can see, Government House was a two story building. It was built as the home of the first Governor of the colony, Arthur Phillips, and subsequent governors for about fifty years until it was demolished in 1850 as unfit for human habitation.  WM and I were quite disappointed to read that – we though it was a lovely-looking building and a fine example of colonial architecture. It appeals much more to our taste than the ornate Gothic-style building which replaced it.

The original house was the two-story section (without the veranda) seen at the front right of the photo below (of a model of the house). 

It was added to by successive governors and was a grand house but always contained structural problems, due to the original part of the building being hastily built by unskilled labour (the British Government of the time gave no thought to finding convicts with the necessary skills to build a new colony before transporting them). One of the loveliest features for me was the curved wall of the dining room, as seen in the photo below.

The kitchens are in the building joined to the house by the covered walkway and the other smaller outbuilding housed the laundries. The photo also shows items found during the excavations which began in 1983, 84 years after workers on the site discovered the foundation plaque from the original building!

The next picture shows a drawing by colonial artist, William Bradley, of the house as it originally looked. I am intrigued by the proximity of the water and the gentle slop of the land – Sydney has reclaimed a lot of land since them and the museum building, erected on the same site, appears to be on much higher ground.

Another area of interest inside the museum had to do with food served in Government House  – furnishings, table settings and cookware as well as the kind of food itself.
    
The table set à la français.
 
The “batterie de cuisine”.

a suburban kitchen from a later period

And a personal favourite for me: a TeasMaid – my parents brought an identical one of these to Australia from England; it was a wedding gift. It sat on a table on my father’s side of the bed and they used it daily for many years – mum poured the tea while dad got ready for work. Surprisingly, they were able to replace it with another which my mother still has but I doubt she uses! The water boiled at exactly the time the alarm went off and made its way from the kettle on the right to the teapot on the left. Purists wouldn’t like it – the teapot was not warmed before the tea was made!

The Sydney Harbour Bridge opened in 1932 and there were many commercially available souvenirs but Australia, like the rest of the world, was still in the throes of the Great Depression so handmade souvenirs were also produced, like these two – one made from shells by an Aboriginal woman and sold to tourists, the other from two wire coat hangers. not surprisingly, one of the nicknames of the “The Bridge” is “The Coat-Hanger”!

The following photo is of a plaque made to commemorate the Federation of Australia in 1901, when six separate colonies formed one country! It shows the building erected in Centennial Park where the “onstitution of the Commonwealth of Australia” was signed by Queen Victoria and the first prime minister of Australia, Sir Edmund Barton.

Here is the way that Jørn Utzon, an architect from Denmark, worked out the construction of the ‘sails’ of the Opera House. The building was opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 1973 and is a very famous Australian icon.

     

As some of you know, I am very interested in family history. I heard my maternal grandmother talk about “Lady Marion Best” many times but I wasn't sure who she was. You can imagine my delight in seeing a photo of “Marion Hall Best” in the Museum. She was an interior designer who had a small shop in the Sydney suburb of Woollahra. My grandmother retired from her upholstery and furnishings business (see where I get my stitching genes from), Nichols and Keep, in 1975. The partnership worked from Bondi Junction and, apparently, did quite a bit of work for Lady Marion Best.

 

We enjoyed our time at the museum very much and were disappointed to have to go, but it was time for our next adventure – Sydney Jet Boat.

Naturally enough we couldn't take a photo on a boat skidding, sliding and doing u-turns across the choppy waters of the Harbour, so this is a photo taken by WM the following day as the boat returned to Darling Harbour. As you can see, the passengers are very wet. We weren’t too wet – we wore the ponchos offered to us! We had a great time, thirty minutes well spent!

Come back tomorrow for the final part of this thrilling saga…LOL

still here, still searching, still crafting (a little) – only a little doped!

Family history research is a very absorbing hobby – absorbing of one’s time, that is!

