Wall of Cactus

On one of my pandemic perambulations,  I came across this amazing wall of cacti.  Someone had set up a box like structure with a vertical arrangement of cactus plants in one of the Smithsonian gardens.   I think it is quite amazing. I hadn't noticed if they'd been up over the winter but it is April now and the little plants are looking very healthy and colorful.  I think these are varieties of a plant called hen-and-chicks and are quite easy to grow in sunlight or partial shade.  They are all very pretty and this arrangement is quite inspirational to see. It would be nice to grow some of these on a windowledge in our apartment but alas, there is insufficient light.

Sneak Peaks into Hirschhorn Sculpture Garden

They've chained off the pathways into the Hirschhorn Sculpture garden during the pandemic, but that doesn't stop me creeping up close and poking my camera over the fence or over the spaces between the hedges to see some of the sculptures there. I guess the Burghers of Calais by Rodin is the most famous or most recognizable one, the others being more abstract and the labels not particularly accessible.  I'll have to come back for another wander around once the Washington DC Stay-At-Home order is lifted or they start to release the locked gates and chains so we can get in and see it all again. Supposedly, May 15 is when the order will be lifted, but you know, there are many street vendors coming back on the corners and even on the national mall we've seen ice cream trucks and hot dog sellers.

Stay-At-Home Starting to End?

It almost seemed like a regular Saturday morning on the Washington National Mall today but if you looked closely you could see the masks and attempts to keep six foot away from the next person and a lot less people than one would see on sunny day. But it was good to see ice cream trucks, bicyclists, families, dogs, joggers and frisbee throwers out in the sunshine and trying not to think about going home and being cooped up some more. Also it was just generally quieter, as if we've gotten used to not making a lot of noise. I'd say there were far more cars, trucks and buses about than I've seen in this past week due to the pandemic stay-at-home order. There were at least two ice cream vendors in their brightly colored trucks doing a good business and there was even at least one National Park Service guard walking about.

Petrified Wood on the Washington Mall

I remember going to the Petrified Forest in Arizona when I took a trip out west once so I was delighted to see some pieces of petrified wood at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum on the Mall in Washington, D.C. recently.  I don't know if these pieces are from Arizona but they look very much like the ones I'd seen before.
To show how I had no idea about it, when I went to the petrified forest national park in Arizona, I really expected to see a standing forest of "frozen" wood. Feeling a bit silly, it was, of course, 'just' several acres of land that you can walk through on paths that weave among logs and trees and stumps that are lying on their sides and are fossils that were created when they got buried in sediment and minerals leached into them aeons ago.
 What is especially interesting are the tree rings and all the different colors that the minerals show in the "wood" pieces. You can touch the ones on the mall and they feel just like stone!  So interesting!

 

Dogwood Tree Blooming By Agriculture Department in DC

On my daily walk recently on the Washington Mall I wandered over to Independence Avenue near the Department of Agriculture and saw this lovely dogwood tree blazing away. Of course, I had to snap a few photos as I knew the rain was coming in soon and all the petals would soon get torn off.

The more you look at these dogwood tree flowers the prettier they get, from the little pink tips to their yellow green hearts.  Of course, I'm hoping that next time I walk over that way, it will still be there but probably not.  I've noticed flowers bloom and go quickly during spring. So doing the best I can to photo and get them blogged!

I also learned -- from the internet -- that as legend has it, the cross on which Jesus was crucified was made from a dogwood tree. God decreed that the dogwood tree would from that day forth never grow large enough to be used to make a cross. So maybe that's why this tree isn't very big! And why it flowers around Eastertide!

Easter Eggs And Hot Cross Buns

It was that lovely time of spring when it's Easter so I just had to make hot cross buns on Good Friday. To me the tradition is all about the cross being on the buns and making the day special using a food.  The real trick for me was to make them without wheat flour or sugar, so I scoured the internet and came up with a great recipe.  It was a keto/paleo type recipe which is just fine for me who doesn't eat sugar or wheat flour. And it turned out I had all the necessary ingredients at hand and they made up quickly.  I did make cream cheese icing too and put it in the crosses.  These actually came out really well and tasted great!

Another Eastertide tradition at my home is to make some dyed hardboiled eggs.  Now, this is something I usually do with my son as we have fun dipping them in the colored waters and decorating the egg shells. Apparently, eggs symbolize resurrection and the cracking of eggs something to do with Jesus coming out of the tomb but I'm a bit hazy on the origins of this tradition. But this year it was the time of the Covad19 pandemic and he was sheltering in place at his apartment so I made them by myself (sadly).

But I had some large white eggs and got out the food dye and dip stuff and made about half a dozen.  And so some of them ended up as part of our Easter decorations. I happened to have a couple of cute stuffed bunny rabbits so it seemed a good idea to put the eggs in front of the bunnies.  I have no idea where the idea of rabbits come from for Easter although I think it has something to do with rabbits being prolific and Easter signals new life. A catholic website asserts the tradition that rabbits are associated with the Virgin Mary, however, as the Greeks, apparently, believed that rabbits could reproduce asexually, so early Greco-Christians may have made that association.

So those eggs have been quietly demolished the past few days, showing up sliced on toast for breakfast and in egg salad sandwiches at lunch.  

