Update on the lily blossoms

Hello, everyone.

This is a brief update on the lily pot that was shown in the last post. It has bloomed a lot more!

They smell nice, too.

The white-bordered leaves below the lily are variegated Cuban oregano. It propagates from stem cuttings but leaf cuttings don't seem to take well.

Flower season in South Texas

Hello, everyone.

Ordinarily with a title like that, y'all might be expecting wildflower pictures from a road trip. Sadly, not this month. But! I have flowers in the yard that I am delighted to put up.

 This was last year's Easter lily bulb, which lived over summer, making beautiful buds about a week ago.

Today it commenced to open flowers! By late afternoon it had this one fully open.

And this beauty is one of the day lilies that was brought over from the old house. She's an evergreen variety and these flowers are reliable, even though they're not all summer long. Where we live many of the famous, trendy day lilies don't do well because they're deciduous--that is, they love their leaves and go fully dormant in the fall. We don't have the cold weather for that. I actually crawled all over the web finding some evergreen daylilies to plant.

There are also some hold over Asiatic lily bulbs, which look mostly like white ones, but their fat buds are not ready to open yet.

Soon!

Catching up on things

Hello, everyone.

We were supposed to be walking on the Via de la Plata in Spain now. Instead, we comfort ourselves with memories of prior Camino walks and Spanish foods. Not tortilla this time! We had tapas for dinner last night: made barra bread on Friday, sliced it thin on Saturday and half of the slices got a piece of manchego cheese and a piece of prosciutto (no serrano ham available at the grocery store these days) on top. The other half of the slices got a new-to-us recipe for topping:

Sliced "Baby Bella" mushrooms cooked in butter with garlic and parsley from the garden. Simply wonderful, and easy too.

In other developments, this is the current pile of completed masks in the house:

It was a bit of a surprise to get 6 of them from that 9 inch wide strip of quilting fabric. It was left over from a big quilt. Then there are 3 of the roses print and a couple of odd ones.

I have enough elastic in the house to finish all the cut out blanks in my workroom. I am using a piece of plain fabric on the inside so the quilting muslin will better contain the germs being breathed-out by the wearer. It's still not hard to breathe and no more "steamy" I think than one-layer ones or paper ones.

In honor of Divine Mercy Sunday today, for the Latins, and Easter Sunday, for the Orthodox, a picture of last year's Easter lily, the one that survived and came up again:

I had thought the buds would open today but it appears there are still a couple-few days to go.

A blessed holy-day and much happiness to all my readers.

Memories of getting out of the house

Hello, everyone.

As we're still mostly cooped up in the house...well, except for looking for supplies to fix things...and sitting in the palapa for gin and tonics in the afternoon. Hey, that's in our own yard! It doesn't count as getting out!

One consolation is to look back at recent visits to parks and such in the area. A few weeks ago, we met up with DS and DGD and DGS to stroll at the McAllen Nature Center. This is a smaller garden spot with some trails. In fact, they have more trails now than they used to have! The city is also now asking for a donation from visitors. But they're working with the place so it's worth giving them something.

They have a somewhat old-style purple martin condo on the property. They aren't really squashes as they try to pretend to be, but they're cute. We were there before the martins were back from their winter abroad, so I can't tell y'all whether the "customers" appreciate the lodging. Probably they do!

Easter tidbits...

Hello, everyone.

This year I found a sugar free chocolate rabbit! A small victory, but I can eat Easter candy with the rest of the bunch...separately.

Being stuck in the house most of the time has turned into sewing, too.

 Five more masks have been made. Not sure who should receive them just now, going to get some given away before making more.

Joanns.com has been sending out emails a lot about patterns for masks, and they've even come up with some pieced ones that a quilter can make patch patterns in. I've just been using up the stash that  is the right size and laying decent sized scrap chunks to one side for future use.

And I needed a break from the mask sewing!

A spring-themed zipper pouch

This is another little in-the-hoop pouch like the purple one. Scrap short zipper, an off cut from one of the masks in the above photo, and other fabric lying around. (The green rosebuds print was made into a mask too, but that one's been shipped out to a relative. I think.)

