Back to Spinning (fiber spinning that is...)

When my (Jennifer) sister and mom visited in June, my sister brought me some roving she picked up at the Salomon Farm Fiber Arts Festival in Fort Wayne, IN. The red/white and yellow are wool. The green and natural are alpaca. I am going to ply the red and yellow together, I believe, for a weaving project. I am SO enjoying spinning! I am currently reading the Alden Amos Big Book of Handspinning and reading this gal's blog quite a bit. Her use of color and devotion to fiber is so inspiring! :)

I also (FINALLY) got around to washing and blocking this scarf I started here.

Yay for the weekend and for spinning and gardening time! :)

Native Plant Day Proclaimed for New Mexico !!!

Governor Richard has proclaimed August 15th. as "Native Plant Day" in New Mexico! Every state in this nation has incredible natural areas and native flora and it will be exciting to see more and more states formally recognize and celebrate their unique floral beauty. Here's the New Mexico proclamation and below it is a collage that I posted awhile back and that I'll repost here as an early celebration of New Mexico Native Plant Day:

Garden Fruit and Flowers

When we moved here to Carlsbad, NM back in April we had received mixed reports on gardening - everything from "don't get your hopes up" to "you can't do it" . Well, we sure are glad we went ahead and planted a bunch of stuff anyway - check out our super early and continuous bounty:

Lettuce mix:


Zucchini:

Beefsteak tomatoes:


Roma tomatoes:

And much more to come as indicated by our flowering black-eyed peas:


More and more tomato flowers:

Pepper flowers:


and tomatillo flowers:


Sure we have to water about every other day but we don't have a lawn or a dishwashing machine so we use our water allotment to grow food. We are happy to announce that one can indeed garden successfully in Carlsbad!!!

Cats, Settling-In At Last

We've been here in Carlsbad for about 3 months now and its taken a bit of adjustment for all of us but particularly for the cats. But lately we've noticed signs of them being more comfortable in this new environment. Can you tell?:

Bounder:


Bobcat: