Most colorful nation?

I wonder if anyone has ever ranked cultures by how colorful they are. Surely Guatemala would be at or near the top of the list. Not only do many people in the highlands still wear their traditional and very finely crafted garments, there is a plethora of colorful textiles and other souvenirs for sale. On our recent trip there, one of the pieces I bought was this beautiful table runner made out of a slightly used huipil or traditional blouse.

I not only bought textiles; I bought some number 8 mercerized cotton embroidery thread in the Panajachel market. These ladies, in their beautiful huipils helped me with some color suggestions. Mr. Rududu is such an enabler: he told me to buy one of every color the seller had. I was slightly more restrained than that because I was thinking about how heavy my carry-on luggage was already. Interestingly, this kind of thread is a fraction of the cost in Guatemala compared to what it costs in the US.

My thread looks like a boxes of candy. I've already started stitching temari with it.

The other side of the ball

   One of the fun things about stitching temari is that not all sides of the ball can be seen at once. If one doesn't do so well on one side of ball, it can be displayed with the preferred side visible and the other side as unseen as the dark side of the moon.
   I just completed a 16 face ball with kiku or chrysanthemum stitch in the four hexagons and the other shapes filled in with swirl stitch.

I tried both solid color swirls as above and swirls where I lightened the color as I got close to the center of the shape as in the next picture.

I enjoy trying different color combinations of different sides too. (Perhaps I just have a low tolerance for boredom.) I also tried different greens with the same blue on the various kiku sides.

This was my favorite color combination.

The colors of this ball were inspired by a little bird found in Monteverde. While not extremely rare, it's very difficult to see because it hides in clumps of mistletoe high in trees. It's the Elegant Euphonia (euphonia elegantissima).

The nitty-gritty: I learned how to mark this ball by following a tutorial in the Temari Challenge Yahoo group. The marking is called C8 to pentagons and hexagons. The 16 faces consist of 4 large hexagons and 12 pentagons. Thanks again to Joan Z., who led the tutorial.

Where are all the sloths?

   Considering that sloths are one of the most common mammals in the tropical forest, they are surprisingly difficult to see. A study cited by Mark Wainwright in his excellent Natural History of Costa Rican Mammals found that sloths accounted for two-thirds the biomass of terrestrial mammals in a study area in Panama. Despite their abundance, it's not easy to see a sloth, especially the nocturnal Hoffman's Two-toed Sloth (Choloepus hoffmanni), the only sloth species found in the Monteverde area. Consider this sloth sleeping less than 3 meters (9 feet) from our bedroom window.

 It was mid-afternoon before we noticed it was there. I don't feel quite so lacking in observational skills after reading in Wainwright's book that " Biologists have found that even individuals that have been precisely radio-located can be impossible to see" because they like to spend the day sleeping in the middle of liana tangles.
  So it's always fun to get a really good view of a sloth. Just looking at a sleeping sloth makes me feel like taking a nap.

 One way to see a sloth is to go on a twilight walk with a guide. Guides often search out a sloth before the tour and sloths are apt to become active around dusk, making them easier to see. The easiest way to see a sloth is to know someone caring for a rescued baby. Babies sometimes fall from their mother and are abandoned. Caring for a baby sloth is a huge commitment as baby sloths stay with their mothers for up to two years.

   Even though two-toes sloths are generally nocturnal, this one was active during the day. Perhaps that special flower was tasty enough to wake up for.

Tropical colors

Green is a predominant color in tropical forests. Small splashes of color have a big impact. Here are some recent photos Mr. Rududu took recently in the Monteverde area. Blue-gray tanagers sometimes puncture flowers and drink nectar from them without doing any polinating.

This insect was inside a plastic bag; the photo shows its fuzzy underside. It was awaiting identification inside a plastic bag so the background looks kind of artsy.

For some reason, scorpions look blue under a black light flashlight. It sure looks prettier than under normal life—and it makes me want to get a black light flashlight to inspect my house with.

Vertigo ball

I started a temari last year that is completely covered in stitching. In fact it's really two layers thick. No wonder it took me almost forever to finish, especially as I was in a different country from it for seven months. It is stitched on a C10 division, so it has 12 regular pentagons and each of those pentagons has 10 lines crossing it. The pattern is built up with a series of pentagons stitched in alternating colors. The outside blue pentagon in this picture has its corners lined up with the corners of the pentagon I was filling.

 Here's the white stitching that I did on the alternate support lines.

 And here's the (finally) completed temari.

It makes me feel a little dizzy to look at this ball but I love it. It would have been cleverer to have the thread base be a color that didn't contrast as much with the blue and white, such as a light blue. I didn't worry about exactly how many rows of each color I used but just made sure the area was filled.

Orioles before breakfast, motmots before dinner

   In our annual migration as birdwatchers, we have returned to Monteverde, Costa Rica to escape Wisconsin's cold. Although it can be cool and misty here in January due to the altitude, today was perfect for being outside in shirtsleeves. Before breakfast I spotted another migrant, a Baltimore oriole. I wonder if it's one that delighted us with its song in Wisconsin's summer.

This isn't a photo of the one I saw this morning although it was probably in the same tree near our house. We've been too busy unpacking and organizing to do bird photography so the photos in this post are from Mr. Rududu's archives. During the day I put out the fruit platform and soon had birds coming to it. The first to arrive were the Blue-gray tanagers.

Before dinner, the Blue-crowned motmot showed up for his (or her) last minute snack just before dark. The motmots are surprisingly regular about the times they come to eat. Last year we had a nesting pair that came twice a day every day. I couldn't really see the details at dusk today, but this is what the bird looks like in better light.

Ah, it's so nice to be back in Monteverde!

Neighborhood architecture award

I hereby bestow my own architectural award for a new building in our neighborhood. It's a new Little Free Library that neighbors have put up in front of their house. (I've blogged before about these little libraries where you can leave a book and take another one in exchange.) This is the cutest little library I have seen, and given the competition in the cuteness category, that is saying a lot.

The attention to detail is wonderful. Someone cut little shingles and put bricks around the base below the to-scale siding. It has a dormer and well trimmed windows. However, the cutest thing about it is that it matches the owners' house, which is in the Marquette Bungalows Historic District. I also appreciate the added touch of a bench for library browsers. 

I've already become a regular patron of this library, which always seems to have at least one book I want to read.