In the past couple of months, I have added over 400 people to my extended family. I try to include the parents and siblings of all my blood relatives’ spouses. Families with ten or more children are not uncommon among the working class from which my ancestors come so the numbers add up quickly.

So, if you’ve been wondering why I’m not reading and commenting on your blog – or writing my own – my computer time is almost totally devoted to family history research these days!

I’m not one for resolutions (and it’s not New Year) but some self-discipline is called for and I am now going to limit my time spent on family history research each day. I have friends who deserve my attention, followers that expect somewhat regular posts and craft projects that need my attention.
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There are photos coming but they have all been taken with my iPad so I apologise in advance for the quality!

Ah, shingles; yes, I was diagnosed with that mysterious virus four weeks ago. I spent the first week doped up so high I couldn’t walk a straight line. I was taking anti-viral medication and a daily dose of125mg of heavy-duty pain-killers (pregabalin for those who need to know such things) for post-herpetic neuralgia. But the good news is that the rash has almost completely disappeared and I am down to 25mg (one capsule) of the pain-killer a day so I’m thinking relatively clearly and almost ready to drive my sewing machine again!

I have been doing some crafting. A week after I was diagnosed I was supposed to teach a workshop on knitting with variegated and hand-painted yarns. I worked diligently through my fog to prepare for that workshop but, alas, it didn't happen; there's no way that I could get my befuddled mind into gear and teach! But samples were made, ripped out and made again.

Why do my mitred squares never come out square? This one will be ripped out!

I even managed to knit a whole dropped-stitch scarf in a commercial variegated acrylic yarn that I’ve dubbed the “brussell sprout” scarf because of the colouring.

In theory, knitting this scarf should have made the blotchy tendencies of this yarn less obvious but, unfortunately, this scarf is still so blotchy the pattern is almost completely obliterated!
 
If it wasn’t acrylic, I’d consider over-dyeing it. I’ve been successful in dying white acrylic yarn but I’m not confident that I can get colours dark enough to overdye this one!  Never mind, the scarf will still make the journey west to Mudgee next week when I tutor a workshop on “knitting with dropped stitches”.

A new project, called the “Mudgee Wrap”, has also been started for the same workshop but there isn’t much to show yet.

I haven’t been courageous (or foolish) enough to use my sewing machine while taking painkillers with that famous warning: “This drug may cause drowsiness. Do not operate machinery.” The idea of sewing through my finger is not at all appealing! But I have paid for classes so attendance is “mandatory”. Bring on the hand stitching…

In the past month I have made quite a few hexagon “triads” from scratch (the photo shows my intended layout although not the final position of the “blocks”)

– which basically means I have drawn and cut hexagons from 4” fabric squares, basted those hexagons and joined them in sets of three to create thirty of these:
  
There has been some humming and hawing over setting these triads but in the end I have decided to go with my original plan and have stuck with my “Dutch cap” shapes which I talked about in this post. In reality, there is quite a lot of fiddling around to create these shapes because each diamond is added separately to the triad then the diamonds are joined together.

So far I have made only one. I hope it will get easier with experience, otherwise I’ll be ripping them all out and looking for an easier setting!

So that’s my last four weeks summed up. Not much to show for it but I am supposed to be taking it easy and concentrating on getting better. The thing is that I just don’t feel “sick” and most of the time forget that I have been ill.

Onwards and upwards, as they say! In other words, back to my Mudgee Wrap which I ambitiously hope to finish in one week!

Where, oh where, can she be?

Hello. I’m still here. Just quiet on the blogging front.

Well, except for the hours I have spent reading through the 500+ posts I had in my Feedly list when I came home. I have only left comments on a few posts when I had something I really had to say but, for the most part, I have just skim-read and moved on. Some people have suggested that I just skip those missed posts and start afresh but I would hate to miss the post I needed to read! I would feel awful if I missed the news of a joyous or tragic event in my blog-friend’s life! I am now down to 238 posts so I’m getting there! I also have dozens, if not hundreds, of emails that need answers – I will get to those in due course, I hope!

