Logbook

Well, flight back to NZ is now booked...*
Definite timetabling now.

But yay to airline price wars and both of us over for less than $500. Just about half that fare goes to the "taxes and surcharges", but you get that.

We now have a happy car again (distributor replaced for the 2nd time - Canberra to Brisbane, Brisbane to Canberra, Canberra to Adelaide, Adelaide to Canberra, Canberra to Adelaide, Adelaide to Canberra, Canberra to Adelaide will do that. And given we still want it to last out Adelaide to Canberra and Canberra to Melbourne...)

Z is having fun in the garage making arrows to use up all the shaft wood and feathers he has. He has had fun boiling/steralizing and cleaning feathers and I am sure will give a proper rant over stove fuels at some point soon. And he is also having fun nearly setting the arrowshafts alight with with sandpaper and an electric drill. I'll let him explain that one too...

I have been sewing the caftan (lining done, now on the outside), occasionally blackwork embroidering the chemise and muttering over trying replicating the silver passements from one of the Birka graves**. Can do the knots fine in thick cord (would look gorgeous as military (or pseudo-military) frogging or on late period stuff ), but couldn't get it to work well in the thin wire I had. It may be that the spiral wire originally used acts in a more cord like fashion so would handle better. The knots are really easy though and do look very good in lucet woven cord...

*There is something quite satisfying about the thought of going through customs and being able to tick the returning resident box... Not that being over here has been bad or anything. Lots of fun in various things...

**Fig 5.8, Agnes Geiger "Textile finds from Birka", in Cloth and Clothing in Medieval Europe.

So, yes, back in Canberra 2 1/2 days and what happens? We acquire more fabric (See here).

In any case, 75 m of oilskin. Now thinking and wondering how well oilskin cloaks and especially hoods would do at Festival and other camping events. First of all for us, and depending on the effort to on-sell price ratio, possibly to sell... Gonna need some form of documentation for them and/or it would be good to know the actual historical precident though. Anyone know of info on oilskin and its history?

And in other puchases for the week, finally doing something about music in the car - there are some mighty boring straight bits on the route to Adelaide apparently. So, now have a teeni tiny iRiver MP3 and OGG player (T30 2 Gb for anyone to whom that means something). And a little set of speakers which can run off batteries or mains, and most importantly, a 150W power inverter, so can run the appropriate powered electrical devices off the car battery via the cigarette lighter (which was only used for burn testing fabric anyway). Z has finished hacksawing bits of the dashboard so all this will fit, the player is loaded with music*, so now "all" we need to do is pack the car, have some lunch, head to the Lifeline book fair for something to read along the way, and we will be ready to leave town. This should be about 3pmish...

*Unfortunately the general music division is such that most of Z's music is mp3 etc, which mine is on CDs. I have the stuff which (I think) is better to sing along to, but his is actually in a format we can copy over. Need to remedy this at some point.