It is spring in the Connecticut River Valley, and the lush greeness of everything is such a startling contrast to the desert islands of the Exuma chain in the Bahamas. I love all this green!….not to mention daffodils, tulips, hellebore, and bleeding hearts. In just the five days I’ve been home the trees have leafed out so much that the canopy of leaves must be at least three times greener. I love it!
Like last year, I made it home in time for the Essex Village May Market, an event that the local garden club hosts. If you arrive early enough, and I did (!), you can buy some of the garden club members’ choice plants from their personal gardens. I got a bleeding heart, some English bluebells, a forget me not, a pink fall anemone, and a helianthus. The plants from the members’ own gardens are HUGE, and cost far less than smaller plants at the local nuseries. It’s the biggest attraction of the event, and I did well to arrive as early as I did! I was not too far from the front of the line.
It was also Mother’s Day weekend, and our younger son came out to visit from New York. He also invited a group of his undergraduate friends and a couple of their significant others to visit. It was a very festive Mother’s Day, even if only one of these young people was actually related to me! They made a lovely dinner for all of us, and they did all the shopping, the prep, and cleaning up! Wish I’d thought to take a photo of them!
I am about to go down to my studio and begin a rather involved stash search for a project I need to get started on soon. My local area guild is doing an exchange where each of us makes fabric for a drawstring lunchbag and napkin that will coordinate with a coffee mug that belongs to another guild member. We all got a photo of someone else’s mug and began designing a fabric to go with it. Here’s the mug I got, a lovely handmade ceramic design by the owner’s daugher!
Hopefully in the next day or so I will have my yarn picked for the fabric. While I was away this winter I used my Fiberworks program to design a huck structure to mimic the flowers on this mug:
Hmmm…unless you are familiar with looking at huck weave drafts you probably cannot see the flower motif. Huck ‘blossoms’ when it is cut from the loom because the warp and weft floats can relax into curves. Wet finishing gives show this fabric off even further!
Here is a photo of linen napkins I wove in basically the same structure, although the huck pattern is just along the edge in my napkins and the linen is far finer than the current fabric will be. The fabric I’m designing now will have the huck ‘flower’ all across the width and in stripes of varying colors with a small black stripe between the color changes and woven with a black weft.
Also, I have had some quiet moments to sort through my bobbin lace project. It involved more going backward than I expected! Backward….forward …. further backward….a number of times. In the end I went all the back to the corner, but luckily no further! And now I am happily going forward. It is very calming and therapeutic to do bobbin lace, especially going forward!
Bob is almost home….so close, and yet so far! He is only about 50 miles away, which is only about a 7 or 8 hour sail from here. BUT, the winds have turned against him so that even motoring would be difficult. The winds are a bit strong and right on the nose. I hope he will have his big homecoming tomorrow evening.
