Saturday Sky - new cooler version!

Saturday, July 22, 8:45 a.m., 66 DEGREES--a beautiful start to the day:


I'm happy to report that there will be no meterologists' severed heads staked on a pole in front of my apartment--we have lower temps! In fact, if you were standing in the shade this morning, it was actually COOL. What a relief!

Unfortunately, now it's time to deal with the consequences of the horrific heat and the accompanying mega-watt UV rays. Here's some of the damage to my garden. Much of it looks like it's been blowtorched.

My stevia plant:


Some of my flowers:




Tomatoes:




And my beautiful eight-ball squash plant, which two weeks ago looked like this--


now looks like this:


That one hurts most of all. The tomatoes may actually come back, and they seem to be trying to put on fruit, but the squash was my baby--I had raised it from a seed. Hopefully some pruning and TLC can help the others, but I'm afraid this little one may be a gonner.

Most of my flowers still look pretty good, but I know they are happy to have some relief. I guess they are better suited for higher temps, and many of them didn't get as much direct sun as others--my poor hanging plants have suffered horribly. Although it's supposed to get back into the 90s next week, hopefully this 100+ degree heat is over.

As for Tour news, I'm almost done with the second bobbin. I should be able to complete it this morning and then it's plying time.

The whole plying thing seems to be harder for me than the spinning. I think it's because so much of the finished product depends on how well the plying's done--that and the fact that you don't ply as much as you spin, so in my case I'm not as familiar with it as I am basic spinning. I want to do this yarn in a nice two-ply, and I think I've learned enough to be able to achieve that with only a little bit of fanagaling. (I say that, and now the whole thing will probably fall apart in my hands.)

The most important thing I've learned about plying is to pay attention. When I first started spinning, I tended to rush through the plying because I wanted to "get to the finish line," so to speak. As a result, my yarn wasn't as nice as it would have been had I spent a little more time paying attention to what I was doing. Consequently, I'm a horribly slow plyer, but I'm happier with my results, so that's what matters. Speed will come later.