Keeping Warm and Dry

I made these coats for my dogs years ago, but haven't used them much because the dogs seem to be able to keep themselves warm enough. But now that they are getting on a bit (15 years, which is supposed to be something like 80 in humans), I thought they might appreciate a bit of protection from the weather.

Scruff, not quite in focus.

Merle.

The coats have waterproof raincoat fabric on the outside and polar fleece on the inside, with velcro fastenings on the chest and the tummy. The dogs seem happy enough to have a bit of added warmth when walking on these cold damp evenings.

Lovely Weather For

Ducks!

Pacific Black Ducks, Anas superciliosa

Afternoon Tea

Afternoon tea and some stitching with a couple of friends:

Enjoying the wintry sunshine.

Unusual Sewing

Here was a challenge! Make a coil of felt to fill an old tobacco tin, to be used as an oil pad for oiling tools.

I'd never seen the finished item, and for once Google let me down. Apparently there is one in the National Museum in Canberra, but the online record has no picture. Here's what I came up with:

I didn't have any wool felt, so improvised with some off-cuts of woollen fabric. So that there wouldn't be threads fraying off the top, I cut a strip twice as wide as the required height, then folded it in half and stitched it together. I then coiled it up and jammed it into the tin with the folded edge facing up. It took just under three metres of strip to fill the tin.

Later it was soaked in oil, and I'm told it works well.

From Canada

When someone recently asked me what I would like from Canada, I remembered the maple sugar treats I enjoyed there so many years ago:

And here they are! Many thanks to the traveller who found them despite not really knowing what he was looking for.

I hope they will be as good as I remember!

Scatterday - X

This time it is the turn of possibly the most dreaded letter!
Our categories are
# hidden
# famous
# alive
# crosses in quilts.

As you will see, most of my photos were taken during a trip to one venue.

Hidden:

The "O" gate at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne is composed of multiple "X" shapes. Maybe the Xes aren't very hidden, but there is something hidden among the Xes.  Can you spot it?



At each intersection there is a flower medallion, except for one, which features this instead:

Famous:

Xanthorrhoea, or Grass Tree, in the Botanic Gardens. Xanthorrhoeas grow very slowly, so this one must be hundreds of years old. It must have started its life somewhere else, as they are not native to the Melbourne area.

Alive:

Xeriscape of the Arid Garden at the Melbourne Botanic Gardens. When I was a kid I didn't quite believe that cactus plants were alive; they looked to me as if they were plastic.

Another view of part of the Arid Garden. I took these photos last week. I'm including a second photo because on Tuesday night this week someone attacked this garden and chopped down most of the tall cacti. It is hard to understand what would motivate a person to be so destructive. Staff at the gardens will propagate replacements from the chopped pieces where they can, but it will be a couple of decades before the cacti reach the size of those that were attacked.

Crosses in quilts:

Not actually on a quilt, but definitely related to quilts; this is the badge of the online group SCQuilters, or Southern Cross Quilters. Before I joined the group I had often seen the badge on women at quilt shows, and leapt to the interesting conclusion that a lot of nuns are quilters. In my defence, I'd never got close enough to read the small print. From a distance it resembled the badges the nuns wore at a Catholic school I once taught at, so I thought all the women with this badge belonged to another order of nuns!

As usual, you can visit Cinzia's blog to find out how everyone else met the dreaded X challenge.

Seedling Maintenance

Looking after the TreeProject seedlings is an on-going task. Maintenance involves checking for pests, removing any extra seedlings that have germinated in the tubes, and trimming any roots that are growing through the bottom of the tubes. Today it was the turn of the dogwoods (Cassinia aculeata, no relation to the beautiful dogwood trees of the northern hemisphere).

Some of them are large and ready to be planted out already, such as the one in the photo above. The bits that look like extra seedlings are actually branches of the one plant. But you can see in the photo below that nearly half of them are still very small and won't be ready for quite a while: