Right now you can check out the start of the Out­door Knit fence action on the cnr of Vivian and Bute Streets.

As love­ly as 3 hearts are, that fence is still pret­ty ugly. Fences as a gen­er­al rule are. So in an attempt to make some­thing awe­some out of some­thing that is a big fat waste of land at the moment, Out­door Knit are get­ting their craft on this Sun­day, and every­one is wel­come to join in.
 
Head your­self over to the fence on the cor­ner of Vivian and Bute St in Welling­ton, and join stiX in weav­ing hearts of all sorts of colours into the fence, all the way along the Vivian St side of the fence.

You total­ly don’t need to know how to knit. And Out­door Knit are sup­ply­ing the yarn. All you need is fin­gers.

Check out the event planned for this Sun­day over at Out­door knit.

Trav­el­ing across the world to sold out crowds, it is Wellington’s turn to check out Hand­made Nation!

Hand­made Nation is screen­ing twice at The Para­mount the­atre on Mon­day August 10th. Each screen­ing will fea­ture guest speak­ers, and a spe­cial Craft Show­case of local ven­dors.

Vis­it the Welling­ton Cre­ative Web­site for full details.

In the 2009 Bud­get, the Nation­al Gov­ern­ment announced an 80% cut in the fund­ing pro­vid­ed to schools through­out New Zealand to run night class­es or Adult Com­mu­ni­ty Edu­ca­tion (ACE).

In 2010 all school ACE fund­ing will be replaced with a new approach that rein­vests approx­i­mate­ly 20% of cur­rent school-based ACE fund­ing to re-focussed pri­or­i­ty areas, such as lit­er­a­cy and numer­a­cy. It is like­ly that there will be only a small num­ber of schools receiv­ing ACE fund­ing for 2010 and beyond.

- Bud­get 2009 Fact Sheet [PDF, 42 Kb], avail­able on the TEC Web­site

In essence, this deci­sion will spell the end to over 100 years of night class­es in New Zealand, and some­what unsur­pris­ing­ly the Com­mu­ni­ty Learn­ing Asso­ci­a­tion through Schools organ­i­sa­tion has organ­ised a march tomor­row (Tues­day 4th August) in protest. 

(unre­lat­ed protest pho­to via KiwiFren­zy On Loca­tion)

Join the march against the fund­ing cuts to ACE, leav­ing from Welling­ton High School (from Gate 4 at 249 Tarana­ki Street) at 2.15pm.  March down Tarana­ki Street, along Dixon and Vic­to­ria Streets, through Man­ners Street into Willis Street, down Lambton Quay, and arrive at Par­lia­ment around 3pm.

A few weeks ago, when we went to talk to Snap­per, one of us men­tioned how many peo­ple we see using cards still fas­tid­i­ous­ly wrapped in their orig­i­nal clear plas­tic wrap­ping.

We thought that, just like the plas­tic couch cov­ers your house-proud aunt nev­er ever did remove from her new lounge suite, these wrap­pings need to be torn off, and the card with­in lib­er­at­ed and made per­son­al.

Well, it now turns out that thanks to Craft 2.0, the solu­tion to this prob­lem is at hand. It involves you.

Craft 2.0 are run­ning the Smarten Your Snap­per com­pe­ti­tion. All you need to do is make some sort of nifty cov­er, hold­er, or cosy for your Snap­per card (or Snap­per USB) and enter it into the com­pe­ti­tion for a chance to win a new Snap­per card pre-loaded with $100. In addi­tion, you could win a table at the next Craft2.0 at the Dowse, giv­ing you a place to mar­ket your cre­ation.

Full details are on the Craft 2.0 web­site, togeth­er with a cou­ple of starter ideas.

Get busy: com­pe­ti­tion entries close on Sep­tem­ber 1 August 27!

There was proof today that provin­cial rug­by can still actu­al­ly get puls­es rac­ing: it just requires a giant inflat­able Log o’ Wood and a typ­i­cal Welling­ton day. Some sort of pro­mo­tion was going on in Civic Square, when a cheeky gust did what [insert name of provin­cial team that you actu­al­ly give a mon­key’s about] has always longed to do: grabbed the Ran­furly Shield and whisked it away.

For some rea­son, there were only mod­est crowds to be endan­gered by the maraud­ing tro­phy. Oth­er than a macabre­ly gal­lows-like struc­ture for a “test your pass­ing skills” game, the only vic­tims appear to have been a moth­er and child who were bowled over, and with any luck just momen­tar­i­ly dazed.

Luck­i­ly, there was a smat­ter­ing of oth­er passers-by ready to rush in and help sub­due the quiv­er­ing giant beast. If only the actu­al rug­by were this excit­ing!

Welling­ton’s “ol’ faith­ful” taxi-cab com­pa­ny Com­bined (or Welling­ton Com­bined Taxis to give them their full title) have gone through a bit of a trans­for­ma­tion in the last 12 months or so.

With the arrival on the scene of new “green” play­er Green Cabs (about whom we have writ­ten — and been wit­ness to some con­tro­ver­sy — in the past), I guess they were faced with the choice of adapt­ing, or get added to the bot­tom of the endan­gered species list.

Hap­pi­ly (for them, us, con­sumer choice AND the plan­et that we share) they chose the for­mer.

Read on after the jump to find out what they have been up to..

[EDIT: com­ments were inad­ver­tent­ly dis­abled on this post, but they are now enabled.]

Accord­ing to a sto­ry in the Dom Post today, a Greater Welling­ton region­al coun­cil report up for debate this week sug­gests clos­ing the least-used sta­tions in the region (Muri and Kenepu­ru sta­tions on the Para­pa­rau­mu line).  Coun­cil trans­port and access com­mit­tee chair­man Peter Glen­sor said the coun­cil and KiwiRail would decide ear­ly next year whether to close Muri sta­tion, and would con­sid­er the future of Kenepu­ru.

[Slideshow via hadley­wood’s album of Welling­ton Rail­way Sta­tions]

Appar­ent­ly while pas­sen­gers make about 16,000 trips on the Para­pa­rau­mu line each day, only 26 peo­ple use Muri dur­ing morn­ing peak-trav­el times and 22 use Kenepu­ru.  That’s not a lot, and its easy to under­stand the argu­ment behind ditch­ing them.  How­ev­er, in these times of cli­mate and envi­ron­men­tal con­cerns, it’s hard to get behind the (poten­tial) clo­sures. 

[more after the jump]