Felted Fruit and Salsa

I just finished another needle felt project...a watermelon slice pin cushion. About a year ago a local yarn shop owner asked me to make some pin cushions to sell in her store. I made half a dozen or so and one was a watermelon. It sold rather quickly and was the first one to go. Since I'm planning to open an Etsy store I thought that another watermelon pin cushion would be a good idea. The color looks exactly like watermelon in real life but for some reason this color never seems to photograph well...it always glows a bright red/orange color. I've taken pictures before of this wool and tried it in different rooms, different lights, outside...nothing seems to work. I'm thinking that I might need to change a setting on my camera or something. If anyone can share advice on how to get the color to photograph correctly, I'd really appreciate it.


I had mentioned in my last post how our dog, Salsa, is very destructive when it comes to toys. Here's a perfect example. This was a gift she received recently. She enjoyed it very much! This is why I'm so impressed at how durable the felted ball toy is. It's frustrating how she tears up her toys, giving them squeek-ectomies and fluff-ectomies but otherwise she's such a great dog.

She gave us a little scare this week. On Monday morning I noticed that her eyes were bugging her. I took a closer look and her eyes looked "broken"! Yikes! They looked like they had rolled half way back into her head. Creepy! It turned out that her secondary eyelids were raised up and wouldn't go down. I tried to call the vet but they weren't open yet. I thought that maybe her eyes were irritated so I used doggy eyewash to clean them out. It seemed to soothe them a little but not entirely. I finally got through to the vet and they got us in right away. The vet told me that her secondary eyelids are controlled by the sympathetic nervous system (the same thing that controls everything we can't...heartbeat, organs, etc.) and that once they close like that it can sometimes take days to open. It can be caused by an irritation or a glitch in her nervous system. They were bugging her so much that he gave her an anti-inflamitory shot and some eye drops. She spent most of the day and evening with her eyes closed. It was so sad. What a sweety though....that night I'd put my face near hers and sing sweetly to her and she'd close her eyes and move her head toward my voice like it made her feel really good. I love that dog! Anyway, yesterday she was doing a lot better and we finally saw her beautiful eyes again. They're bothering her a little this morning but I put drops in her eyes and, hopefully, they'll be all better, very soon. We went on our walk this morning and she kept looking up at me and bumping my hand with her nose like she was trying to tell me thanks and "I love you, mom!" I've never been a dog person...Salsa has changed all that!