the dignity of the dog

a somewhat self-indulgent post, featuring The Dog...also known as Kip the Wonder Dog. brilliant at mustering sheep on the paddock and even better at completely losing her dignity when collapsing into the dog-basket...

fuel for thought

here's some interesting reading for those who have been pondering the plight of the world...peak oil is upon us, they say (click on the link, it's worth it).
thank goodness we've still got a few horses in the paddocks.




unfortunately a return to horse-powered transport is likely to bring back Dickensian conditions for these beautiful animals, as unskilled and thoughtless owners used to going where and when they want (at speed) thrash extra mileage out of them. it's bad enough seeing the tourist carriages in Melbourne being trotted thoughtlessly on hard roads; let alone the ghastly conditions one finds horses in; when wandering in Asian countries. rib-thin horses pulling sulkies at a Palace in Hyderabad come to mind, not to mention those poor Welsh ponies used for racing in Vietnam. depressing thought.

summertime

way back in January (when this blog was first unleashed) i was teaching at the Kapiti Summer School, run by Whitireia Polytechnic. i'm delighted to say i'll be back again in 2009.

not only is Aotearoa one of my favourite places, the region around the summer school campus is blessed with an abundance of flora suitable for botanical alchemy in the dyepot. it's also blessed with beautiful rivers, beaches and woods - with a magical patch of original Nikau forest

and next year will be special indeed, with a day trip to Kapiti Island (pictured above)

more climatic nonsense

Australia's Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was recently quoted as blaming the state of the River Murray and its associated lakes Alexandrina and Albert on climate change.

I'm sorry, but this is arrant nonsense...rainfall in the river catchment area hasn't varied enough to cause the present situation. The root cause of the lack of water in the Murray is GREED. Irrigators are pumping out as much as they can suck while the water is there...meaning not a lot goes downstream. Where's this water going? A lot of it is used to unnecessarily irrigate vines resulting in a glut of cleanskins selling for less than the bottle (that they are contained in) costs. Remember too, that when Australia exports wine a lot of water goes overseas. Water that the driest continent needs to keep at home.

Add to that the complete idiocy of Mike Rann's South Australian Government who happily let 12 Gigalitres of rainwater flow out to sea during a recent bout of precipitation while complaining there isn't enough water in the Murray to supply Adelaide's needs. Twice as much water as Adelaide needs falls on the city every year, but instead of catching it and storing it, the government whines about the Murray and commissions a desalination plant.

warm fuzzies

the farm nursery presently includes a wee calf and several lambs, all being bottle fed for one reason or another. while they share time in the great outdoors some nervousness regarding the calf's health has led to her enjoying nights in front of the kitchen fire, where the Youngest of the Three has been tending (the calf's) every need. what goes in must come out and requires speedy action with a bucket.

every cloud has a silver lining and so the emissions are being saved in a large receptacle (NOT in the kitchen) for the next indigo bath...

unbound

for those of you who were curious to know what emerged from the recent cauldron, here it is.
a little like a rough woollen landscape, which sadly becomes a bit of a mudslide when hung on a dummy. back to the drawing board, i think, and another attempt with a lighter weight cloth...those leprotic-looking circles were supposed to be wee pointy peaks that retained their shape! my suspicion is that this cloth has been treated with 'superwash', a process that while it doesn't inhibit dye take-up certainly plays merry hell with the other attributes of wool, particularly that one of wool remembering the shape it was dried in; vital to creating a sculpted form!

stormy weather

storms can lead to rainbows...and also to windfalls in abundance. a forced trip to the Big Smoke resulted in a fantastic harvest for this dyer (Eucalyptus sideroxylon, a great source of red!)

fire burn and cauldron bubble

today i am treating a rather nice piece of wool with exceptional brutality. it arrived last week, about 3 metres of loosely woven fine blanketish stuff, to be transformed for the 'sculpted packages' exhibition being curated by Denise Sprynskyj and Peter Boyd as a contribution to the 7th World Shibori Symposium being held in Paris, France in November this year

'sculpted packages' is partly sponsored by Australian Wool Innovations through the donation of wool cloth. each of the selected designers has been issued a length, to be transformed using shibori-zome techniques

i began by sewing a garment from my cloth and have used all but a small fragment (about 10 x 30 cm)...that piece was used for the initial dye test

after stitching was complete, the garment looked a bit like this (guess who forgot to take a photograph)



it was bundled with windfalls for a layer of leafprints

and then i spent a day wrapping individual spikes into the fabric, so that the last immersion would fix the shape (rather different to the image above)...right now it's drowning in a boiling cauldron redolent of eucalyptus and wreathed in steamwraiths.



suspect this one will need two trees planted as eco-compensation, rather than the usual one-for-one... i console myself with the thought that the twigs burning in my fire would have generated exactly the same volume of carbon had they been left rotting on the paddock and that the well-meaning eco-nazi burning a stand of pine trees a few miles down the road has probably done more environmental damage in a day than i'm likely to achieve in a lifetime




the wasteland here looks like Isengard after Saruman started his own little industrial revolution.

new heights of idiocy for beaurocracy

whilst in Canberra (our nation's capital) last week various gems of governmental gossip floated past my shell-like ears. the usual response is to chuckle, stifle a yawn and order another Margharita...but the following piece of nonsense is too ridiculous to be ignored

apparently some bright spark who clearly has too much time on their hands has decided that farmers also need extra entertainment. the plan is that we are to weigh all of our stock individually on a quarterly basis, advise the tax office of the total weight and then be taxed on the estimated methane output.

every farmer i've shared this story with so far has given the same response ...'if that's the plan, we'll sell the sheep/cows/chickens/pigs/wildebeests and plant trees instead'...and that's our plan as well

enjoy eating your tree-flavoured cereal in years to come, washed down with soy 'milk' because there won't be any steaks, chops or bacon and certainly no yummy milkshakes

soylent green, here we come...