Convergence!

I'm leaving for Convergence and the ATA workshop tomorrow morning! I'm looking forward to all the wonderful events and to coming home full of inspiration!

I did not harvest my weld.....I guess it will just wait for me....
I saw the first fire flies of the year last night, so it's really summer!

Wedding Shower

I finished the cover kimono from Knit Kimono in time to wear to my future dil's shower tomorrow. I'm not happy with my photos, but I'll try again. Bob and I are still hurtling ourselves around, and I had to find the camera in his packed bags in order to take this photo! I'll be camera-less for the weekend....

He'll be sailing in the Shelter Island area of Long Island, and I'll be on the Connecticut River at the shower and then visiting my sister. Hopefully we'll be buying a flower girl dress this weekend! Poor mother of the groom is going to be the last one to get her dress!

Tapestry is beginning to seem like something I used to do. I've started a new warp for a small sample project while I have two larger projects in various stages of woven incompletion (my neglected historical piece and 'Handsome Rob'), and there's a Hudson River design that is dying to get out of my head onto some paper. sigh.....

My weld is huge, and I'm ready to dye. I've got some handspun single-ply Romney for tapestry, as well as some commercial merino/mohair and some commercial wool, both of which I'd probably use for knitting. All I need is some time at home!

My dog Riptide continues to take up much of my time on weekdays. He's not failing yet, but he needs to be monitored fairly regularly to see if his liver function can improve enough to get him back on his chemo therapy schedule. If he doesn't improve soon it will become too late to accept him back into the program. It's a clinical trial being done by Abbott Labs. He's done very well on it for nine months before chemicals began to build up in his liver. He still acts perfectly healthy, although a bit more subdued than he was before getting lymphoma.

On that note....I have to get ready to take him for his blood work....

Found Time

It feels like I haven't had a moment for anything spontaneous in months. I've done lots of outrageously wonderful and fun things lately, but it's been all pre-scheduled and hurry, hurry, hurry! This weekend was to be no exception. It's both my 31st wedding anniversary and my husband's birthday. We had family come down for CT to have dinner Friday, and it was wonderful to sit in the back garden among the foxglove, peonies, iris and cranesbill as the evening turned to night.

To celebrate our anniversary, we spent Saturday at the Cloisters as you'll see below. It was 'garden days' with special tours planned every hour, some focusing on medicinal plants, plants for scent, and general tours. We arrived in time for one of the general tours, which included a stop inside in the room with the 'Hunt for the Unicorn' tapestry series. (I'd already gone in there to make sure I had my own visit since I never go to the Cloisters without visiting the tapestries!) I had not expected the tapestries to be included in a garden tour, and it was a pleasant surprise! The docent did an excellent job talking about the works. Everything she said about tapestry weaving was very accurate, although not terribly detailed (after all this was a garden tour), and she did a very credible job talking about the plants depicted in the tapestries and the sacred/secular underlying meaning of unicorns in medieval lore. It was an unexpected highlight! We finished the day with dinner at our favorite restaurant, which just happens to be in our town!

Today I was busy making plans for the another round of relatives who were coming for lunch, when we realized that we'd all misunderstood each other about where lunch was taking place! I was waiting for them to arrive for lunch in the garden, and they were waiting for us to arrive at our typical half-way meeting place on the shore of Long Island sound in Rowayton. It was too late for either of us to jump in the car to get to each other, so I've got an unexpectedly free afternoon! The first thing that comes to mind is spinning! And secondly, doing a little research on how to use the weld I have flowering in the garden this year, and the woad seeds I've just managed to obtain (not willing to admit where I got them just yet.....).....
So....without delaying anymore....I'm off to spin!

Photo Collage!

Scenes from my garden in early June

Launched into Summer

Well, I have not managed to learn how to make a photo collage. Everything technical is such a steep learning curve for me!

The garden is looking quite nice....the peonies have just opened, along with the pinks and cranes' bills and Siberian iris, while the bleeding hearts are fading. My weld is huge and just about to bloom so I'm looking forward to some dyeing! Hopefully I can rejuvenate my indigo vat and get some wild lime green like I saw at Vicki Fraser's studio two years ago!

My catalog for ATB7 arrived in the mail just before Chris' graduation. What a wonderful surprise to find part of Buddha's face on the cover! I'm very honored!

Wedding plans abound, Convergence is just around the corner, I've got homework from my Pre-Columbian workshop with Susan Martin Maffei, and three tapestries in various degrees of completion (one that is still in the design stage). My knitted kimono is almost done! It's sewn together and the knitted band is about 1/2 done. I'd like to wear it to the wedding shower in mid-June....next weekend! Yikes! I'm partially done with a silk kimono style vest that tempted me at the MD Sheep and Wool. It's a kit from Just Our Yarn. The only downer for me right now is that somehow I've caught a summer cold that's been making the rounds here.