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]