Trying out new skills

Hello, everyone. 

As it says in the title, I'm working on improving my skills on the embroidery. Today, as a tangent from going through the lessons of my Hatch program, I decided to embroider the included beetle design on terrycloth. 

Before actually getting going on it, I added some "laydown" stitching to keep the loops from getting in the way.

I also learned that my hoop refuses to latch onto the fabric. The towel was just too thick for this, so I floated it on top of the hooped stabilizer. Put pins in to help it stay, too. Made the double bounding box after the topper (the shiny stuff) was placed.

The fabric stayed flat with the many layers of encouragement and now I have a psychedelic bug to use somehow. 

A new moth in our yard

Hello, everyone.

As y'all know, we wanderers appreciate a lot of facets of nature. Today we saw a moth we had never seen before. Never heard of it either. But there they were: Rothschildia forbesi, known in Spanish as Quatro Espejos, the Four Mirrors. It's a wild silk moth native to South Texas and points south.

There are two of them here. They seem to have just crawled out of their cocoons. Aren't they beautiful!