Spring Wildflowers

I saw these on my walk this morning for the first time in the 13 years we've lived here.  Our wildflower book calls them Desert Evening Primrose.

It says that each flower blooms for only one night and then it will wither in the light of day.  But as the flowers dry, they turn pink and lavender making almost a bouquet on each plant.

I think it's astounding how they can grow in dry sandy soil.

The primrose are in a neighbor's yard.  We have Crane's Bill in ours, like we've never had it before.  The good news is that it's a ground cover of sorts and seems to have crowded out the nasty and highly flammable Tumble Mustard.  The bad news is that it's a sticker.  It's name comes from those spikes, because they look like the bill of a crane when held sideways.  However, each one of those spikes when it dries will produce four stickers.  Our poor dogs.

I also saw lupine for the first time this year.

We have a few Desert Peach, but where it normally punctuates the sagebrush landscape in May with splashes of pink, there is just a smattering.  The early spring weather last month followed by a week of killer frost was a game changer.  

I finished my laprobe from our Shetland wether Ollie.  I thought the brown was Shetland but it's something else, without the typical Shetland luster.  I was disappointed the light brown stripe so took it my guild meeting yesterday.  They suggested a closer sett or a thicker yarn, but they all liked it the way it is.  I have plenty more yarn where this came from :)  Our final meeting of the 2014-2015 guild year was a combination dye day and death by chocolate.  Oh my, did we have lots of both and you can read about it here.  

And I also finished the scarf from novelty yarn warp and plain weave weft.  It's nothing to write home about and I've decided in the future to use a yarn like this in combination with something else.  It would be a whole lot more interesting.  I'm already planning a mixed warp using Tom Knisely's method of designing in the reed.

I got this warp on Maudie Mae last week and have secured it on the breast beam with lease sticks using these fancy holders that Melissa gave me a long time ago.  I haven't used them in years and thought it was time to try them again.

I've decided to take a break from the studio for a couple of days.  I hung my sun catchers in the tree after breakfast and then cleaned out the flower bed a little.  We planted this bed over ten years ago when it was in full sun, but we have lost some of our sun-loving plants as the trees have grown and created shade.  I spent an hour on the front porch with my High County Gardens catalog and have made a list of plants to order tomorrow, xeric plants that tolerate partial shade and are also browse resistant to rabbits.   It took a while but I'm ready to place my order when they are open tomorrow.

Mid Something Summer

Here it is the middle of July and we still have wildflowers.  These are Prickly Poppy.

I was driving by and had to take a picture of these - Composite.  It's been such an unusual weather year.  It was muggy again today with late afternoon clouds and thankfully, so thunderstorm activity. 

At the same time we're getting early rabbit brush flowers, which means that I need to start thinking about whether or not I'm going to have them in a dyepot.  Hey time - stop crowding me!

I decided that I need to take some downtime and follow the example of my dogs.  It's been a busy spring.  I'm very excited though following our guild board meeting on Friday.  I followed up on the suggestions and met with the library managers since the library was right on my way home.  We have a for-reals weaving outreach event in the spring that the library has adopted and will advertise for us.

In the interim, I've had some grandchild knitting to do.

Wild Flowers

I spun up a couple of my batts this morning and this is my singles.  Next I plied, or rather bound it, with a silk thread.

 

 I took my camera this morning when I walked the dogs, hoping to catch some wildflower shots.  I'm always surprised to see them thrive in dry sand.  This is desert lupine.

We are inundated with wild mustard, which looks kind of pretty right now, but when it's dry will become a serious fire danger.  It's overwhelming.

Mim posted a picture on Facebook of the fiber she recently dyed.  Robin and I decided we needed to see it for ourselves and buy some, of course.  She picked me up at 11:00 and I made her stop the truck a couple of times for wildflower pictures.  Mim's end of the valley is wetter and the Mules Ear are prolific.

As are the wild iris.  Mim's husband Bob hates them because they're useless.  Cows and horses won't eat them, but they really are pretty. 

I have no idea what these are but they remind of a Victorian postcard.  I've only seen them on the road to Mim's.

And here they are close up.

These are some of the things we wanted to tempted ourselves with.

Robin and I stayed too long, talked a lot and spent too much.  We had a great time.

I chose these rovings to make into future batts.  I bought one of them to take to my class next week.  I'm taking Spinning Coils from Lexi Boeger at the Conference of Northern California Handweavers.   I'm looking forward to have someone show me how instead of trying to figure it out on my own.

I washed my skein and let it hang to set the twist.  It's in my bag to take tomorrow to the weaving group.  This is the closest I've come to intentionally spinning art yarn instead of accidentally getting something weird.  I'm finally starting to get the hang of what  my hands need to do to get the results I want and I'm pleased.

