It turns out I can make one of these in half a day. Hooray! It’s the Umbilical Cord Hat from the first Stitch ‘n Bitch book, with 8 extra stitches and as such, an extra lot of decreases to make up for the thinner yarn and smaller needles. Rav details here. I hope it’s still cold enough in China for a tiny new babby to wear a lovely wool hat.

It is getting colder here. And when I was choosing a yarn to knit the hat with, I found two bags of ‘Summer’ wool/silk roving from the Melbourne Handweavers and Spinners Guild in my stash. What better time to start spinning it than just after summer’s end, on the weekend of constant storming when we get hailstones the size of golfballs?

I also received some other lovely presents and many well-wishes from here, there and everywhere. Many, many thanks to everyone. I also had a very lovely party; thank goodness it was last weekend…

I’ve once again entered the weird and wonderful world of podcasting. I must say, it’s a helluva lot easier and more enjoyable with a bunch of other (enormously fun) people in the room.

This one’s all about our fair Melbourne town. Check it out — Macabre Melbourne.

Rabbit and the Moon from Leonie Connellan on Vimeo.

Rabbit and the Moon was made in the second semester of 2007 with a combination of lithograph/linocut printed paper cutouts, before I’d discovered the wonders of using a multi-plane unit. It tells the celestial myth of how the rabbit came to live in the moon.

Special thanks to Vetti for the narration and Mr Crumpet for the music and sound.

(Drawing by Mr Crumpet, on Gizo’s whiteboard. I love it.)

(Edited to add, I stole the drawing and put it on Flickr because Twitpic was being an absolute shit in letting me share the original properly.)

With a few days to go before it all has to be handed in ready for the screening, Mr Crumpet has pretty much finished up the score for my stop-motion animation! Go and listen here.

So, a blog post of photos.

I made a thing.

And with a little trickery and magic…

I turned it into another thing.

Of course, it’s the famous Baby Surprise Jacket by Elizabeth Zimmermann. My first. Rav details here. I’m still stunned by it’s ingeniousness. It was for Lola, who I still haven’t met in person yet. But Gizo, I forgot to tell you that it’s a hand wash only item. Hopefully it is not a tiny surprise jacket yet.

On Monday night, Mr C and I sat down to watch Talk To Her, a Pedro Almodóvar film that we’ve been waiting for from Quickflix for months. Whomever had it on loan finally decided to return it… we were starting to believe it would never arrive.

Both of us loved it, and it had many wonderful moments, but one of my favourites was a small one. A nurse answers a phone at one point with “Hola Lola!” (I won’t say what she said following that, but it was pretty funny…) We’ve both been walking around the house since then shouting, “Hola Lola!” repeatedly.

So imagine my delight when we received an email last night from Gizo with the news that we knew was coming, but the details that we didn’t. Yesterday, the second day of spring, Kymbo gave birth to a healthy baby girl… named Lola! Congratulations!

Hola Lola!

I’d better get cracking on your surprise.