My First Love…

This is going to be a long one, grab a cup of tea and settle in…

It is incredible to me how full my life is right now. Too full if that’s possible. I’m doing all the things I love, almost to excess, because, why not, I am a free spirit, exploring new worlds, new communities, and I know how fragile life can be, and how it can all be gone in a heartbeat.

So it is August. My least favorite month. I’m so tired of the heat, 90-100 degree days, no rain in site. It is painful to be out tending my gorgeous gardens every day, but I committed to this and I wouldn’t change a thing, except I pray for rain hourly, and check the radar like a crazy person. I’m assured that native plants can handle drought well, and I’m trusting that. But I’m getting tired. I’m glad I live in NJ, where we garden for six months of the year and things go to sleep for six months. I have an indoor life, so I’m happy to let things rest.

I’m going to visit a friend down the shore tomorrow, so I wanted to make sure I got the lawn mowed, and the ponds topped off and critical plants watered, etc. I’m always rewarded by the most remarkable happenings in my yard, I have a Monarch Butterfly and sometimes his friend that love to follow me around the yard, doing long lazy figure 8’s, buzzing by my head, taking a quick drink of nectar and off again. He even flew by my big window while I was eating lunch, wondering where I was?

I have all sorts of insects in the yard, besides the huge population of native bees and wasps. There is the swallowtail butterfly…

The Spicebush Swallowtail…

A hummingbird moth… (I had to look that one up!)

And I watched two dragonflies tied together doing their dragonfly thing…

And today, I was watering the newly planted Persimmon trees, and a hummingbird buzzed around me, checking me out, and looking for I’m not sure what, but I understand they find spiders and feed them to their babies. After he checked me out for awhile, he flew up into the curly willow tree and watched.

The flowers are beautiful, even though everything is stressed from the drought.

And of course, my fish greet me every morning when I come out to feed them, they are voracious little piglets…

And I have the most beautiful pond lily…

Last Saturday, I went, with two members of my weaver’s guild, to a memorial service for a beloved guild member, Hedy Lyles, who passed away last month. It was a beautiful memorial service, her handwoven fabrics were everywhere, and the stories of her life were beautiful and poignant and a testament to the full life she led. After the service, there was a repast back at her house with a lovely spread by her family. It was comforting to be with weavers from the Philadelphia Guild, the New York Guild, my own guild, the Bucks County PA Guild. Hedy was beloved by so many people.

At 1 o’clock, they opened her studio and all of its contents, yarn, books, fleeces, warps, more yarn, handspun, weaving tools, sample books; most of the things were reasonably priced, but I looked around and there was nothing I needed or wanted. I’m finished with the acquisition stage of my life, and being in Hedy’s studio, amongst all the things that made her the fantastic weaver she was, I thought again, how fleeting life is, but how weaver’s stashes get spread out through the weaving community like dandelion seeds, and was happy knowing that life will continue with the next generation of weavers.

However, there was a table in the lower level that had commercial fabrics on it. With a sign, best offer. The fabrics were mostly upholstery fabrics, brocades, decorator fabrics and all I could think of was, I could make costumes out of these! And what I can’t use, I can donate to the Shakespeare Theatre where I volunteer as a stitcher in the costume shop.

So all of this came home with me…

Mulder picked his favorite right away. The grey raw silk.

Meanwhile, on the trip back, one of my guild mates asked me about a native plant place near where we were, as we headed back to NJ from PA. I mentioned Bowman’s Hill Wildflower Preserve, the largest native plant preserve in the US, and they sold lots of native plants. A quick check on the phone, and it was 16 minutes away. How did we ever get along without a GPS?

They had to drag me away, because I filled two carts with plants, and the driver of the SUV was convinced they weren’t going to fit in the car with the loom and all the bags of yarn and my fabric purchased from Hedy’s sale. I was determined, even if I had to sit with a button bush shrub and a couple of Elderberries on my lap in my handwoven dress for the two hour trip home…

I think it funny how my priorities have changed. Now I buy plants, not yarn. I have too much yarn, you can never have too many plants, especially if you find one that is hard to find! So I have to get all these planted, in August, in a drought, which isn’t the best idea, but they were available and I don’t often get to Bowman Hill Preserve.