It was nice to use the embroidery machine for that project. (Link is to my local quilt shop, where DH got me my Janome Memory Craft 500e embroidery machine.) I'll probably do some more pouches of this type in various color combinations. They're useful. And textured fabrics can be used with care. There are also some pieces of linen ready to be made into embroidered coasters...I gave pairs of matching coasters away to family for Easter this year.

Piles of (American-made) plastic pony beads have arrived from mail order. They will probably be used in fidgets. (As movable items along a ribbon) Along with the various fake fur fabrics, random on-sale zippers, and odd cuts of fleece and whatnot. The fidgets are fun to make, but they do demand a certain amount of creative focus to come out right. I found that making a fidget for someone I knew was a lot easier, just because I had a sense of the kinds of themes they like. 

This 'n' that

Hello, everyone.

As we're all penned up in our houses because of the Wuflu, I've been sewing more masks. Have shipped out some to various family members. Now using pipe cleaners for the wire element.

The spring lilies that were potted up last year, at least some of them, have survived. Even one of the Easter lilies from last year is alive, and has a big budded stem. It's probably not going to bloom out until closer to Divine Mercy Sunday (the Sunday after Easter) but there are a lot of growing buds on the stem. And a number of baby lilies growing from root sprouts. I'll try to get a picture of any flowers that result.

DH is still tending the bird feeder.

This is one of his little friends. They really like the bird seed.

We had our first 100F day of the year a couple of days ago. It's actually a little bit late--frequently there is one in March.

I wish for all of my readers a blessed Easter and lots of spring flowers.

More about the mask construction

Hello, everyone.

As mentioned yesterday, I'm using Leah Day's pattern to make simple masks. After posting that, I remembered to take a photo of some of them.

These aren't all, of course. But these are in the sewing studio at the moment.

The project went along pretty smoothly until the end of the 6 inch long twisty ties was reached. An order for chenille stems (that's the fancy word for pipe cleaners) was placed with Hobby Lobby online, which presumably will arrive before the whole mask project becomes moot.

In the meantime, the imagination got to work. A chance suggestion from DD2 about using beading wire led to cutting 12 inch pieces of blue 22-ga. wire, crimping the center around the rosary plier to make a double thickness, and then curling the loose ends into a little spiral that wouldn't poke out through the fabric. That was where matters stood at the end of the day yesterday.

During the night, the imagination must have kept working, because it occurred that really the thin paper or plastic around the wire in twisty ties is pretty much tape. So the shipping tape roll was rounded up for an experiment.

Here are some possible home-made twisty ties. They're not cute, but then they're supposed to be encased inside the cotton fabric anyway. I used shipping tape because it's less likely to do something weird in laundry than duct tape. I just laid a piece of tape a bit longer than the wire piece with the sticky side up, put two wire pieces onto the stickum, somewhat separated, and folded the other half of the tape over onto the wire bits. A little pressing and squishing, then trimmed with the scissors. (By the way, those are the paper scissors, not the fabric scissors.)

It might work. Or I might amble out to the store for a tide-me-over bag of pipe cleaners, which would be less fussy to work with. And each 12 inch pipe cleaner gives shaping wire for two masks.

Decisions, decisions.

March in South Texas, 2020

Hello, everyone.

I have been busy sewing fabric face masks. I'm using the Leah Day pattern with 2 layers of fabric. (It may be a little bit stiffer to fold around at the cheek bones, but having 4 layers of cotton is bound to intercept more flying spit-bits than only 2. And you can and should drop them into a hot wash load and dryer load to clean them. This particular virus is said to be very sensitive to hot temperatures, like the temperatures when your hand says the water is too hot (my sink can put out 120F sometimes) and the washer with its detergent and water and agitation just gets them off and flushes them down the pipe.) No pics, unfortunately, but I sent some to DM and gave some to DS1.

And I'm using up stash, too. Found pipe cleaners at Hobby Lobby online for moldable wire inside the mask so it will fit the nose. Though when I went to the link for the ones I ordered it now says "out of stock"--probably there are more coming soon! I used the 6 inch long twisty ties for the first masks, they were stash also as they came with trash bags a while back. Am hoping my order--or at least part of it!--comes soon so I can resume sewing the masks.

In other, more cheerful news, it's flower season!

The avocado tree that came with the house is blooming.

We've had this pot of cactus for decades. Every spring it makes beautiful flowers.

The kalanchoe pot, which also came with the house, is beautiful again this year.