Azaleas and Lace

Those storms yesterday that tore apart Mississippi weren't neaerly as bad by the time they got to East Tennessee. We have been so fortunate that we have missed most of the bad weather. We live in kind of a bowl and stuff goes either north or south of us. Works with snow in winter as well much to the school children's disgust!

This is the last of the big showy flowers in my yard. The azalea bushes have been here about 50 years and they are so awesome. They're at last 6 ft tall. We've been able to root some of the branches to move to other parts of the yard.

Today the flowers are absolutely at the peak!
So, today one of the pictures decided to reproduce itself twice! It's the view from the back of the driveway looking toward the house. The other picture is from the driveway looking toward the front of the house. You can just notice the red of the azalea we planted years ago in memory of my Grandmother, Katharina Neustadter Martens Dick. She is probably the one that I inherited a good bit of my creative ability from.

Today I am having a time with downloading pictures. So if when I print this there are alot of the same pictures, well, sorry, I'm going to blame the computer. It's got nothing to do with the operator, right?!

Thursday was my last morning to weave at the museum. My DH finally came to see what all the fuss was about. I talked him into winding a bobbin which I then wove into the fabric.

He didn't know what the big deal was about bobbins. Now, if it had been a Maton guitar, well, that'd have been much different!

My last color bands with the brown kind of in the upper part of the fabric.

Something else I do is make bobbin lace. Friday was our monthly lace guild meeting. There weren't very many of us this time but we did make lace. The close up is chrysanthemum lace. I'd never heard of it but a few of our members went to Georgia last weekend for a workshop and one of them did this lace. It's probably a fairly easy lace at least according to what I saw on the pillow. Half of it is always cloth stitch. That's just plain weave to us weavers. The other half was a bit more complicated but still pretty straight forward. Might have to try that after I've done all the milanese lace I have on my list!

Here is the rest of those at the meeting. Helen is making a phoenix. She's the one on the left. When you make lace, you often cover up what you've done to protect is and just work with the area maybe an inch or two square that you're in the middle of. So I couldn't show how much she'd done. Just can see the bit of wing that she's started. My pillow is at the bottom of the picture. I'm making a petal for a rose. The project takes 6 petals, 2 each of three different patterns and sizes. This is the middle size. It's got wire wrapped around the edge to give it shape. I've done one rose and am trying to get another one or two done. See how many bobbins it takes to make one little bitty petal?! Looks really impressive, right. Actually, you're only working with 4 bobbins at a time. You manipulate the 4 bobbins, drop 2 of them and pick up the next 2 and do the same stitch all the way across, at least in this project. You always are just working with 4 bobbins at a time. Weavers have the patience to do lace. If you can thread a loom, you can make bobbin lace. Trouble is, it takes an hour to do a square inch of lace. Nothing fast here.

I've gotten the last of the natural warps off my loom and am putting another exciting color on........tan! Nothing great to take pictures of either but it's good production colors. I think I'll weave either red or caribe next. I'm beyond ready for some color!

Carol