Surrounded by.....

Some springs are like this. I"m not sure how it happens because I thought we'd cut them back last summer but we're surrounded by wisteria!! Just about all around the house up on our hill, we've got wisteria hanging off the trees.

It's hard to pick a view to show because there are so many of them this year.

 Maybe because we had a bit of a cold winter but not an extreme one?

 Or maybe wisteria just likes Tennessee weather and grows like crazy each year. At least it's prettier than kudzu!! I wonder if the vines would work for wreaths like kudzu vines do...

 And, my lone stand of lilacs grew a bunch this past year. The bush is at least 9 feet tall.
It had blossoms all over it too.

 Love the smell of lilacs!!

 In the studio I have to make a baby quilt this week. The shower was yesterday but I didn't get there. We'd been out of town. The mom to be is crazy about ladybugs and I found this applique set in my stash from about 15 years ago. So I figured out a little quilt design and headed to my favorite quilt shop to buy some fabric. I couldn't believe that they had a piece that had little ladybugs on it. That will back the quilt and also be part of the front as well. It's going to be simple but full of dots!! I think the baby's room is going to be mostly red and black with lady bug accents everywhere. I added the green and yellow to give it a bit of punch. The dots on the bugs are buttons so I suspect little Lillie won't be playing with it til she's a bit bigger but they will figure that out! It's going to be 36 x 45 or so.

 On the weaving front, this pale purple fabric is already washed and ready to be cut and serged again and assembled into pieces.

 The all natural is off the loom. It is a sort of boring fabric but I found several different wefts I could use to weave it with so that helped break the tedium of a solid, boring fabric. The end results will be lovely.

 I just put another warp on the loom. This is also natural but it's got bits of different tans in it as well, especially in the middle of the warp. I haven't woven on it yet. That'll happen in about 10 minutes after I finish this blog. I'd like to  get it off fairly quickly. I don't have alot of time to weave this week so will have to try to do as much as I can today and Wednesday.

The reason that the natural fabric is just sitting on a loom instead of being washed and hanging up to dry is because, yes, my washing machine is broken again. It broke yesterday. I started a load and it seemed to start and then quit, something else, another sensor, I suspect, is broken. Took forever for the machine to unlock the lid so I could get the clothes out. I ended up hand washing the load and letting the dryer dry it all. I can't quite do that with the handwovens.
Guess you know what DH and I are doing this evening. Enough of this machine. It may work ok most of the time but the internet blogs say that the model we got, 6 years ago, is a dud. Lots of things go wrong with it. I guess we were lucky to have it work as long as we did. It doesn't make sense to spend a couple of hundred bucks to fix it when we know now, that it'll just continue to break down. I like to have a machine with warm wash and warm rinse. They're getting rarer and rarer. I've come to the conclusion that we're going to get as simple a machine as possible and just deal with the warm wash and cold rinse. It's that cold rinse that can shock fabrics but with cottons it's not as serious and I'm not weaving with wools right now. When I do pull out those rubbermaids full of the wool yarns I have left, I'll just have to figure out how to wash them or find someone who still has a warm/warm cycle on their machine and go over there to wash them....not happening anytime soon.

So that's the latest from here. I'm enjoying looking out at all the spring flowers popping up and the leaves that are suddenly there. One day it's like there aren't any leaves on the trees and the next, they're full green!!
I'm heading to the studio and my new warp. Magnum PI is waiting for me. I'm almost finished watching season 4. It takes me back....
Til next week, keep weaving!
Carol