When we got home from our vacation, I had an email from a member of Lost Cousins, a family history site of which I am also a member. That sparked my curiosity about something in my own family history and there I was, off searching around my own ancestry. In those two weeks, I re-established connection with some “lost” cousins and have had some delightful and informative emails from my second cousin in England so have really been distracted from my crafting and other pursuits.

I’ve also found a site called Deceased Online, which doesn’t sound terribly exciting but is a good site to find the location and date of the burial of English ancestors (for free) and further information, like who else is buried in the same grave (for a fee). I have been lucky enough to find a few of my ancestors or blood relatives on the site – they are adding more and more information every month.

I am focussing my attention on one set of my great-grandparents and their descendants. I am working from their eldest child, through their descendants (and so on) and am finding some very interesting (to me) facts. I just love the hunt and the thrill of finding small scraps of information! Some of which leads to other areas of inquiry.

I have sent emails to other members of Genes Reunited who have people with the same names on their tree that I am researching in my own tree and have had quite a few answers – most not relevant but it’s still good to get a reply.

I have used another site called Curious Fox (a site for ancestors in Britain and Ireland but you need to know where they lived specifically) and had some answers with some new information which, as I’ve already said, is very exciting.

There has been some crafting. I have been working on some hand-stitching which I have now dubbed the “Dutch Cap” quilt because of the shape of the paper-piecing I have designed.

Since I started cutting out hexagons on the train trip home, I have achieved this much (22 “triads”)!

My sewing machine was serviced while I was away but I have not yet taken it out of its case! I need to do so soon if I am going to have the binding sewn on the Earth and Sky quilt before the end of the month! I also need to do a small amount of sewing on another project so I can call it finished too!
There has been some knitting but I’ll leave that for a separate post.

So, don’t write me off – I’m still here, and The Year of the Finished Project linky party is still alive and well.

I’ll be back soon with the promised knitting post!

still here – still crafting and researching

Well, I may be a bit quiet on the blog front but my computer time has been swallowed up by a resurgence in my interest in researching my family history. Anc*try is always adding new databases but recently they have added the London Electoral Register and I’ve been searching for where my family members were living. In Australia, home ownership is the norm so it’s strange to find people living in the same few rooms for upwards of twenty years – but that’s the nature of the place and time, I guess.

Anyway, I have also been sewing – I have almost finished a quilt top that started out as a scrappy coin quilt but has turned into something a little different. I have learnt a bit making this “flimsy” but I’ll post about that when I complete the top.

As for knitting, I was shopping at the Big Box Store for fabric but "just happened to wander through the yarn department. A ball of Moda Vera Noemi caught my eye. It was a little more expensive that I would normally pay for an acrylic/nylon blend but the long colour repeats got my attention so I bought one ball and cast on for a simple garter stitch shawl – letting the bouclé type yarn do all the work. I soon realised that one ball (273 yards) wasn’t going to go very far so added another five balls to my collection: one in the original colour way (“turquoise mix”) and two each of “purple mix” and “red mix”. I started the second ball of yarn at the opposite end so the colours change more logically.

I’m reasonably happy with the result but have cast on a second shawl (using the “purple mix”) using needles three sizes larger (6:00mm US 10) and like the drape better.

works in progress?

Or at a standstill? Then they'd be UFOs, wouldn't they?

So, what have I carried from 2011 (or before) into the Not-So-New Year?

And what do they need to be completed?

