mine are prone to squirrels as pest when i water them. It does like indirect light to bright light. I live in 10 so mine grow on a tree year round. The brown stuff you are talking about is probably coconut fiber. A lot of people place them in those types of hanging baskets. You can find them in the orchid section of lowes. I have stuffed the baskets with sphagnum moss and orchid bark as a soil mix, and keep moist. Once a month beginning in spring, I give mine a weak infusion of liquid fertilizer and a dash of Superthrive hormone. The beige/brown part of the plant are actually modified leaves that help to anchor the plant and help it spread. If you take proper care of it, and it sounds like you're on the right track, it will thrive, spreading all over the entire basket. Maybe then you'll find it more attractive :) Nicci Here is a link that might be useful: superthrive

Thanks Sue for the tip or thew advise. How many would have thought that bad things for years to come would come just from a check, and not from a personal checking account either.

You cut a hole near the top of the bottle so you can insert your yarn and then string the end through the neck of the bottle. A yarn holder is great if you have cats or a dirty area where you will be crocheting and you want to protect your yarn, such as taking the project with you to the Little League game. I took a little zipper case that came with some free sample cosmetics at the department store to use for my needlework supply storage. I keep scissors, a 6 inch ruler, a small tape measure, safety pins for marking, a row counter, yarn needle, crochet hooks, and a few knitting things in it. Then I have everything in one place to use when I settle down to knit or crochet. Be sure to save left overs in their original sleeves, and tape them together tighter to keep them secure so that you can buy more of the same yarn and know what it is if you ever want to use the scraps in another project. If you use acrylic yarn, look for No Dye Lot yarns that will let you buy perfectly matching yarn months or years later. I like to make a copy of the page from the pattern book using the scanner on the computer. If the print is small, I enlarge it. Then I can put away the pattern book to keep it nice and mark up the copy as I need to. You can mark the row in the pattern with a Post-it note or even buy a special place marker set of a metal sheet and magnets. Some beginners like to put a bobby pin or safety pin through the first and last stitch to be sure they crochet all the way to the end.

Since it's tip day, here's a couple of mine: I just zoom in and out of the page with the ctrl key and the mouse wheel. A quick way to increase or decrease font size is press ctrl shift and the > (to increase) or Another little tip while typing, if you make a typo, it's often quicker to just retype the word rather than backspace through all the letters or use the mouse to highlight. Just press ctrl and backspace and you'll wipe out the prior word. The last tip is another reason I like Opera so much better than anything else. Reading the forums you often scroll right or left. With Opera (and Chrome has an extension for this) you can just hit the "fit to width" button and zoom in as much as you need to increase font size. And a hit on the space bar brings you down a page worth in viewing. So many tips, so little time....