Bubbles

We made homemade bubbles yesterday. Finally something to do with that jar of corn syrup. Of course, if it keeps going like it's going, I'll need to buy more corn syrup to make more bubbles. Wish I could use the extra molasses that's still sitting up there as well...





Here's the recipe that came on the back of the bubble wands we just bought-
Mix together 12 cups water, 3 cups liquid soap, 3/4 cup corn syrup. And it worked! Really well, in fact. And- the same mixture is still working today!

Today I leave you with flowers for Mother's Day...

Eva water painting in the sunshine and climbing out Japanese maple out front while I garden.




Eva climbing on the bags of mulch at Home Depot.

chacha yarn

Eva picked out some funky yarn at the yarn shop a few weeks ago. (Trendsetter yarn Chacha in color 29, purple.) They had a scarf made out of it on display and Eva loved it and thought it would make an amazing purse (and then a smaller scarf with what was left over...).

I wound up the yarn on a toilet paper roll the other night and read through the instructions on exactly how to knit with this yarn because you don't knit with the actual ribbon but instead knit through holes above the ribbon. This proved to be trickier than I had thought it would be and I ripped out what I had and set it aside. I waited until I had some quiet time to myself this evening to check out the yarn again and found this youtube video to help.



Sample of Chacha. It's a little under 1 inch wide and knits up in ruffles!

weed, weeded, weeding

I spent a good bit of the day weeding (i'm generally opposed to the word weeding {for myself} because it holds so many assumptions, but for the life of me I can't find another word for the job. tidying up? two words. yard work? possibly, but still two words. i'm working on it. i have resorted to using the word weeding over the last two weeks for lack of a better word and because I think it is fairly descriptive of what I have been doing, whether I like it or not...) again and am glad to see that my back and neck aren't having quite the same problem they did a few weeks ago when I first began tidying up the back garden area in earnest. I keep doing it because I really want that area cleaned up and logistically easier to care for, but I won't say I wasn't concerned my body wasn't going to be as into it as my mind seemed to be. My mind jumped at the chance. And the two of us- my mind and I- have been working on the garden area one thing at a time (i keep reminding my mind when it gets ahead of me and i feel overwhelmed with the task. one.thing.at.a.time. don't look beyond that lest i feel too overloaded to tackle any of it.)

(and why divide us all up like that- body, mind, me?- just for the fun of it. and frankly- to account for some of the disparity i experience when i try too hard to sum things up into one experience.) (and to sort of indulge that disparity a bit. i read somewhere a few years ago that one way we as a culture are dysfunctional is that we are taught we shouldn't feel more than one way at a time and as a result, we have a difficult time reconciling different and conflicting feelings....)

I'm happy with how it's going. I spent quite a bit of time with the strawberries and am pleased with how many we now have. I transplanted a few and cleaned up around most of them. I'm now trying to decide how to keep it um weeded more easily. The nursery people suggested cardboard around the plants and then dirt on top of that. It seems like that would work well with rows but my berry plants are all hodgepodge like, with very little rhyme or reason. I don't really want to go the way of hemlock mulch around them because I don't believe it really is sliver-free (and eva walks out in the garden a lot. it has to be eva-friendly.) I'm not sure which way I will end up going. One project at a time. Right now I'm working on the area in between the raised beds, covering it with newspaper (i actually bought one!) and then medium cedar chips, with rectangular pathway slabs on top of that. Eva is thrilled and mentioned how fun it will be to walk around under the sunflowers later in the summer.



I love how the purple kale has yellow flowers. It's such a nice contrast. Never fear- this kale is from last fall. There is more spring kale in the other bed. Always plenty of kale.