I'll start with the most recent and work backwards (according to date of cast on), knitting then quilting.

knitting

I finished mum's socks on Wednesdayand immediately cast on another pair. I turned the heel on the first sock last night so am powering along with those. William's blanket: the knitting is finished, I just need to sew the ends in and block it. I stopped working on it for two reasons: the weather was not conducive for blocking at the time I finished it (about ten days before Christmas). When the weather warmed up I had house guests for nearly three weeks so it wasn't appropriate to cover half the living room floor with blocking boards,etc. I became sick a week before Christmas and didn't want to share my germs with baby William so put it aside to do the ends later (and forgot about it until now). Sideways Striped Baby Jumper I finished the body of this and need to pick up stitches around the neck to do the collar. I can't remember why I stopped; probably I just didn't feel like picking up all those teeny tiny stitches (sock yarn).

Soft Blue Socks knitted from the toe up; I have no idea why I stopped working on these. Purple Cocoon Socks knitted from the toe up; I was questioning whether to knit the second sock or rip the first because they were a bit too snug for me and I though the Cocoon, although 75% wool/25% polyamide, was too loosely spun to wear well as socks (it was designed for baby knitting). I might finish them and give them to mum; she'll wash them by hand!Merlot Socks need to find the instructions for Jeny's Super Stretchy Bind Off and get them done! My computer is always turned off when I'm ready to knit. Hey, I could use my Kindle, couldn't I?intarsia blanket - I was working on this just four weeks ago but it's too hot to knit blankets/afghan from 8ply (DK) now. This project is 40" (1 metre) wide so don't be fooled by the small photo. striped garter stitch afghan: this is the project that I had to rip because something had eaten big holes in the acrylic; I was still working on this project four weeks ago too and have put it aside for the same reason as the intarsia blanket - I work on them alternately: the intarsia requires more attention to details than the garter stitch afghan

I have other projects on needles but they are hibernating for one reason or another - they are certainly not WIPs; just UFOs. If you really want to see the list of them, here is a link to my Ravelry projects page!

quilting

Scrappy Coin quilt: this one kind of started itself; I have a 66" panel of small strips left from my over-enthusiastic piecing for the backing of another quilt so I decided to make a Scrappy Coin quilt. Since then I have used up most of my own scraps and most of the donated scraps; I think I have enough for about three-quarters of a quilt! I still have some scraps to cut and then I think I'll have enough. the photo may not look like much but there are 248 little pieces there.Disappearing Nine Patch: top and backing completed; sewing machine on quilting frame hopefully now sorted, this quilt should be loaded and started either today or tomorrow Scrappy Strings II: top and backing completed; waiting to be quilted when the Disappearing Nine Patch is done Hunter's Cabin: pieced and quilted; just awaiting finding the correct flannel fabric to make the binding; flannel isn't easy to buy in the middle of an Australian summer! Country Houses: the QAYG blocks have been sew into rows,

the rows are waiting to be sewn into a quilt top. I have procrastinated on this one because it is too big for the single bed for which it was intended and I haven't yet found the fabric I have in mind to make it into a top for our queen sized bed.

Finally, another work in progress is my newly created family history blog Are We Related? I thought I may as well use every resource available to try and find some long lost relatives!

I'm back!

Today life returns to something resembling "normalcy".

My sinuses are still not completely clear but that is normal for me! At least I can do something other than sleep or sit with my head as still as possible. Thanks to all those who sent good wishes and prayers my way during my fight with acute sinusitis.

I have been away from home the past two weekends: the first we travelled to Armidale to my niece's 21st birthday. The second, this past weekend, I went to the biennial camp of the Knitters' Guild of NSW (Inc) - there will be a separate post about that; all I need to say here was I had a great time!

In the week between Armidale and the Camp, we had my mother staying with us. There were visits from DD (mum's eldest grand-daughter) and the Grandboys, a visit to my MIL, a visit to my brother and his family, and a special birthday outing - the subject of another separate post (I need to have something to write about! LOL)

I must be the world's most boring daughter because while mum was here she had time to read two novels: The Tin Ticket (the central character of which is my dad's great-great-grandmother: a convict originally from Glasgow, Scotland) and The Drovers. Mum really loves Australian novels so once she started reading she couldn't put the books down.

