Christmas Eve

The weather was perfect today - not hot, not cold, not windy, not anything negative. I was finally inspired to go out to our new glasshouse and dig out some of the dyeing equipment. I soaked some of my silk in an alum solution.  It has boiled for an hour and is being left for a time. As it is Christmas day tomorrow, I may not get around to doing the dyeing part, I will see. The recommendation is to leave it overnight, at least. Last year I inadvertently left some of the fabric for over a week but later found out that that is a recommended practice. I don't think I will last that long this year though.
The hollyhocks are in wonderful bloom. I have been keeping some out of the freezer, letting them get all dry and crumbly. I hope they work as well as last year.
Then I decided to take some more pictures of the flowers, trying some of the settings on my camera. It takes quite good images on the automatic setting but I decided to play around with the settings today, to see if I can remember how to do certain things, and to see if I could get some special effects. Some of the photos turned out ok.

Playing around with the settings, not that successfully.

After dinner we decided that we should take the dog out - it had got too hot for her in the afternoon and we had been busy in the morning. Off we went to Yarra Bend Park. We didn't get there till almost 9.00 and the sun was about to set.
Lo and behold (very appropriate for Christmas) a huge stream of fruit bats/flying foxes were just leaving to go foraging in the night. There were thousands of them!!
I took some more photos. It was quite dark by then and I couldn't see the camera that well, so the playing around with settings wasn't fully successful. But it was a wonderful sight and a lovely night for a walk.