Friday Smiles 2024 # Week 6

My how the weeks fly by, and here we are at Thursday already, and time to look back at what we have enjoyed over the past few days.

For a start I have enjoyed the weather which has been mostly sunny, with a little hazy cloud, and one grey, damp day. But on Sunday it was lovely so we again decided to take the opportunity for a walk along the coast. We went down to Mojacar, and because we decided to go before lunch this time, it was very quiet there. (The Spanish families all turn out for a late lunch and walk on Sunday afternoons).

Just below the water line at the start of Mojacar beach, there is a large rock where most mornings the cormorants come to spread their wings and dry them in the sun. They always make me think of a group of old ladies gathering to have their morning gossip.

I could stand and watch, and listen to the waves rolling in and breaking around the stones for hours, but we were there to walk!

I don't know how far we went but it was a little further than usual as I had clocked up 8,000 steps when we got home - well over my daily target of 5,000

We passed this building which houses the beach 'facilities', and it is always kept freshly painted as it is one of the features along with the children's play area just near it, that help to keep our blue flag award each year for that stretch of beach.

I had to smile at this angle of the end of the building. At first glance the only thing I saw was a face of a man with a droopy moustache. Of course I soon realised it was a whale's tail, but it still made me smile.

We stopped at one of the beach cafés for refreshment before walking back to the car.

As we passed the rock on the way home I saw one bird was still there. It had a very white chest and I thought it was something different, but looking back at my earlier picture and zooming in on it, I dicovered that all the cormorants had white chests. I was surprised as I thought cormorants were all black, but when I looked it up I found that most of them are, but there is also a sub-species known as white-breasted cormorants, so my walk was educational as well as healthy!

I mentioned last week that a friend was introducing me to the craft of laser cutting, and it turned out to be a bit more of a chore than he had expected. The first machine he lent me wouldn't work at all, so he swapped it for another one which only partially worked! When we returned that one he had got the original one fixed so I now have that one back, and Yay! it is working. But it is not a straightforward machine to use and needs a lot of trial and error to find the right settings for power and speed, for each material, so I have had plenty of failures, but I am learning. I needed a good silhouette image to play with and the first one that showed up on my computer was a treble clef, so I went with that. And I have managed to cut one out from medium weight card, and have engraved a larger one into the surface of some MDF plywood. 

So now I have to plan a project and work out what materials I need. I do have some thinner sheets of plywood and some birchwood ply on order from Amazon but it won't arrive for over a week. In the meantime I can try some other images from thinner card - too thin and it will burn. I can also try to learn how to edit a photo to give me an image I can engrave with shadow-fill, rather than just an outline. So plenty to keep me busy. This photo shows it in action, but I have to wear dark green goggles when it is in use to protect my eyes from the laser beam.

It is a long time since we had a nice sunset, but on Tuesday evening I was just in time to catch this one before it all went dark.

One more little 'happy' is that this morning the bandage was removed from my hand. It is not completely healed but is no longer infected so doesn't need to be covered. I am hoping it will now continue to heal and the scar will fade and settle down a bit more. It is not a pretty site but at least it isn't sore any more.

And finally a funny little tale of a wee pixie. He is one of many that I made with my boys thirty years ago. We sold them at the primary school fete, and this week our home town local newspaper ran a feature called "A trip down memory lane", with the caption "Can you spot anyone you know?" Well sure enough, there was a photo of my son Tom holding up a Santa which we had also made, and the young girl beside him is holding one of the pixies. It was of course, a photo of the school fete, Christmas 1993. (Tom was 10). But back in December Tom had posted a picture on our family chat page showing his pixie being hung on his tree this year with the caption "Mum made this in the 90's". So I am not the only sentimental one in the family. Who knew that a bit of felt and a ping-pong ball could last so long.

And now I am ready to post this tomorrow on Annie's Friday Smiles.

Friday Smiles 2024 # Week 5

We have had a mixed week of bright sunshine days, and cold grey days, but last Sunday was one of the sunny ones so we decided to go for an afternoon walk around Vera Laguna. We never know whether there will be lots of birds there or none at all, nor what they will be. It is dependent on the weather a lot as the lake is entirely natural, so wild life is free to come and go, and also it is only a short stretch of sand away from the high tide line, so on really stormy days it just becomes one with the sea. However, on Sunday it was crowded with seagulls, plus a fair flock of moor hens. The more usual ducks and geese were nowhere to be seen.

The lake is lovely with its backdrop of reeds, at this time of year swaying with feather flower heads, and beyond them, the misty mountains. 

Looking the other way, you can see the sea, and if you look closely at this rather blurry photo (blurred because I cropped and enlarged one section), you can see a further row of seagulls sitting along the edge of the sea.

Every time a child ran passed shouting at the birds, or just playing, the gulls all took off, and then settled again a bit further away. I have never seen this many gulls at the lake before.

The moorhens must be used the children because they continued to bob around near the shore.

It was a lovely walk and blew the cobwebs away for us. We should do it more often while the weather is sunny but not too hot.

We only have live TV to watch but the programms are quite good at this time of year, so we usually spend our evenings with the fire on, comfy on the new settee, and I do a little bit more of my crochet each evening. So I have now finished the first motif of the blanket I am making.  It was a case of two steps forward and one backwards. I don't expect to have to do as much unpicking as I have with this, but I am comfortable with how it works now so hopefully the next motif will go better.

I don't think I made the best choice of wool for my secondary colour for this first one. It was sock wool and it changed colour too frequently so the pattern is not very clear, but it is alright. Here it is on my blocking board. I have steamed it and when it is quite dry I will store it away until the next one is done. By blocking them I can make sure they are all the same size. There are twenty altogether and they will all have the same blue yarn for their main colour, with various secondary colours using up oddments from my stash.

The warm weather is confusing the garden again. I noticed as I came in from shopping, that my bright pink geranium is looking better now than it did a couple of months ago. It even has two more heads of buds coming up for when these ones die off. I have normally brought them in under the porch for shelter by now.

I have a friend who has been a crafter ever since I first knew him, but he is now limited to only leaving the house on his mobility scooter so he spends a fair bit of time at home. To keep busy he has developed his skills with laser cutting, 3-D printing and other technical wizardry. He has a lot of knowledge in the field of electronics and on Tuesday he invited me up to see his machines in action. I was very impressed with his set-up. There were four laser cutters, and a computer to control them and an amazing array of wires and switches, all in a small garden 'shed'. And behind that, in what I think would be called a narrow storage room he had three 3D printers all set up ready to use, and another machine that I have forgotten the name of. (Of course I was too interested to stop and take photos!)

He talked me through the software for the cutters, and I did manage to cut one image out of 400gm card. Then he gave me the smallest cutter to have at home on 'long term lend'. So yesterday we set it up in my craft room and installed the software, but we could not get it to read the files. Chris spent ages trying to sort it out for me but we had to admit defeat. So we are going back to Steve's probably tomorrow afternoon, and he is going to swap it for a different machine that he thinks may work better for me, and give me a few more tips for using it. So maybe by next week I will have something to show.

It was cold and grey when I set out this morning. I had an early appointment with the nurse to have the dressing on my hand changed. I hoped to have it uncovered by now, but although it is no longer infected, it is very slow to heal properly, so I am again well wrapped. But never mind. I can do most things I need to, and I have silicone gloves for washing, and in the kitchen.

It has taken all day for the sun to finally break through, so I am hoping for a brighter day tomorrow so I can wash the sheets and get them dry outside.

So now I will just finish this off ready to publish and post on Annie's Friday Smiles tomorrow.