One of the greatest delights in the whole process of having chickens has been watching the mother hen interact with the chicks. This relationship has a sweetness that gets me every time. Sue is a really good momma. She watches out for the chicks every step of the way, teaching them to forage, how […]
Sue, our broody Momma Hen, has done it again! Four bouncing, healthy baby peeps. Two of them are Lemon Cuckoo Orpingtons, and two of them are Silver Laced Wyandottes. We don’t know yet (and won’t, for a few months) what we have in terms of boys and girls.
I’ve seen various versions of Quick Response (QR) Code made by fiber-arts methods – the most common are knitted (both hand-knit and machine-knit) and cross-stitched. To get the reader to pick up the code properly, the grid needs to be fairly square, and the contrast has to be very high. I looked at this, and […]
My friend Julie Hwang saw the AMNH Silk Road exhibit in Taipei, and sent me this photo of my video! I knew that the exhibit was going to be traveling the world, but somehow I didn’t immediately process the fact that it was going to be subtitled in all these languages. I can recognize the […]
I’m fascinated with some of the new avenues that publishing is taking. I wrote an article for the Winter 2011 edition of Interweave’s new electronic fiber-arts magazine, SpinKnit. It has cool little galleries for pictures, it has video (not my article, unfortunately – I had trouble trying to record video properly – but some of […]
I got a new cell phone (an HTC Inspire 4G), and decided to take a few shots to see what kind of quality it gets in photos. It has an 8MP camera and an LED flash, but only a tiny lens, so depth of field and focus aren’t amazing – but it’s not bad. A […]
This is what they looked like a week ago, on 8/31: This is the third instar; the thoracic tubercules are spiky, but not actually very sharp, and they’re bright yellow. Most of the time, this happens on a twig, and it’s very difficult to see – I’m lucky that this time, a couple of […]
The chickens are holding up OK in our record summer heat. We did lose one to heat stroke, early on… one of the young roosters was trying to be close to Momma while she was trying to lay an egg in the middle of the afternoon, and it was just too much. I set up […]
The Promethea caterpillars are changing to second instar. They’re seven days old. They have not all shifted yet – they may have hatched across two days, or some may just be a little delayed. You can see that the remaining first-instar caterpillars are smaller, and also yellower than their second-instar siblings. You can see – […]
The Promethea moth (Callosamia promethea) lives in Texas, but not the part where I live – they want the far-eastern reaches of the state, up against Louisiana. They have a wide range in the eastern US, all the way to the Atlantic. These are the eggs after hatching. They remind me a lot of the […]