So the costume thing. Every Friday I go to the Shakespeare theatre costume shop and they give me some outrageous assignment, you want me to do what with this? I’ve gotten really good at taking apart things and remaking them into other things, borrowing parts from other things, and engineering a way to make it all work. It has made me look at my own closets and stash. Truth it, I don’t need any more clothes. I have a killer wardrobe, almost everything made from my own hands. But I love to sew, it is my first love, and the world is at peace when I’m one with the sewing machine. Which is saying a lot.

So next Sunday, the 24th, Montclair Early Music is sponsoring a medieval fest, and I’m going to perform with two groups, starting at noon, cello with the beginner group, and bass recorder with the regular early music group.

I have a hankering for a new costume. It’s a week away, I’ve got time! I took one of the fake suede upholstery fabrics from Hedy’s stash and some trim I bought last year from the going out of business sale at M&J trims in Manhattan. I made this…

I chose to use cording to make loops, instead of grommets. I’ve never been very confident with grommets, I don’t have good tools to apply them, but I can always devise an alternate method for pretty much everything in the textile world. So I took apart a commercial frog, and used the cording for loops and bought a pair of shoelaces for the ties. Now I have a new vest. But I kept thinking about a dress I’d seen, long and slender, lace up the front, and I started poking around my closet…

I found this…

I had made this dress, and hand beaded vest to stand for my friend Candiss Cole at her wedding in England to Roger Footit. I wore it again when I stood for my mom when she remarried in 2006. The dress was a bit legendary, but it has been hanging in the back of my closet for a long time. I haven’t figure out yet what to do with the vest, but the dress was exactly the style I had envisioned for a medieval costume, laced up the front over a full skirt, hopefully full enough I can get a cello between my legs.

I thought about it all day while I was watering and watching my insect friends. Basically I needed to cut the dress right up the middle. Armed with my new found confidence to make anything work, thanks to my vast experience now in the costume shop, after dinner tonight, I cut right up the middle of the dress. I needed something to work for the loops for the lacing, and I have bags of frogs, but none of them were the right color. I took a bunch that were shiny white, and stuck them in a pot of green tea. They came out perfect.

I used some yarn from the studio, and made a twist ply rope for the lace cord. And voila! I have a new medieval costume to wear! Still have a lot of handsewing, but I have a week!

I’m poking around in my closet to see what I can put under it. It is an outdoor event, and I’ll be sweating my butt off, but I’ll look pretty spiffy and medieval as I play early music with my friends.

Meanwhile, as plant season is drawing to a close, I’ve spent little time printing with the plants. So I grabbed some PAS mordanted silk, from maybe two years ago, and some of my favorite leaves, and created a couple of very cool pieces of silk, leaves dipped in Fe, with a logwood blanket and the second one, an osage orange blanket. The green leaf in the second one is from a nine bark cultivar, best printer on my property.

And yes, I’m still weaving, though this is getting kind of old… I have currently on my small 8-shaft floor loom, the warp that never ends. Kind of like that girl scout song, about a song that never ends… Yeah, I have a warp like that. Originally when I set up a bunch of Structo looms for teaching, I put on some ridiculous warp, like 6 yards, of 20/2 cotton, which was never going to be woven off, because students would just weave samplers to explore the technique. I want to clear all of those looms, as a number of institutions want the looms for teaching and I don’t want to do that anymore. So I’m transferring the warps, one at a time, to a floor loom so make the weaving easier. Sooo much easier… This is an overshot sampler from Robyn Spady.

After a couple yards of the sampler, I decided to change colors, and just pick one of the samples and weave that. I can use the fabric for making zip bags, or totes, or I don’t know what, but the point is, I want to weave it off.

And there is still an unknown amount on the back of the loom…

And so, between daily practice on the cello, and recorder, and new early music communities I’m rejoining, and the gardens and gardening adventures, and my volunteer work, and my vast studio stashes, there really aren’t enough hours in the day to fit in all I want to do… But I try…

Stay tuned!

A Summer Routine…

My mom mentioned she hadn’t gotten to read a blog post from me in a while. I said, just reread the last post. Life is basically just a rerun during the summer. Get up, have breakfast with my little buddy, and then go out and water.

Last post I talked about how much rain we were getting. This month, not so much. There was that flooding 5″ of rain a week ago, but nothing since. So out I go to water anything that was just planted in the last couple of weeks. Which is a number of plants!

