World Rural Women's Day.

To celebrate World Rural Women's Day today, Bren and I spent the day at a festival in the grounds of an estate in Smeaton which is about 20 minutes from here.

There were lots of talks about issues facing rural women, and about women in agriculture, and a talk about 'wonderful organic women', WOWS (I thinkI need a t'shirt). There was also a farmers' market where we sold eggs.

The highlight for me was meeting a woman who was spinning some wool that she had dyed using eucalyptus leaves she'd picked on her neighbouring property.

She was just learning and experimenting with all different types of natural dyes and mordants and had skeins and skeins of wool labelled with the fruit/seed/leaf/bark/berry that she had used to dye them with.

Unfortunately for me she wasn't selling her wool because she said she was too attached to it and was so excited by looking at it all together to separate it.

She was really generous with her information though and took my address to post me some photocopies of different dying techniques and different mordant/natural dye combinations.

Here she is with her copper dying with eucalyptus leaves that apparently don't need a mordant at all. That orange jumper was knitted from wool dyed with these same leaves.

Of course there were also some of our woolly friends on display too.

We had to leave early to pick the girls up from school but just before we left Bren heard his name being called for the raffle. Imagine his surprise to have won this lovely work of art. The potato farmer next to us thought it might be the patron saint of chookies.

So happy World Rural Women's Day to you all.

And happy Melbourne Cup Day if you live around here.

Bye now. X