My traveling rainbow

   It's impossible to get embroidery thread other than floss in our little mountain town in Costa Rica. Because of my interest in temari, this year I brought a box of #5 perle cotton wrapped onto bobbins in a wide variety of colors. I'm really looking forward to using as many of them as I can.

   Japanese temari are often made with rice husks as their filling. I think that coffee husks are similar and last week I walked to a coffee plantation where I know the people. It's coffee harvest time here, so a very good time to ask for husks and they gave me an ample supply. (For scale, the scoop is one cup.) Normally they use the husks as mulch, which they refer to as organic fertilizer.

  I've already stitched a few temari since we got here.

The nitty-gritty: I found instructions for the swirl pattern at temarikai.com on page 9 of patterns. I used them on the blue swirl ball. However, I wasn't happy that the polygons I got were very irregular and the diamonds were hard to stitch. So Mr. Rududu did some spherical mathematics for me to improve the pattern.  Here's my improved method, which gives regular hexagons and squares:

1. Mark a simple 4 division with an equator.
2. Measure the distance from the north pole to the equator.
3. Multiply that number by .295 to get the number from each center to corners of the hexagon.

The result is an Archimedian Polyhedron  called a "truncated octahedron" described in about 260 BC by Archimedes. The famous knitter Elizabeth Zimmermann calls this "unventing" something because many people use the same ideas and there's not that much new under the sun. I used this method to stitch the white swirls.
   The other temari is a variation of a pattern called Belts and Buckles by Robin Stein. It can be found here. I left out the buckles for lack of space but am very happy with how it looks. I plan to do a picker version and put in the buckles.

We mammals like a sweet drink

   Lazy or tired birdwatchers can take a seat and enjoy the Hummingbird Gallery just outside the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve. You can sit and watch dozens of hummingbirds zipping around to numerous feeders. As far as I know, no one has ever been impaled by a hummingbird but they often fly close enough to graze your head with a wing. (The Hummingbird Gallery also has a nice gift shop and a great free exhibit of nature photos by Michael and Patricia Fogden.) Sheltered from the wind, the patio where the feeders are is nice and warm if the sun has come through the clouds. It's particularly nice to grab a cup of the best coffee in the area at the Cafe Colibrí next door and do some birding from a seated position after a morning of serious hiking.
  When we were there recently, an olingo (Bassaricyon gabbii) came to one of the feeders and had a nice long drink of sugar water. Martín, who works in the gallery, told me the olingo usually visits once a day in the months of January and February. As he remarked, this particular olingo must be the most famous in the world because it makes such an easy photographic subject.

Before you typecast this mostly nocturnal mammal for its fuzzy cuteness, consider this information from Mark Wainwright's The Natural History of Costa Rican Mammals:

"One in Monteverde was seen chasing down a variegated squirrel and killing it with a series of bites to the back of the head. Another Monteverdean individual, which frequently arrives to steal sugar water from feeders at the Hummingbird Gallery, also snags the occasional hummingbird, a demonstration that has horrified more than one group of feeder spectators."

We did not witness any predatory activity but we were quite amazed with how much sugar water he consumed. Olingos also drink nectar in the wild, but I'm sure they never find any other source that is so large. 

Good morning!

Morning--time for a good cup of Costa Rican coffee. Yum. I've been making cafe con leche by heating milk and sugar in the microwave, then sitting the filter on top of the measuring cup and pouring in the water to make the coffee. Not only is it delicious, but also the way the coffee and milk are in layers before I stir really perks me up because it's so pretty and subtle. Enough to make me like the color tan. That in itself is an eye-opener.









Right now I have these beautiful gerbera daisies. There is one store in town that sells flowers on Thursday and Friday. For years I didn't know that, until one day I walked by on a Thursday. It's a difficult decision which flowers to squander $5 or so on--huge clumps of tropical flowers, or something like these daisies. The stems were about 2 feet long!










And meanwhile, this is what is going on outside. We are having our roof painted. It will be green this time. Last time I picked blue and it was pretty, but really, how much time do we spend looking at our roof? It's only visible from a couple of places. So this time we went for the cheapest color. One can also get red.

Notice the clouds and imagine them moving. Clouds almost never sit still around here, thanks to the trade winds.