Pleasure craft

OMG I have so much bike porn for you! But first, my day of craft. This afternoon was, of course, the Stitch A Ride workshop. It all happened in Fraser Studios, a fantastic space tucked in a laneway behind the Clare, a stone's throw from UTS and Railway Square. The street also features some awesome graf and a tiny food co-op, and it seems like there would always be something interesting going on there.

It was a motley crew of craft enthusiasts gathered around sewing machines and cutting tables... let loose with scissors and pins and thread. But the Spoke & Spool girls were incredibly helpful, and irrepressibly enthusiastic. The idea was that you brought in old clothes to be deconstructed and then reconstructed into bike-friendly apparel.

A full-skirted dress could be turned into a cool onesie. One lass made riding gloves from a pair of socks. Or, in my case, a $5 pair of old man trousers could be converted into LEDERHOSEN. Yes, they may have been called overalls the last time I wore them (year 7), but today they sound much more exotic. After a few false starts my LEDERHOSEN (sorry to keep shouting with caps, but I love this word) began to take shape. One cut-off leg became the front bib, the other became a pocket. The front piece buttons inside the waistband, and I used reflective strips for the straps - fully removable, they button on and off at the front and back.


The whole thing was just inspiring in the sense that there are young people out there who aren't driven by consumption, but rather the opposite. Boys and girls making old things into new things, and delighting in the kinds of skills our generation so rarely use - sewing, mending, thrifting...

The Spoke & Spool ladies had thought of everything. There were baked treats and cups of tea, buckets of buttons like nanna used to have, and all manner of goodies to enhance our bikewear: reflective strips for visibility, leather patches to reinforce knees and crotches. I couldn't resist a hankerchief-sized map of Sydney's bike paths - super cute to sew into a pocket, and you can even embroider your routes onto it to customise.

The fruits of my labours:
Yes, that's a pocket big enough for a collection of maps, a modestly sized paperback book, or even a small kitten. Really - pockets should always be sized with pets in mind. The only potential issue here is that LEDERHOSEN have not traditionally featured strongly in my wardrobe. IE, not at all. But who knows? Perhaps looking like a reflective, overgrown Von Trapp child on a bicycle is that indefinable thing my life has been missing thus far?

The fairest of the seasons

The unmistakeable scent of this week's flowers has had me skipping down memory lane all afternoon.

Jonquils smell like childhood winters… running around in cold clover, rosy red noses and chilly toes. The appearance of white and yellow jonquils would always mark the changing of the seasons. Every year mum would help us plant the bulbs, and when they finally sprouted and flowered we were ecstatic.

It was like our own version of The Secret Garden, which was one of the decadently girly books (see also: The Little Princess) mum would read to us in serialised form each day of the school holidays. We’d lie in a sunny patch out on the lawn, on a blanket, and she’d read to us about exotic things like daffodils and crotchety old gardeners, and crushworthy boys like Dicken who'd tame squirrels and teach you stuff about nature.

Around this time of year, when there’s a certain kind of clear chill in the air, I often feel homesick for the George and specifically the wood stove in mum and dad’s kitchen. In winter months all the activity of the house moves to the kitchen to bask in its warmth, and there’s always a pot of soup or stew bubbling away. Dad makes the world's best toast on the stove, with a toasting fork he improvised from fencing wire…

And while summer weekends always hummed with the lawn-mower dad would push around shirtless, winter weekends sounded like rugby league on the radio and the crack of the axe in the wood-heap. One of our favourite games was when Dad would drag us around the lawn in an old wool pack he used to collect fallen leaves and grass clippings. Wish I could run across the lawn and up the front steps and warm my toes at that stove right now....

Happy birthday dad!

Stitch n bitch

Just a quickie - any bike lovers in the Sydney area might be interested in this fantastic workshop Spoke + Spool are putting on tomorrow (Saturday).

"Stitch A Ride" is the name of the game - rock up to Fraser Studio, 10-14 Kensington St, Chippendale from 1-5pm with your steed and some old clothes, and they'll provide sewing machines and the know-how to knock up some bitchin treadly threads. Which, for example, include reflective cuffs and "map pockets". SOLD. Afterwards there are drinks at the Clare hotel. And it's all free!

Getting there:


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Craft, bikes and beer - not a bad way to spend a lazy Saturday arvo! See you there?

Souled out

Bleak days never seem to come in isolation; they feed on one another. Procrastinating things to panic levels, letting things slip through the cracks. Promising yourself the next morning you'll be up early to make the fresh start that's all you need to turn everything around and make it perfect; then hitting snooze and conceding defeat before you're even conscious. Weeks like this when professional disaster looms - and I know 24 hours from now it will be over, it will be ok. But it won't be spectacular, it might not even be good. There are days I barely recognise this person. Is it worse to feel too much or nothing at all?

