Come in spinner!
I think a two-up term is in keeping for the day after Anzac Day — we had the gear ready to go for a rowdy game of two-up at the Bondi yesterday, but somehow it never got played!
Anyway, I'm using the term loosely to show off my yarn, though I only dyed it, I didn't spin it. (It's a long stretch, I know.)
I followed the instructions on Suse's excellent blog, Pea Soup, the exact post of which you can find here. Only my efforts were not nearly so neat, orderly and well-executed as Suse's. Nor were my colours so artfully combined and tasteful! I soaked my wool in the vinegar, and laid it all out on the dining table, and got stuck into the colours. You use those little pointy-capped bottles of food colouring that we used to put in the bath water for the kids when they were little, or to colour cake-icing and Easter eggs.
I was going for a bluesy look (as you can tell!), so I'd mixed teal blue and two lovely purples to go with the blues that came in the packets. I had two packets of ordinary colours, and one of startling neon colours, which had a hot pink and turquoise, which I thought would go quite nicely.
Initially, I used paintbrushes to put the colour where I wanted, but in the end I was having so much fun and listening to some great music, so I resorted to chucking.
And I was so excited and caught up in the whole fabulous process that when I'd used all the colours in my scheme, I couldn't stop. Didn't want to. I frantically went back to the packets I'd opened and rounded up all the unused vials of reds, greens and yellows.
The result is, well, a dog's breakfast ...And my skeins came undone, so I had the mother of all tangles to deal with.
But in a funny sort of way, the colours work, I think, and they are sort of growing on me. So I may just knit the whole mess up into a scarf or something. And I'm absolutely hooked, and now that I've gone berserk and had my fling, I shall approach the whole process with more panache and maturity! Thanks, Suse!

:: I just drove Will to meet up with friends at Encinitas beach, having made him promise he'd not go swimming in the sea!
Yesterday morning, we had a tragic and dreadful shark attack at Solana Beach, just north of the dog beach at Del Mar, the first fatal shark attack in San Diego County for half a century. It has eery similarities to the fatality at Cottesloe (popular metropolitan beach in Perth, Western Australia) seven years ago: same feeling of a tragedy completely out of the blue, same time of day and time of year (spring), same sort of shark, same sort of guy ... spooky.
It was very strange all along the coast this morning. We have a warm, sunny weekend forecast, with highs of 29 and 30C, so people have flocked to the beach — but very few of them have ventured into the ocean. No surprise!