The garden right at the beginning of a rainstorm. The frogs are singing, and I sing them a silly little song. These are mostly cricket frogs – I think they’re Blanchard’s Cricket Frog, but it’s tricky to tell one little jumping warty critter from another. We also have Rio Grande Chirping Frogs and Gulf Coast […]
This is Paper Mulberry, Broussonetia payprifera. They are a weedy species here in north Texas. They rarely get the right conditions for fruiting, so you see these huge groves of them with lots of leaves, but no fruits. This is the second time I’ve seen fruit, in the decades I’ve been looking at the trees. […]
I dance. I have danced to country-western music since I was a kid. I learned first when my mom and dad took lessons; I remember them coming home from classes when I was probably seven, Dad in a pearl-snap shirt and Mom with her hair bouffed up pretty and her Mary Kay makeup on. Mom […]
Howdy to my YARN friends! I’m going to be teaching at DFW Fiber Fest in September. One class on Basics of Tablet Weaving, one class on three decorative techniques (Diagonals, Double Face, Brocade) and then a three-hour intensive on working with and designing Double-Face.
Sorry, folks, this rambles a lot… but it’s interesting stuff. In order to make silk by hand, I’ve had to learn how to devise some of the tools that I need that can’t be easily procured in America. These are textile eyes; I order them from a company that makes them out of technical ceramic […]
I’m preparing to teach a weaving class. It’s the first time I’ve done one in a few years – the last big effort was 2017, when I did a class for the DFW Fiber Fest board members, trying to get my brain back into teaching mode. It didn’t really take. Don’t get me wrong – […]
One of our neighbors has this SPECTACULAR patch of Coprinoid fungus. I think it’s Coprinopsis variegata, but I’m not expert enough to be certain. It’s a massive colony that is digesting a long-dead felled tree; you can see the outline of part of the stump. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coprinopsis_variegata And Dan Brewer’s post about magnolias and how they […]
I have been working on my brain. Years of therapy, meditation, lucid dreaming, vision work; I’ve been an explorer for most of my life… but recently, I’ve taken a deep dive into a different kind of therapy that I’m going to call non-plant-based-medicine, because the organisms aren’t plants, and the folks who know, will know, […]
And while I’m in the racked-with-sobs mode… another thing I have to call back to every once in a while, is this Dar Williams song. The first time I heard it, on NPR, in Houston, driving in my car, I had to pull over and cry. Like, big racking sobs, sitting in my car, on […]
There’s a house in the cul-de-sac that I call the Witch House. It’s been essentially abandoned since we moved in here 14 years ago this May (gosh, time flies) – and I’m deeply sorry that I never got to meet the woman that I still think of as the witch. She may or may not […]