No Shrinking Violet....

Just four days ago it was downright chilly here and we were back to wearing socks and and I even had to put the heat on in my studio to take the chill off. We didn't mind though as they promised the heavy clouds would bring some much needed rain.  Well, the rain never fell.... leastwise, not here. 

 Roll the clock ahead a few short days to today and we are now enjoying a heat wave and have fans running to cool us down!  So starts summer 2015.... which they say will be long, hot and very dry.  Our neighbour last night lit a fire in his fire pit and he was literally pounced on by the local fire department.  I'd say people are a tad bit nervous and rightfully so!

Anyhow, with the sunshine came the opportunity to finally take some pictures of the latest project off the Louet Spring.  Its a deep rich violet and so natural daylight is best to capture the pattern.

It started off as these two yummy skeins of silk I bought from an Etsy shop called Dye for Yarn in Germany.  I just loved the colours!  The violet they called "It was a dark and stormy night" and the green is called "algae".

I had been looking around at handweaving.net newly revised web site and found this nifty eight shaft draft that uses only four treadles.  I was thinking this might be a quick light treadling and be easy on my knee.  As you can see the pattern seems to give a nice balance of violet over olive green. 

Except with the way I did the tie up it was reversed and so I had to scoot underneath to see the pattern! (see picture below) I was looking at the back of the cloth the whole way and it was predominantly more violet. I also noticed that the pattern was producing a definite striped effect.  I can see it clearly in the pattern draft above now, but somehow I didn't before and so it came as a (pleasant) surprise to me.  Don't ask me where my head was when I planned this project!

Its 20/2 silk, 212 ends sett 28 epi and the width on the loom was 7.5 inches by 3 yards.

After the scarf came off the loom I quickly twisted the fringes and gently hand washed the silk.   After a night drying to just barely damp, I gave it a good hard press to bring out the shine and trimmed up the tassels with my rotary cutter.   Then I looked at it critically and decided it needed a bit of something 'extra' so I dug out my bead boxes.  I only had two olive green delica seed beads or  Swarovski crystals and nothing in the deep violet colour so that was that.

click on the pictures to see more detail

Then after waiting out the cloud cover,  yesterday I took "Madge" outside to pose pretty and get her close up.    The finished scarf is seven inches wide by seventy two inches in length. The fringe is seven inches long.  The beading is just on the outside corners of each scarf end and they add a little sparkle.

Its long enough to try some of the fancier tying methods.

I did take some shots inside under lights with a flash and here you can see the darker side on the left and the brighter top side. 

I think I would try this type of size yarn next time as 24 epi and I think this pattern would make lovely fabric for upholstery, say, dining room chair seats?  Also lovely cushion fabric too.   I made  notes in my samples.  

My next project is better thought out than the last but it still has surprises..... I'll give you a sneak peek:

I already have been well exercising my cussing vocabulary! It will be a while before you see the end results of this snarly mess but it will be tamed. I'm not one to give up !

By way of a bonus:  Bruce has a new camera he keeps handy. Its a Fuji X100S 28mm and I'm quite impressed by it! It looks like an old style 35mm film camera but its fully digital and takes great shots. Here's a doe munching away on new maple leaves by the west side of our house.  Clear huh?

Until you see its taken from inside the house through a window in his office!  That's his little model train display on the top of his cabinet. No flash used, no manipulation by computer afterwards either. Well it did help that we had just cleaned the windows inside and out....

Keep cool and enjoy the great outdoors!

The Salad Bar

Isn't he handsome with his new antlers?  Bruce was sitting at his desk when he heard banging on the house. Something told him to take a camera with him and the picture above was the first he snapped. The buck was hitting the house with his antlers.

But not the last shot as this fellow decided that Bruce was not a threat and went back to eating fallen peaches off our tree that's against the house.

Then he added some last remaining flowers to the plate.   So this is why we don't have fancy gardens here. This buck and his doe.... and fawn all nibble on everything here. Even stuff that the garden shops swore up and down are deer proof.   Ya right....

Then he made his way to where the wife and kid are. Note the cedars, artfully shaped by the deer of course.   This buck has been living on our property for three or four years now after his mother was hit by a car.  

We seem to have a bumper crop of pears this year!  Bruce picked these and we are enjoying their aroma in the kitchen while we wait for them to soften up a bit.

The old gala apple tree has just a few apples this year and they are developing a nice red blush with the cooler nights.   Fortunately the apples and pears are all above the height for the deer!  (bears are another story...)

Bruce also spotted a muskrat swimming up the creek today and he watched it for a time doing some 'personal grooming' at the creekside.  I'm sorry I missed seeing that one!

It seems that the local wildlife know this is a safe place to visit... and I like that.

News!

I have been given a date of December 18th  for my knee replacement surgery!   A week before Christmas....   

I'm so glad I started on the baby blankets now and not later....

Back soon with a progress report on that project soon.   (I did mention I'm weaving really slow now right?)

