I've had a camera malfunction and lost some photos, so I only have these photos from Newport. When I mentioned to Liz that I had a thing for teapots, she took me to a great little exhibition of them at the Newport Museum. 
I liked the rows of terraced houses, particularly running up the hills.
I'm now in the Isle of Man recovering from the bad cold I picked up on the plane. It's lovely here, and I'm staying with Loulee and her Kiwi husband. More photos as they come to hand.
Here's a random handful of photos from the past 3 days. Above is Changi Airport in Singapore- a lovely place, beautifully planted.
Me on the Thames Embankment. It was pretty cold in London.
Me posing with a long-suffering Household Guard - he has to stand there impassively while cheeky tourists take liberties like this. Note my dyed green pants - that's Prochem's Avocado for the dyers amongst you.
The Great Hall of the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. That's a dinosaur skeleton down below in the middle of the photo.
I have a large plant of this, but it's not in the sun so it isn't flowering as well as these cuttings. It's such a pleasure to have flowers around where I work. 
This is also a cutting, just a small plant that's flowering for the first time. I have a soft spot for Zygocactus which are also known as Orchid Cactus because of their lovely intricate flowers. See the little bit under the pollen (that's a technical term, people)- it's an amzingly bright fuchsia colour.
It's the middle of April. We've already had a couple of mild frosts. But because NZ had the coldest spring for over 60 years, the tomatoes are actually cropping their best now, though they are small to medium sized at best. 
Firstly, I've been doing lots of knitting, and yesterday I handpainted some wool. This red skein is for a scarf for my friend Bronwen's birthday, as she loves scarves.
And for me...something quite and subdued and neutral.......just kidding! This is a crappy photo, but it's a mixture of Hot Pink and National Blue, and I will make it into a scarf that I can wear with the 2 overtops I have in those colours. 
I also found a pattern for making fingerless gloves on 2 needles - great for knitters like me who don't like using double pointeds. The colours are a bit washed out in the bright sun, but they are green, orange and purple, with some added black in the ribbing. Much nicer in real life than in the photo.
No danger of extinction here - there is still plenty more upstairs.
And here is the earlier 5 colour piece. Now this, I hasten to assure you, was not done to be used in the piece. Indeed, it's quite ugly when you see it this way. However, it will look a lot better when I've dissected it and stitched it up again.
What does a woman think about at 6am on a Sunday morning? Why, 5 colour dyeing, of course. Here's 2 metres of fabric, soaked in soda ash and laid out across 5 trays.
Turkey red, marine violet, brilliant blue, emerald green and mustard.
The green and blue end....
..yellow in the middle, then red and purple.
"The paparazzi are such a bore" says Frodo. Cressy pays no attention.
It's atumn, and the garden has flush of flowers before the cold weather sets in. 
The roses are looking good. So are the weeds, but I carefully didn't photograph them.
Yesterday I bought this hand spun mix of suri alpaca (the rare kind), tencel and merino with a nylon binder. These were quite pricey, considering there are only 4 skeins of 50 grams each. I wanted to make something special with it, so settled on a cowl.
As half the skeins have the red and half don't, I alternated rows with one skein if each. This is the cowl at the ned of 2 skeins - the yarn has gone further than I thought. This is done in garter stitch (1 row plain, 1 row purl)and the cowl is currently 16cm wide (just over 6 inches).
Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! The critters chez Shirley don't know it yet, but I'm planning to run away. For a while, anyway. Seven won't mind too much - she's an odd cat....
...but the twins will, so I'm trying to find them a congenial housesitter. Plans are afoot...
Meanwhile, here's an early autumn sunrise that started some dodgy weather. 
As a dyer, I'm a colour person - I love colour. However, that doesn't mean that I can't appreciate white. Above are my white agapanthus - I also have the more usual "blue" ones.
The very annoying (but pretty) convolvulus, that goes crazy here in summer....
Japanese anemones ....
..tuberous begonias..
...I've totally forgotten what these big lilies are called...it'll come back to me. They have to grow in pots here. The flowers are a good 6" across.
And of course....white poodles. Here's Cressy enjoying the early morning sun. And in case you're wondering, I've never been tempted to colour the dogs. Poodles have to put up with a lot of stupid tinkering by people, so why insult them further? They're a wonderful breed of dog.
OK, designer it ain't - but it DID only take 20 minutes to run up. It's just a double layer of fabric with pellon inside, and it even has an internal pocket.
Okay, this is what I ended up doing with my burgundy shibori. I selected the best 15" square from each fat quarter, and sewed them together (tha bit is fine). Then I dyed some green fabric in a shade (Leaf Green) that was the opposite to Burgundy on the colour wheel. That's also fine. I wanted to give the quilt some zing, seeing as it was so monochromatic.
Of course, I had to some more shibori today. I liked the effect of folding fabric into triangles so I did this with the surplus dye from the top (see below). I put Turquoise on the triangle tips, and faux Indigo on the rest of it. 
Here's the result which I really like. Now I have to think what to do with it.....
The main project was to dye a plain white cotton tunic-type top. Here it is all bound up - I tied the sleeves first, with little puff-balls on the shoulders; then the yoke which is tied with soft stretchy cotton tape. Then I ironed accordion pleats on the body, and rolled them up.
In the dye, it looks like some horrible alien insect!
..but I really love the end result! This is the back.
I enjoyed doing the burgundy shibori so much that I did a couple more half-metre pieces in the evening, in ProChem's Blue Violet, which has lovely pinkish undertones. The piece on the left was accordian folded along the short side, then spiralled; while the one on the right was accorian folded along the long edge, with the pleats changing direction in the middle and creating the pretty webbed area - you may need to ckick on the photos to enlarge them to see this more clearly.
And here they are. Numbers 1, 2 and 3 above....
..4, 5 and 6 ...
..7, 8 and 9....
..10, 11, 12. 
I am finding my present job sucks out my energy and shrivels my soul. Today, despite the call of the garden and other "shoulds", I decided to nourish my spirit and do some shibori. I tore 3 metres (yards) of fabric into a dozen fat quarters, and soaked 6 of them in warm soda ash (dye fixative) while I folded and tied the other 6. I have numbered all the pieces, and made notes so I can compare the results. 
The designs were all out of my head - I wasn't following patterns in a book. This was quite a complicated one that i dubbed "The Scorpion". First, I tied knots around 3 small peach stones. Then I folded and tied the rest of the fabric. It came out looking like this:
Below are the 6 dry pieces after folding and tieing. Then I removed the wet fabric from the soda ash and put the tied pieces in the bucket to soak while I worked on the wet pieces. 
See the numbers attached by safety pins?
Here are the wet pieces. All 12 are different. I've just poured burgundy dye on, and I'll wait a couple of hours for it to batch before I remove all the tied bundles, untie them, rinse and then wash them. 
