Goofy Day

That hint of spring quickly flitted away, taking away any hint with her. I love the Nevada City Inn, and when I heard the rain start in earnest last night before midnight I got worried. It showed serious intent toward snow by breakfast. It was hard to "throw in the towel" since I was there with towels for show-
and-tell for the weave study group, but I respect the Sierra weather. It doesn't negotiate.

This is my April show-and-tell. I'm disappointed to have missed the meeting but after all these years living here, I'm happy we beat the storm. It was fun to have a day out, nice to get away, even as bizarre it ended up. I like being safe in the end.
I knitted every bit I could. Tomorrow is my daughter's significant birthday. I couldn't finish the loom project I wanted to give her so finished this instead - it's a pair. Squint

DIL Missy called this evening to thank me for the rag placemats - she loves them. Even better - they are happy with their new home in Oregon. I could not wish for better. It just has been the best goofy day.

A Hint of Spring

Ian and I babysat Alexia last night so DD Chris could celebrate her birthday with two other friends. She said it was a fun party but the others had babies to get home to, so she and DH went to a late movie. We were happy they could. Lexie Lu and I took a walk after breakfast. She loves Papa's trail.
When she started to clamor down this bank, I said - "Alexia, this is not a good time to go exploring." She called back - "Don't worry Gramma. I have six years of experience. " "You're only five." "Oh!"

This is the "stepping on my shadow" game. Charlie had been very contrary to her this morning and took a swipe at her twice. When I commented on what a beautiful morning it was, she said, yes - but Charlie scratched me on two of my legs. ??
Christina loves it that when Alexia rides her bicycle, she self-talks - be careful not to fall, be careful not to fall. Alexia wanted to collect chert chips today, hoping to find an arrowhead - it actually could happen. I could hear her saying to herself - be careful not to slip, be careful not to slip. I think there's a lesson there.
I could hear her singing, while carefully working her way back down the bank - "hush little baby, don't you cry," but I couldn't make out the rest. "Momma's going to buy you a wrist band-aid" she told me because she had banged her hand.

The worst part about living so far out is that we don't get to babysit more often. I love it. Every single time - even watching her Scooby-Doo movie this morning. It's that latest one and the worst one. I thought it would never end and was glad and sad then it finally did. It's a 35 minute drive to take her home and she talked all of it.

Ian and I are headed for Sacramento in the morning. I have an order of soap oils to pick up and then we're headed up the foothills to Nevada City. We're spending the night there and the next day I get to finally attend the Foothill Fiber Guild weave study group. Snow is forecasted and I had an earlier email that the meeting might be canceled. We're going anyway. Ian wants to shop at Peaceful Valley Farm Supply and if the meeting is canceled, then we'll track over the Sierras early. Eleanor, our trusty Forrester, will get us home - she always does.

Or Not, Mostly Not

Sammie gets agitated while we do our morning absolu-
tions and got over zealous with this ball of yarn that I had earmarked for Alexia's hat. Before I can begin to knit, I need to fix this. Sammie doesn't mean to be naughty....

She tossed and chewed so I ended up with three small balls, but with the other solid color, I've weighed and have enough for one hat for Alexia. I have to finish the second ear flap for grandson Logan before I can start on this hat. After those three hats are done, I can get back to knitting produce - can't wait.
I won this 100 gram ball of dyed silk at our guild raffle last Saturday, thereby ending my run of "never winning anything." The colors are pretty bizarre but I have some hogget grey Merino that might be just the ticket to ply this with and give me close to 5 ounces for a project. That's respectable.
I thought you might like to see what gardening looks like at 5,000 feet in the high desert. Each box has a buried layer of chicken wire so the ground squirrels can't burrow in and steal. The T-posts and high fence are to keep out the deer (we hope) and Ian will line the inside of of the field fence with rabbit guard, an ingenious wire to keep those adorable cottontails out.
Our shearing date has been resche-
duled, but that pretty much means these fleeces won't be usable. I'm not too upset since we have at least another dozen in the garage to skirt and process. I've relegated my sore back to the deck and the weather surprisingly was cooperative.

I finished The Executor by Jesse Kellerman, son of Jonathan and Faye. The apple does not fall far from that tree. This would be a killer book club book - a Harvard graduate student with an abusive background who is majoring in philosophy strives to get his PhD dissertation completed on the subject of existentialism. The whole book screams existentialism - it begs discussion.

I'm close to the end of Men and Dogs by Katie Crouch, which falls into the Chick Lit end the literary spectrum. I loved the cover and needed something light. Her first book was okay and this one is okay too.

