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First green, best green. A green in transition. This won't last more than a few days, but I love it while it's here. I want salad for dinner tonight.
I saw this on my neighborhood walk today:
I am imagining a rebel in the sewer maintenance crew. Does he/she go home at night and make quilts? I hope so.
For the past several weeks we've been watching a robin gathering grass and twigs in our back yard and storing the fiber stash in a big pile near the back door. We knew there must be nest construction somewhere.
Today we finally found it, in the far corner of the carport. The mother bird has been sighted.
Meanwhile, in a different part of town, another creative act was taking place. Wherever there are artists, there are also critics.
If I get up early enough, this is what I see out the kitchen window as I make the coffee:
Lining the photos up as they appear above suggested to me a zigzag motion in a dobby stripe design. Perhaps a satin overlay for 40 shafts?
Several repeats will look like this:
I've been wanting to write a post about why I blog. And suddenly it became unnecessary, because today I read Bonnie's post about that very topic, and I couldn't have said it better.
And in the sleeve department, serendipity also reigns. In the midst of my struggles with the set-in sleeve, the day's mail brought a copy of Shirley Paden's Knitwear Design Workshop. On page 84 I found the answer to all my questions. I took notes.
(I figure if I post them here, I'll always be able to find them later, which is not the case with items lost on my desk.)
Sometimes if I need a quick sky for a project, I employ Photoshop's cloud generating filter (Filter>Render>Clouds) and use it as a background.
But today on my walk I I was reminded there's no substitute for the real thing.
I'll say no more about this knitting project except that I've frogged the sleeves five times (Rip-it! rip-it!). The object of this exercise is to pick up and knit a properly fitting set-in sleeve from the top down, while waiting on endless hold for customer support from a certain company.
Another thing I do while on endless hold is to play with research Photoshop. Here is a photo from this morning's walk:
…and here it is after some research:
Now I can finally read this book!
I'm at roughly the halfway point in the sewing. I decided to wrap the signatures in the same blue paper I'm using for the endpapers, as the spine looked pretty naked otherwise. The waxed linen thread is olive green.
It's an odd experience to bind a book before you've read it. I see bits of text at the beginnings and ends of the signatures, and in the middles, but there is no real continuity. It reminds me of the programs that condense text by eliminating every other word; you know there's meaning in there, but you just can't grab onto it!
I've been wanting to read The Thread That Binds, a collection of interviews of independent bookbinders by Pamela Leutz. It's published by Oak Knoll Press in three different forms: hard cover, paperback, and unbound signatures.
I purchased it in unbound signatures, partly as an economy measure, and partly to have more practice binding.
Yesterday I cut the covers and covered them in handmade paper from my stash. I also cut some blue endpapers.
Next step will be the punching and sewing (and then, of course, the reading!).
As I compose this post on Sunday morning, the sky is overcast and there is an 86% chance of rain here. But yesterday was another story, a perfect spring day. In the morning we went down to Falls Park with our cameras. Yes, the sky really was that blue.
The falls roared, not too slack, but not too muddy either.
On a rock beneath the bridge a girl sat reading—or was she texting? No matter.
In the afternoon we attended that quintessential spring event, the opening of the Little League season.
Note this young player's look of steely determination.