I mow when necessary, weed when necessary, which is all the time… The interesting thing about native plants, is when they fill in, you don’t need to weed under them, but you do need to watch out for things that suddenly appear out of nowhere and are 4 feet tall because some bird pooped out the seeds. Today I pulled out four Northern Catalpa trees. There were a few Tree of Heaven seedlings, which I instantly eradicated. And though the pokeweed is native, and I kept a few bushes because they are an important food source in the fall, I don’t need 485 seedlings. So I’m always on the hunt for things that shouldn’t be on my property, and I use my plant app on my phone hourly.

The gardens are magical.

Even the lily pad in the koi pond bloomed.

My landscape designer ripped out a 40 foot tall non-native trumpet vine, and we replaced it with an American Wisteria (Wisteria frutescens), who knew there was such a thing, not to be confused with that monster non-native thing that destroys buildings.

I had additional path lighting added to one of the new planting areas. It was magical to sit in my window and look out at the lit path as dusk set in, during a rain storm.

The insects are everywhere, except mosquitos, for some reason I don’t have them. Dragonflies are everywhere. I hear dragonflies eat mosquitos…

There must be 50 different types of bees in my yard, all different sizes. Here is one on the Rattlesnake Master.

Lest you think that my life is one giant play in the dirt kind of existence, which it mostly is right now, I’m heavily into the early music world, playing recorder with a couple of different groups, and now the cello, with the early music beginner group. We had a performance at the Tenafly Nature Center last Saturday night, I wish I had a picture. It was for a Faeries and Fireflies festival, and there was a quintet of us, along with a drummer and a couple vocalists, all set up in a life size eagle’s nest built on a platform. We were in our medieval costumes and it was just the greatest experience. We even had a mama doe and four baby fawns stop to listen to a few songs.

Our Medieval Festival is coming up the end of August, and I’ll be playing bass recorder with Montclair Early Music, and cello with the beginner group called the Musettes.

I think a lot about this new path I’ve chosen, especially on the cello. I’m not particularly good at the cello, but I am always prepared, organized, and I show up. And I practice a lot. That in life, counts for a lot. Talent is a gift. But the professional part of showing up prepared and practiced counts for more! So I practice, and I show up with my music ready, in order. And I play my heart out. And each time, I get a little better.

Meanwhile, my local library in the next town has a botanical drawing class once a month. True botanical drawing requires precision. Especially on location. Laying on the ground using calipers and measuring devices, to sketch accurately a particular flower or leaf, isn’t quite my most favorite thing. I much prefer to draw from a picture that remains static, and isn’t influenced by a breeze, or by changes in lighting. One of the things I tried was to take a great flower picture. and then trace it onto my sketchbook. That way it is accurate size wise, and then I could fill it in with watercolor. But that sort of becomes like a coloring book. Which I use to love as a kid.

But now, I just want to look at the picture, figure out how things are shaped, and do a quick line sketch, toss in some color, research what I’m drawing, and call it a day.

July is my least favorite month, I hate the heat, obviously I’m a sweater girl, because I make them. But July is filled with loud thunderstorms, and fireworks, and I have a couple of animals that get traumatized easily with loud unexplained noises. So I always plan to sit on the floor of my basement, during July nights when there are fireworks or thunderstorms, with my dogs, one of them has to be sedated, and have my knitting at hand. I started a new sweater, because September will be here before you know it.

And yes, in spite of my crazy busy life, I’m still weaving. I have a powder room on my first floor, off the kitchen. It is located in the interior of the house, no windows, and therefore some protection from things like fireworks, etc. One of my dogs lays on the tile floor in there a lot.

I was using the powder room the other day, sitting there, like one does, with the dog curled up around the sink, and noticed that there was some kind of rubber debris scattered around the floor. Right away I assumed the dog chewed up something. I looked at the little bathmat on the floor, not remembering at all where it came from or how old it was, and it looked intact, so I was confused.

I turned the rug over and yikes! The rubber backing was disintegrating before my eyes.

Damn, that means I have to add to the list a trip to get a new rug for the powder room.

As I sat there, I started to think… Which one can do easily sitting a powder room…

I had just transferred a warp from a table loom, onto my floor loom, or one of them anyway. It was a colorful Rep Weave, about 25″ wide, and would be much easier to weave off spread over 8 shafts on a large floor loom instead of struggling trying to separate a dense warp on 4 shafts on a table loom. I had blown through half the repeat in just one sitting already. Yarns are vintage Silk City Fiber Contessa, Rayon/Silk, variegated, circular wound on a board to create an ikat effect.

