Rocking Your World 2016: Week 14

Hello again. I hope everyone enjoyed a Happy and Peaceful Easter. I had a very quiet day on Good Friday and Saturday, but Easter Sunday was lovely with a special service at our church. It had been decorated in the front corner with very pretty flower arrangements and of course purple cloth.

As you are probably aware, a small group of us have been meeting each Friday afternoon to practice two songs to sing at this service, and these were well received by the congregation.  We are referred to as 'the choir' but I think that is a bit of an exaggeration, but we do try to all look the same so we wore black trousers or skirts, white tops and red accessories, which along with our red folders made a nice splash of colour.

(Apologies for the photo. It is a still taken from a video).

Through this weekly post, and my craft blog, I have made friends with Lisca who I am sure many of you also know within blogland. She lives about a two hour drive inland from us, and her house is much higher so it is colder too. Well she, and her husband decided to bring their camper van down to Vera for a short holiday last week, and on Sunday they came up to our church service, and we invited them home to have dinner with us. Being very traditional, Chris and I still enjoy a typical British roast dinner every Sunday, even through the hottest months. Really, once it is in the oven we can keep away from the kitchen until it is ready, so it is not a hard meal to make whatever the temperature is outside. Anyway, Lisca's husband Graham seemed very pleased to have such an 'English' meal, and it was very pleasant to share a meal and chat, and get to know one another better. I am afraid we were so busy talking that this is the only photo that was taken!

It was such a lovely afternoon, and our porch was sheltered from the wind, - the thermometer out there on a shady wall was showing 27º - so we were able to sit outside after lunch and enjoy the sunshine until it was time for them to leave.

Apart from that we have had a very quiet week. I haven't shown you my smile yet so here it is. I happened to see this on facebook today and I could so relate to it, as I am sure many of you can too. There must be a lot of students at that university.

I had another happy moment this week when another parcel of wool arrived. This is for a lovely lap blanket to crochet. The design was inspired by the life and work of controversial Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, and the designer, Jane Crowfoot, is going to release the pattern in eight parts, one each fortnight, starting next Tuesday. It is a CAL project (Crochet A-Long), where the idea is we keep up with the pattern releases and all finish together. There have been hundreds, in fact I think thousands, of the yarn packs sold, so there will be some very busy crocheters around the world next week. I am of course, still working on Sophie's Universe. I'm on Round 56 with another fifty or more to go, but I am having some problems with muscular pains in my arms, and soon she will be too heavy to hold, and it will also be too hot to have a blanket in the making, spread across my lap as I work around it. Frida's flowers is made from several large motifs, so they will be easier for me to handle right now, but I shall continue to work on Sophie as well. And that's not mentioning the little animals I am knitting ready for a Christmas fair, all my half finished projects for Africa, my Ireland scrapbook and several greetings cards that are barely passed the planning stage. So you can see, I could indeed relate to the photo above.

Here is something else that made me smile. Isn't it beautiful?

This is the amaryllis that my friends at the Wednesday group gave me to thank me for their crochet lessons. It was in tight bud when they gave it to me last week, but I put it on our front step where it gets the early morning sun and then it is in the shade, and it has opened up so quickly. It is called 'White baby', but each white petal has a pink edge which is so pretty.

I am also very excited about this plant in our front garden. When a friend of mine returned to live in the UK two years ago, she gave me this plant which was very small and in a small pot in her garden. We bought a rather huge pot and moved it into that, and it soon started to grow. It was a bit like an untidy head of hair at first, but the stem has stretched up longer and much thinner now. Every now and then, a new set of 'leaves' grows up from the centre, and the lower ring dies off and you can gently pull them away.

But just lately we thought it was getting to be a rather odd shape. The newest centre shoot didn't separate like it usually does, but it just kept getting taller, and the whole plant looked a bit bedraggled and sad. I thought maybe I wasn't watering it enough over the winter so I started paying more attention to it, and this week I realised that the new shoot is in fact a flower! I had no idea it even had flowers. But this evening I took this photo and you can clearly see there are flower buds all the way up it. I am excited now to see what it will look like. At the rate it is changing, I think I will be able to show you by next week.

