Last night I went to a Halloween party at a friend’s house.  It was a small function, but the host had gone to an enormous amount of trouble to decorate the house and to cook Halloween themed food.  It was loads of fun – we ate bats wings, finger biscuits, spider cupcakes, and a flayed skull (don’t ask).  I wish that I’d taken photos!  Halloween isn’t a big deal here in Australia, but at the same time it was lots of fun to get into the spirit of an occasion.  The girls dressed up a little to welcome any trick or treaters that knocked at our door.

And because I am fortunate enough to live in Melbourne, today is a public holiday for the running of the Melbourne Cup! As weird as I think it is that we do get a holiday for a horse race, it’s great to have a family day off in the middle of the week.

I forgot to report on my trip to Bendigo the weekend before last! Unsurprisingly, it did include yarn. I purchased a few balls from Bendigo Woollen Mills, including this Melody to make myself a 4-S vest.

While I was there I had the pleasure of meeting Calidore, who recognised my children from my blog and introduced herself! I think that my Mum and husband were a little surprised! I felt a little famous for a moment there. It was lovely to chat to her and to talk yarn. Mum, Clare and I particularly enjoyed the White Wedding Dress exhibition. Beautiful craftsmanship and lovely fabrics. Many of the dresses were so incredibly detailed! I was also amazed at how tiny the dresses were – women were all so slim back when high calorie food wasn’t so readily available. I loved watching Clare examine each of the dresses and read about how they were made. It wasn’t about weddings per se for us, it was all about the sewing and the fashion!  I highly recommend it – but you’ll need to be quick if you haven’t been, as it ends this weekend.

I’ve also done some embroidery during the past week.

While nowhere near as impressive as Tania’s embroidery, it will hopefully reduce the number of times that we need to reinstall the screen door as people walk into it and pop it completely off it’s track.

A shout-out to Kathryn over at Crochet Concupiscence is also well overdue!  If you love crochet and don’t know her blog and website already, do pop over and have a look.  She is a dedicated crochet blogger and provides a marvellous resource for all crocheters.  She has three big crochet projects underway at the moment that you might be interested in.  In her words:

1. Swaddle! A Crochet Art Project. Swaddle is a crochet art project exploring the ways in which women nurture the men in their lives. It looks at silent forms of nurturing but specifically delves into the way that women communicate. Swaddle looks at the positive ways that female approaches to communication improve relationships but also looks at the darker side of how differing communication styles can suffocate relationships. It does so using crochet, which has stereotypically been considered a female craft. It will include 12 – 24 works of crochet art incorporating a range of crochet types including hyperbolic crochet, mosaic crochet and granny squares and using yarn from indie dyers, sellers and small yarn stores. I am trying to crowdsource funding for the project and all people who contribute will be represented in the project. Learn more here.
2.  The Health Benefits of Crochet (a book). I am writing a book about the mental and physical health benefits of crochet. Crochet is such a healing, soothing craft and can provide significant mental health benefits for people dealing with depression, anxiety and stress-related illness. It can be used as a form of both long-term and short-term pain management and also as a form of occupational therapy for people with various hand ailments. What I’m spreading the word about is that I’m still interviewing people for this book and I’d love to hear from anyone who feels that crochet has helped their health and who would like to complete an email interview for the book.
3.  Hooked Together! (a blog project). Hooked Together is my huge crochet blog project designed to explore the connections within the crochet community. I have a list of 270 crochet / fiber / yarn blogs that I read. I am going through the blogroll for each of those blogs and exploring what they read, sharing their links to crochet, craft and other blogs on my blog every Friday so that my readers can find other blogs that they’ll enjoy. In the end, I’m going to put all of this together into a big display so that we can all see how the crochet community is connected within itself and to the larger craft community.

These are all wonderful projects – I’ve just contributed to Swaddle.  I’m especially impressed because Kathryn does all of this purely because she is passionate and positive about crochet.

I’ve been on a bit of a cutting-out frenzy again lately. These patterns arrived from StyleARC last week. I’m looking forward to making both of them. There is also some voile just waiting to be turned into pyjamas and nighties (for me me me) and numerous items have been cut out for the girls. It will be a busy time for me at Sewjourn in a fortnight!