Two posts in one day! Holy crap!

This is where I've been hanging out lately.  It's the best place to read.

There's been a lot happening in the garden.  We've just about reached the end of the yummy lettuce.  Much of it's now too bitter.  Lettuce just doesn't like temperatures above 90 degrees.  I'm with you on that, lettuce.  Our tomatoes are doing well.  We're already harvesting the cherry tomatoes and it  looks like it won't be long before the big boys are ready.

See the little cherry tomatoes on the left?  Now look at the big green ones on the right.  That plant is loaded! 

The chard is still doing really well and it's quite a bounty this year.

Good for us that we love chard!

The little grapefruit/tangerine hybrid that Suzanne and Melinda gave me has now produced little fruit.

  

Here's our volunteer squash plant that's growing along the edge of the garden.

I planted things in the concrete blocks that surround the garden.  Here's one of my

favorites: Loebelia.  The blue is really that intense.  Next to that is baby thyme. 

Just wanted to show you a picture of the beautiful big

Talavera pot I found on one of my bulky pick-up day

outings.  

I also found this big metal grid that works perfectly as a plant table.  I'll soon be repotting more succulents and this is where they'll live.

We're still designing our chicken coop.   I thought we'd be building by now, but such are the woes of urban farming.  I guess I'll be happy if the chickens are safe, comfortable, and productive.  

I'm a bad blogger!

Seems like I've been meaning to post for weeks, but I never seem to get around to it!  Just finished my Surface Design class at the Stitch Lab.  We dyed, stamped, silkscreened, did bleach and wax resists and whatever else you can imagine doing to fabric!  Here are a few pictures:

This is canvas, fan folded, and then folded again and dyed cerulean blue.

I'd like to overdye this piece.  It was dyed golden yellow and washed, the leaves were silkscreened, then a texture was applied and turquoise dye rolled over that.  

This is cotton, folded and then rubber banded, died blue and washed; then the spirals were applied with a stamp dipped in a bleach formula, rinsed, then overdyed with green.

This is my favorite piece: dyed Chinese red, washed, placed on top of a lace-patterned plastic placemat, and bleach applied with a roller over that.  

This is cotton that was folded over and over again, clamped between plexiglass, then dyed a chocolate brown,  and washed.  I used one of Kat's stamps coated with a bleach formula to make the leaves.

These were all just experiments to find out how the fabric would react to different dyes and surface treatments.  Now I'd like to make a couple of screens specifically for using with dyes on fabric and order some dye colors I'd like to work with.  I'm already thinking of all the white shirts in my closet!  One thing I will not do is is rainbow colored tie dye.  That you can be sure of!  

One great thing about these Procion dyes is that they are so stable.  The jet black is truly black and the colors are rich and saturated.  Even if you just want to dye some fabric a solid color, this is absolutely the best dye to use.  It's available at Dharma Trading Company in many yummy colors.