The Last Blossom

I have a peanut cactus plant (aka Chamaecereus silvestrii) in the courtyard, which (thank heavens) is able to tolerate my hit-or-miss watering routine. Everything else in the courtyard is on an automatic dripper system, but this plant is located where the drip line can't reach. Every June, it pops out in literally hundreds of bright orange flowers. Well, my hit-or-miss routine must have included some water with fertilizer in it during late July, because now the cactus has spit out one more bloom. Looks like the last one, though, because there are no signs of other buds developing.



This plant is very easy to propagate - just find a peanut that's loose, put it on top of some soil and keep it damp, and it'll root. Each time the plant starts to look really ratty (every 5 years or so) I just start a new crop. It only blooms once a year, but when it does, it is really spectacular. I should have taken a photo when it was in full flower, but somehow never did. You couldn't see the cactus, only flowers...

Not much exciting going on in the studio - I'm plodding away on a new warp on the jacquard loom. So far, I have 11 sections wound on, out of a total of 32.



Yeah, a solid black warp is a real visual thrill.

I'm using a new yarn, a 16/2 mercerized cotton from a mill in Pakistan. So far, I've wound 11 sections, each 30 yards long, and the only knot in it was my fault. It's nice to find a good quality product! The marketing guy at the mill sent me four 2-lb cones on a promotional basis, hoping that at some future date I might order a railcar load... or at least a pallet... I'm not sure how likely that is, but maybe I can find enough other weavers who need solid black warps of this size to share that railcar load. Um, yeah, right...