Letters from Wetville

I've given up sewing. I got up early today and began more work on my yellow Colette crepe dress. Yesterday I had to resew both seams on the armhole facings but I managed to fix them. Today I discovered that the facings for the neck don't match the dress - they are out by about two centimetres. Given that this is only out of a sheet and as I'm less convinced that I love this pattern on me after all, is probably going to be only for wearing round home, I decided to pack it away. I will pick up sewing again sometime, as I have some things to make for birthdays and maybe even the C word, but no more sewing for me for a while. I thought I'd get cracking on this cleaning the house lark, only I got as far as hanging the washing out and didn't come in for hours, except to eat. The washing line is a useful escape route to the garden. I cleaned up the chicken coop, changed their water, gave them many many snails and slugs which I collected as I gardened and even a pott...

Garden: I went outside with a torch and a small container last night and found three large snails at work on my vegetables in the punga raised bed. No doubt they are responsible for the annihilation of the beans. Chooks: These ones have been unkeen on being caught after a session outside the poultry palace so I've hardly let them out at all. But tonight I trialled letting them out not long before dusk to see if it was much easier to return them to the palace. It was. Kitchen: I tried the greek pumpkin spread for my ten new meals project. It was awful pumpkin and too much fennel. I am going to try it again with decent pumpkin, no fennel and maybe even some coriander in it. I made pizza from scratch tonight. I haven't done that for ages, certainly not since Dominos Pizza moved into Wetville. But as, most irritatingly, there are more days until payday than is ideal, I opted to make it at home. It was better than the bought stuff and did leave room to buy some wine. Hou...

It was time to do more completion and less starting of new projects. I was sort of successful. Done: 1. The ironing board is now functional. It looks like this: There were indeed some plain blue and even plain beige covers in the shop. I did not care for them . 2. One shirt belonging to Favourite Handyman now fixed. Jackie at the Bernina shop advised me how and didn't charge me a cent for it. She is shopkeeper of my year. 3. Planted slenderette dwarf seedlings, celery seedlings and some polyanthus. Watered my basil and tomato pots. 4. Cooked loads of fried foods for dinner. I almost didn't provide dinner at all, because the garden was so much more interesting. Fried sausages, bacon, onions and mushrooms, plus I added butter to the steamed broccoli and asparagus. Only the carrot escaped the butter or oil treatment. It tasted beautiful. Not quite done: 1. I began weeding the strawberry patch and bought a netting cloche to go over it and protect it from the birds. Proba...

One in the morning is a perfectly reasonable time to get up and do some sewing and blogging, isn't it? That or nothing this week. I did buy some more sheets ( errr yes. Cheap. ) from the Sallies and St Vincent de Paul. Those Catholics have expensive sheets. Three whole dollars vs the Sallies only charging $2. So I've made up the bodice of the Colette Crepe dress in a plain yellow, using my new pattern piece for the front with an FBA and adjusted neckline. I pinned down the sides and tried it on and indeed it looks like the adjustments work. Hurray hurray hurray. I don't have enough fabric for the skirt as well, but I did buy some sheets which I think complement the yellow fabric and so this time the skirt will be a contrasting colour. I am getting faster at sewing. Once, the bodice would have taken a week of evenings. This time round, I think my blood pressure is even stable when I sew darts. Other blogging sewists have suggested they would fully line the bodice...

Clothes stuff. That seems to be my main evening interest at the moment. Just for my own personal record really... 1. I have nearly finished the night shirt. I shortened it a lot compared to the last one. Looking at it unhemmed, I think I will make pyjama bottoms for it and it can be a long pj top with bottoms for the coldest nights and the nightshirt can work alone when it is warm. 2. I was thinking about cardies the other day? This looks useful: It is McCalls 6408 and is apparently easy to sew. Not just now, but maybe after I've sewn the Colette Crepe. I suspect I'll have to buy fabric outside of Wetville for it. I like the red version. Indeed, I would like a red version myself. 3. The Colette Crepe pattern arrived. Gotta get the night shirt jammy bottoms made up so I can sew the big spring project. The instructions do look very accessible. 4. Found a blog called Girl with Curves . Tanesha Awasthi is totally gorgeous and what makes her blog appeal to me is that ...

