Glorious

Happy Hardy Hibiscus

The hardy hibiscus is putting out daily blooms! It is worth spraying for Thrips to see these glorious huge flowers. I’m still just using a mixture of Neem oil, Peppermint oil, and Castor soap in water, but now spraying twice a week.

Bloom is larger than my hand

I think I can get one more planted in that area. Hm.

Another wrapping option

As the pull skein of yarn sat wrapped up in my Grandma’s blanket, waiting for me to finish the edges, it became quite untidy. Since it will be awhile before I am ready to get back to knitting on this piece, and I will have it laid out and put away several times to measure edges, I decided to rewrap the yarn to keep it neat. A cut and folded paper towel roll works well as a center, and if you run the yarn down the fold, it stays out of the way during wrapping.

Folded paper towel roll cut in half
Rewrapped yarn with working side on the inside of the ball

Here is the link to my short video on wrapping a center-pull ball of yarn, if you need it.

Trail cam update

Hm. The trail cam went unchecked for several weeks again. There were over 6,000 pictures on the SD card. Six-thousand. I usually import the whole reel then delete 95%, but in this case it was better to draw upon the skills of my eagle eyed eldest and sift through the thumb nails to just import photos of interest. I really don’t need 5,900 pics of shadows, grass, and cat tails (not the plant type). I do need a crisp, amazing photo of a gray fox. Nice.

Gray fox trail cam pic

This photo was taken a while ago, as we haven’t seen 71 degrees in weeks. This is about 20 feet from the coop, by the way. I definitely recommend installing hardware cloth around the chicken runs and coop, and buried a foot or more down into the dirt.

Wrapping up some alpaca

I’ve been working through my carded alpaca rolags (although they have unrolled in the basket so are now more like small batts) both with the upcycled wheel and walking with the drop spindle. The charkha-like motion of the converted stationary mini bike means I have to wrap the newly spun yarn into a cone shape on the spindle. To ply, I like to have center-pull balls, so I have to rewrap the yarn.

Transferring alpaca singles yarn from the spindle to a center-pull yarn ball
Wheel spun singles (left) and drop spindle spun singles (right)

I’ll let the balls sit for while, then get to plying. The thicknesses of yarn produced by the two different methods is close enough that I will combine it all together into one skein.

Find them all

Frogs in the melon vines

How many frogs can you find in the melon vine leaves? I play this game each time I pass my container garden, so I thought I’d let y’all have a go too. Below is the same image with the frogs shaded pink, if you’re having trouble.

Three tree frogs, highlighted in pink