Garden Friends

Yesterday morning, I caught Smitty and Sadie in a rare moment of nose-bumping. Actually, they do it fairly frequently, having become fast friends...it's just rare for me to catch it with the camera.

Or maybe they're working out a strategy to catch this squirrel.

This squirrel has been with us for a number of years. Just yesterday, I asked Alexa (our AI listening machine, grocery shopping list creator, kitchen timer, and information gatherer) what the life expectancy of a squirrel is. She said it was 12 years. This is one of the fattest squirrels I've ever seen, and I'm pretty sure she's the matriarch of the squirrel herd that inhabits our field. I'm also suspicious she's the digger in our flower pots.

While I was out yesterday, I picked two cups worth of lavender blossoms to make a lavender infusion, which will be turned into lavender blossom jelly. Pretty, huh?

It's the first time I've tried this infusion, and I was surprised when the color completely leached out of the flowers almost instantly. They're not as pretty now, are they?

The resulting infusion isn't a pretty lavender color, as I'd hoped. Instead it's a kind of darkish brownish purple. I'm kind of wondering what the jelly will look like. I could add some food coloring, but with such a dark color, I doubt food coloring would make it look better...it could even make it look worse.

So, I'll go ahead with this. It only makes four half-pints, so it's not a big loss if it turns out ugly. Either way, it will still taste good.

There was some other kitchen business in yesterday's wanderings, but nothing I'm ready to tell you about. Late in the day, I got to work tracing out a pattern for Todd the cat. It was all going along well until I got to the nose. From there, I was having trouble discerning enough detail to make the nose look like a nose.

I tried starting over with another transparency, and just tracing the nose, but I needed a sharper image with more detail, and so I wrote an email to my friend and told her the problem I was having with this. Here's the image I'm working with.

You can see that there's just a little bit of blur. These need sharp detail to end up looking like the actual cat, especially when I'm enlarging them to make a quilt. It's one thing to have a small 3 x 2-inch image on a computer screen. When they're blown up to a larger size, a lot of the detail is lost. I could still make a cat from this image, but it probably wouldn't look like Todd. It would just be an orange cat...it could be any orange cat on the planet.

When I started this whole process, I had this image to work with. When I tried enlarging it, it ended up all pixelated because it wasn't a high enough resolution. That would be fine for making a collage, but for a pawtrait...no go.

So, now I have this image, and this one might work. I won't know for sure until I try to trace it out.

To do these, I first "posterize" the images to give me good definition on the color values. Here's "posterized" Todd.

The nose is a little easier to see now, and so I'll give it another go. Fingers crossed.

This morning I'm walking with my friend Sue. When I get home, I have some more kitchen stuff to do, but then I'll get back to work on Todd.