So I got to thinking… I wonder if I could just finish that little Rep rug, and if it would fit in the area in front of the sink in the powder room. I went out to the studio, turned on some music, and got to work. Within a few hours, I had woven off the rug, stitched the ends, tossed it in the washer and dryer, and bound off the edges with some silk noil bias I had laying around.

It is my new favorite thing in the house. I love that I can instantly fix a problem with something that comes from my hands.

Oh, and the original rug? My daughter told me later, when I showed her the replacement, that the original mat had been given to her by a former co-worker 9 years ago when the co-worker was leaving the vet practice and cleaning out her locker. The co-worker kept it in her locker for her dogs when she would bring them to work with her. It didn’t owe us anything.

So my days are full, of flowers, of music, of yarn, of animals, I only wish there were more hours in a day. Fortunately I live in a climate where by late fall, the gardens will go to sleep, and I will have a few months of inside time, and by March, when I’m tired of the inside time, things outside will start to wake up. Meanwhile, there are vegetables to harvest and eat, and we are coming into tomato season, and there are a lot of tomatoes out there!

Stay tuned!

On turning 70…

May flew by in a whirlwind of events, opportunities and some major gardening…

It rained…

It is hard to figure out what to start with, since May is the month of blooming flowers, and my gardens didn’t fail to impress me. Things I planted probably 15 years ago, popped up, like foxglove, which I thought had died, but there they were in all their magnificence.

And the bearded irises, I thought all the pretty colored ones had vanished from my yard years ago. My landscape designer says it has to do with not mulching, and disturbing the surrounding soil, things that were dormant in the ground suddenly come to life.

Azaleas were gorgeous…

The red columbine climbed high…

And the peonies…

The native Cross Vine was in glorious color over the front of the gazebo.

And I discovered a Christmas fern, tucked under a Hosta, which I’d never seen before. I drew it.

It rained in May. A lot… 10.5 inches according to my frequently dumped rain gauges…

I found the most interesting insects, like this one… A Lady Beetle (lady bug) larvae. The pictures on the internet of it morphing into a lady bug are adorable.

And my frogs. Almost unheard of anymore in NJ, I have a few. They found my ponds. I look for them every day. They just sit on the rocks by the pond, zapping up bugs and flies and things that all contribute to a healthy ecosystem.

The first year growth of all of my newly planted natives is unprecedented.

Because you know, it rained… Did I mention that?

And then this happened…

My neighbor, who has a healthy amount of young grandchildren visit regularly, wants a sterile yard for her grandkids to play in. She isn’t happy I have a huge host of native bees, snakes, koi and goldfish ponds, frogs, and all sorts of beneficial bugs. She wants her precious cargo protected. It is hard to explain to people the destruction of entire ecosystems, and how much we are destroying all we take for granted with such short sighted actions. I’m compiling as much data as I can find on what the company uses, a synthetic version of Pyrethrum and hoping to at least give her a bit of education. Wish me luck…

On a happier note, I finished knitting my socks! I started them a couple years ago. Obviously there is little time for knitting. But I started a new sweater, hopefully that won’t take a couple years.

Mother’s Day, weeks ago at this point, my beloved son came and cooked for me. He made beer batter fried cod tacos, they were delicious. He hated my knives. He said he figured out what to get me for my birthday…

A couple weeks ago, I turned 70. It was a big deal because I’m triumphantly moving into Act III of my life and enjoying every minute of it. The world around me is imploding as I write, and I’m so appalled I’m paralyzed, but in my own small space in that world, I do what I can to make the world a better place, especially for the future. Leave things better than you found them…

I had no plans, so I asked a music friend to take me to lunch in Montclair, NJ. We play recorders with Montclair Early Music, and he lives in that town. I went to college in that town as well, so it holds a special place. He took me for Thai food, we had a lovely lunch, and then as a surprise, he took me a couple doors down from the restaurant to the Arthur Murray dance studio, for a tango lesson. It was just the most glorious fun. Backstory, at the spring concert for Montclair Early Music, we played a couple of challenging tango numbers. The director of the group brought in the principal dancers from the local Arthur Murray dance studio, who performed a tango for one of the numbers. My friend and I remarked about how much fun it looked and wouldn’t it be something to try… And so he signed us up for a lesson. I’d like to find a way to fit dance lessons into my already overflowing schedule. These are first world problems I know… I wish I had a picture!

