What I'm doing

Apart from putting online courses up which has taken inordinate amounts of time, I'm also doing a little practice run before making this:
it's the Modern Quilt Wrap and I just love the colours of the Rowan kidsilk haze and I'm working my butt off over the next four weeks so I'm lashing out. But, I've tested the pattern first on the leftovers from The Accountant's Cappucino vest - all earthy browns with a couple of greens, a black and a black and white heather thrown in and I quite like that, too. Mitred squares are fun! Okay, so they aren't perfect, but what the hell - they'll probably improve. They are certainly addictive. If I'm correct and I can do a square each trip from here to Box Hill I could finish the wrap in the next three weeks because I do exactly six trips a week for the next three weeks! Perfect!

I'm on a cooking whack, too - so I've been ferreting around in cooking blogs. Tomorrow night The Accountant is taking his eldest daughter to dinner, leaving me and the doggies behind to fend for ourselves. I shall be cooking this:
Warm Butternut Squash and Chickpea salad with tahini from
I feel like a vegeterian meal and that sounds perfect.

I love food blogs almost as much as I love knitting blogs, but like the latter, I have only a couple of the former bookmarked. It's so time-consuming searching for new good ones - somewhere out there must be a list of the best blogs...but who has time to even search for that? I wonder if food blogs will eventually subdue any desires for new recipe books - particularly when they often come with beautiful photographs of the food. On the other hand, knitting blogs and all the free patterns in the world didn't stop me ordering Folk Style from Interweave - indeed, I partly ordered it because of the knitalong blog started specifically for this book!

Today I did the annual snipping of Polly's top coat - she looks bizarre now, patchy. You aren't actually supposed to trim border terriers. You're supposed to kind of pluck the top coat off to achieve a smooth, sleek undercoat. Yes. Well. Imagine someone plucking your guard hair off. I wouldn't be impressed. Nor is Polly. So we use scissors. I used to use a kind a horse shaver thing - and give her a number two, but I somehow lost that in the move from Traralgon to Belgrave and can't find a cheap enough replacement (no way am I paying $200!!) so I use common scissors. After all, the difference between a good haircut and a bad one is only three weeks.

Once her straggly top coat is gone, she looks all wobbly and soft like a puppy and people stop to pat her in the street. Unless my cutting is job is too bad, in which case they avoid her in case she's got mange. Then I gave her a bath - which she hates, but which was really necessary. Honey needs a bath, too, but that can only be really successfully accomplished at Trentham where we can lift her into the people bath after a person has bathed, and scrub her.

It's been a beautiful day today - I had lunch on the deck - leftover sweet potato rosti and some deliciously nutty King Island cheddar from my Royal Melbourne Show bag. If it's as fine tomorrow I might have breakfast on the deck - I only didn't today because I was busy putting up my online courses.

Aren't holidays fantastic - you get to knit mitred squares, source yarn, wash and trim dogs, eat what you really want to and still have some time over to blog. Tomorrow is writing day, however, and write I will!