Yard update after the storms

After all of our monsoon rain the past month, I finally got out in the yard to photograph some of the colorful blooms. This purple flowering shrub with grey-green leaves is the Texas Ranger, which only blooms when it gets just the right amount of moisture and heat. Mine burst into bloom yesterday! The bees love them.

This is the Baja Fairy Duster, and the rain brought out a lot of its pretty red "dusters." Hummingbirds love them.

 

This monster plant in my west-facing courtyard is called a Lady Slipper because the red flowers are supposed to look like slippers, but I don't see that. It's one of the few plants hardy enough for my courtyard that bakes in the summer sun. This is another one that hummingbirds love. I call it a monster plant because its sap can cause severe rashes if you get it on your skin.

 

These red spiky flowers are on my potted Firecracker plant, which is the only potted plant of the many I've tried that has survived the summer in the hot courtyard. But I do have to water it twice a day all summer.

The prickly pear cactus that reaches my roof is bursting with immature fruit since we got the heavy rains! They seem to have appeared almost overnight.

And my ocotillo, above, which had looked like a clutch of grey thorny sticks, suddenly greened up a few storms ago. It's a very hardy Sonoran Desert native that requires no water from me, and in the spring it sprouts red flowers on its tips.

My double-stalked yucca is doing great, but the tender succulent below succumbed to the intense heat when it climbed above 110 for a stretch. I think it baked in its pot, even though it was shaded most of the day. I also might have watered it too much trying to cool it off. And it was doing so well! Lesson learned. After four years here in the desert, I still have much to learn about growing plants.

We had another doozy of a storm yesterday, with pounding horizontal rain that came in under my back door, nonstop thunder and lightning, and flooding streets that required lots of rescues of drivers whose cars got stuck in the high water. And we're looking at more rain for the next week.

Have a colorful day

Another beginning

Another day, another little collage!

This time I'm working with green.

Since it's once again way too hot to be outside (102 right now), I did some big, slow stitching in front of the news this morning.

Then I stamped some faint silvery spirals around the borders, which will mainly be wrapped around the edges and back of the frame. I'll continue slow stitching with the evening news.

My work room is awash in fabric!

I'm already playing around with another collage possibility using more greens.

In between, I added some pink cross stitches to a wool appliqué block that I started years ago. 

Since I'm stuck inside in the AC, my thoughts turned to baking yesterday and I whipped up a batch of brownies. I LOVE this Ghirardelli mix, which makes better brownies than any of my scratch recipes. I get a big box at Costco with enough to make six batches.

Juniper says, "I'll take some!" She's half a year old now and starting to eat solids. I miss her so much! Before I know it those little feet will be walking.

Have a colorful day

Little collages, big stitches

I've been doing a lot of hand stitching on little collages this week, sheltering inside from the triple digits and evening monsoon storms. I plan to staple them around 8x10 inch frames.

This is my latest one, made with old painted scraps from my stash. The only new touch was on the teal circle, which started out bright blue and didn't work with the rest of the piece. I applied a thin wash of yellow paint, which toned it down and made it teal, then I sponged on some silver-blue fabric paint to tone it down further. It's a mix of our desert heat and rain.

I decided to limit my hand stitching to long straight stitches and big X's. I know all kinds of elegant, intricate embroidery stitches, but I want the look of these collages to be wilder. Since the pieces are small, I'm using two strands of embroidery floss instead of the thicker pearl cotton that I usually use.

This one is called "Healing Rain," which is true of rain in the desert except when it's accompanied by wicked winds like last weekend. The silver circles were made by using bubble wrap as a stamp, and the green is that sheer silk organza that I painted awhile ago and layered over the background.

This one is "Desert Heat," no surprise. I love spirals, circles and hands and use them a lot in my work. They seem to be universal symbols that have shown up in art for thousands of years.

I think I'll call this one "Morning Light." I made it with fabric I painted recently after I decided to dust off my paint bottles and get creative inside to beat the heat.

I think this one is my favorite because I love the clear, but soft, colors. It's called "Monsoon" because there's so much going on during one of those storms -- changing light, wind, rain, and people outside celebrating the life-giving water in the desert.

When I've lived in wetter parts of the country, people tried to escape the rain. Here in the desert, kids rush outside and dance in the streets when it rains, just like kids up north rush outside when it snows. The rain cools our temperatures by about 20 degrees, which is nice -- from 108 to a bearable 88!

The little petroglyph figure is from a stamp I bought from Sherrill Kahn about 20 years ago. Those are more bubble wrap circles. I made the gold spiral with a foam stamp from Michael's, also bought about 20 years ago.

Have a colorful day

Another monsoon storm and tornado warnings

I had so many weather warnings on my phone Sunday evening that I could hardly keep up with them, including two tornado warnings which are virtually unheard of here!

This time I escaped the worst of it -- my house didn't leak, I didn't lose any trees, and my power stayed on.  But the wind howled and the rain came down so hard that my yard was like a lake.

Look at all the power outages from last night! I'm in Oro Valley, which is just north of Tucson.

Here are storm damage photos that were posted on Facebook. Some of these are only a few miles from me:

"This is the strongest (monsoon) event for Tucson I've seen in my almost 20 years (here)," said National Weather Service meteorologist Glenn Lader. Winds were clocked at up to 78 miles per hour and there were many inline wind events.

And we're expecting more this week. This is way too much excitement for me.

Have a colorful day

Monsoon damage

We had a doozy of a monsoon storm move through yesterday afternoon, collapsing the roof of the Hobby Lobby a few miles from my house and knocking out my power for a couple of hours.

 

Coincidentally, I just finished my "Monsoon" piece (above), and I'm almost done with "Heat Wave," (below). 

Our Southwest summer monsoons are generated by excessive heat (it's going up to 108 today) and moisture from the gulf that swirls westward, opposite of usual weather patterns that move west to east. Besides having torrential rain, monsoons have very high winds. And the season goes from June through September, so we're not done yet!

The storm blew one of my beautiful Talovera pots off my patio table and shattered it ...

... and tossed around my outdoor chairs and messed with the rug.

This big tree was ripped apart in our neighborhood park, and a lot of my neighbors had big branches down.

But in the midst of it all was a rainbow behind my house.

 

Have a colorful day