That night, my son promised to take me to a new restaurant in town, very high end, and raved about on social media. We walked to the restaurant, in the rain, did I mention it rained this month, and to my complete shock, my sisters and their husbands, and my daughter who had just left for work just a couple hours before, or so I thought, were all sitting at the bar waiting for me. I was touched, one sister drove up all the way from Maryland for the occasion. It was a glorious night, and my gratitude for my son and sisters for arranging it all, knows no bounds.

Besides dinner and dancing lessons, people who know me well, gave me some much appreciated gifts. A wooden puzzle from my friend…

A hand crocheted sunflower for the garden from another friend…

New knives, which are razor sharp and beautiful from my son…

…and my daughter, who vacuums the house once a week, was appalled at the shedding pleather on my office chair, and so she ordered me a new one, which I don’t have a photo of because I’m sitting in it…

And I bought myself a beautiful used cherry wood Kung bass recorder, something I’ve always wanted, a high end performance bass. It is spectacular…

My little buddy Mulder is never far away. He curls up and makes me sit still for just a few moments…

And last Sunday I had my cello recital. It was really fun, I won’t say it was the best I’ve ever played, but I’ve come so far since last September when I first learned how to hold the cello and bow. I have a recording of my solo, which was really a trio with my teacher also on cello, and a piano, I played “Bring Him Home” from Les Misérables. Then I joined all the little cello students and we played Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and many of its Suzuki variations. I wasn’t great, but I had a blast…

And yes, I’m still a weaver and slowly working through looms when I get a chance especially when it rains, and did I mention there was a lot of rain this past month? I wove all five scarves on the warp that was inspired by the stained glass puzzle of cats.

Between each scarf I left 3″ of fringe to be divided between each scarf, with hem stitching starting and finishing each scarf.

I did a tutorial for my guild on hemstitching. I do it this way, so the entire length of all 12 yards can be tossed in the machine to wet finish. Which leaves the front and back end fringe that can get pretty messy in a washing machine. So I fuse a strip of fusible knit tricot along the fringe at either end of the 12 yards, before I throw it into the wash, which keeps things tidy, and then that gets cut off when the scarves are pressed.

Taking advantage of a now empty 8-shaft floor loom, I immediately grabbed one of the Structo table looms I’d set up a few years ago, and transferred that warp onto my floor loom.

This was an 8-shaft warp, in Tencel, in Shadow Weave, four colors and black. The pattern was from Webs. It didn’t take me long to get the six yard warp transferred, and then weave the first repeat. So much faster on a floor loom… I should get two scarves plus from this warp.

This morning, I was interviewed for a podcast, The Straight Stitch: A Podcast About Sewing and Other Fiber Arts, with Janet Szabo. We had a great time, and she told me the podcast should drop tomorrow. I’ll listen while I’m out in the garden…

This weekend marks the ninth anniversary of my husband’s death, Father’s Day weekend. I think he would have been so proud of how the kids have grown up, and what I’ve done with his beautiful gardens and ponds. I replaced the water feature I had installed right after he died, it was time. It has a little light at the top of the ball.

My landscape designer came today, to rip out more of the invasives that plagued my property, the last of the Japanese Barberry is gone, and most of the Burning Bushes, and Morrow’s Honeysuckle. She brought paw-paw trees, persimmon, ninebark, sassafras trees, and sumac. It was glorious planting in the rain…

Stay tuned…

Milestones

It has been a beautiful busy couple of weeks. Spring is here and it is glorious looking at how my newly planted gardens are coming to life, lots of plants to sketch, identify, celebrate, rip out when appropriate, and appreciate.

The 29th of April would have been my late husband’s and my 47th wedding anniversary. My glorious Kwanzan Cherry (yes I know it is not native) did not let me down. It bloomed once again for our anniversary. The tree means a lot to me, because my husband and I planted it when we first bought the house, in 1982, in honor of our wedding anniversary. All of our wedding pictures were taken in front of a Kwanzan Cherry outside of the church where we were married.

