Tree question, stitching updates and planting

Cold but bright sunshine today, good for walking.  

 

Dogwood lovely against the bigger trees 

And further down the walk, is this sapling a young black walnut? There are nature ones close by,  self propagated, maybe with the help of squirrels.

And stitching is moving along happily 

Also I've been wanting to plant and the weather's been too cold to put in seeds, but today I planted potato eyes in a container for my annual two meal harvest.

The qtips are squirrel deterrents. Soaked in essential peppermint oil, not the baking essence, the real thing, and stuck around the pot, squirrels won't dig. 

Here's the kit, the bottle marked Not Food, and kept away from the spice cabinets.

I saw a squirrel burrowing away in the pots I haven't planted yet and staying away from this one.  It doesn't hurt them. They just avoid the scent.

No Friday knitting group today because our fearless leader was away and I felt a bit tired anyway. So I did a bit of walking and planting and stitching and reading, back with Elizabeth of York, in the middle of which I seem to have nodded off and missed a couple of battles and exiles. 

Happy day, everyone, try to stay alert for the main plot of your life today.

Garlic, mystery trees, Textiles and Tea, and Larry

The garlic I planted outside is pushing up scapes, now that the indoor pot is done

Gary planted these, maybe peppers, outside the fence among the daylilies. I like a combo of food and flowers, too.

And the tree that was planted on the street to replace the dead maple needs a blogista to identify, please. I feel I should know it, but can't find it in my tree books. 

Pictures to show size against houses, foliage, bark. The leaves are purplish like my Japanese maple, but the leaves are not maple. The trunk looks like a cherry to me. No blossom. 

Any help gladly accepted by neighbor Karen and me.

But the tree books did come in handy as models for a few minutes of drawing 

Yesterday's Textiles and Tea featured Sarah Saulson, a weaver largely of commissioned Jewish prayer shawls , observing the ritual rules of the two thousand year tradition, while applying her own inventive design

She also creates other woven artworks such as these three pieces, retirement gifts for three physicists, each noting their key work in the field, using graphs from papers they'd written.

And garments like these

Where she paints the warp with dyes

She's also active with weavers in Ghana, Guatemala and India in the WARP (Weave a Real Piece) project where artists from different cultures and traditions work together. 

Here she's showing the strip weaving work of Guatemalan women, in their case to be worked on a backstrap loom

In the course of searching for the tree books, I came across an old book of Larry cartoons, had to share a few favorites

Happy day everyone. Yesterday a brave New Jersey lady testified in the January 6 hearings. Cassidy Hutchinson is from Pennington, a skip up the road from here. 

NJ sends many stars, Queen Latifa, Bruce, Bon Giovi, and writers, Joyce Carol Oates, John MsFee, sports stars, politicians, Booker, Katzenbach (stood up to Nixon) loads of great folks. Alas we also own Christie and Alito, further down the animal kingdom. 

But Cassidy may prove to be the greatest mover and shaker of all, if she brings down TFG. Let's hope.