Rain and devastation

Firstly thank you so much for all the emails received from the wonderful people who were concerned, and wanted to make sure we were ok. I also received lots of phone calls from friends to check up on us. It's heart warming to know that we are in the thoughts of so many people. We are fine. It's not even remotely bad here compared to the rest of Queensland.


I started this post on Monday ready for Tuesday Tidbits.  I went to bed on Monday night oblivious to the terrible devastation to lives and property in the Lockyer Valley and Toowoomba west of Brisbane. I woke up yesterday morning  to see the absolutely terrible disaster and horrendous situation these people had to endure. After the initial disbelief of what happened there I spent the rest of the day yesterday quite teary as I have friends whose family live in Toowoomba and then seeing the flooding that happened between here and Brisbane, another place where people I know live, it was all just a bit too much.
Fortunately everyone I know and their friends and family are all safe.


I am sure you have all seen on TV the footage of all the damage. It now means that 75% of the state of Queensland has now been affected by flooding.  To put it into perspective, Queensland is twice the size of Texas, and the state covers a quarter of the Australian land mass. 
Our area is now cut off to the north where the nearest major town, Gympie has been inundated and is suffering from mjor flooding and will be so for the next few days. South of us between Brisbane and here on the Sunshine Coast the roads have been cut. Hopefully in that area the water will drop more quickly and today the roads will be accessible. 
My heart goes out to all the people who will be affected by the flooding in Ipswich and Brisbane over the next few days, there are so many people in this state whose lives have been changed forever by this devastation. The floods in Brisbane will be just as bad as they were in 1974, and possibly worse. We are all hoping that it will only be as bad as 1974. The severe weather system is now affecting northern New South Wales , so there will be major flooding there as well in the next few days.


In my little part of the world, I live on acreage and rely on rainwater for my water supply and I am always acutely aware of the rainfall here. I'm also a bit of a weather geek, ask any of my friends. I have two rain gauges, one electronic and one normal manual one that I check regularly. I can only tell you about how much rain I have had and hopefully it will give you an understanding of why the flooding is so bad in the rest of SE Queensland. Since the 1st of January we have had 774 mm of rain that is 30 inches in just 11 days.  In December we had 675 mm of rain, 26 1/2 inches so in just over 40 days we have had, at my house, 1449 mm or approx. 57 inches of rain. That is only at my house, some places have not had quite so much some have had so much more. If you imagine having that much water pouring on to your land day after day after day, onto earth that is already completely saturated you can begin to understand why this flooding has occurred. It is hopefully a once in a lifetime occurrence, a freak of nature. we have been so very very lucky here, the rain has been an inconvenience, blocking roads, making daily living a little more difficult. The rest of Queensland has been affected in a much greater way.


I found out last night about Toni's blog Make It Perfect. Toni is organising an online auction to raise funds for the  Premier's Flood Relief Appeal. I am not sure whether I will have anything ready to auction by Friday but I will definitely be doing what ever I can to help add to the fund. So if you can add the button to your blog to let as many people know about it. The more people that know, the more money can be raised.


Now on to a lighter note.


Fortunately for me it stopped raining long enough on Monday for the postman to deliver some more of my purchases.  Yes more and there will be more soon! I'm still waiting on most of the yardage I bought before the end of the year. Look one bright piece in amongst MORE soft-hued purchases!

 These were extras for this pattern:

This also arrived in the mail, I have been looking at Emily's work for some time and finally decided to purchase her book.  It has some great quilts and ideas that I would like to try.....eventually.

I'm relatively new to quilting so at the moment I  would rather follow a pattern which I can make my own mark on by changing it a little bit to be more individual. I don't feel I have enough confidence to just go ahead and make something with out some form of pattern to follow. I'm hoping that one day soon I will feel more confident in having a go at designing my own quilts.

During all the rain it would have been a perfect opportunity to do masses of quilting but I was too worried that we were going to slide down the hill, and had to go and clean out gutters, dig trenches etc, to concentrate for more than a few minutes.  

I started on this instead, I'm enjoying the rhythm of crocheting and it was peaceful and calming for short bursts in between the frenetic activity.  This was my second attempt at this, so I haven't got very far, as I am adapting a pattern, thanks to an idea I found on flickr. If it works I will link the flickr photo next time. I don't want to link if it looks like crap when I've finished.

It's another of those things that looks absolutely fabulous in my head but I'm not so sure about at this stage. Part of the problem with this, as although I'm buying out the universe's supply of quilting fabric I don't want to buy any more yarn until I use some of what is in my stash, and I don't quite have the colours I originally wanted to use. These are close, so I'll keep on with it and see how it progresses.

Before the massive amount of rain I finished sewing 100 of these squares together, still need  to finish another 100.

The grand total for Sunday's rain was 273mm which is just a bit under 11 inches. Thanks for all the great suggestions after Sunday's post, I especially loved Rachael's offer to get George Clooney to come and save me.