I just returned this afternoon from a bittersweet beautiful weekend visit with my mom, who turned 94 on Friday. I say it was bittersweet, because I adore the woman, she has been a constant in my life, for my entire life, kind, supportive, knowledgeable, and the absolutely best mother anyone could have. Each time I see her, or talk to her, I realize that at 94, she is on borrowed time, and every hour is a gift. My middle sister and her husband came on Saturday and we all went out to lunch at a local restaurant.

I brought my cello and played Happy Birthday for her, I know she will never get to hear me play in concert, so I brought the music to her. I’m not very good yet, but determined. And she was so kind and pleased that I brought the cello, and as she napped in the afternoon, I played each day for more than an hour and a half. She said they were the best, most soothing naps she’s ever had.

The trip to just outside Baltimore, from Northern NJ is long and boring, down most of the length of the NJ turnpike. I woke up Friday morning early, prepared to pack, have breakfast and leave for mom’s, and one of the emails that came into my box, was from a woman from Montana, Janet Szabo, who has a sewing podcast called The Straight Stitch. She wanted to know if I would like to be on the podcast, and of course I said yes. We are scheduled to chat in June. So I listened to a number of episodes (there are something like 77 so far) of the podcast, and the trip down to Baltimore and back just flew by. I thoroughly enjoyed the podcast, at least the dozen episodes I listened to, and look forward to my conversation with Janet. Check it out.

I spent all day Thursday volunteering at the Shakespeare Theatre of NJ, working on restoring the velvet smoking jacket for the lead character in Oscar Wilde’s, The Importance of Being Ernest. I saw this play there a number of years ago and it is hilarious. I get to work on the coolest things when I volunteer there. Last Saturday night was their gala fund raiser, I look forward to it every year. Great food and entertainment and there is always an interesting silent auction. This year I bid on and won a gorgeous pastel/charcoal painting by Edith Moore Hopkins. I had to have this painting because it represents how I feel about the world every time I look at the news. This is my new emoji as I respond to whatever comes across my internet feed.

I continue to sketch most mornings, with the cat patiently watching me. Sometimes he watches from inside the wall unit.

The gardens, like I said above, are glorious. We are getting a good amount of rain, and everything is just glowing. All sorts of critters have taken up residence, including another raccoon, this one unfortunately appeared to have babies, which we didn’t know about until after I had her professionally removed, and we couldn’t save them. I hope the raccoon saga is over for this year, and I’m working hard to shore up the places where raccoons might find residency appealing.

And I’m weaving whenever I can. I finished the two scarves on the leftover warp from Natalie Drummond’s Deflected Double Weave class. They washed up beautifully, and that loom is once more clear.

And I’m almost finished the third of five? scarves on the “cat” warp. These are mixed yarns, all hand-dyed, cellulosic and some silk. Tencel weft. The mixed structure draft is original.

I’ll leave you with my morning view out my music room window, the azaleas, (yes I know they aren’t native) are in full bloom. The Packera has beautiful little yellow daisy like blooms, and is everywhere. That one is native.

And, my first Bearded Iris just opened up.

Stay tuned…

Personal Triumphs

It is a challenging world we are living in right now. It is hard to know what to make of things, what to focus on, where I can do the greatest good. Living in the moment, taking each thing as it comes, putting out small fires, and taking pride in the smallest of endeavors keeps me moving in a forward direction.

Earlier in the week, I had my landscape designer come back with her helper, to remove more Burning Bush (Winged euonymus) from the property. A couple of them were probably 15 feet tall, been in since the 1980’s. She doesn’t use heavy equipment, just a shovel, loping shears, a hand saw, and a pick ax. They are a remarkable team.

She removed all the branches from the four bushes, and her helper set out removing the stumps. To watch someone with that kind of physical strength and determination was really powerful. I wish a bit of that for all of us. When Saul finally got the root system to break free, the look on his face was indescribable. I asked him if he was proud of what he had done, and he responded with such joy, how he lives for this kind of personal triumph. Of course then he proceeded to spend the next hour with a pick ax and a hand saw, taking apart the root ball so they could lift it in parts and get it in the back of the truck with all the branches and the other root balls. I wanted to genuflect at the greatness of perseverance.

I thought about my own life and what things, no matter how small, gave me a sense of personal triumph. No one may even know, no one may even appreciate some of the things that I do on a daily basis that give me real satisfaction. But nevertheless, I managed to do something I didn’t think I could do, or was really challenging, and I managed to pull it off, and those are the things that make us smile and pat ourselves on our own backs and say, well done.