Another thing that rather tickled me today was when we went to Turre to take two of our cats to the vet. One was Arwen, who lives just in this room, and gets a bit fretful when she is taken out, so I waited until the last minute to persuade her (forcefully push her), into the carrying box. The other was Tango, who is too laid back to ever get stressed. I set his basket on the kitchen floor with the door open, and a few minutes later he wandered into it and settled down as though he went in it every day. He is barely aware of Arwen's existence, but she hisses and growls at anything that moves, so I decided to put one on the car floor behind my seat, and one in the boot. Before long Arwen started to complain. She has a high pitched, tiny mewing voice. Then Tango answered in his deep mournful mee-ow, and they took it in turns to make these two noises all the way to the vets. It was like a slightly discordant duet and Chris and I were in stitches listening to them. Fortunately neither had a too serious condition, so soon they were back home in their separate areas and happy again.

I am glad to say we have had some better skies in the evenings this week so I have two photos to close with. One was tonight. I went shopping later than usual and on the way home I thought the sky looked like it might produce a nice sunset, but then it cleared and there weren't really enough clouds to make it interesting. But just before it went dark I looked out and saw this lovely arc of light. I love the way there is nearly always a little bird in my photos, flying back to wherever it roosts for the night. There are a couple in this one, but you may have to click on the image to enlarge it before you can see them.

This other one came earlier in the week, when the high wind that often starts at tea time, had broken up the cloud giving this beautiful effect.

And on that happy note I will go and link up with Annie's Friday Smiles, and Rocking Your World, and I'll see you all next week.

Rocking Your world 2016; Week 13

I hate to tell you peeps, but this is week 13, which means we are a quarter of the way through the year - and I'm only just getting the hang of remembering to write 2016!

But we can smile all the same and here is a smile from one of my little cats. I use this old St Michael's bag to take my current craft project to my Wednesday sewing group, and when I had put everything away, I left the empty bag on the telephone seat. Paco decided that it was just the right size for his bed, so this is how I found him when I got up the next morning.

And here are a couple of his friends - well he is friends with Tango sometimes.

Now that's what I call a laid back cat!.

And finally here is another one of Arwen. She always has big green eyes, that are quite different from the other cat's yellow ones, but last night, something disturbed her, and when I looked at her, her eyes were like saucers, and the pupils were so dilated that they were nearly black. She soon got over her scare and went back to normal, but I managed to get a quick picture of her first.

The week got off to a good start with a lovely Palm Sunday service at church. Tall fronds of palms had been collected to decorate the pillars, and at a workshop last week palm crosses had been made for everyone.

It was a lovely sunny morning so we were able to go outside for the Blessing of the Crosses, and then we all went back in singing 'Ride on, ride on in Majesty'.

I had a lovely surprise on Wednesday, when I arrived at the sewing group, to find that the group I had been teaching basic crochet to, had bought me an amaryllis plant. It is a white one, and has two buds on it, so I am looking forward to having some flowers soon. It was all wrapped up in some very pretty cellophane, and tied with a green bow. I wasn't looking for any thanks, but it was a lovely gesture. They all did so well too. One has already made a 'granny square' big enough to cover a cushion, and most of them mastered ripple stitch and reading a simple pattern too. This week I stared three more off. It is good to be able to share our skills. It was at this group that I learned to do bobbin lace, because someone was willing to sit with me and teach me the basic techniques.

It really feels as though Spring has arrived here. The temperature is slowly rising, and the flowers are waking up after the showers we have enjoyed. It is still really windy in the afternoons, but we half expect that right through to the end of April, and the flowers that look so fragile, seem able to withstand the harshest wind. But before I show you what is waking up in the garden, I must share this with you.

It is our Christmas poinsettia, still looking beautiful on the front porch. When my friend called this week she said "You must have green fingers. Look at this still flowering". But as I told her, I think it thrives on neglect, because apart from being told how beautiful it is whenever I pass it, it only gets a little drop of water now and then. It has been there for so long that it is beginning to look dusty!

The two smaller ones that were on the stand just underneath it, have died, and rather than having empty holders, I put back the two geraniums that were there last Autumn. I thought they had died, but they have found a second wind and now have several lovely heads of flowers on them.

My Easter lily has flowered right on time, and it didn't take long for a little bee to notice it. This is the first time it has had a flower for a few years, but when I went to the flower festival at Cordoba, a man told me that he kept his with its feet in water all year round. I haven't quite done that, but I have watered it more regularly than I used to and it seems to have paid off. It has a second bud ready to open very soon too.