The truth is that while mum was here (and reading), I had to finish knitting some samples for Camp. I had knitted samples and written patterns, but I had to test knit the patterns! Let me tell you that is not as easy as it sounds; my brain knows how to do entrelac and it was hard to follow the pattern word for word so some mistakes were, unfortunately, found over the weekend!

I foolishly also thought I could knit a short-sleeved jumper in two weeks! Who am I kidding? I did about twenty percent of it, I suppose. Which, in the end, is just as well, as I have decided to rip it all out anyway. It is being knitted in Moda Vera "Bamboo Wave", which is textured (thick and thin) yarn: 60% bamboo and 40% cotton. I have gauge for the jumper but it's still too loose and drapey - and given that cotton drops a lot, I have decided, after consultation with another knitter whose skills I admire and trust, to rip it out (and, maybe, start again).

The jumper is the Morning, Noon and Night Sweater (Ravelry link - third photo) by Gwen Bortner, in her book Entree to Entrelac. I was quite happy with most of it (apart from the slowness of entrelac) but, as explained, it must be ripped out -- when I can bring myself to do it.

I have also been knitting on my garter stitch blanket (since I came home, happy, but exhausted, from Camp). I am just past halfway with that.

What you see here is approximately 40 inches wide and 45 inches long. The top edge is on a Knitpicks cable, ready for me to knit in the other direction. The bottom is on the 4.5mm circular needles I am using to knit this DK blanket. I got bored with one row per colour so I am now knitting a Fibonacci sequence: 1-1-2-3-2-1-1-2-3-2- etc. Yes, all those ends are still hanging out but wait till you see what I do with them!

There has also been some sock knitting - again the subject of another post.

Why so much knitting? It was the only craft I could cope with for the last month or so! And even then the pattern needed to be fairly simple! I knitted in front of the television for up to five hours a day, staring straight ahead - moving the head as little as possible!

In the midst of my pain and woolly-headedness, I just couldn't face sewing so there has been very little of that. In fact, I have only used my sewing machine twice in this past five weeks; once to do the block which was the subject of this post, and on Monday last week when I went to sewing class for the first time in three weeks. I attempted to make another block but I have either lost my ability to sew in straight lines or perhaps I never had it in the first place! Either way, patchwork is dependent on cutting and sewing accurately - the more seams there are, the more accurate one must be! Much, much more accurate than one needs to be for dress-making! And I have discovered that I am not accurate enough!

Sadly, these two blocks were to be sent to So Sarah Sews to be sewn into quilt tops for girls in the foster care system who have been doing it tough. I really wanted to be part of this, but just felt that my work wasn't up to scratch. I had to write to Sarah and ask to be allowed out of the group -- I feel bad for letting her down but I'm sure it will be easier for her to make two extra blocks than to make mine fit! I could make new blocks, but Sarah wanted them by 7th October - two days from now; she lives in the USA and I live in Australia so it was never going to happen for me!

Having been away from my computer since before the trip to Armidale, I have spent hours since I came home from Camp trying to catch up with other people's blogs. Since there are 165 blogs on my Blog Reading List, this is no mean feat. I spent three hours today reading all and commenting on some of the posts that were published three days ago and two days ago, so another few hours should find me caught up.

I cannot set even weekly or monthly goals - they seem too daunting; I will just have to take things as they come for the next little while.

So now, I'm off to re-acquaint myself with Jan, before she forgets who I am entirely!

in which I speak of family

 To answer the questions from the comments on my previous post:

Grandbubby is doing fine but is not a baby anymore! He will get his own special post next week but for now, here's a couple of Christmas photos. He had two changes of clothes - his "good" clothes in the morning and his "Santa's elf" clothes after lunch.

Family history is addictive and fun and maddening and frustrating and... one needs lots of time, patience and a certain amount of capital to do a good job! "Who Do You Think You Are?" is one of my favourite shows, no-one is allowed to talk while I'm watching it, but it gives an unrealistic idea of what it's like to trace one's own family.



