Inspiration

After finishing my tapestry for the Pacific Portals show, and my long project, the Sand Pail, I have been taking a break from weaving.  I just haven't decided what I should work on next.  There have been lots of things in my head, but nothing that just jumps out to inspire me.

We have been having lots of rain here, and the colors of spring are fabulous.  Everything is a beautiful rich green, and after a rain in the morning light, the water and sun combine to make everything look fresh and dew covered.  Yesterday after I dropped the kids off at school, I took my camera out for a walk around our farm.  I am hoping today to take these photos that I have played with on photoshop and start sketching to end up with my cartoons that I will weave from.  I think I will make a triptych with the flower shown below with the petals beneath it as the big centerpiece, and the two other pieces half that size.  I am not sure about the sizing, but I will work on it and give an update.

 After that, I am thinking of working on a vegetable garden series.  So much has been done with these, but maybe I will find something to new to say.  I have started with this photo of a head of lettuce and a strawberry bloom.  I love the light shining through the leaves.

A Growing Garden

Sometime ago I posted photos of our front yard after we moved back in after our renovation.  Then it was a bare plot of land with a wall and a sidewalk.  The sidewalk was new, and the wall quite old.  Here is a photo of our burgeoning front yard.  After 15 years of marriage I find out my husband doesn't like those messy cottagey gardens.  So we ended up with a different kind of yard.  After looking through scads of garden books, I found one picture where he said, Oh, I like that.  It was by Piet Oudolf, a garden full of grasses, he loved the structure and look.  So, grasses it was.  I have fallen in love with all of them.  They look different at different times of the year and of the day.  

The grasses in this photo are quite small and will take a while to mature, the ones on the left which are hard to see are quite beautiful and standup against a wall.

These grasses are a bit larger, but hard to tell in this photo.  It is hard to be patient sometimes with a garden, but in time the grasses will all fill in and be quite beautiful.  These grasses, pink Muhlebergia look lovely in the winter with their pink blooms that glow in the morning sun.

I do have one area that is more like a cottage garden which is filled with grasses and very tall wild flowers.  They are supposedly deer proof, but several gotten munched on pretty heavily this spring and summer.  This garden has a wild unmanaged look with tall grasses with while puffy flowers intermixed with flowers.  About 90 percent of the garden is native.  We did put in four crepe myrtle trees because we couldn't find a native that fit in the space with the same structure, and there are a couple of flowers that are in the garden that are not native, but otherwise....

One thing that I love about my meadow garden is the visitors.  The butterflies and bees have loved this plant which started blooming in June and is still blooming now, although not as pretty as it was in June, it is still attracting visitors like this Hawk's moth above.  My children observed that the bees tended to come in the morning and the butterflies in the afternoon.  I even saw a Monarch butterfly yesterday visiting.

I haven't gotten any weaving done, but I do love my garden!