Prize Week

This week I feel like I've been winning all sort of prizes! I've been in product training at work all week, and to keep us interested there have been games, quizzes etc. I won four times, once solo, twice in team based quizzes and also for a team play-dough model (don't ask). Nothing valuable of course, but stuff like a cook book and movie tickets.

Then today I went to a talk about Sydney's drinking customs, including pub architecture, stories of the Rum Rebellion and the Six O'clock swill, and the gangster connection, including the recently deceased Abe Saffron. I won one of the Lucky Door prizes, an appropriately themed prize of a card pack with 52 pubs of Sydney described (and more importantly located on a map). Our SnB pub is not listed, but the pub where we had our training group dinner during the week was.

Due to having international people flying in for the product training a night out at the Australian Hotel, at the Rocks was arranged. The organisers thought it would be a great idea to get kangaroo and crocodile pizzas, but many people were hesistant to try them. Some of the locals were hesistant to eat "Skippy" and we then had to attempt to explain the cheesy TV show to the visitors. It was quite amazing to see how a discussion of a ridiculously dextrous mammal with the ability to communicate about smugglers and mine shafts could bring together a bunch of people.

Purchases

In an effort to put some knitting content to the this blog, I will mention some purchases I made at the recent stitches and craft show. Scrapbooking is the big thing at these shows, but I did buy some yarn from ecoyarns. I bought some of the soysilk, Phoenix & Oasis. This is the Oasis in the Napa Valley colour scheme.

I also bought two books that I don't really need. This one does have some spectacularly tacky items in it, such as a bead tie and a macrame giraffe (scarily similar to something I think I made once), but a few of the projects such as doilies and the sock monkey would still be acceptable now.

The second one is by perennial favourite Nicky Epstein. It has some great ideas for applique, embroidery, use of I-cords and fancy edging. When I look at it I think how good it would have been to include some of the ideas on past projects!

Pictures!!

While googling I found that the phone/camera I have is known for being dodgy for downloading files to a computer (now I find out!), but that fiddling around and persistence can pay off. After several stints of fiddling around with drivers and USB connections, I have managed to download several pictures that I took months ago. Here for your delight I have included a few......

Firstly, a close-up of the flower's from my niece's cardigan.
Secondly, the beaded edging from the bolero I finished recently. Unfortunately, while I love the edging, the general bolero shape was not great.

Next a photo of someone else's work - a knitted roast dinner complete with all the trimmings (although some of the glasses and candles look a bit wobbly). This was on display at the Sydney Royal Easter show earlier this year.

Finally, because no blog is complete without the mandatory cute animal photo, here is a picture of Honeybear. She is the dog I was dog walking while one of her owners was overseas.

Hopefully, here's to more blog entries with pictures!

Lessons Learned (or Not)

Three weeks into the new job and it seems to be going well. Wish I could say the same for the knitting. Just when I was congratulating myself about getting to the armhole shaping for the front of my current work, I realised that I had forgotten to increase during the first 24 rows, so I had to unpull it back to the beginning of the section. What made it worse was that I made exactly the same mistake on the back! So much for learning from your mistakes. At work one of the things I am trying to stress is that the design group learn from the production problems to make new parts easier to assemble. If I can't even institute my own lessons learned program how can I get the people at work to do it!