Finishing Things

I finally finished Kiernan's hat. I ended up purling the first two rows of the cable cast-on. The ribbing behaves well when it's on a normal sized head. One friend suggestion that I think about Elizabeth Zimmerman's recommendation to reduce garter stitch ribbing by 10% of the body of work. I would have done that next, were this not successful. I used alpaca this time - a first for a hat. Now I can no longer say I don't like to knit with alpaca, because it makes an awesome hat that will also be very warm.
I'm using a technique that Sara Lamb suggested in her SpinOff article on the falling leaves shawl. She said that you get a nice cable effect on the edge if you slip the first stitch of every row and purl the last stitch of every row. I think it gives it a nice finish.
This sweater was actually finished during NCAA March Madness but I didn't care for it and had decided to donate it to the guild while elephant sale. However, I find myself wearing it quite a lot, so I've decided it must mean I like it after all. I used the Vogue Knitting instructions for a sweater-in-the-round but just made the neckline bigger. I've come to realize that I don't like tight necks or long sleeves.
We are beginning to get a little sun in between the clouds and I couldn't resist this shot last night.

I'm disappointed that I won't be able to finish my daughter's dish towels in time for her birthday next week. I hurt my back yesterday, moving tables and getting the room ready for the library book club. We had 15 people, which is the largest group we have ever had. The book was A Prayer for Owen Meany and I suspect a number of people came because of that. Since it is a library program, we seem to get new people all the time. I don't know if a group can be effective and satisfying if it stays at this size, and it's pretty difficult to facilitate.

I recently finished While I'm Falling by Laura Moriarty. I read her first book twice but skipped her second due to mixed reviews. I loved this one, a story of how tenuous our security is and how quickly a change in circumstances can take away our safety net. Veronica is a dorm resident assistant in Kansas, in love with her boyfriend and with a supportive family living nearby. Divorce suddenly turns the family upside down, and when her boyfriend asks her to move in with him, she declines because if the relationship fails, she'll have nowhere to live. She no longer knows what she wants, her happiness seems to be slipping away, and her mother appears to be cracking up. Moriarty doesn't suddenly tie up the story with a happy ending but it ends well nevertheless. I always love a character-driven story and especially one that has a plot. This book met my expectations.

A Hike

When you drive north from Reno on your way to Susanville, there is a marked point in your vista when you see the red rocks. They are visible from three miles away and they mark the road that leads to Red Rock Valley, so named for the rocks.

As for driving by Red Rock Road, this is just about the what you're going to see of this unique anomaly. I mean, everyone who has driven this route, and that includes me before we moved out of town, saw the rocks, saw the sign. It meant that we had driven for close to an hour.
Yesterday my neighbor and I had planned to take a long walk, but instead we ended up exploring the other side of the red rocks. This area burned last July after a trailer chain sparked a devastating fire. I suppose all fires are devastating.
These century old trees will not come back ever, and eerily, there's a Volks-
wagon bus carcass. I see it as representing the wildlife and habitat lost.
And then there's this peculiar red cone thing that we can see from the road. What heck is that and why is red when the other stuff is white? The white stuff is "fluffy" and is powdery but we couldn't help wonder about the bits of seashell. Too bad the local School of Mines is so busy looking for gold. This is interesting stuff.
I'm trying to keep this brief and not bore you, but Sandy and I were just stunned by the whole hike. It was so steep that at times we had to scramble on all fours. At one point I lost my glasses and was stunned and happy to find them on our descent.




In any other context you'd think you were at a volcanic crater, right? There is no crater here, and none for many miles. I do so love the alive geologic west. It's a mystery. Another mystery. What is this, our first wildflower sighting. We think it's of the pea family - that's our guess.
















Yes, those are the Sierras.

And so~

I took this picture on my dog walk this morning. It's Sage Creek. You have to use your imagination, but there is a creek bed there - in which the only thing is sagebrush. It's also where my son found two arrowheads.

Before I leave color theory behind, I want to share this from Sylvia - her husband said, "The smack dab center of the visible light spectrum is the center of the light emitted by our local star, the Sun. Natural selection has selected creatures that see best at the local star's peak emission frequency." She said he added that red is a lower frequency than blue, thus we need more receptors for red than blue - he really liked the bit about the red and blue threads not yielding the expected mix.

I want to know more and when I Googled optical light mixing, found all kinds of opportunities to take expensive classes. For now, I'm going to step away from this subject, but I'll be back. Oh, and before I forget - LA asked me if I enjoyed making the placemats. I have to say that I did not. But that's because I was at sea the whole time during that project. The results were even better than the photos. Now that I understand what I did, I look forward to the next project and will certainly employ the use of the back of front of fabrics to create shades.
Before I do more rags, my daughter's birthday is in two weeks so this is the warp that I've wound for her towels. She's a pretty wild and crazy gal so I think my first weft will be black. I'm toying with Rosepath threading but any suggestions are welcome.