Fixing to Get Ready

I took this picture of Desert Peach in early May and just didn't get around to posting it. It's just about the first sign of spring that we have, not that we actually get spring. It's a teaser.
I took a picture this morning when I walked the dogs. Desert Peach, in addition to having peach-colored blossoms, actually gets little peach-like fruits on it. The birds don't eat them and haven't found any mention of Natives using it - I'm not sure they're anything more than pretty. Laura tells me that as a fruit any dye would be fugitive. No thank you.
I grew up in San Diego, accus-
tomed to whole fields of California poppy, the California state flower. We assume these "volunteers" are courtesy of migrating birds - the state line is a mile west of us. It started with one plant and now the bank is filling. They're such scrappy plants. I've tried to cultivate them, to no avail.
If you were reading my blog a year ago, you'll recall that I posted about spotting and reporting a fire. Actually, there were more than one, as a man pulling a trailer north on the highway had unknowingly left his safety chain unconnected and had sparked several, two major.
The area is coming back, though too much is from cheat grass and the junipers are gone forever. I cried over this fire as did many of my neighbors. Nevertheless, our beautiful rocks stay and for them is our Red Rock Valley named.
The colors this late afternoon were golden. If you click for big you'll see my neighbor in a pink blouse walking her Min-Pin (miniature doberman pincher) on a leash. She's the best neighbor ever, but her dog is psycho. It makes me feel so much better about my dogs, especially Buster. At least he minds me, groaning and muttering all the while. It's all relative.
We have a small front yard though with all the native grasses and weeds, it's suddenly become huge. I originally thought I'd get it in hand with a half hour a day. Hah! This is on the east side of the house, away from the prevailing winds and where we've been able to put bird feeders - away from the prevailing winds. We like to hang out here in the summers. I think summer just started here - today. Yesterday it was too cool to sit outside.

Today was our last leisure day of June. Prepar-
ations and packing begin in earnest tomorrow. We won't be home until July. How did I suddenly become such a home body?! I have lists and piles on the dining room table to keep me on track. We are Oregon bound.

Reading on the Deck All Day

It was 66 degrees and so beautiful this morning that I took my wheel out onto the front porch and spun using the "real" happy light, accompanied by a full birdsong chorus.
I walked the dogs later for the first time in weeks and took along my camera for pictures of wildflowers. I realize that most of them came and went during the rainy weeks. However, these are still here - note the clumps of white.
Each clump is actually a cluster of flowers. I have no idea what they are - they're not in our wildflower book.
Here in an Indian Paint-
brush, negotiating for living space with the sagebrush. The banks are dotted with these little scrappy survivors. May is the season, except for this year. I don't know what the season was.
I've never seen so many galls on sagebrush before and in looking online for a source, I learned that they are from a parasite. We live on land the Paiutes formerly roamed during hunting season and have found arrowheads in our creek bed. I thought you'd enjoy Judy Trejo, a Paiute storyteller tell about sagebrush. It's quicker to read the transcript but I loved hearing it in her American Indian voice and her songs. It's true. It does burn and is great kindling.
We have a Brown's peony that just keeps getting bigger every year. I kept meaning to get a picture of it while it was in bloom, but while it was in bloom, it was in mud.
I'm too late -the blooms are exhausted - but isn't it interesting that they hold their heads down, not up. I've never seen another plant like it. Mim says her sheep won't eat it, so what's its point?
I'm telling on Charlie - he's reacting to the eggs I boiled and was chilling with ice cubes. As the ice melted, the cubes began to shrink and rotate in the pan. He won't back down from the dogs but was freaked out by this. Hehe.
I know I told myself I was going to spend the day reading, but all the time I was spinning this morning, I was thinking about making a different soap - a lemon soap. I had shredded the peel which was dried on a cookie sheet. I decided to use the juice - don't know if it will contribute anything but why not find out?! I'd have to throw these away otherwise.
There it is. I think I'm going to call it Lemon Bar. The miserable thing is that I'm not going to know what kind of a soap it is for another three weeks, which is how long it takes to cure. I'll been been gone and back from vacation by then! Click for big - it looks positively edible.

Thunderstorm in June

I made a quick trip across the valley this morning to Mim's for eggs. I called to see if she was home and Bob said she was shopping, but that he'd be glad to sell me eggs. The clouds had just started forming as I left the house.
I wouldn't have given them a second thought, but right after breakfast, Eddie began hiding behind the toilet. That means there's going to be some electrical activity. Thunderstorms weren't in the NOAA forecast, just Eddie's.
I almost drove by these wild-
flowers on the road bank, thinking they were just weeds. I've never seen them before and can't identify them in my Wildflowers of the Eastern Sierra book.
It was quite showy, once I got out of the car and looked more closely. I think it looks like a flower from a Victorian magazine, kinda lacy and sweet.
The wildflower cycle is seriously disrupted with the coolness this year so I was happy to see one my favorites, Prickly Poppy. Their end of the valley is high but also has a more shallow water table.
Breaking yet again and sprinting from the car in my rubber flip-flops - I just have to get a picture of this field of Yampah. It's delicate like Queen Annes lace and is so pastoral. Well, yeah. It is a pasture.
I took so much time getting photos that the storm almost beat me home. The squall was upon us in no time, so I decided to knit on the front porch and enjoy the sounds and smells that some with huge raindrops of a summer storm. The songbirds and crickets sang along. I'm knitting with the silk that I plied with brown Merino. It reminds me of M & Ms.

After the thunder and lightening had passed and the wind died down, I realized I could see a reflection of the storm in the still waters of our garden fountain.