We have been a bit distracted over the last few days, so no quilting to blog about. We had out-of-town friends drop in, and our oldest brother and his wife are staying with Mereth, and there has been a lot of socialising going on. All good stuff, but nothing for the blog.

On Saturday we went to a local folk fair, and had a scout around for wooly, quilty stuff, but there was nothing that caught my eye. I did admire these camels (they were wooly), who looked superbly disdainful. I guess when you're so tall you have to look down your nose at everything.I bought this agave from a local craftsman; the pot is made from recycled corrugated iron. The pot and the cactus managed to bite me several times, you'd think the ensemble would be glad to go to a good home. Being drought tolerant should help them survive in my backyard.

Then on Sunday it was off to Adelaide to pick up a couple of Ebay finds; more sewing machines. I will put photos up once I have cleaned them up a bit. I like this collecting thing, and I like rescuing old machines that are in danger of being tossed on the scrapheap.

We stayed with Mereth's Firstborn Son, and watched Sweeney Todd that night. Hmmmmm. I can safely say I will never see it again; it was sort of Edward Scissorhands meets Jack the Ripper, with songs from Aladdin. I have no idea what was going through their heads when they decided to make it.

Next morning we ran errands and then took off for home. Now I don't ascribe to that whole 'women can't read maps' rubbish, because both Mereth and I can navigate perfectly well. However, South Australia has the worst road signs of any place I've ever travelled. There just aren't any, most of the time. We have dubbed the area around Gawler 'The Barossa Spiral'; it's like the Bemuda Triangle, but not terminal. If we try to bypass Gawler we get lost, every single time. Not lost in the true sense, because we just keep heading north and we know we'll get home eventually, but we have no idea where where we are in the meantime.

But the scenery is fine, so we don't really mind. We found some lovely little backroads, with fantastic country views, and agreed that we would get 'lost' in that area again. But on purpose this time.There was a fire somewhere, and the drifting smoke made the sunset very atmospheric. It's still rather hot and dry here, we haven't had a lot of rain, so there's no new grass to smother the dust. And we had such a dust storm during the week; this is what my laundry is covered with. It's like someone threw a bucket of dirt over everything. Guess I'll be cleaning up before I get back to sewing...