Weekend Round-Up

Yes, this is finished - I went over it carefully yesterday and could find nothing left to do.  So I signed it, trimmed it down, varnished it and now it is ready to go.  Now I have to find something else to paint, preferably in splashy watercolours.

I've been knitting a couple of these - each flower is no more than a centimetre across.  They are for the animation, so of course have to be in proportion with everything else.

Also knitted this tiny little chap - using 3 ply baby yarn this time.  I like how he has turned out, fits in the palm of my hand.  Have a look and see the difference between him and the last one I made:

Same pattern, just a radical change of yarn. 

We've been having some differences of opinion with the local magpies lately.  They seem to think we need to be woken up at 5 a.m. with some ear-piercing screeching outside out bedroom window, we beg to differ.  So we initially joked that we needed a stuffed bird of prey out there to scare them off - turns out, you can buy model hawks all over the place for that very purpose.  Now we just have to figure out how to attach it to the porch roof.

If it had been in place yesterday, we wouldn't have had the little drama played out at 7a.m. in what used to be a car park.  We heard the most awful noise, every bird in the neighbourhood was squawking at the top of it's voice, magpies, crows, you name it, it was perched out there shouting.  We went to see what the commotion was about and discovered a magpie had managed to get itself wedged in the builders' wire fencing - he could have slipped through the gap, but one leg was twisted around the wires and he was gripping it for dear life.  So after failed attempts at untangling him and getting pecked badly (I was bleeding!) we got the wire cutters and a tea-towel, and cut him out.  Off he flew, unscathed, nary a thank you.  However, it was quiet out there at dawn today....

Having lost the tomato race, there isn't such a sense of urgency - but I do have one lone tomato coming. The others are flowering or getting ready to flower - we'll get there eventually!