bee creative

staycation 2009

Tomorrow marks the first day that I am off from work for a week and oh do I have plans.   For last year's staycation I started painting the living room floor red.  This year I hope to finish it!  I also have a bag of clay I want to play with.  And some sewing to do.  And some gardening and cooking and knitting and reading and daydreaming and sitting on the beach and watching the stars come out and the moon grow to fullness and then shrink away again. 

For tonight I pulled a little experiment out of the cast iron dye pot:

 

Wool dyed with hop leaves, not sure how color fast yet. 

 

I wonder if there is an universe to be found there? 

latest bus project and it's not socks

Headband.  I don't think Briar wants to give it up.  And from the garden:

I cheated and bought this as a potted plant.  It's so big that I have to set in a pot of water so that it won't dry out in the heat. 

what if we just endure?

I started out thinking about the sun but the moon is pink right now.

The record was broken for hottest day ever recorded today for this area.  It's almost 9:30 PM and it's 91 degrees Fahrenheit and oh so humid.  Which lead me to the above experiment.  It was sort of a what if I doodled on this, what if I sewed this, what if I layered this on...

dye pot compost?

Too hot to do much other than pick blueberries once the sun goes down and eat ice cream the next day for dinner. 

And maybe stir the dye plants a bit.  Sage does turn out well.  I experimented with making a bundle.  I'll probably unwrap it this weekend and see what I get.  Also noticing a strong similarity between soaking plants to make dye and composting.... 

the bride wore flipflops

Went to an outdoor wedding this weekend.  Didn't get much else done...

Just a little stitching on my daisy pillow.  I've read that using old silk thread isn't a good idea, but I've been using it for top stitching, along with some cotton thread.  I love how one reflects the light and the other absorbs it. 

canidates for a Dr Seuss garden

I broke one of my garden rules just  a bit.  I'm trying to buy only plants that are edible, useful or native for my garden.  I'm not sure if this passionflower will ever set a fruit that would be edible and I don't know that there is any useful reason to have a passionflower in the garden other than it's beauty or as a fruit, but I still bought it and planted it this spring.  What a treat it was to come home and see the first blossoms had opened. 

This is love-in-a-mist, or nigelia.  I fell in love with this flower as a child.  It was one of the flowers my grandfather always grew.  I'm pretty sure he gave me seed from his garden for the first garden I had.  Some of the flowers in my garden might be descended from those first seeds as every year I collect some of the seed and scatter it for the next year.  

I think I'll need to work on my sweet pea quilt this weekend. 

this is magic

I'm thinking about how much I love this (at Spirit Cloth).   I'm thinking about how strange it is that mold is only visible to the human eye when it has created a colony.  I'm thinking of the magic of something decomposing and creating nutrients, even while something else is growing. 

How much magic can be found when we look around us.

 

 

Sunset tonight.  Also thinking it's time for me to go to bed....

still yellow

I bought something a little different than I normally do at the last farmer's market:

Beeswax. I have eucalyptus, rose, and clary sage steeping in almond oil right now. I'm hoping to get enough calendula to do a batch and I will do some mint soon as well.  The almond oil and beeswax will be used for salves.  I am "busy as a bee" right now....

finished basket

Crocheted with wool, trim is silk.  I felted/fulled it a bit.  Still making applesauce....

yellow seems to be the color of the day

Today was mostly about the garden and cooking.  Did lots of weeding and rearranging and thinking about what I want to do differently next year.  I think gardeners think of time on many levels constantly:  past, present, future.  I also picked raspberries and blueberries.

Made butter so that I could make muffins.  I wonder what threshold has been crossed when it's easier to make butter from some cream in the fridge than it is to wait for butter to come to room temperature?

Cherry- apricot muffin with honey butter.   Also made a batch of applesauce. 

I did start one new project.  I'm making a basket for a wedding present.  I have some silk yarn to add as an accent.