Global Warming Hits Close to Home

This is what a mild winter looks like six months later!   Have you ever gone for a drive along a country road and noticed the 'tents' hanging in the tree tops? Well, the Forest Tent Caterpillar runs in ten year cycles and when an infestation occurs, it takes three years to get under control again. The moth lays 300- 500 eggs per nest and although we cut and destroyed all we could reach in our orchard, the thirty to fifty foot alder trees were unreachable! (Especially when they were on the neighbour's property) So for the past two weeks we have been under invasion. They literally crawl uphill like they are programmed  little zombies. You could see them coming up the driveway and through the lawn. They eat everything in sight! We started picking them off the flower beds and a cascading wall of a native vining plant called kinnikinnick (or bear berry or Uva Ursi)  They *LOVE* this plant and once on it, they dine and then seem to go into some sort of orgasmic coma. You can pick them off and they lay still like they are stoned or something.  The trouble is, they eat the blossoms. The local bees and bumble bees wait all year for the wall to bloom!  So while I gave up on the thousands elsewhere (no lie!) I did work to keep the  kinnikinnick wall clear. The honey bees just buzzed around me and I made every effort to stay clear of them working the flowers.

As you can see here... the flowers are catching heck! Click on the pictures for a close-up!

Here is healthy bear berry that I have managed to keep the 'Pillars' off for the bees.   (We have started calling them the Pillars ... as in " the pillars will get you!")   They like straight lines such as the boards in our deck and so you see little convoys of them all in motion to and fro.  The jar shown above is a 2 kilo peanut butter plastic jug and it has been full to the brim several times with no effect. Eventually, you go inside and ignore them as Mother Nature will win this round. Trouble is, they'll be back next year too as it will be year three.  

The last time I can recall them being this bad was back in the late 1980's when we visited Salt Spring Island when out touring on our boat. The fall country fair was on in Ganges and we found jars of 'pickled tent caterpillars' on display and even entered into the fair for judging. The lady who had brined them up told me the fair was about the local bounty and since they grew more of them than crops, why not?  

I'm concerned that the ants will be enjoying the extra bounty of dead caterpillars and increasing their numbers too. They seem to be the only thing that eats them. Birds leave them alone unfortunately.

We have another casualty this year. My favourite tree.  I went looking for a decent full length picture of it and now I'm further saddened by the fact I didn't really take its picture while it was healthy. Here it is in 2009:

Well, the base of it anyway. It had just prevented a group of three large trees from falling and hitting our house. I was sitting having my early morning coffee when I heard the crack and watched them fall!  This old fir that must stand at least 80 to 100 feet tall, blocked them from coming towards us and redirected them to fall behind the hedge in a nice tidy heap. What you see there is some of the firewood from the adventure.  It resulted in many trees being taken down due to disease or age in the coming weeks between our property and the neighbours. They had developed  a condition called cone rot.

In  late September 2010, it looked like this:

The needles aren't as lush or as green and we called an arborist in to look it over. The back needles on the inside end of the branches had gone brown months earlier than they normally do and were falling off. He had to go and do some research and when he got back to us he told us it was an infestation of a silk type worm. It would either make a come back or fail completely. You might recall sometime walking under a tree and there is a little worm hanging from a fine thread? well, its those little things.

Six months later:

Its lost the fight. Those sweeping branches that I saw an owl sitting on one evening twilight, looking so much like a Robert Bateman painting, will be coming down this fall. A casualty to worms that didn't die off this past mild winter or the one before.

We have other pests too. Oh, there are raccoons here, and feral cats from time to time. Wild rabbits in the meadow and the odd neighbour's cat comes hunting birds. Bears in the fall and we understand cougars pass through here spring and fall at the change of seasons. There are also ever present deer. We have a much smaller variety here called Island deer. Most tourists see them by the side of the road and think them cute as they look like babies, but those are full grown! I've watched them go from standing still and leaping over a five foot fence with ease. They have brought down full fruit frees and cleared entire crops  from the trees.  They eat anything you plant for flowers around the house except for heather and lavender.  The (so called) deer proof Lily of the Valley?  gone.... My glorious purple lupine? gone in one night!

So we bought tomato plants and a new small Japanese maple and put them in pots on the cedar deck to keep them away. They only go on the grass or natural ground... right?

Apparently not. Half the tree was eaten and they took all the shoots and flowers off the tomatoes. They've all been relocated to protective custody on the upper deck, behind bars.

We personally have made many choices to 'do our bit'. We compost kitchen vegetable waste, participate in a kitchen scraps composting pick up, recycle all we can at home, and only put out one bag of garbage every two weeks. We multi task our trips to town to maximize on fuel. We turn down the heat, and switch off lights.

I hope its enough.... we have a grandson and his future to consider now.

A parting picture or two:

This an old variety of Allium is just coming into bloom.. The perky star star like flowers can be picked and toss into a salad. They taste like chives or onions. Some gardeners we had here two years ago said that they hadn't see this plant in years as its an old varietal. It seems most people go for the purple globe types now.

Best news? The deer leave them alone!  

Today as I was typing the basics of this post up, we had a big shadow swoop by the patio door and eventually a large bird came in for a landing.

I had my camera nearby and Bruce crept out and took several pictures quickly. A big Turkey Vulture had landed in the dead fir tree. Now you can make of that what you will!

Back to weaving next post....