Yardwork - June 2, 2026

Our yard has very little grass in it - at least not the kind people actually want.  What we have is ground cover, every kind of ground cover that exists.  Creeping Charlie.  Henbit.  Clover.  Chickweed.  Name it, and we probably have it.

And poison ivy.  OMG, the poison ivy.  It is everywhere.  I have sprayed it, chopped it, and dug it up, but there is just too much to eliminate it all, and unless you eliminate ALL OF IT, it's coming back.  Between the poison ivy and the English ivy, we may wake up one day to find that they have imprisoned us in the house.

All of these weeds are thriving from the good rains we've had over the past few weeks.  Yesterday afternoon, despite the rain that came in the morning, I decided that mowing the yard was absolutely necessary.  

We keep our riding mower in Nanny's big shed because we mow her yard, too.  Just after lunch, I walked down to Nanny's to get the mower.  Our yard has all sorts of places where the mower can't go - banks, ditches, etc. - so when I finished mowing, I cranked up the weed-eater-on-wheels and attacked the edges of the property, where the poison ivy thrives.  With the ground so wet, it was a battle.  About 4:30, I called it quits.  The yard looked nice.  I came back to the house cool off and drink some water.  While I was resting, it occurred to me that the garbage truck would run the next morning, so I got up to drag the garbage can to the edge of the road.  

I had not viewed the yard from this perspective.  The area at the end of the driveway was still a mess, a tangle of honeysuckle, wild grape vines, and poison ivy.  There's a 30-year-old forsythia bush in that mix, as well as a half-dead 40-year-old rosebush, both of which were entangled with vines.  Sleeping Beauty would've been safe in this corner.  I went back to the house for the weed-eater and the clippers.  It took an hour to cut all those vines out of the forsythia and the rose.  I cut the vines as close to the ground as I could and pruned that rosebush back to a nub.  

The Husband got home about the time I finished.  I told him he'd have to take the lawnmower back because I was too pooped to do it.  

The debris pile from that final assault is still laying by the driveway.  I should deal with it before it gets any hotter.

New Week, Same Stuff - June 1, 2026

It rained almost every day last week.  The moles have been digging so industriously that the yard is like soup, and the grass is getting so tall that it's hard to see the mole tunnels to set traps in them.  I was hoping to mow today, but it rained again this morning.  It is hot and muggy, a good day to work inside.

So I've been making jewelry.  

Last week was "clay week" in the craft room.  I fooled around with the gooey Creative Hands ClayStudio clay all week, trying this and that to stiffen it up enough to use it.  There is not much to show for my efforts.  I intend to use this clay to "stretch" more expensive clay, but I probably won't buy any more of it.  

My sweet niece texted me Friday afternoon to tell me about a hydrangea sale at the botanical garden in the big city.  The flyer that came with the text said that they were selling some macrophylla hydrangeas that I have been wanting.  I picked them up from her Saturday afternoon, and Sunday afternoon I planted it about 4 feet away from an Annabelle growing at the edge of the woods., where we can see them through the living room windows.  These will be the only hydrangea blooms we'll see this year because of the late freeze we got in March.  

Kitchen Duty - May 26, 2026

Yesterday, I spent the whole day either cooking or washing up from cooking.  The refrigerator is now stocked with enough breakfasts-to-go to last the rest of the week and a pork loin for tonight's supper.  And there's a pan of brownies on the counter.  

The kitchen is closed for a few days.

While I was puttering in the kitchen, I decided to fix the #(!*@ screen door between the kitchen and the porch.  The screen in this door has been flapping for a couple of years, ever since Dusty the cat tried to escape the vacuum cleaner.  I don't know what compelled me to take on the job during the middle of the cook-fest, but I did it.  Sent The Husband to the shed for the roll of screen left over from the building of the porch, gathered up my crafting tools, dragged out the stepladder, and got 'er done.  

Not much happened in the craft room yesterday, but between oven buzzers, I watched some craft tutorials and lined up some projects for the coming week.  Some of the projects called for stuff I don't have:  a "steel soap" and a texture sheet with irregular bumps resembling pebbles.  I put a steel soap in my online shopping cart but didn't buy it right away.  (I did not know that steel soaps are an actual thing for handwashing; I thought it was just a craft tool for shaping clay.)  Instead, I decided to try to make my own stuff.

I made the "soap" by rolling out a sheet of clay on the thickest pasta machine setting (2.5 mm on my machine), cutting out a 3" circle, and shaping it over a tennis ball (covered with plastic wrap to keep the clay from sticking to it) to create a domed shape.  Happily, the dome did not collapse while baking, and I used it this morning as a form for shaping a domed pendant.  The raw clay did not stick to the form during baking.

The pebble texture sheet was easy.  I just used some ball tools (various sizes) to press indentions in raw clay, overlapping the indentions.  Of course, using the ball tools made the "pebbles" perfectly round (until overlapped).  The baked form, pressed into raw clay, made a texture that looks more like pearls than pebbles, but this is what I was going for.  If I'd wanted it to look like irregular pebbles, I could've just pressed real pebbles into raw clay.

Now that I've made all this stuff, I have to figure out how to turn it into jewelry.  I need inspiration!

Every morning, I bring my coffee out to the back porch and fire up the laptop.  I work a puzzle, read some news, and check for new craft videos.  

This morning, I came across a video about polymer clay that appeared to have been filmed in a camper.  It gave me a flashback to about 12 years ago, when we were on the longest camping trip we'd ever done - nine days, two or three different campgrounds, best camping trip we'd ever taken.  I took my sewing machine on that trip.  Don't remember now what I was making, maybe a quilt top.  But I remember sitting at the kitchen table, with a view of a lake and squirrels scampering around the campground, thinking that it was a most delightful place to sew.

