Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Swallowtail and the Flower Show

At last, finished and blocked. Some projects just take a lot of fiddling, and sometimes I wonder how I stand it. First, buying only 2 oz of the handpainted silk top when I knew it would never be enough. How casual I was about that! 'Oh, I'll just whip up a little something to go with it!' That led to the miserable experience of trying to dye my own silk top which matted and made spinning a very un-zen experience, which put me off spinning for several months! Being put off spinning is not a healthy place to be! Then came the rewarding experience of dyeing some commerically spun silk in my own indigo vat. I did find that exhilarating, but wanted to scream when I ran out of the lovely blue before reaching the end of the lace border. Some projects just seem like one hurdle after another. And yet....I can see myself doing this all over again, ad infinitum!

And here are highlight from this year's Philadelphia Flower Show. The theme was Italy. At the tail end of a very cold winter, at the end of a week that started with a blizzard, I wanted to skip town and head straight for a warm coastline....I'm thinking Amalfi!












And shoes were big this year....

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Beautiful shawl.

Life Looms Large said...

It's great that you persevered and got a beautiful finished shawl out of that project! It sounds like you had numerous opportunities to talk yourself out of the project, but you didn't! The shawl is gorgeous!

The Philadelphia Flower show pictures are great! Better than Italy at the moment, because I think it would still be a bit cold there too. (Oh, who am I kidding - the food and the art would make up for it!!)

Think spring!
Sue