Pop-Up Laundry and The Lunch Line (and a Blythe)

 Last week the weather was perfect, and we planted quite a few things, including a new echinacea plant. It looks like we will get some of the old ones to come up again from seeds, and they are the greatest color--so fingers crossed. They will hopefully be like the ones in the photo above. The Blythe is one I got from Ebay--she came in that outfit and was both cute and inexpensive since she had some odd product on her hair I have not been able to completely banish. (Something like argan oil).

This week it has been wet and rainy, good for the plants, less fun for humans gardening, so I have been doing housework instead. I ordered a couple of travel hampers from Amazon-- they are light and vertical, so you can carry them in one hand and hold a stair railing, which I decided was important since I am finding it less safe to carry a laundry basket down stairs with both hands while not being able to see my feet. They came in a small envelope and I was sure they had sent me the wrong thing--but no, they do indeed pop up, and VERY vigorously, so when you slide off that last elastic band, toss the disk away from you as it deploys. Because it does not mess around and the support wires are sturdy. Here is one unwrapped and one still shrunk down for shipping:

You can see why I was looking at the envelope they came in and thinking "this can't be right" lol.

They are in fact quite strong, my daughter has them and drags them up and down flights of stairs every day, full of jeans and outwear and blankets. I was afraid they would be pricey because of tariffs, but they must have been warehoused in the US because they were inexpensive, around 7.00 each. They come in pink, white, red and blue but I just went with basic black:

They hold the same amount as my plastic laundry basket. 

Another thing you can get from Amazon at the moment is bjd elastic, the 3mm which is good for SD's (I had been buying it from Ebay, which is kind of hit or miss--sometimes you can get 1000 yards for cheap of the 3mm, and other times it's 10 yards in some kind of plaid ). This is just your basic cotton white:

Anyway, as I was doing the dishes I happened to look out the window and the sparrows had all decided to visit the feeder at the same time, so there was a line. They stayed there long enough for me to get a poorly framed photo of them (I had it on zoom and braced on top of the faucet), but you can see how cute they are:

And speaking of cute, here is the repaired caterpillar, now doing his decorative thing:

I sort of wish I had caterpillars for all seasons :D