Midwinter activities

Last night was my Herb Society meeting, every month different members serve snacks at the end of the meeting. We always have a wonderful table centerpiece and snacks. The meeting tonight was on learning how to have your own compost. It was very interesting, and I hope to get one started as soon as the snow leaves. This center piece incorporates a compost sifter (the wood and screen piece) with lots of other gardening tools, seeds, and herb plants. There are also candles in little flower pots. It was so nice to see "summer", I'm getting so tired of snow, which is heading this way again tonight.

This was one of the snacks, a dirt cake. The rows of "vegetables" were tiny pieces of herbs, some she dug under the snow to gather.

Our local college has had a lot of exhibits and lectures for Black history month going on. This was one of them, two men from the Congo in Africa demonstrating different traditional drums. They played for 90 minutes, I don't know how their hands did it as they played the drums hard and fast. While they played we purchased food from the cafeteria that was featuring different Africa dishes.

This little drum is a replica of a much larger one called a "talking drum". Different villages in the Congo have large talking drums and when they play it on the top off a hill they can "talk" to the people in other villages.

This is the final results of my fabrics dyed with lichen, it was a fun plant to use. The left one was the first fabric dyed and then the others followed with a about a week in between with the dye plant soaking. I simmered the dye and fabric about 1 hour each time. Now, I have a sample of each fabric setting in a south window going on the second week testing how light sensitive the dye is, so far its doing good.