A trip to Kelly Tarlton’s

The weekend before last we took E to Kelly Tarlton’s.  I’ve been meaning to blog about it since then but it has taken me a while to upload the photos!

We had a great time and E loved it!  I hadn’t been in at least 10 years and neither had A, so it was quite different to how we remembered and we all quite enjoyed it.

 Here are the pics – a bit fuzzy sorry because you aren’t allowed to use a flash (which didn’t stop most people!  grrrrrrr)

In the playground, E rode on a springy whale thingy

And played in a sub, although I had to go in with her so that she wasn’t scared (really!) The screen in front was rounded, hence the crazy lights reflected back

And she liked playing on the snowmobile thingy (thats my ergo attached to my waist btw)

and on the slide (which was coming out of Nemo’s mouth but you can’t see much of that in the picture)

After all the playing I popped E in the ergo in the hip carry, and we went through the aquarium

yes that is a stingray above our heads! look at E’s face! tee hee!

She can say “fish” and “shark” and “ray” and “turtle”! 

unfortunately she started saying “fish! yummmm!”

We don’t know what this fish was but it sure was funny looking!  E quite liked it

And this puffer fish

A was intrigued by the massive crayfish

And then we went through the aquarium again, this time with A holding E

And E got up close and personal with a large grandaddy snapper

Then we went on the ride in the Snowcat to see the penguins.  It was so cool we had to do it twice

My favourite part was seeing the penguins swim, they are so graceful underwater!

this is what E is looking at in the pic above!

Ridiculously excited

Check it out Ravelry users!  My pattern is on Ravelry!  How cool is that!!!!! This link won’t work unless you are a Ravelry member D

I’m so chuffed, which is daft but its so cool that other people are using this pattern!  I must get around to adding some measurements in to make it more useful.

I have to admit, I don’t go on Ravelry very often because I spend too much time on the net and not enough time knitting and crafting as it is, so I haven’t yet discovered all the wonderful features there.  I must have another look at it tonight… 

Another couple of soakers

Well I haven’t had much to show off here lately, but thats not because I haven’t been crafting! I’ve been busy cutting out and sewing a nappy stash, but I don’t have any finished ones to show yet.

 But here are a couple of FOs, firstly a soaker for E made from the utiku yarn that I dyed last month.  I’m not really feeling the love for the colourway, but oh well its functional at least (its been worn so it looks a little stretched here):

And secondly a nb size soaker for a swap.  Its for a bubba whose flavour isn’t known yet, hence the two icords!  Its entirely possible that my swap-ee will see this here, but she won’t know she’s my swap-ee until she gets it so thats ok (I think) ) This is in lovely Treliske merino (not the icords, they are scraps from my stash). I may have mentioned this before but I much prefer icords to elastic waists for little babies.  This soaker is kinda plain and it seems odd to me to leave wool like this undyed!  But its kinda nice and classic at the same time.

More dyeing

After the success of my first dyeing session I couldn’t wait to have another go.  So a couple of days later I dyed the rest of my cotton towelling velour – another 3.5m of it cut into 21 pieces, each to be dyed a different colour!  I’ve now cut each piece out into nappy patterns.

This is the result of both dyeing sessions (less 2 more colours which somehow got forgotten when I took the pic.)  The colours in this pic are more true than the rest of the photos, but IRL the colours are even brighter than this:

I used cerulean blue (which looks way nicer and more vibrant IRL – the fabric they are sitting on is a nice pale turquoise as in the first pic, not off white like it looks in the rest of the photos):

and aqua (which also looks darker IRL):

and bubblegum pink, which I don’t think I mixed in properly cos it came out a bit spotty in places:

This is lemon yellow + aqua, it came out just gorgeous IRL:

And this is lemon yellow + cerulean blue:

These were a bit experimental:

left: yellow + pink,

centre: blue + aqua

right: pink + aqua 

The pink was very very weak against the other colours, so I made some splotches by pouring it directly onto the fabric:

 

And these are

left: lots of basic red + a bit of cerulean blue,

centre: even amounts of red + blue,

right: red + aqua. 

I love the patterns on these but I’m not so keen on the actual colours:

Dyeing session

 

Nearly a year ago I did a community education class on dyeing with Procion using ziplock bags.  Ever since then I’ve been wanting to have a go dyeing fabric at home, but  it wasn’t until yesterday that I finally got around to doing it.

My sister and I acquired some white cotton velour terry last year, with a view to dyeing it and using it for small fitted nappies.  Now neither of us is pregnant, but we (hopefully) will be at some stage so I figured I might as well get on with making a nappy stash now while I’m in the mood and have energy.

I cut the CVT into 50cm wide strips and laid out my nappy pattern on it – I could fit 6 nappies to each strip.  So I cut each strip into three, with each cut fitting in 2 nappies.  I’m a bit of a fabric miser so this involved some wiggly cutting!  Then I overlocked all the raw edges cos CVT frays a lot in the wash.  I have 5m to dye so that meant 30 curvy pieces to overlock – it was good practice for me though as I haven’t done much overlocking before.

 I want to make a rainbow of nappies, so yesterday I started with 9 pieces of the CVT.  I was aiming for a light, medium and dark shade each of yellow, orange and red.  I read the instructions I found here about 10 times.  I dug out the measuring cups and spoons that I’d bought for my community ed class, and once E was safely asleep in bed, started dyeing.  After the yellow and orange I thought the colours were looking deeper than I expected… thats when I looked at my measuring spoon again and realised that the one tablespoon measure I had been using was actually one and a half tablespoons!  I’d assumed that since it was the biggest spoon in the set that it was a tablespoon, but no, silly me.  Hmph. 

 The fabric still came out looking quite funky, just not quite the light to dark graduation that I’d anticipated.   I’ve cut out some small nappies from it already, and a few soaker pieces from the scraps.

Here is the yellow (lightest on the left and darkest on the right, can you tell?  Its not easy *insert rolling eyes emoticon*).  This is lemon yellow dye, its um, rather vibrant IRL!

The orange turned out more “burnt orange”.  Which is ok cos I like that colour.  I’m really pleased about how it turned out all mottled.

And here is the red.  I’d figured out my mistake by then, thank goodness!

And here are some close-ups of the funky splotchy bits:

Permanent marker + toddler = bad news!

A couple of days ago E was outside with A, and he let her play in his car while he was busy.  And she discovered a red permanent marker in the centre console.  EEEEEEEEKKK!!!!! The result was red marks all over the steering wheel, stereo, door upholstry and drivers seat! OMG!  Oh yeah, and a little girl looking rather pleased with herself:

I had no idea if it could be removed, but I quickly jumped onto the net and google was my friend!  It turns out that nail polish remover is the go for getting Vivid off upholstry (you have to imagine my massive grin here) – I managed to get all of the marks off save one nearly-invisible-smudge.  PHEW!

Elisse

Elisse is still away at horsey boarding school – here are a couple of recent pics