Here's the red scarf/stole thingie I'm working on:




I've just attached the second ball so it's about 1/4 of the way done.

It doesn't photograph well. There's a simple lace pattern in there - sort of a variant of the old Razor Shell - but it doesn't really show up. I suppose it's because it's pre-blocking, and it's also "Mohair Art" (or "Art Mohair" - "Art" in the old, early 20th century sense where they'd call something "Art Silk" or "Art Leather" to disguise the fact that it was artificial. There's actually mohair in this but there's also, I think, nylon or something like that. It's a mostly-synthetic yarn).

I was also happy to see that my Christmas cactus is flowering:



I'm happy because this is a plant I babied along from a tiny cutting I took from my mother's plant, which she got from a plant her grandmother had owned - so, genetically speaking, this plant is probably 100 or more years old.

Christmas cactuses (or is that cacti? I seem to remember a fight in the Letters section of "Arizona Highways" about that subject) are actually not desert cactuses; they are more tropical (I think, tropical dry forest?). So they need more water than desert species. I keep mine on an automatic waterer most of the time, it gives it a steady but small amount of water and the cactus seems to do really well.

Christmas cactus are one of my favorite types of houseplants; their flowers are nice (but they only flower once a year) but their foliage is cool looking too.

some FAQs on Christmas cacti
Care and feeding of Schlumbergia (That's what a Christmas cactus is).
More on Christmas cactus (Hmm...they're epiphytes in their natural habitat. Interesting.)

One thing I did know about them is that they're what's known as "short day" plants - they need a long period of darkness in order to trigger flower bud formation. If you have one in your house, sometimes it's necessary to cover it with a box in the evenings so that the house lights don't disrupt its phytochrome reaction. (I once was a teaching assistant in an economic botany class, where one of the things we did in lab was "mess with the heads" of Christmas cactuses by using different night-length regimes to cause flowering out of season or prevent flowering).