Where's Daisy?

If you don't follow me on Twitter and/or Facebook, you may be wondering where I've disappeared to yet again. Well, this time I've had a good reason. The whole province of Manitoba (Canada) in under a state of emergency for flooding. It's been going on for the last couple of weeks and we were directly and negatively affected. Our house has been protected by a sandbag dike and remains dry, reasonably anyway. Parts of our yard, though, are underwater. Luckily, the driveway, while partially underwater, is passable by both foot and vehicle. No boots or hip waders required.

We went through this back in 2011 and we were warned that this time could be worse in terms of water levels. We were prepared as we could be for it, but thankfully that didn't happen. The water levels were near those of 2011, not worse.  Regardless, it was extremely stressful. The last few weeks have been filled with anxiety, tears, and sleepless nights...along with lots of work to get things ready before the water came up. The work continues and so does the stress. There has been a small drop in water levels in the last few days, but it'll probably be a few more weeks before the drop is significant and even longer before the water is totally gone. Needless to say, reading/reviewing has taken a backseat as my concentration level and attention span are near nil these days. Yesterday was the first time I picked up or even looked at a book in weeks.

My apologies to those who are waiting for reviews. I'm slowly getting back into reading and I hope to resume reviewing as soon as I can.  

Thanks for understanding. 
Marie 

Needlework Tuesday - Knitting and Twigs

Needlework Tuesday is an occasional post detailing my needlework and/or crafting projects.

As I said last week, I started another temperature scarf on June 21, 2014. I've only completed a few rows so far, but here it is:

Not very long or exciting yet.  I've changed the temperature ranges just slightly from the last scarf I made (June 21, 2013 - June 20, 2014). I'm going to round up (or down) some of the temperatures, especially those that are close to colour changes. For example, 22C-29C is orange, while +30C is red. Last year, I only used the first two digits of the temperature so that 29.9C was orange. This year, I'm going to make 29.6 and above red. Because that's close enough to 30C for me.  I've made this slight change on all of the colours. It's going to skew/mess up any comparisons between the scarves and temperatures for the respective years, but I think it'll make the second scarf a little more accurate.

I also worked on a twig weaving. I had done one last summer, but only recently got around to making another. Here it is:

I didn't start out with any plan on this one and ended up with more open space that I would have liked, but overall I like it.

In addition to these needlework projects, I also made a few items from twigs, since we seem to have an overabudance of dead trees. We also have a rather large pond/swamp/puddle/lake in our backyard because of the recent heavy rains and high water table and high river levels. When it first appeared I was frantic. Now that we've had it for awhile and it doesn't look like it's going anywhere soon, I've adopted a "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" attitude and decided that the pond needed a raft.
 

Materials include: twigs, rafia, fun foam (??) The sail is decorative and not very functional and probably should be bigger.  Because of the heavy winds we had on Sunday (gusting to 70km+), the raft has beached itself on some tall grass, so someone is going to have to rescue it. 

I also made some stars with twigs and rafia.   My husband thought they were "little people" for the raft. *big sigh*    Instead of saying "Look what I made", I should have said "Look at the stars I made".   One of these days, I'll learn.
 

Now that you've seen them, I ask you, "Do these look like people?"   I think the original project said that they are supposed to be part of a garland or something, but I'm not sure what I'm going to do with them yet. If nothing else, they will end up on the Christmas tree.
 
I found both of these twig projects on the House Revivals website. I put my own spin on both them.

Needlework Tuesday is hosted by Heather over at Books and Quilts. If you've done any crafting this week, I hope you'll consider linking up so other can enjoy your creations.