There's a neat little scene in High Fidelity, Nick Hornby's study of Rob, a record store-owning manchild who ranks his break-ups like pop charts. He's moping in the store, fabulously named "Championship Vinyl", when a woman comes in and asks "have you got any soul?", and he thinks:

That depends, some days yes, some days no. A few days ago I was right out; now I've got loads, too much, more than I can handle. I wish I could spread it a bit more evenly ... I can see she wouldn't be impressed with my internal stock control problems though, so I simply point to where I keep the soul I have, right by the exit, just next to the blues.

This was going to be a fun post about Spoon and Cold War Kids, two totally white, hipster bands who nonetheless slay me with the soul in their tunes. But I guess til I get my own internal stock control problems sorted, I gotta lean on their lean, sparsely made songs, with spare keys and a crack in the throat, to get my soul fix(ed).

Mum's the word

So I was very slack with posting on the weekend, caught up in a whirlwind weekend visit from my Dad and my little sister. In typical Fletcher family iconoclastic form, we managed to get everyone except mum together on Mothers Day. We did call her! But I was thinking about this, after reading some great columns by Sam de Brito and even Marieke Hardy in the Sunday papers, singing the praises of mums and all they sacrifice... And it's such a mum thing to do, to pack off your husband and book plane tickets so that the rest of your family can spend a weekend together like they haven't for years. To put yourself last of all, while making sure the people you love are happy.

My mum and I are close, so we know each others quirks and we know how to drive each other crazy with consummate skill. So while no one can rile me up quite like her, she's also the only person I want to talk to when things are looking bleak. I have learned so much from her about strength and grace - she is fiercely loyal, fiercely protective and fiercely resilient. She is full of suprises - openminded, generous with hard-won wisdom, and can pull out a jaw-dropping one-liner when you least expect it. She taught me the value and power of words and books and education; of decency and hard work. She's my mum and she's tops!

Beerfest

In the last few years, my dad's discovered a passion for boutique beers... Not the easiest obsession to indulge from our rather isolated home town. So when he and my sister visited Sydney over the weekend, beer was high on the agenda. On Saturday we had a lazy couple of hours at the Red Oak microbrewery and beer cafe in Clarence Street. Dad had tried a few of the brews before, but said tasting them off the tap was completely different. My sister later made the fitting analogy that Dad's sudden, all-consuming love for all things Red Oak was like he'd discovered girls a few years ago but suddenly met "the one".

Anyway, Red Oak not only had great beer, but fantastic food. We ordered three different tasting plates - themed around meat, seafood and cheese - each of which matched four beers with four canapes. The three of us together, dividing tiny portions on tiny plates into thirds and delicately sipping from tiny glasses, our legs swinging from high bar stools - the whole thing felt oddly reminiscent of the tea parties we used to have when we were little!

The sommelier blatantly loved his job and really knew his shit - we talked beer philosophy, beer physics, beer chemistry. Dad mentioned off-hand that he'd love to run a little speakeasy beer cafe back home, boutique drops and tasty food... within half an hour we'd named the joint, designed the fit-out and concocted a guerrilla marketing plan. Watch this space... unless you're with liquor licensing, in which case, this blog post never happened.

We also spent Sunday night at The Local in Flinders Street, sipping pints amid the overstuffed leather armchairs and retro light fittings. They put on a pork roast so good we had the barman interrogate the chef about how they'd made the gravy....

Manly pursuits

It was a golden late afternoon at Manly wharf on Saturday...
...Not quite warm enough for a dip though...

There are buildings with some beautiful old facades down near the beach...
Spotted: this ripper old dragster on the promenade...
... St George players warming up before taking on the Manly Sea Eagles...

Brookvale Oval, home to the Sea Eagles, is my favourite NRL ground. Aside from how fun it is to get there, passing all the most famous views of Sydney Harbour on a chugging ferry, it's also a really small ground and one of the few that still has a grass hill rather than wall to wall grandstands. Consider: a sell-out crowd, like Saturday night's top-of-the-table clash between the Eagles and the St George Dragons, comprised about 16,000 people.

We got to the ground so early we scored front row seats in the bleachers. It gave us a fantastic view of the game, and put us right in the middle of the game's atmosphere - both on the field and in terms of bogan crowd behaviour. A contingent of Dragons fans were encamped behind us on the hill, singing "When The Saints Come Marching In" and heckling the diehard Manly fans. Both the Dragons and Manly fans were up in arms about the quality of the refereeing - both adamant that the umpire was biased against their team. "He's been doing it all day, ref!" was the cry that rang out over and over. Despite the enthusiasm for these fat guys next to us (they were particularly impressed with the Manly cheerleaders, the "sea birds"), the most intense fan was a tubby old lady with owl-like round glasses, who seemed hell bent on provoking a physical altercation with someone, anyone....

At the end of the game, they sounded a siren to let the crowd know they could run onto the field. Suddenly kids appeared from every angle, leaping over the fences, playfighting and attempting to steal the various padded promotional signs. I looked away for a minute and my dad had calmly wandered down into the fray, and told me later on the bus home that he couldn't wait to tell the folks back in the George that he'd stood on Brookvale!