Monday, April 14, 2014

It's Spring!

I love how each spring it's suddenly here! One day the trees are still leafless, brown. Then the one day you see the sheen of green and the next day they are full of leaves! The same in our yard with the flowering trees and vines.
My favorite are the lilacs. It's not easy to grow lilacs down here but we have a small stand that so far is happy. The bushes are about 8 feet tall and it's hard to reach the flowers. It's easiest to stand on our upper deck and take pictures down into the bush. It makes me happy to smell the lilacs. Where I grew up they bloom in June. Here it's April!
 We have a tree here called a redbud. The flowers are really purplish and they seem to be wild because they grow all over our lot, coming up where they are happy. So right now they are in full bloom. Also in bloom are the wild wisteria vines that have invaded our yard. They get closer to the house each year. I wonder if we'll end up with vines on our deck?
 They are pretty kind of mixed together. However, the wisteria will kill the trees. I guess we'll have to go out and cut them back once they stop blooming.
 On the loom I've had a mixed warp of colors, mostly blues, navies, but one yarn is a lavender. It goes great with the variegated yarn I have.
 I wondered what it would look like weaving with navy on the mixed warp. Looks pretty good.
 My Mom reads my posts and I promised to post pictures of the scarves I made in the class last weekend. Here's the first one, all whites and naturals in the warp and then felted with a mixed color roving of marino wool. There was one yarn that didn't cooperate. It looked like wool but it sure didn't felt into the mix like the rest of the yarns. One other yarn was a kinky little, probably mohair mix yarn. It worked great and felted nicely. I have a bunch of wools and mohairs stashed away. It tempts me to pull those boxes out and see what I can do with them....
 It's hard to see in the picture, but the roving is a combination of all the colors I picked for the second warp. This scarf is so much fun. I'm still learning how to layer and felt the combination but this was a fun one.
I'd taken the class hoping I wouldn't enjoy it. After all, I don't enjoy knitting. It could have happened. Well, this is awfully fun. We hope to schedule a felting day for those of us who took the class. We figure we can help each other while we wait for another scheduled class to happen at the center.
So, what's on the loom now? I'm weaving some of the painted warps that we recently scheduled time to do. I want to get several done in the next week or two.
Today it's dreary, cloudly, windy and probably will be raining soon. It's the perfect day to get some work done in the studio.
Until next week, keep weaving!
Carol

2 comments:

Maggie said...

Looks like you've been in a lavender state of mind!

LA said...

I just hope the lilacs don't get nipped by this cold spell of weather!