Another Recycled Quilt from Shirts And Curtain Fabric

 This quilt was the inspiration for another one I wrote about recently as it was my first foray into using old shirt material to make the squares and triangles that make up the design for this quilt.  The old shirts were from my son and husband and had accumulated in my fabric stash and were just crying out to be used for something.  I also used some old curtain fabric -- the satiny brown fabric -- for the side striping that finishes off the design.  And I used a piece of old flannel sheeting for the backing. You can tell that I'm a bit of a hoarder when it comes to bits of fabric!

Again, I used the fast triangle sewing technique to make up the squares pretty quickly.  If you are working really fast, and a bit slapdash like me, you can skip using the ruler and pencil and just eyeball sew it.  When I cut the squares out, I use a 5" by 5" square piece of cardboard as a guide for the size of each square.  After making as many squares as you can generate from your fabrics, it's time to lay it out and see how you can arrange them in different ways.  This particular design (the blue and orange plaid squares) is called a windmill design and it's easy to do if you just lay them out ahead of time and turn the squares in the right way.  I take my time with designing these, and in this case it was a full week before I had it figured out!

 Once I put the larger squares together it was time to join them together with strips of grey plaid shirting and then finish it off with the bronze edging.  I also stitch-in-the-ditch in a few areas, to join the top piece to the bottom, once I've joined the flannel back to the designed portion. But I don't quilt all of the top to the bottom portion as I like my "quilts" looser.
Lest you think I sew this up in a day or so let me tell you that this type of project can take me several months to complete. I may just cut up the shirting fabric scraps one day. Another day cut them in the 5 inch squares.  Another day stitch the triangles, and yet another day to lay it all out. And yet another day or week to put the surrounding strips on.  The backing on this quilt project was some leftover flannel sheeting I had and that gave it a nice soft feel. I didn't use batting to fill it but I could have used some old blanketing or another layer of flannel sheeting had I wanted this to be fatter and warmer.  I just left it this way, essentially two layers of fabric.  It's just great to tuck around me when I'm reading in bed -- as it's about 4 foot by 4.5 feet wide, and I didn't want something too big.  This size makes for a great lap quilt for keeping you warm watching TV on the couch too and is a size that folds up neatly and can be easily stored nearby where you might use it. Everything was scrap fabric so again I felt virtuous upcycling, recycling and reusing all these bits of fabric that were piling up in my fabric stash.

Lovely Spring Flowers at Bartholdi Park, Washington DC

Whoever takes care of and gardens the various flower beds on the national Mall area in Washington, DC does a fabulous job.  This spring, during the time of the pandemic, we were able to take daily walks and see spectacular displays of hyacinths, tulips, daffodils and a myriad of other flowers whose names I don't know.

The flowers in this blog are from the Bartholdi Park garden  at the bottom of Capitol Hill on its southwest side.  It is located near the enclosed glass US Botanical Garden, which is now closed, but this park is open

and free to the public.  We have roamed through it a couple of times lately and just love the incredible displays of color, the aromas and watching the seedlings grow.  The park also has trees and a fountain, although that's not running now. 

We don't encounter too many other people on these walks due to the City of Washington DC Stay At Home order, but these walks are a valuable contribution to our health and well-being as staying at home all day every day for weeks on end is, strangely enough, quite exhausting.

Quilt Made During Pandemic: Recycled Shirts

Well, I pulled together a lap size quilt this past week from some old bits and bobs of fabric I'd been accumulating.  Most of the scraps were cut out pieces from old shirts from my husband and son. They are pretty hard on their shirts and once I can no longer sew the rips in the seams or shoulders or the tears that can't be patched, I cut up the shirts, open up the sleeves, etc.  Then I cut out 5 inch squares and start making a quilt.  I think this quilt is made from about five shirts, although I have scrap squares left over that I will turn into something else. Maybe a pillow....
One of the ways I have speeded up sewing quilt squares into triangle shapes was one I learned from a television show on sewing called "Sewing with Nancy" that I stumbled upon one day. Who says you can't learn from watching TV?
Anyway, to really make triangles fast the method is to get your two different squares sewn together fast by sewing two different squares together by putting the two right sides together and then stitching diagonally across from one corner to the other. Then you sew
a seam either side of that diagonal, about 1/8 inch away, so you end up with three seams running diagonally corner to corner.  Then you just snip through and across the middle seam, that is, the middle diagonal line of stitching, and hey presto, once you open it up, you have two squares made of two different triangles stitched together.  You just press them out then arrange them in rows, and then sew it up!  I try to make the whole thing as geometric as possible.  Usually, I bind the edge with strips of left over material sewn together to finish it.
I'm not the neatest sewciopath but over all, I'm usually pretty happy with how these come out.
And for the batting inside I used an old blanket piece, attached that to the patterned side of the quilt and then put on the backing (which was made up of discarded T-shirt material, so very soft and cottony) and then stitched it all together and turned it right side out (left about a foot unstitched so I could turn it right side out.  Then hand sewed that final foot and pressed the whole thing.  And eh voila, a lap quilt for keeping knees warm when curled up on the sofa watching tv or when reading in bed and when you don't or won't need a full size blankie. And it's all reuse and recycle or upcycle, and I feel virtuous that I didn't fill up the landfill!