It's loquat time!

Do you remember this old-fashioned fruit? Best eaten standing under the tree, because the large stones and tough skins lead to a certain amount of spitting?
My tree is next to the letterbox, and I've been picking a handful every day.
The loquat, eriobotrya japonica, is a distant relation of the apple, and native to China. Evergreen, and apparently immune to frost and drought, the loquat makes a good shade tree, and flowers in early winter, perfuming the garden for a couple of weeks.
The fruits are delicious, sweet and juicy, but with an underlying tang. I've never found a practical use for them; I know you can make loquat jam or chutney, but it would be so tedious to prepare them...

More round things

You might have noticed that I am an admirer of round things, I thought I'd share some beauties that I stumbled across the other night.
These pictures are from an old website called Morphographic created by Michael Spall, which doesn't seem to have been updated for about five years.
None of these are real objects, they are computer graphics, but some of them are beautiful -

or unusual!
Most of the links are broken, so I can't tell you more about them, or their creators.

In the real world, it's honeysuckle time, and the honeysuckle vines which have gone feral down the side of the house are covered in blossom.
Apart from our sparse rainfall, these get no water at all, but they don't seem to care. I've been picking great bunches of the stuff, and the house smells divinely lemony.

I've been working on the charity quilt I started last week, so nothing much is happening in the Bauble department just now - although there have been mysterious experiments with acrylic paint on fabric, which may eventually lead to interesting Bauble developments - or not.

Lazy blogger

It's been six weeks or so since I last posted, and I really have no excuse. I just sort of fell by the wayside. It's so easy, I've discovered, to fall off the blogging wagon, and quite hard to climb on again - and the longer you leave it, the harder it becomes.
The main reason for stopping was that I had no new Baubles to show you (although there is one on the way, almost finished.) The previous one wasn't completed because I fell out of love with it, almost at the finishing post :-(
Then I fell out of love with cotton stuffing, too; and then I spent a week or two refining the basic pattern, to make it less prone to unexpected distortions. I learned a lot about fabric grain and stretchability in the process.
The new bauble finally begun, I succumbed to a crochet attack, made a scarf or two, and began a new ripple rug. And all the while, in the back of my mind, that little accusing voice "but what about the blog?"
The truth is, I didn't plan ahead when I began this blog, intending simply to tell the world about my Bauble journey. But as I've discovered, the Bauble production is far too slow for a sustainable blog - if I want to keep going, I'll have to find other things to write about - in short become a Better Blogger.
I want to continue, I enjoy blogging - but I need to think about my future direction in the blogworld. So please bear with me, I'll be back soon.
Now every blog needs some eye candy, so here are a few pics of of some of the other 'round things' I've found online.
Made from Canson paper, picture from Flickr, I saw it a while ago, sorry I didn't record the maker's name and details.
Made from a LOT of rubber bands, don't you love it? Also from Flickr, and again I have no idea who made it. (If you belong to either of these pics, and are not happy with my use of them, please let me know and I'll remove them.)

By an artist named Jamie Lee Byars, I can't find out anything more about him