Wednesday Bits and Pieces

First, a little bit of responding to comments.

Becky said, "So *that* is what those kinds of spiders are! We quite frequently have them trying to live in our mailbox."

They get in my mailbox, too! My husband emphatically does NOT like spiders (this t-shirt is just made for him), and when these come in the house in the mail, I'm the one who escorts them back out again.

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Cathy-Cate said, "My Asiatic lilies have never looked the same since a friend of ours (who is a landscaper) thinned them three years ago....he said they would bounce back better than ever in a couple years."

I have my suspicions about what he did! The way to thin lilies is to dig up all the bulbs after the stem starts to die and space them out, so each bulb has more growing room. But this takes a lot of time and a lot of labor.

The cheating way is to pull off the stems of some of the lilies in each clump, hoping to starve those bulbs out and let the ones left with their stems take over. This method is obviously a lot faster and easier than all that digging.

But the problem with this method is that if the lily variety is tough, instead of the stemless bulb dying, it just throws up a new stem the following year.

This new stem will be smaller and weaker and less likely to bloom, since it didn't get to store up as much energy when its stem was pulled off.

If this was what happened, I'd either leave them in place (the small stems will probably recover), or else dig them up and space them out in the fall.

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Catsmum said, "I don't want to know what the stitch count will be by the final row."

Well, that's the thing about Nieblings, they don't always increase in a strict geometric way. In this particular doily, the stitch count got to 76 stitches per round in Round 139, leaped up to 101 per round in 140 (that make-a-triple-yarnover-into-13 bit), and has been decreasing by two stitches per pattern round ever since.

I just counted out the last chart round, and it has 91 stitches per repeat, so I'll be ending at 1,092 stitches in the final round.

I also stretched it out a little against a ruler, and it's at least two feet in diameter, even knitted in size 30 thread on a 2.0 mm needle.

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In other news, we found some more beanie babies for Beanie Baby Wars.

An octopus mounted on an ice dragon.

A turkey mounted on a unicorn.

They're jousting.

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Ah! And I finally got a picture of one of the hummingbirds at the feeder this year. I waited so long with the camera all set up that the power saver kept turning it off again.

My camera's preview screen has a speed of 30 frames per second, and when I watch the hummingbird on it, I can see the wings moving! But they were still too fast for the camera and showed up as blurs in the photos.