Even when we aren’t even sure what we did to make something happen, against all odds there are five adult frogs living in my ponds. I haven’t had frogs in my ponds in years, frogs are one of the things struggling to survive in these changing environments. But there, sunning itself, was a gorgeous frog, and when my pond guy came and opened up the ponds, cleaned them out and hooked up the filters, he found five. I’m not sure how they found me, but they are most welcome.

I’ve had a house full the last couple of weeks. Natalie Drummond was here last weekend for a workshop with my guild. I adore Natalie, I’ve known her since she took one of my retreats in the Outer Banks, NC back in 2018. I’ve followed her career. She has made Deflected Double Weave her thing, (that’s a structure in handweaving), and we all arrived at the 2 1/2 day workshop with looms warped and ready to go. I blogged about setting up the loom last month, knowing this past couple of weeks would be challenging.

Natalie encourages the use of hand painted warps, I chose to use a variegated yarn wound circular to create an ombré effect. I was fine with it. One of the things she teaches is how to substitute a warp, or group of warps if you want to change things up. My warp didn’t really lend itself to that, I liked the value contrast in what I had, but I followed along, always willing to learn something new. We used a lot of cell phone camera previews, checking value by using a grey scale mode.

There were two of us who picked one of the eight shaft pattern samplers, and I started in on the sampler the morning of the second day. I happily sat and did my thing, making sure Natalie was fed (since I was the hostess) and by the end of the day, I had woven all three samples and an additional one, the last two were yarns that would shrink differentially.

We were then supposed to cut them off and wash them that night, and bring them back to class the next day to evaluate.

What surprised me was how much I loved the subtleness and patterning of the second sample from the bottom. I wanted to weave a couple of scarves out of that.

Once I was home, I had gardening and yard stuff to attend to, but alas, it was pouring rain all day, and so I decided to pull the remaining four yards or so from the table loom, because we have already discussed how much I don’t like working on a table loom, and put the whole thing on one of my floor looms.

Which I did. By the end of that rainy Monday, I was weaving away on my first scarf. The yarn, in case anyone is interested, is vintage Contessa, rayon and silk, from Silk City Fibers. No longer available (I’m still in mourning) I hoard whatever I can find at weaver’s estate sales. I have a lot of it I’ve dyed. I love the matte finish of this particular rayon with a silk fleck. Deflected Double Weave will deflect and collapse once it is washed, so the patterning will look quite different. And when I transferred the warp to the floor loom, I brought back in the original warps I had substituted out. I’m very proud of myself…

Meanwhile, after all this rain, my lawn was looking seriously like it needed mowing. Last Wednesday, after having decided not to renew the contract for my lawn service, I dug out the electric mower, made sure the batteries were charged, so I could mow. I couldn’t even find the batteries in the trashed wood shop from the racoon debacle. They had fallen under the workbench.

I got everything charged and set out to mow, and alas, I couldn’t get the poor mower started. I loved that little electric mower my husband bought me before he died. It worked last year, when against all odds, before my lawn guys came, I charged it up and was out mowing with a broken foot in a boot. Talk about proud of myself.

But this year. Nothing… So I spent some time looking at options on the internet, and ordered basically the same mower from Amazon, which arrived on my doorstep the next day.

The house guests I have this week, and old college friend and her husband in from CA for a family event, have been wonderful to visit with, and spend the evenings fixing puzzles, restringing my guitar, and going out to dinner. Her husband agreed to help me assemble the lawn mower, which I will admit, I would have probably had trouble doing on my own. I charged up the battery, and of course it rained. Three quarters of an inch, all day yesterday.

So today, after reading the directions for starting the new mower, I went to the old mower, which had been sitting out in the rain, and I tried it one more time before tossing it out at the curb for bulk pick up tomorrow, and to my complete shock, it started right up. Of course… So I mowed the back lawn. It performed admirably. I wasn’t going to return the new one, I’d already taken it out of the packaging and set it up, and so I mowed the front with that one. It is a little heavier and blows the grass out the side, so I have to learn the best way to use that feature. I don’t bag my grass.

Anyway, my lawn is mowed, and I’m pretty damn proud of myself.

Stay tuned…