Scientifically speaking, leather tanning and thickness determine durability. Chrome tanning leaves leather smooth and treatable with "paint" dyes, but also dries out and makes the leather more brittle and open to scratching. Oil tanning enhances long-time strength, keeps leather more supple, and helps resist scratching. It also helps ward off staining if you maintain it with neatsfoot oil. Light-colored leather, microfiber, or chenille will all suffer staining and discoloration from use. It comes with the territory, so expect it, and count on it to disappoint you when it comes to maintaining it, color-wise. Chenille is more loosely woven and more porous than either microfiber or leather, and tends to lose stitching and pick, due to the looseness of weave. Also, if you have asthma or allergies, it is simply not a choice at all. Ultimately, porosity determines how stain-resistant any material is. Polished microfiber, if thick and stitched properly, can outlast chrome-tanned leather, because the leather can crack with time. You can retard cracking to some degree by regularly wiping it down with wipes made for the purpose. Polished microfiber looks like leather and resists stains better. But as it wears, the shininess wears off, and it develops a surface nap. You can wax it or rub it down with mink oil to make it shiny again. Be sure to wipe it afterward to keep the treatment from getting on your white linen clothing (lol).

I have never found my leather sofa to be 'sweaty' in the summer (and it does get hot and humid here), nor is it cold in the winter. In fact, it pretty much matches body temperature almost immediately. It is skin, after all. Further, as long as I can afford it, I will only have leather upholstery in my car. My current car has black leather seats. Even in hot, sunny, sweaty summer, it cools down almost immediately - unlike vinyl that feels like it's going to melt to your skin. I cheat in the winter, though, the car came with seat heaters.

Mmm , I am on here looking to learn the best way to keep My adopted pets outdoor room warm , he will be living inside with free access to outside the dog I am adopting is A grey hound , and when I go out during the day , he will be outside as I have an outdoor storage room I am converting for him , it’s dry and insulated and Gives him access to the toilet and he can choose To go inside the room or stay outside , its a great safe room for him if he is napping during the day and to protect him from the weather and make him feel snug and i have cameras I can put up so I can check on him , I have found animals are all different depending on the breed and our family are animal lovers and all have dogs and cats of different varieties and every animal has very different preferences , I live in a warm climate most of the year and we find our dogs choose to sleep where we sleep and choose to snuggle when we are watching tv , and I use electric blankets on our beds , so thats their choice all day in winter even if no one is in the room and we are home , but in summer we find the bigger dogs choose to stay outside and just wander in flop down say hi and go back out to their perfect spot , the staffies in the family as they mature have all built their own lair in a hiding spot regardless of quality man made bedding and our beds and couch on offer , and it’s their retreat and stash spot , the little dogs in the family have doggie doors , and indoor and outdoor beds , i will keep my dog indoors at night , if I am not home in winter but he will be outdoors with his own indoor room during the day , i Will be using cameras to watch him to see how he adapts , now if you have a few dogs together their is no reason to have them all inside at all , in my experience people with multiple dogs who live outside are happy healthy cared for dogs who get the best of both worlds and dont need to live inside , a single dog is different and every dog is different , I know people with a little dog and they say he wants to stay outside and doesnt sleep indoors , they would like him too , but he wont , we live in a great climate here and with the fresh night air and breezes , I personally used to sleep out on my kids trampoline some nights before I got air con in the house and love camping and being outside , i think the single dog locked out and tied up isolated and forgotten about who ends up with behavioural problems is abuse and should be reported , I don’t think the posters here are doing that to their outdoor dogs , I think dogs locked inside all day , day after day would not be right for some of the family dogs at all , the staffies In particular opted to build lairs outside and would go to their outdoor lair instead of being left inside while I went to work but would come inside and chill out when I got home in winter they would be in bed with the electric blanket on , but in summer at bed time they would opt to go out to their lair that they built with household things they stole , and they had a range of dog beds we tried for them to pull apart and chew up to use to build it , summer is too hot here for body heat especially if you are stuck with a fur coat , i see nothing wrong with dogs outside of they are happy and well adjusted animals

