Doing the morning school drive there were numerous contrails across the blue sky. One contrail was casting a shadow on the wispy cirrus clouds in the distance. It made a striking effect, and I rolled down the window and took a picture while we were stopped at a light.
What a beautiful day to observe a solar eclipse! The temperature here in Texas was in the 60s, and the sky was clear. I made the word “eclipse” by poking holes in black card stock, essentially making a series of pinhole cameras. I held this above a white sheet of card stock to get the images of the moon moving between us and the sun.
We had some wind, so I found the best way to get my pictures was to use a branch to keep the white paper still on our mailbox, and fold the edges of the black paper to keep it rigid. I also snapped some pictures of the shadows of the trees, which made their own “pinholes” between layers of leaves.
Alas, we did not experience totality at our location. The picture above was taken when totality was predicted to occur.
Every year I make bookmarks for my youngest’s teachers. The teachers love them, and my youngest gets enthused about ideas. This time she wanted herself flying through the sky, so we took her picture laying on a bench, and I Photoshopped her onto a sky with fluffy clouds (since she chose to wear her fluffy cloud sky shirt). But what to do for the tassel? I went digging through my stash, looking for white felt, but instead found some poly batting. I could work with that. To make the clouds, I cut out a oblong of batting, then melted the edges with a candle flame to reinforce the edges and make it more cloud-like.
I attached the “clouds” to the bookmarks with a length of pearlized cotton. For this blog, for safety sake, I blurred out her name and face. The bookmarks that went to the teachers were not blurred!
Yesterday my weather app said that we were getting heavy snow. What was falling from the sky is not what I call snow. It made a “tink” noise as it hit the ground and bounced… then stuck. In the morning it looked like we had and inch of snow on the ground, but it was completely solid and could hold weight, no footprints in this accumulation. The National Weather Service describes sleet as frozen raindrops that bounce. The Farmer’s Almanac says sleet is rain mixed with snow. (They also have an article on all the words for snow. Cool.) But none of that adequately describes what was happening here. I think the best term is “ice storm”. I have seen ice accumulation before, but not where the ice layer can be measured in inches. There was a pile of the stuff out our front door that could hold my weight.
I was able to pick up a bit that was on an outside cat hammock, and when I zoomed in I could see the tiny, tiny round ice. No crystals at all.
It did eventually start to snow for real, all on top of that thick, thick ice.
There is benefit in being up when the sun rises, as I was able to take this picture off my back porch. Now time to go make things.
P.S. For those of you looking at the post time in confusion, this photo was taken this past week. I schedule my posts for 2am because it seems the internet traffic is slower at that time and there is more regularity in posting. I tried scheduling for 8am and it sometimes took hours to post. I am an early riser, but not that early.
Critters and Craft 