bee creative

field notes...

Field notes:

7:20 AM 65 degrees, 87% humidity, Visibility 10 miles Wind speed calm.  The pollen count yesterday was the highest it's been yet for grass.  Sunrise 5:10 AM, Sunset: 9:17 PM

11:08 78 degrees

5:50 85 degrees, 53 % humidity.  We matched the record high today of 86 degrees. 

Eating from the garden:

Polenta cake and berries.

Recipe for the cake is from Ripe by Nigel Slater.

Eating from the farmer's market:

First beans and new potatoes of the year.  There were tomatoes last week.

 

Gardening:  pulling weeds, watering, harvesting, planting fall/winter crops.

 

Reading

"If we cannot control the volatile tides of change, we can learn to build better boats.  We can design-and redesign-organizations, institutions, and systems to better absorb disruption,operate under a wider variety of conditions, and shift with more fluidly from one circumstance to the next.  To do that, we need to understand the emerging field of resilience."

Resilience, Why things Bounce Back by Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy

I'm two chapters in and finding it very interesting.

And a bit of stitching.  This will be a patch for my "Mending heart," blanket but I think it has it's own name... "Hiding in plain sight."

 

house keeping, garden keeping

I picked the first artichoke and then promptly lost my balance reaching for a strawberry and stepped on the stem.  Might be a problem.

The blueberries aren't quite ripe, but close enough.

I've been sweetening my tea and coffee with honey. 

I'm running a little low on honey and decided to put a bit of sugar in my tea. 

For some reason today it tasted exceptionally good.

 

Blanket making with wool scraps. 

It might be summer but this is the Pacific Northwest...

altered

This isn't quite where I thought I was going to go as I sat down to reflect on the day...

I was playing with photos, planning on sharing about my trip to the market place for the Northwest Weaver's Guild. 

To show my favorite  yarn bombing

And a bit of  Western's campus which is beautiful.

when I started to think about what it meant to alter something...

"To change the form or structure of" and "to become different," according to Wiktionary.

From Medieval Latin, alterare "to make other," and Latin, "the other."

About how to educate is to alter, to change...

In August I've been invited to demonstrate carding, spinning with the drop spindle, knitting and crocheting at one of our local farmer's markets. 

I said that I'd love to with the understanding that I still consider myself a beginning spinner. 

Today I started two hats, one crocheted and one knit, both with hand spun yarn, to take along.

The knit hat is being started with yarn that was used to test some thoughts about color, how it could be altered.

The crocheted hat is being made with hand-spun yarn that I bought and then cut up and then carded into white roving and then re-spun. 

It is being crocheted with a hook that was once a tree branch.

Altered.   

how it might begin

This morning (sunrise 5:07)


                                                                                               This evening...the first.                                                                                                           (Sunset 9:17)



                                                  And sunshine on the back porch.
                                                                        (visibility as far as I can see)

permission

I sit at the top of the stairs under the covered porch and look out...

It's raining.  Soon I'll have sour cherries to pick. I'll prune the cherry on the right so that it will stay small, easy to reach, easy to cover and protect from the birds.  I am listening to the birds.  I would share, but I doubt they would.  Their life is really about survival (at least that's the way it seems). 

Spin a bit and then knit a bit.  Just a little at a time.  I think sometimes we have to give ourselves permission to be tired. 

cloud making

This evening, sitting on the deck, thinking about how sometimes if we just do a little bit at a time...





to be continued.

Documentation

A feild of grass is a beautiful thing, but grass is not my friend. 

It grows where I don't want it in the garden and I get frustrated because I can't keep up with it.  The pollen makes me feel ill. 

Along with staying up to put the chickens to bed, it has made me tired and cranky at the end of the day, the time when I usually blog.

The time when I sort through what I'm thinking about and feeling and deciding what I want to say.

What I want to document. 

Why documentation is important.

And so I am thinking about how time is spent.  How to work around challenges.

I just started reading Brene Brown's book Daring Greatly and have decided one thing I need to tell myself every morning is "There is enough time for everything I want to do."

________________

 

Thinking about what we choose to have in our lives and why:

 

 

 

how a memory might grow

About eight or nine years ago I was given a few iris plants that my grandfather had purchased a bit before he died.  I lost one, the other two have struggled and have never bloomed.  Last  year they put on quite a bit of new growth.  This year a blossom...|

a place to rest

About yesterday...

Sunday is my go-no-where/stay home day. 
A day to rest day.


A little sewing... (with supervision)

 
Some cooking (avocado popsicle!)

Some more cooking (Millet muffin).

A lot of time in the garden:

 

 

field report: knitting in the sun

                                                                    This is the spot I picked.
                                                        (61 degrees F, Winds South 12 MPH

To sit and knit.

By the jasmine.

Pollen count is Moderate-High for grass and Moderate for weeds.


      "I can get all the news I need on the weather report..."  Paul Simon

Visibility 10 miles.
 

I woke up before dawn (5:08 today) but have to wait for sunset (9:10) to go to sleep. 

It's all about the chickens.