Nancy, Hooray for blooms on the tomatoes. Today's max wind gusts weren't as bad as yesterday's---in fact, 4 mph lower, so the wind wasn't as bad, but we were two degrees hotter so it still felt warm/windy and sort of miserable. I am sorry to hear that you and GDW have been through the wringer this week. That must have been very scary. My dad and I both reacted very badly to anesthesia. I hope I never have to have it again for any reason. Amy, Congrats on the score! I love it when a gift I've selected for someone else is an obvious hit so I know how you're feeling about that. I hope y'all's Mother's Day gathering with your mom was wonderful. Rebecca, I agree about just how bad this early heat is. I cannot ever remember a year when May was hot and then June turned back cooler, so I'm not expecting it to happen this year. I hate to say I've already lost hope, weather-wise, but I sort of have. Usually, at least we have May, you know? The cold of April is gone, our usual May weather is nice, we might have some severe storm days but we have plenty of other nice gardening days. We work ourselves to death in the garden in May because we know the June heat is coming and this is our last good month to really spend all the time we want in the garden, right? So, to have May feeling more like June or even early July is very discouraging. I'm already working around the heat like I normally do from late June onward. This isn't good. It is bad that your TV meteorologists already are comparing this year to 2011 and 2012.....it was okay when I was doing it because I'm not an official anything...but they are official....so we have to take them seriously. Hailey, Begonias are ridiculously easy and so pretty---I just love them. They are very forgiving of dry spells too---surprisingly so. With the Wave petunias, they are hybrids so any seed you save is not necessarily going to give you identical plants next year--they might give you some plants that look like this year's plants, or they might give you something entirely different. They might give you a similar color, but most people who have tried to grow F-2 Wave or Tidal Wave petunia seeds have gotten a whole range of colors. You might get the color, but not the same growth rate or disease tolerance or whatever. It depends on how the genes resort themselves in the F-2 generation (the plants you have now are the F-1 generation). So, if you want to get an exact color of Wave petunia or an exact growth habit, you'd be better off purchasing F-1 seed than saving F-2 seed from F-1 plants. Even if you have to buy the F-1 seed, it still is a lot less expensive than buying the plants. Petunias are surprisingly easy from seeds. We'd better have a fall! Mother Nature owes us a very nice, beautiful, mild, prolonged autumn to make it up to us for taking us straight from winter to summer with no spring. Actually, that's not a fair statement. At my location in southern OK, this is how the seasons have gone: January & February: Winter, March Spring, April Winter, May Summer. It isn't fair, though, to have Spring followed by a return to Winter. It sure confused all the plants. I blame it all on the convergence of Easter with April Fool's Day. I just knew something horrible would happen as a result, and the April cold is the horrible thing that happened. The whole month of April was one big April Fool's Joke, but then there's May. Who is to blame for May being so summery? I love liquid seaweed. It works great. Tips? Never use it indoors because it is stinky, and that's doubly true of liquid fish fertilizer. Both of them will attract cats and coons, and sometimes vultures, so keep that in mind. Are you rural or semi-rural? Every time I use blood meal or bone meal, I have vultures circling above the garden for days. Also, all of these can attract dogs and cats....I cannot let dogs come into the garden with me or they'll try to dig up the bone meal. You can use liquid seaweed either to drench the ground beneath the ground or as a foliar feeding. It seems to work fine either way (just like compost tea or manure tea). Since the NPK on liquid seaweed is low, you probably could use it weekly if you wish. Jen, Plants always do that. When there's something I really want to take to the SF, those volunteers never sprout until after the SF. Your comment about the doctors in Tulsa is not the first such comment I've seen or heard. When we moved here, we just kept using our Texas doctors because we were so comfortable with them. Nancy, I'm glad your blooms are beginning to appear. It is about time! I still feel like not enough is in bloom yet, but we do have lots of blooms in our garden-just not as many as usual. The wildflowers in the fields are the same way---some didn't bloom at all, some haven't shown up yet but I still have some hope we'll see them, and others are blooming either very or somewhat early---there's no rhyme or reason to it. Blame the weather. The weeds are indeed growing like weeds with many new ones sprouting daily. I weeded most of the asparagus bed today as it is the only one that didn't get weeded during the week, and it looks so much more normal and under control now. Rebecca, Those tomato plants were born in a cabbage plant....no, wait, that is Cabbage Patch kids. Hmmm. Well, it all starts out with one tomato blossom that has anthers and pistils.......hmmm. That might be too boring. Well, where did they come from? Did they fall off the turnip truck? Follow you home wagging their tails behind them like little stray puppies? If you do not know where your tomato plants came from, how are we supposed to know? Let's ask the squirrels what they think. I bet they'll know. Hailey, The bottles of liquid fertilizer ought to have directions right there on the bottles. So, it hit 89 degrees here today and it didn't feel quite as bad as some days earlier in the week, but it was no picnic either. I worked in the garden this afternoon while Tim mowed. I weeded, planted a few things, water those things in well with a watering can, etc. and harvested some more tomatoes---this time Early Girls. I also ate Sungolds while working in the garden---they are a natural form of gardener's Gatorade. Tim broke some sort of belt on the riding mower and didn't want to push the push mower around in the heat, so his workday outdoors ended early. He came and offered to help in the garden and I sent him to the house. I felt like he needed some free time that didn't involve working on anything. Mosquitoes are horrible, horrible, horrible here now. Now, I'm off to bed because I hope to get into the garden early for a couple of hours of work before the day gets too busy. Dawn