I don't know about woven material, but in my experience the black plastic definitely heats up the ground. I read somewhere that it actually works better if the soil is damp because the warmth creates steam. I've heard clear plastic works better to warm the soil in the Spring, but that black will still help with warming the soil. I know that if I step on black plastic in the garden in the summer, it can burn my feet, so I'm sure that kind of heat has some effect. I've come to the conclusion that here in Utah just having a shorter season tomato doesn't cut it, we have to also grow varieties that handle our extremely hot/dry summers. I think that varieties that do well for Texas growers would do better here than varieties grown by those in the Pacific Northwest or the New England states. Some things I did this year that greatly increased my success were---consistent watering(we installed a drip system), I also used Fish emulsion to fertilize when the plants started blossoming, and about a month or so later when fruit finally started setting. This was in addition to the compost, peat moss, bone meal, and fertilizer I added at the time of planting. The plants seemed to really love the fish emulsion, I swear many of them grew overnight after applying it. (I especially noticed this on the peppers and squash.) I'm going to try and plant out earlier next year by warming the soil with plastic, and planting up against our ceder fence on the west side of my yard. Plants are effected least by frost there. I am going to buy some row cover, and tack some clear plastic to the fence and create a mini-greenhouse. I have a tomato friend from another forum that gardens in Montanta---I have gotten a lot of good advice from her as far as variety recommendations. She really raved about a variety called Aurora this year. I will be trying it out next year. I think days to maturity is so variable. I just stick to varieties that are in the early to mid-season range and still try one or two varieties that people rave about each year regardless of the maturation date. Tyffanie

I don't have a pattern for the smaller CPK's but I do have a pattern for the soft sculpture type.. if you're interested.. you could email me directly and i could send you a pdf.. you could take a look at it and scale it down a bit to make a smaller CPK body to fit a head.. also.. you can buy the bodies in kits on ebay still for the original doll baby heads.. msfogel@hotmail.com

Sky Dancers, yes, rob333! One afternoon when my son was five, we were watching kids' programming. A commercial for Sky Dancers came on-- smiling girls outside launching those spinning, helicoptering fairies to the sky. Immediately following, came a commercial featuring a camouflaged jeep bumping over rough terrain and some sort of elbows-out, knees bent, posing, grim-faced, yelling boys shooting their big toy guns. If I remember correctly it was actually the jeep being advertised, not the toy guns. When that commercial ended, my son said to me, "I think I'm more like a girl than a boy." Here, I understood that he was saying he liked the Sky Dancers better and understood, even at five, that those were presented as being for girls, while the jeeps were presented for boys. Heck, I had to agree with him: the helicoptering fairies were much cooler than the vehicles which were really pretty common if you take away the camo paint job. I did talk to my son then and who-knows-how-many other times about being aware that people were trying to persuade us, to bend us to spend money in order to feel or look the way the commercial seems to be. And that we have the ability to weigh, to choose, to go with our own assessment. I told him that the idea of boy toys and girl toys was not right, but that he was going to run into that idea a lot. That Christmas we bought him some launchable spinning 'copters that came two in a package, at a much better price than the Sky Dancers. I see nowadays that the very same toys are sold in the same packaging at Harbor Freight. They come in several cheerful colors--no camo, just wings.

Yes, that's just what I mean. You can buy those (you may have to flip the image left to right on your computer) and iron them onto t-shirts. I can tell you if you have one of those 'no scorch' Teflon plates held onto your iron with a spring, you WILL have to take it off to transfer the image.