Seedlings I Need to Plant

As soon as I moved the trays inside the seedlings started to appear! The next morning there were tiny plants growing, they just needed a bit more warmth! Now they have been in these blocks for seven weeks and need to go in the ground so I can have pumpkins by Halloween! The luffa has been slow and is just now sprouting so I'm not sure all will go into the ground, but most of the squash and melons will. The flowers have been quite pathetic and need more time and probably some nutrients. All the seedlings started out really well, but have been struggling lately I guess we will see if they grow.

Hibiscus Sichuan Shaved Ice

My Craft Book Club craft for The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow is a snow cone recipe I found in Nicole A Taylor's cookbook, Watermelon and Red Birds. When contemplating what sort of food to make for this book, I decided it needed to have sea salt because the first door January goes through, she describes the smell as "salt and age and adventure." The recipe also needed to be adventurous (age was not a priority for me). This recipe for hibiscus Sichuan Snow Cones sounded perfect, it had sea salt (I realize now that it wasn't as salty as my initial idea to represent this book) and two special ingredients I needed to buy (hibiscus and Sichuan), adventurous! I topped milky ice with the syrup because I love bingsu, but I think it will be better on plain ice as intended. There is lots of left over syrup, so I can try on plain ice too or even in a drink!

Our next Craft Book Club read is The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix. I still need to borrow it from the library! 

Snake Yarn Bomb

Saturday was International Yarn Bombing Day and I celebrated by installing this last minute knit snake on the stairs near where my sister lives. It turned out cute and is a bit camouflaged with the ivy. Can you see where it is in the second photo?

This was going to be a post about how much I love banana slugs, but I had pictures of other creepy crawlies and things that look like bugs that I wanted to share too.

Long. Mille. Not Butterflies. Pollinating. I moved this one.

Oil Pastels

A few weeks ago I went to the store and bought some oil pastels and am now trying to figure out how to use them. Here are a few of the drawings I have made. If you have any tips, leave them in the comments. I used some bag balm to blend out the sunflower (since I didn't have baby oil at that time), a paper blending tool on the face, then baby oil to blend the clouds. I think I prefer the solid fat over baby oil, but it probably depends on what you are doing.