The video made me think FORWARD a couple of years, after The Husband will have retired.  He says that we're going to get a Class A camper, one that has a motor and a steering wheel, and we're going to drive that sucker all over the country.

It's going to have to be a big one to hold all my crafting stuff.

Creative Hands ClayStudio Polymer Clay - Part 2

A post or two ago, I talked about my first experiment with ClayStudio polymer clay that I bought at Hobby Lobby.  It is very sticky and hard to work with right out of the package.

Yesterday, I tried refrigerating the clay, and this made it a little easier to manage/roll/cut until the clay warmed back up.  

When the clay is warm, my pasta machine eats it up.  It sticks to the rollers, and the sheets don't come out smooth.  I tried rolling it between sheets of printer paper.  This helped, whether using the pasta machine or the roller.

The clay mixed well with white Sculpey Premo.  I added some pearl powder to it, and this stiffened it up a bit, enough to impress designs into it without it sticking to the stamp/cutter.  Cornstarch also helped to stiffen it a bit.  

The purchase may not be a total loss, after all.  I still would not recommend it to someone who just wants to condition a chunk of clay and get down to work.  You gotta baby this stuff.  Outsmart it.

Copper wire trick - May 22, 2026

The Grandson and I went down to the garden this morning to poke 20-gauge pure copper wire through the tomato stems.  It's supposed to keep down fungus.  

It's SUPPOSED to be done when the plant stems are about as big around as a pencil; mine were thicker.  And tough.  There may also have been some window of time (not sure how long, or why) between planting and poking that I missed.  The wire bent like crazy; it was hard to get it in.  But we did it.  I just hope we didn't kill the plants.  

Two of my pepper plants and one of the tomato plants are just gone.  Not even a shriveled stem where they were.

The okra has come up, is about 2-3" tall.  I thinned it and replanted some of it the skips.  The ground around some of them was like . . . chocolate pudding.  I just mushed 'em in with my thumb.  

The Grandson and I washed our crocks off with the waterhose by the back porch.  I noticed that the inside of my left ankle was bright red, angry.  Ants, most likely.  They're all over the place.

Last weekend, I tried an ant-killer recipe of 3 oz. orange oil, 6 oz. Dawn dishwashing liquid, and 1 gallon of water.  Poured a whole gallon straight down into the mound across the road from our house.  Ants came pouring out when the water hit.  I did not hang around long to see what happened.  Yesterday, I poked that mound with a stick.  It's still full of ants. 

On Mother's Day, while we were visiting at Nanny's, I set fire to two ant mounds at the north end of the garden.  Two weeks earlier, I had piled up okra stems and weeds on top of the mounds, just to piss them off.  A third mound, just a few feet away, had popped up during the interim.  I lit the two piles and went back to the porch for a while, and when I went out to check the situation a few minutes later, the ants from the burning mound were moving over to the new mound, entering the mound at ground level, not from the top.  I did not get close enough to get a good look, but it almost looked like the ants on the inside of the mound had knocked out part of the dirt at the base of the mound to welcome the new-comers.  Or maybe the mound defenders were busting out to meet the new-comers and run them off.  

In any case, the experiment tends to prove that roasting an ant hill does not work.

Creative Hands "ClayStudio" Polymer Clay from Hobby Lobby - Review - May 22, 2026

Yesterday, I yielded to temptation and went to Hobby Lobby to get a little more polymer clay, "just a couple of packs" to enable me to make something I'd seen in a tutorial.

I already had a couple of 2-oz packs of Sculpey clay in my basket (at roughly $3.50 per pack) when I noticed another brand of polymer clay - Creative Hands ClayStudio" - hanging above the Sculpey.  There were six 2-ounce packages of clay in each box, and there were four color themes - warm, cool, primary, and neutral colors.  Each box of clay cost $9.99.  My razor-sharp math brain calculated the price of each pack of ClayStudio clay to be a little over a dollar-something per pack.  On top of that, there was a sign that said, "Clay 40% off."  SOLD!  I bought a box of each color theme.

I wasn't sure the 40% discount applied to ALL clay, so when I got to the cashier, I asked if the ClayStudio clay was part of the sale.  The cashier said that the clay sale didn't start until Monday.   I said, "But there's a sign...."  She paged the manager, he checked (and took down the sign), and I got - 24 2-ounce packs of clay for $23.something.  SCORE!  

When I got home, I googled the brand and found only one mention of this clay, a short video made by someone who had bought the brand at Dollar Tree.  The video said that the clay was very soft and sticky, with the consistency of already-been-chewed gum.  

I opened a pack and began to condition it by rolling/folding it in my hands.  It was sticky straight out of the package, and the color was uneven.  I tried rolling it through my pasta machine.  Instead of coming out smooth, it looked . . . leprous.  I was able to get it smooth with an acrylic roller, but it was impossible to lift it off a tile without stretching it, and impossible to get it out of a cutter without mangling it.  

Eventually, I made a pendant and some earrings, all of which were misshapen by the time I took them to the oven.  The package said to bake them at 250 for 15 minutes.  My pieces were about 1/4" thick.  I was afraid that 15 minutes was not long enough, so I baked them for 30 minutes.  Left to cool overnight, when I attempted to sand them, they crumbled.  

This morning, I tried again.  I skipped the whole conditioning process and tried just rolling out the clay with a roller.  It was sticky.  When I tried to cut out a shape, the edges came out ragged.  At this moment, I have a 1/2" thick log of the clay on a tile in the refrigerator to see if cooling the clay will make it easier to handle.  I probably should have made a slab instead of a roll so that I could get straight to the cutting.

We'll see.  

Admittedly, I am not an expert at handling clay, but I cannot give this clay a passing grade.