Last Friday night saw me inflating 200 balloons for our library event on Saturday. Janelle had a
Heart Felt moment
when she saw them and rushed off to get her camera. They spilled out of my office and I eventually managed to corral them along a space on the balcony.
The pops of balloons as the heat and rough textured wall claimed some provided many gasps from the customers working on the
ecentre. Worth it though, as on Saturday we had
Mary
Kippenberger and Peter Charlton-Jones to entertain with stories and music. To start with it looked like a small audience of toddlers and babies but once they got going numbers quickly grew to enjoy the
hilarious fun - it's always good to see the adults enjoying themselves as much as the children.
We had a melt in the mouth, rich, sticky mud cake from the 10
O'Clock Cookie Company,
Clifford the Big Red Dog made a brief appearance and then we let the balloons tumble down to create more colourful chaos. And then we looked out the window and saw a rainbow that sat above the town for about an hour. We had expected a really cold southerly, with snow, from
Antarctica but straight after the wonderful event I felt as if we had been blessed by a very special visit.
The balloons and the blankets from the Operation
Coverup Blankets created a wonderful splash of colour and shape under the
Hadlow School
mural of local history. We have had a great week of gifts of blankets and wool.
Barbara
Udy is finishing her eighteenth ladder design blanket. She has fun experimenting with colour and the children in the Ukraine and
Moldovia who receive them will be so grateful for such a wonderful gift for their life.
This project has been very humbling and wonderful to be involved with as people create blankets for children who often have only light cotton eiderdowns in well below freezing point temperatures. Some knit Peggy Squares, some strips, and some whole blankets. Some sew the blankets. The project is fortunate to have the support of Mission Without Borders who every year help with the shipping and distribution of the blankets, $3.00 per blanket. I love the colours and patterns and every blanket is individually created. The blankets are given as a gift to the children and will remain as their own property for life.
If you want to start knitting - use pure wool please. Acrylic is too cold. They recommend 8mm needles, double knitting wool, and 40 stitches. Knit in garter stitch ( stocking stitch curls) and you may choose to make a square or a complete strip the length of a single bed (allowing for tuck in at the end and blanket to cover the face.) Several strips are stitched together to form a blanket (single bed,
tuck-in at the sides and end.) Of course you may also want to make a complete blanket and it is fun to see the themes and styles people
choose for these.
I took Meg and Skip for an early run around Lake Henley to try and beat the front coming through. To my right I could hear the football crowd having a wonderful time as
Carterton and
Pioneer fought it out. It got really exciting with cars being
reeved and horns tooted. Quite a different sound from the usual birds and running river. The
Ruamahunga was brown shouldering at it's banks, as if the garment it was diving into had suddenly shrunk. The large gully that has been constructed to take the overflow was already filling from the rain in the hills.
Saturday night we had a huge thunder storm through the night. (Jeff said it was motorbikes! There's got to be a story there about a storm god on a
motor bike- I'm off!). The chimney leaked from the pressure and angle of the rain. It only happens occasionally and we always forget to get it repaired when we have normal rain.
Meg's blankets spread a little out of her kennel last night so when I was taking them out to dry in the wind that had come up, I found the missing Dominions. For weeks we have been losing the Dominion newspaper which is tossed from a passing car into our garden. She has been gathering them up and taking them to her kennel, still perfectly wrapped in plastic. We had searched and searched the property for where she was putting them - didn't think to look under her blankets.
Had fun with our four and a half month grandson looking at "Who's there Spot?" He was fascinated with the large black letters and kept scanning the pictures. He especially liked looking under the flaps once he got the idea.
Our walk around the lake tonight was a little late and it was disconcerting to arrive and find the army there, walking around with a small red lights from their night vision equipment, like moving red buttons, and the dark shape of trucks,
port-a-loo and tents. They were just inside the gates of Lake Henley and appeared to be either camping on the ground there or about to pack up. Each year they arrive here for a training exercise so I presume that's
what they are doing. You almost didn't know they were there. It was eerily quiet. Just as with babies, balloons and storytellers, their presence, their slicing red lights, and their shadows transformed the space.
Matariki is a small star cluster that appears around this time of year in New Zealand and marks the change of the seasons. It is seen as the beginning of the Maori year.
