A mini stroll on the deck early Wednesday

Wednesday morning was cool and bright, and the plants, indoors and out, like it.

Catch the monarch butterfly up there?

Lovely second blossom on the orchid.

Then a walk down to the pond, disturbing frogs 

The rabbit is still there, overtaken by foliage 

Home again to online chair yoga AARP style. 

It went about fifty minutes and I shortened the poses here and there, a bit long for my stamina. She addressed practically every body part! It was pretty good. I modified some of the warrior poses, because of a bit of sciatic tenderness. But Wednesday I definitely got back to moving after no walk Tuesday.

Later afternoon tea and drawing on the deck. 

Curry leaf plant in front of Japanese maple, groundcover.

Happy day, everyone, move it! Or don't. It's your body!

Blessedly cool, drawing and and plying

 Friday morning 

This was lovely, since I was up in the middle of the night trying to get cool and having an early breakfast while I was up.  It cooled off while I slept,  much later than usual, and wondered if I'd missed my walking window. Seemingly not.

So I walked to the pond and saw the first turtles gliding into the water as I got close. Frogs are all splash, scream, swim,  while turtles are slide, leisurely, under water and away. They're the sophisticates of the pond.

 

and home again to the plying process.

 I had made a two ply yarn from the singles you saw earlier, blending a green wool with the silvery sparkle yarn. 

More plying is planned because I have quite a few singles and I can make a warm two-ply from them, so I'll have a good supply for probably warm socks. So many ideas, so little time.

I needed to set up the plying better, because I was getting the yarns tangled. I can do this easily using yogurt containers.  It's better than my usual Ready!  Fire! Aim!  approach. Of course there are beautiful craftmade plying thingies, but sometimes cheapo diy does it.

So here's the set-up. Yogurt containers with a hole punched in the lid for the yarn. The tp holders of spun yarn fit inside, one per container. This way they can't tangle. Then the two threads are fed through the lid and attached to the spindle. Then they're  spun the opposite way from the original spinning. This is how you set up the ply. Then I made the plied yarn into balls ready to use. 

There's a sexist name for this plying setup when it's a fancy tool, so I'm replacing it. 

This is a brainy Kate. Just sayin.

Ply is an interesting word, from the Latin for fold. Seen in plying yarn, making plywood where the folding is lamination, and other meanings. Complicated is an offshoot, and you can see why, layers of meaning or activity.  It's an economical word, containing many meanings in one syllable.

And some drawing happened again. Cool enough to sit outside with a cup of tea and peacefully draw the hibiscus. Just as a point of interest, there are different meanings around drawing and sketching. 

In my usage, a sketch is a preliminary form of notetaking, not the final artwork. A drawing is the freestanding artwork, not a preparation for anything else. So I'm drawing here, not sketching. 

I do sketch ideas for things I'll make, because they're the preliminary ideas for something yet to happen.  None of this is a big deal, just a thought. 

A neighbor who's been away came to visit and make sure all's as well as it can be at this point. This is a nice neighborhood. I gave him a bunch of sage to take home.

Happy day everyone, enjoy what you can.

A new bouquet, a survey and Misfits

 New pickings today for a bouquet 

With an ink drawing suggested by it

The patio at this season is different every day 

Wednesday brought the last online survey from my hip surgeon.  It paid attention to pain and activity, where my answers ranged from none, pain, that is, to everything I want, activity, that is. 

I expect he'll be happy with my recovery. It's three months now, then my final follow up visit is in a couple of weeks. At this point I'm used to being unaware of any need for special care. Happy days.

Thursday was Misfits delivery day,  and they tell me they can't supply the peaches I ordered, but oh well. Everything else  arrived. 

Apples because they're the daily snack, strawberries and blueberries for desserts, cherries for afternoon snacks, tofu for crisp tofu katsu, yogurt, vital, bread because it's too hot to bake, shrimp for salad maybe, feta crumbles, two healthy sparkling drinks.

Easy food prep is on the menu in the heat and humidity.

Lovely colors of summer.

Thursday afternoon was about staying in the cool, reading 

New to me but starting out very promising 

Then I needed to set up an audiobook to spin by. 

I'd found a fine roving in my collection, with a bit of sparkle, which I used to spin some laceweight yarn. My hands needed a change from other fiber arts, different movements. This is a good regency,  full of comic scenes.

Happy day everyone, let's hope for some cool.  I did get a good walk early before it got too hot.

Late breaking: the insurer called, have approved the claim for the house repair, and will inform the contractor, so we can get on with scheduling the work. It feels like several years since this started. So this is good.

Still hot at 10pm

Garlic, mystery trees, Textiles and Tea, and Larry

The garlic I planted outside is pushing up scapes, now that the indoor pot is done

Gary planted these, maybe peppers, outside the fence among the daylilies. I like a combo of food and flowers, too.

And the tree that was planted on the street to replace the dead maple needs a blogista to identify, please. I feel I should know it, but can't find it in my tree books. 

Pictures to show size against houses, foliage, bark. The leaves are purplish like my Japanese maple, but the leaves are not maple. The trunk looks like a cherry to me. No blossom. 

Any help gladly accepted by neighbor Karen and me.

But the tree books did come in handy as models for a few minutes of drawing 

Yesterday's Textiles and Tea featured Sarah Saulson, a weaver largely of commissioned Jewish prayer shawls , observing the ritual rules of the two thousand year tradition, while applying her own inventive design

She also creates other woven artworks such as these three pieces, retirement gifts for three physicists, each noting their key work in the field, using graphs from papers they'd written.

And garments like these

Where she paints the warp with dyes

She's also active with weavers in Ghana, Guatemala and India in the WARP (Weave a Real Piece) project where artists from different cultures and traditions work together. 

Here she's showing the strip weaving work of Guatemalan women, in their case to be worked on a backstrap loom

In the course of searching for the tree books, I came across an old book of Larry cartoons, had to share a few favorites

Happy day everyone. Yesterday a brave New Jersey lady testified in the January 6 hearings. Cassidy Hutchinson is from Pennington, a skip up the road from here. 

NJ sends many stars, Queen Latifa, Bruce, Bon Giovi, and writers, Joyce Carol Oates, John MsFee, sports stars, politicians, Booker, Katzenbach (stood up to Nixon) loads of great folks. Alas we also own Christie and Alito, further down the animal kingdom. 

But Cassidy may prove to be the greatest mover and shaker of all, if she brings down TFG. Let's hope.