when it is hot...

What a hot and (unusually) humid week we have had. I haven't felt like sewing much, but I have done a little. Here is a portion of the small piece I'm working on for an exhibition in May.

I have spent some time in the garden over the last couple of weekends, as our small back garden is quite shady, so not quite as hot as everywhere else. When we turned the sprinklers on one day we got beautiful rainbows in the filtered sunlight. My 'on auto' attempts to capture the effect in a photo worked quite well I thought ...

 Yesterday I applied my creative hand to refashioning my 20+ year old bird feeder. The thatch style roof of twigs had nearly all disappeared so I trimmed a diosma bush and used that to re-cover it. Not sure how long it will last but it looks good!

 

 

In betweeen stitching and gardening there is reading ...
My last book read warrants special mention here, not just on the side. It was The last runaway by Tracy Chevalier - a very good read. I have read and enjoyed The girl with the pearl earring and another of her books which are well researched and really take you into the time period. This one is the story of Honor, a young Quaker woman from England who finds herself alone in Ohio. She struggles to fit in with the local community but they don't share her compassion and desire to help runaway slaves travelling the 'Underground Railway'. It's a good story, and it is also full of quilts - lots of detail about Honor's English style piecing, the local Ohio applique style, and quilting 'frolics' to quilt the tops. I won't say more. Find it and read it.

...and tomorrow it should be cool...                                                      

garden visitors

Pictured this little fellow on the path the other night, looking somewhat frightened - and my flash probably didn't help him.

We have a lot of frogs in the garden and in the fish pond and the storm water drain. We rarely see more than a flash as they hop by or splash in the pond, but we certainly hear them. There is a chorus most nights, at different pitches (usually 3), which can go round and round the yard as they respond in turn. They seem to breed quite happily in the fish pond. Last time I cleaned it out I rescued dozens of large tadpoles about to become frogs.

These are some of the fish which are about as hard to photograph as the frogs. You can see them pretty easily (except for the 2 blackmoors) but they won't stand still!

I thought I would put up some of the other visitors to the garden - some welcome and some not. The pictures have been taken over the last couple of years. I don't know their names. Some of them don't eat much, but some I'd rather not have. Having said that, I do find them fascinating and often quite beautiful to look at.

If only the birds picked them off as readily as they do the apples!