Another success story is my bottle-brush plant. I bought it as a tiny plant in a pot and almost lost it the first year - again probably through inadequate water. But i moved it into a large tub and cut off all the dead branches, and it is now a really nice shrub with several 'brushes' on it.

I think they are fascinating flowers. I wonder how many fibres there are in each flower head.

Even the plants out in the street are doing well. When the road was completely dug up and repaved some years ago, the council removed the orange trees that used to grow all up it, and replaced them with small ornamental trees in planters. The planters seemed too shallow to support a tree, but they are on an automatic watering system, and the council workers come round about twice a year to cut and shape them, and they seem to be doing fine. Every now and then, they also plant a few flowers under each one. Last autumn they planted small chrysanthemum plants, which died back in the winter and poinsettias were planted instead. But now those have gone and the chrysanthemums have sprung to life again, and are now a mass of flowers. Our planter happens to have two that are red and one white one, but there are also yellow and pink ones in some of the pots. This Spring we each got a lavender plant too which is good as they are known to repel flies and other unwanted bugs.

Still in the garden, but something quite different; just beyond our back railings there is an old agave or century cactus. Its leaves are splitting and it is passed its best, but I am hoping it will flower in the next few years. (It takes thirty to forty years to flower, and then dies, and we have no idea how old our one is). However, every year it is suddenly covered by a mass of spider web. One little spider, and she really is little, works diligently all through the night, and every morning the network of webs is bigger. She makes several little balls of eggs, dotted around her web so I guess she thinks if one gets eaten or blown away, she will still have several more. 

The webs catch all sorts of dead leaves and other rubbish that gets blown around in the high winds, but sometimes I see her wrapping up a little fly that has got entangled too. She puts so much work into building it that I haven't the heart to take it away even though it does make the plant look even more of a mess than it usually does, but this morning I was standing at the rail and looking at it, wondering whether I might spot the little spider, when the early sunlight caught it, and I realised that strategically placed among the untidy webs, there were carefully constructed flat layers of perfectly formed round webs, much like a normal garden spider weaves, but with the rings very close together. I just marvelled at her handiwork. I think nature is wonderful.

One of the highlights of this week was when I joined a new group in the village on Tuesday evening. It is an 'intercambio' group which means 'interchange' and the idea is that English and Spanish people meet together to chat about anything, and the Spanish have to speak in English, and we have to speak in Spanish. It was great fun and will be great for me to practise listening and to learn more vocabulary. I think there were seven of us there who were British - non-Spanish anyway, and then four Spanish people. We sat around one table to begin with, but because we were talking across one another, and we were in a bar so there was quite a lot of background noise, we split up into little groups and after a while we moved on to the next one. I enjoyed it. We were all around the same level so hopefully we can all help one another to improve our language skills and make some new friends.

This just shows some of us. The man in the cap is my friend Chris who is S. African and his native tongue is Africaan so he is good at making some of the more guttural sounds that I find so difficult. The lady he is speaking to is Spanish and so is the man next to her in the green jacket. The ones sitting opposite them are English. I was talking to the young girl who is just off the left side of the picture. They all knew I was the lady who makes marmalade and has a big dog, which surprised me, as I only recognised one of them! I will definitely go back for another session this week.

With the weather improving through the week I have been able to find a spot sheltered from the wind, to sit in the sun and do a little of my crochet most afternoons. Sophie hasn't made much progress this week as I wanted to, and did, finish off a blanket for Africa before I did any more of her, but she does now have a pretty row of 'tulips' all around her garden, and she is no longer square!.

I have also done a little bit in my craft room. I made a couple of Christmas cards for a blog challenge today, and also a birthday card for a friend next week. I did it as a bit of a last minute rush as the challenge I was entering was almost due to close, so I was pleasantly surprised to look a few days later and find I had been drawn to receive a prize. So I will have some pretty butterfly stamps arriving in the post some time soon.

Now I will be off to link with Rocking Your World at Celtic House. I can't seem to find a Friday Smiles post from Annie this week, but I expect she is having some lovely family time this Easter weekend. Hopefully next week there will be some nice sunsets to show you again.