Rose Clothes the Blossom Grows

A woman whose blog I love and read regularly challenges her crowd to spend an hour a day for a whole week sewing clothes for kids. After years of being scared of patterns, measuring, and any other sort of accuracy in creation I'm excited to take part - and hopefully post the creations here. 

In other news - the summer crop is dying down, the squash having produced a whopping 5 zucchini but endless blossoms, tomatoes from Zach which produced 4 beautiful red and purple, sweet and savory fruits, and radish which have mites and are being harvested early. Fall crops have been planted: lettuce, onion, beets. They are sprouting and hopefully will spurt before the December cold. This evening has a chill to it, like autumn is settling in but I know next month will be warm as we carve our pumpkins and wait for an excuse to costume and throw a party for all ghouls. 

I visited the rose garden by the lake a few weekends ago: one photo below, and more here. 

    A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

    Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed

    By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,

    He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

    How can those terrified vague fingers push

    The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

    And how can body, laid in that white rush,

    But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

    A shudder in the loins engenders there

    The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

    And Agamemnon dead.

                        Being so caught up,

    So mastered by the brute blood of the air,

    Did she put on his knowledge with his power

    Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

-Yeats, Leda and the Swan

Fort Desoto

Visiting home always feels like a mad dash to see everything I love and everyone I want to hug all at once and then before I know it I'm stuck in the terminal with a two-hour delay because of an approaching hurricane, or I'm leaving New Orleans in a daze of lactic acid and gin and tonic overkill sitting all strapped in, or connecting in LAX when the steward announces that we are grounded for thirty minutes while the fog in San Fran passes over the airport. As if it is ever going to stop.  


Click the photo for more! 

Baby Blanket Pillow Pal

Last year when I was in a lakeside apartment I could hear tweets and squawks out my window from a half mile down the hill and made infinite pillows to keep myself from rolling off the bedframe and onto the floor. I gave some away as birthday gifts, one to keep a new home warm, one to keep a bench butt-safe, and others stuck around and were patched and washed and slept on by many guests. I like making simple quick projects because it serves utility and makes me feel accomplished at the same time. Instant pillowfication, you know?

Cousins with more baking buns need a new blanket to add to their stash, I'm sure, and baby might like the soft backing on this (courtesy of the now depleted free box), finished a few days ago:

And two more pillows for the collection, thanks to a ripped sheet, blue and white mimic-eyelit stash from long ago, leftovers from a roommate's project, and a torn and discarded pillow case from the middle room.

Oh, and it just rained for two minutes! What is going on, cloud cover?

Zucchini und rettich

The gladiolas from last year came back bright purple again, and in a day I will plant found dried bulbs from the tool room and a few tulip bulbs to try for a summer bloom. The rest I will probably plant at the end of November for a spring crop.

The summer garden is still happy and shooting off some little green blobs that will eventually look and taste like tomatoes. The seeds for this heirloom variety came from a friend, Zach. (You can look at his flickr here). 

Thanks to some advice from the Master Gardeners, and now weekly fertilization, my zucchini are doing much better, producing fruit that grows instead of shriveling. I have been using Buddha Grow leftover from another gardening project last year. It contains Bat Guano, Worm Castings, Soy Protein Hydrolysate, Kelp Extract, Molasses, and Yucca Extract and packs a phosphate/nitrate punch! Below are the radishes that roommate Crystal planted from seed, sandwiched between a few onion and tomato sprouts (from seed). The onion stalks grow extremely quickly. 

So, other than watching things grow there has been a lot  of summer happenings, including celebrating Echo's birthday last night by dressing up at home and packing 6-to-a-mini-cooper across the Bay to the Castro Theater to watch Sharon Needles perform Silence of the Trans live on stage! You can read Echo's blog about summer camp in Hidden Villa here. Hidden Villa is an education farm and garden in Los Altos Hills, CA. During the spring it is flocked by baby animals thanks to the husbandry team, during summer it is swarming with children making nature crafts. Sunset magazine just did a typical bourgeois article on how farming vacation are trendy, and wrote about Hidden Villa. You can read the article here. 

Renzo recently made salve in the kitchen. I have a lot of glycerin soap block that I got from the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse  and am thinking of making lavender soap with the bursting bush downstairs. Sometimes lavender makes me skin break out so I might just save the soap for gifts or to use in our house. Echo also posted a recipe for making magic potion salve in the blog linked above. 

The sun breaks through the bamboo cover on the porch all day, drying out the soil and our skin. Sam and her dance company, Blind Tiger Society, in part, bathing in the rays on a midsummers midmorning. They are performing in a piece mid-August called Sunk in Sleep which resembles Alice in Wonderland. Our lovely Sam being the madhatter, herself. 

Bharatanatyam

Summer Camp is in full swing with cultural information, whale crafts, Salam / Bonjour / Hola / Aloha greetings abounding, cookies and jello, and in the midst of it all this traditional Indian dance to punctuate the kids total fascination with otherness. It is amazing and wonderful to tell a group of kids about cultures so unlike their own, yet very similar in many other ways. This year is kicking last year's ass in awesomeness. 

Garden update: radish sprouted 1 inch high, beets radically rooted, air plant transplants in the middle bathroom just this morning, succulents sufficiently transplanted, and squash still blossoming with the help of force pollinating. I read an article in Organic Gardening about this: take pollen from male blossom (with brush / finger) and lightly rub onto budding female ends. Voila! Zucchini never tasted so unconsenting.