Grow Your Blog

Welcome to my blog.

Please visit Vicki for the full list of Grow Your Blog participants.

My name is Kate and I have been blogging on and off since 2009.  I live in Brisbane, Australia. Later this year DH and I will be celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary.  We have 2 children, DS just turned 18 and DD is 13.  DS is starting an engineering degree at uni next month and DD is starting grade 9 next week.

Last year was a bit of an injury prone year for our family and right now I am still recovering from a badly bruised tailbone suffered when I was thrown from a horse during an accident on our New Zealand holiday last month.  (The girth strap broke when my horse shied during an argument with another horse)  I had to ride back as there were a few river crossings on the way, but I swapped horses with the guide.  I took DD on a trail ride as a surprise for her.  My first time on a horse in 20 years!  Here I am just after the accident during the photo stop with DD.

I blog mostly about cross stitch.
Last year was very stressful and my stitching was limited.
DS got quite sick in term 2, and broke his right collarbone and missed most of his assessment in term 3 during his final year at school.   He still got great results and was offered his first preference for uni this year.
I hope to do better with blogging and stitching this year.

I am currently working on Fall Mandala by Ink Circles.

I have some frogging to do on this.  Can you see the difference between the golden brown leaves on the sides and bottom from the top pair?  I ran out of a colour and the new shade is different so I have to pull out the old thread and replace it.  It is bothering me so I need to fix it.  I am using HDF silks.


I usually don't get much stitching done during summer.  We have no air conditioning and I keep saying that because it only gets really bad for a few weeks, it's not worth putting in air conditioning.  This year however seems to be worse than usual.  The humidity has been horrible and I'm not sleeping well.  Last night at 11pm the humidity was 95% and the apparent temperature was 33C.  This morning at 5am the humidity was 95%, apparent temp 31C.  I feel like I'm constantly sweating.  We've had a bit of rain on and off so the mossies are quite vicious outside.  I work from home doing a bit of share trading online so I can't go to air conditioned work to escape like DH.  Still, in another month or so all my friends will be getting $700+ electricity bills and I will be getting $400-$500 credit from our solar panels.  Multiply that by 4 and you can see why I am resisting getting air conditioning.  But, I think it is much easier to deal with the hot weather than the freezing winters that my friends in the northern hemisphere have to cope with.


As a reward for reading all of the above, I am offering a giveaway to be drawn on February 15th.  Just leave a comment stating you wish to be included in the giveaway.  The prize will be a $50 gift voucher to 123Stitch.