Moving Ahead Again

Well, look who's back.... this is year two of a three year cycle...

They are feasting on the bear berry flowers. Its like a drug to them!  They munch away and then seem to go into a catatonic state. You can pick them off and they don't wriggle or scrap with you!

There are a lot less of the little beggars this time round, but its still gross finding them on your house, decks and crawling on window screens and all through the grass as they make their way up hill.  It all lasts about two to three weeks and then they make cocoons and become moths. The wave of their infestation is moving northward towards Nanaimo. The bushes and trees were covered there last week! Next year they will be back again but less again and hopefully we can get back to normal around here again. { There is a small wasp that takes advantage of the increase of caterpillars and lays small egg on their backs. We look for ones with small white dots on their backs and leave those. Nature is going to do a better job then we ever could! Nothing else eats them.}

The weather has warmed up here finally. We've had a cool, wet spring. Poor Calli, our Airedale was gasping from the heat with her long coat so she went to a new dog spa and had a double bath, cut and mani /pedi.  They did a real nice job on her cut and she looks like an Airedale once again (don't ask about the last time!)

She turned three years old in April and is well settled in with us and has us firmly wrapped around her paw.  She was ten months old when she moved in. She even 'talks' to us by using grunty noises and she can throw a lot of attitude into a grunt!  Just forget a cookie at bedtime and see what you get! What else can I tell you? Well, she's very gentle and this afternoon, she backed away from a butterfly.  She checked over her shoulder to see where 'mum' was and slowly inched her way forward to check it out.... with back legs stretched way back in case she needed a fast getaway!

Calli spends most afternoons napping either on her bed in my studio near the patio door with a view of outside.... or the bed beside Bruce's desk. Toys and balls litter the hallway between the two rooms.

There is even a toy in my loom bench... you just never know when there might be a chance to throw a ball. This was my 'loom d' jour' today and just as I left it. The Louet Spring is a real little workhorse. I have a 10/2 mercerised cotton warp on to weave off a dozen guest towels. They make nice gifts and are a nice touch to place beside the hand basin for visitors to dry their hands on.  The hemstitching slows things down but its the one detail that makes them look well put together later on. I'm on towel number six now and using a softly twisted bamboo as weft: soft teal, cream, white and a bronze. I'm very low on weft yarn and so you know what that means! Yup, yarn store visit coming up quick on Monday. I've called ahead and they have lots to choose from (phew!)
Here are some views of the work under way:

There is also a cream on cream towel, plus another with a cream hem allowance and white weft on another towel on the cloth beam roll. The sett is 28 epi and its a 12 shaft twill that I have used before. Does it look familiar?   Think book marks and then runners  :)  I'll give you more details and data on the current project when they are off loom, hemmed and done okay?

Towels on the big loom are waiting for my knee to feel a bit better. That loom requires a deep leg push and its too difficult for my left knee right now. Its frustrating as I would really like to get them finished. {Surgeon appointment on Tuesday!}  That's a second warping board hanging on the side of the loom so I can have two warps being wound at one time. Bruce added extra dowels across the bottom so I can have fractions of a yard wound, over just whole yard increments. You can see a couple of warps already done and waiting their turn (eventually!)

My next design challenge is to use the existing tie up on the Louet and mix it with various drafts in Fiberworks and see how the tie up changes the draft. It will be fun to see what I can come up with!  It will become the next project on the Spring.

There's going to be a fair amount of running around town, appointments and such in the coming days ahead. Its a busy time of year for everyone as the great outdoors calls and there are herds of tourists and relatives on the move to greener pastures around the province and country! Hopefully you are all looking forward to some time with friends and enjoying  summer events. While I can't get my floor looms out the door to the deck, I'm going to take my spinning wheel out there and enjoy the breeze. When I don't have to throw a ball that is!

Girl needs her beauty sleep.

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....