And now on to family news from the past eight months:

For WM and I, the "Darby and Joan" lifestyle goes on much the same. We celebrated our 33rd anniversary in December as well as the nineteenth anniversary of living in this house. WM still works full-time as a station manager and is finding his job a bit more stressful than he would like. I have just two and a half hours work a week (I'm not complaining).

During the researching and writing of the book, my hard drive died. Fortunately, my computer technician was able to retrieve all my data (most of which was backed up) and installed a new, larger hard drive in my machine. I am thinking aobut buying a new computer now - WM would like this one, it's much bigger than the dinosaur he is using!

We had a wet weekend away in October staying in an apartment at Coalcliff, south of Sydney. We like to get away for the weekend in places that are within a couple of hours from home, otherwise the driving is such a pain we wonder why we went away in the first place! I will save the photos of that weekend for another post (gives you a reason to come back LOL).

WM has his annual holidays in April. We are considering a trip to Perth on the Indian Pacific (Australia's only  trans-continental passenger train) and then a week in the Perth area before returning to Sydney. Any comments / suggestions?

We recently spent a week at mum's place. WM helped mum with jobs that needed doing around the place; I stayed in the comparative cool and worked on the family tree (a future gift for mum - can't say anything too much because she sometimes reads my blog!)

Mum is lonely but coping after dad's death twelve months ago. That's to be expected after fifty-three years of marriage. She will not leave Bingara (a small town on the north-west slopes of NSW) although her closest family, my sister, is 160 kilometres (100 miles) away. Mum intends to remain in her own home until she can no longer care for herself. She is finding many things that she never knew she could do and is proud of her achievements. She is also clearing out the clutter - dad was a hoarder!

Mum has to have a cataract removed from her eye. The date has been set for 11th November! Public hospital waiting lists - who needs them? Mum is also having physiotherapy for her shoulder although no diagnosis has officially been given. It is not frozen shoulder but she can't knit! I remember the trauma of that.

DD and SIL were previously living in a two bedroom home unit (apartment). It took an hour to drive from here to there, and that was in non-peak hour traffic! In October, they bought a house only twenty minutes drive from here. It's old and needs work but it has electricity, hot and cold running water, a stove that works, air-con in the main living room (they have two living rooms), three bedrooms, and only leaks in one room in bad storms. It's two minutes walk to the local primary school. Better yet, it belongs to them (well, to the bank) to do with as they will.

On 31st January, DD and SIL celebrated their second wedding anniversary. We looked after "The Boy" while they went out to dinner. We were going to send them to the same hotel where they spent their wedding night but WM decided a gift of money for landscaping would be more practical!

DD and SIL are expected their second child in late June / early July. As with "Grandbubby #1", they won't find out the baby's sex until he/she is born.

And that sums up eight months in the never2hot2knit family! I close with another photo of "The Boy".

 

new look, same old writer

Is there anyone still out there?

I'm back.

Where have I been?

Well, the short answer is: last June I discovered an interest in family history. For Christmas I gave my mother a 76 page book detailing the ancestry of both her parents' families. I was able to find ancestors on my grandfather's side back to 1630!

All that research, checking, writing and editing the book took 40-50 hours a week for five and half months which, with work and family, didn't really give me much time for anything else. After all that time in front of the keyboard, I didn't want to do anything else computer related: no blog, no Ravelry, no reading other people's blogs!

I did find some time to knit but not anywhere near as much as in previous years. I obviously spent less time in front of the television and therefore had less knitting time.


Thank you to the people who got in contact with me via email. I appreciate your concern.

And now that the book is done and dusted? I am still working on family history but I have to be patient to get the results I am seeking now. There are other people involved not just the records of births, deaths and marriages (and other interesting records) and people don't work to my agenda!

In the meantime, my Ravely notebook has been updated and my blog has a whole new look.

Can I stay the distance? Only time will tell. :-)