One highlight recently was that Sarah & Bob were in town and so since it also happened to be Louise’s birthday weekend, we invited the clan over (a total of 10 of us) and we served pozole and enchiladas and picked up a birthday cake for Louise! Super fun to have everyone, and to meet Becca, Neil, and Ruth. Not sure they want to be pictured on my blog, so you’ll just have to visualize all the smiling faces :)
Our uncharacteristically social month continued when we hosted a friend of Rob’s for dinner, John, along with his wife, Mary, who were visiting Austin for the weekend. And most recently we met Susan & David at a Thai restaurant, Sway, that was roughly located between our homes as they live north and we are west of the city. Definitely will want to go back there.
John & Mary
Speaking of food, we have recently been using our chicken eggs primarily for omelets at lunch. Rob has the method down (I haven’t tried to do it myself—looks too hard!) and I always generously sprinkle them with garlic chives we have growing out back!
And on the topic of eggs, the other day when I went in the coop I saw a VERY large, white egg on the floor. It was apparently Nessa’s! It sat on the kitchen counter a couple of days until I got up the courage to EAT IT FOR LUNCH! It was obviously larger than a chicken egg, and the yolk was a higher percentage of the egg than in chicken eggs. To me, it tasted like the chicken eggs :) Hopefully we’ll discover more of those in the future.
Raine gave me a set of animal postcards she made and I finally found a fun way to show off the frog. I mounted it on a painted strip I had around, and then I glued a dead scorpion to the other end! It was fun to do an asynchronous collab!
With spring barreling along, there’s a lot of new flora and fauna. Trail cam sightings include skunk, fox, and armadillo. Saw a fawn on the side of the road this week, and the wildflowers come out one after the next, week after week. One plant I hadn’t really noticed until Regi pointed it out is called a sensitive plant. It grows low to the ground with purple spherical flowers and when you touch the leaves they fold in immediately! Super cool.
Of course there’s loads of these growing all over the neighborhood.
Our fruit trees are looking pretty good and the peach trees have small peaches already and there’s even a couple of plums on the plum tree!
Rob has just started attending a class in Wimberley once a week to learn how to better recite Shakespeare passages. It is good preparation for auditions. He doesn’t know if he’s gonna take it that far; for now it’s just a thing to explore and get to know the folks in the area involved with this kind of stuff.
So my focus has been making botanical prints. First because I have all the stuff now, but also as I mentioned, there are new wildflowers every week so I figure I need to try them all! Some plants are duds and not only make no mark, but are impossible to scrape off the paper afterwards. Can’t predict what will be good. So I just have to try everything.
Among the great performers are redbud tree leaves (come out yellow) and false dandelion (come out fiery orange). Some of the other wildflowers I’ve included in “bundles” include: antelope milkweed, groundsel, evening primrose, mexican hat, indian blanket, rain lily, agave, verbena, lantana, and ones from flowerbeds/pots like hibiscus, roses. Bluebonnets are all over but I’m too scared to cut one or who knows maybe someone will shoot me (and we don’t happen to have any in our yard). Of course I also throw in various leaves from trees, weeds, vines, etc. It’s endless and it also varies throughout the year. On top of that, I’m soaking rusty things to make iron acetate and I soaked some agarita leaves in that before a print and they came out nice and blackish. Eventually I’ll try out the copper acetate which hopefully will make leaves turn blue-ish.
Redbud tree leaf
current obsession
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current obsession 〰️
Now that the prints are coming out better, I’m not real inclined to embellish them with watercolor/pen or whatever (even though the instructor encourages it). She applies “matte medium” to hers to finish them off which I may do but I don’t really know what product to use. Maybe a couple layers of mod podge? And sure I could just hang one up as-is but maybe I’ll do something else.
I already ruled out placemats. Also découpage as that makes me feel all cheesy. I may want to make a table lamp by curling the paper into a cylinder and lighting it up from the inside but for one thing the strips are kinda small for this. I recently found a couple of broken tiki torches in a neighbor’s garbage and I thought maybe I could use the top part with my paper inside and light it up from inside??
Of course I can use it for cards too.
Recently Regi came over with a bunch of leaves and we BOTH made a bundle which was super fun.
More images below.