The sun shone and it was time to let the chooks out of the poultry palace. We've had these chooks for a month now, but kept them in the run (5 x 2 metres plus a large laying coop) as they were noticeably more jittery around us than previous chooks. But they have definitely become tamer and I knew the endless green would be good for them. Hmmmm. They did enjoy being out of the run. They did not want to be caught again. The fifth one took about an hour to catch. Not that I chased her for the entire hour but I did weed the garden and wait and wait and wait until my moment to catch her and boy did she have a lot to say about it when I did gather her up under my arm. I put a pot of seeded salad greens in the run later which they liked. I may have to grow pots of greens to put in the run for them as a supplement for the dock and wandering jew which we pick and poke through the chickenwire. No photos. I was too busy with the problems of reincarceration. Tonight, the sewing...

Vomit over. I spent much of the day on the couch while the convalescing children seemed increasingly to have more energy than me. I re-read gardening magazines and decided I want to paint our outside table yellow and did some garden re-arranging in my head. Then Past Judgement: Social Policy in New Zealand History arrived and now I am considering ideas like 'changing conceptions of need' across a range of contexts. It is a pleasure to read such thoughtful, intelligent prose as in this book. I guess I spend so much of my non-fiction reading time on op-ed style short texts which pale by comparison with this product of months and years and sometimes decades of research, thinking and writing. Our Blackball exhibition on care workers will be squarely focused on the workers themselves, but I want a sense of the wider issues in which their real, individual lives play out. There are another half dozen or more books in the footnotes which look very interesting but I will be r...

I've just finished Room by Emma Donoghue. It was ghoulish. I don't like the genre of really nasty stuff in lots of detail at all. Once I read one of Martina Cole's novels when I was pregnant and we were travelling through Spain which seemed to accentuate my reaction. It was all about a pimp and drug dealer and the women he seduced and then exploited. I had nightmares. For the record, at the time of these nightmares stemming from reading a novel, I was 30 years old. Last night I started Room and couldn't stop until Jack and Ma were out of the room (prison) and I even cheated and read bits at the back to make sure they would get out sometime in this novel, preferably early. I'm not even attempting to write more about capitalism and socialism and alienation and social isolation and racism and the UK riot court verdicts having echoes of Victorian England only this time there are no colonies to send people to only ooops lots of the people who were arrested f...

Still thinking a lot about the riots throughout the UK. This Guardian article: 'Being liberal is fine, but we need to be given the right to parent' deals with some of the challenges which the left need to consider as clearly empathy for the sense of hopelessness of estate life in a recession is not to be conflated with carte blanche for people to loot and riot. The stop and search law came in after we left the UK and I had not considered how it impacted on the lives of quite young men until this week. To think of my own son being stopped and searched by the police at the age of 14, on the way home from school, makes me shudder. Yesterday I planted flanders poppies, polyanthus, pansies and snowdrops along the front of the house. Today I did housework. Tonight I aim to learn why my chooks (not laying yet) have red in their poo. Update: this very useful page has photographs of all kinds of chook poo, explaining what is normal and what is problematic. So now I know th...

Warning: This post is not suitable for vegetarians. It does deal with some very unappealing aspects of animal death. Today we continued with the chook slaughter. Last week Favourite Handyman killed chook #1. The biggest learning point from that was that they do have better eyesight than he'd thought. The remaining four chooks weren't going anywhere near him. This morning we organised the children in front of the computer and I coaxed one chook out with some grain. I caught her and spoke to her gently as I carried her round to the side of the house, where FH broke her neck. I repeated this performance once, before the final two chooks decided they didn't trust me and refused to be bribed. The two dead chooks were in a sack waiting for me and FH took the children to the local swimming pool. Then - and I warn you again, this is not a pretty post - I went to start the skinning and gutting and, upon opening the sack, saw that one chook was still breathing. I didn't...