She told me today that Alexia's kindergarten has employed the "collection" of knitted fruits and vegetables into the current curriculum. Apparently they're alphabetizing them and next will evaluate their food properties. Wow! And the teacher asked if I would be willing to show the class how to make a sweater from a sheep. Is that the coolest opportunity, or what?! And we'll do it on DD's birthday - even better.
As for knitting, I've promised my niece Nancy two scarves for a breast cancer fund raiser this summer. She's on her board of directors, and while I'm not sure I understand what she does, I know she's engaged in fund raising in the Walk for a Cure. She said she could use two scarves, so this is the first one and I'm spinning for the second. Pink!!

And then there's the new piece of art with my NCAA pool winnings - I just knocked a print off the wall with the ironing board and broke the glass. It was one of Ian's mother's collection - a Kaoru Kawano print. Many years ago Alice was enrolled in a print-of the-quarter thing with a NYC gallery, so we have some odd-ball but cool prints. The frame was the original cheesy gallery frame, so the obvious was that this would have to be reframed. I took it in and will get it back in a couple of weeks. Enter and exit my winnings and more - and more, since we realize that the others probably need archival frames as well. Sigh

April in the Great Basin

I bought this water color about 15 years ago - whenever it was the Arizona Sun Devils won the NCAA tournament. It was my first year to enter this pool and in selecting the brackets, since I didn't know anything about basketball, I just picked the team to win that was the most west of the two. In the end, I came up with Arizona. This is by Joyce Rossi who wrote the childrens book, The Gully Washer. She's a friend of my mine and I happened to be in her home, where I saw it propped up against the hearth. Long story short, it was for sale and I had money burning a whole in my pocket. It's especially meaningful to me since one of my aunts was a principal at a Chinese school in Lima, Peru. Globalization is not new.

Ian and I have continued to participate in this pool with family and friends and last night when Duke won the NCAA play-off game, I got second place. I collected my winnings today and put it in an envelope. I've decided to feed that envelope and when I find that must-have painting, I will be ready. I would so love to go to the Laguna Art Festival but for now, I'm biding my time.
I am thrilled at Missy's place mats. Each one is a little different but the undyed side of the fabric creates a neutral unifying fourth color. I'll be sorry to see these go in the mail. I'm reading the Finnish American Rag Rugs: art, tradition and ethnic continuity - almost ready to put on my first rag rug warp.

I took this yesterday morning from the front door.

And this afternoon I am bundled up, reading on the deck in the company dogs. I desperately need to do a little solar collection. We have another system predicted to hit this weekend. That's how Spring works in the Great Basin. The garlic is growing well and carrots are planted. Potatoes will go in the raised beds before this next system arrives. It's been such a long winter that we're getting low on firewood, though we should be able to squeak through with a stick or two to spare. It's been a great day.

My First Placemats

Before I move on, I'm going to try to explain one last thing, simply because it was absolutely new to me. We know there are two ways of looking at color and color mixing: light primaries and pigment primaries. We're familiar with pigment primaries because that's how we dye. Light primaries are the hues that printers (and Judith MacKenzie) use. It's also the way our eyes see color. Our eyes contain three receptors for color: red, green and blue. We have the most receptors for red, fewer for green and even fewer for blue.

Say we want to weave a violet cloth for a dress and we have both red and blue silk, which we've decided on because we really really want a violet dress to go with a jacket. We think this blend would make a nice complex color, instead of just buying violet and weaving it as warp and weft. Half of the threads will be the red warp and the other half will be the blue weft. How it will mix and appear to our eyes isn't what we expect. At a distance the cloth will be red violet because we see more red than blue, in spite of the logic of using half of each color (my illustration). If you have a weaving program, try it, then zoom out and see what color you get. It will be red violet. If you change to 3/1 twill and repeat the exercise, you will get your violet. When we weave, we're not mixing colors, all smooshed together. We're doing something more like Seurat and the the pointalists did - dots of color, blended by our eyes. Sorry folks, that's the best I can do.
I finally finished DL Missy's placemat's today. They're hemmed, washed and drying on the balcony. I'll show them when they are dry. Thanks Hilary for being adamant about the temple. It held the warp at the same width throughout and they are all the same size. I'm more pleased than I had expected to be.
The beating on the warp does not bother my studio companion.

Just Wow

Today's class went from 10:00 to 6:00, with a half hour for lunch, rather like a work day. We started with "simultaneous contrast," something we're familiar with but she didn't just show us as a review. She made us pick out color cards of our choice, snip contrasts, paste them on and then evaluate them as a group. One of the things that we universally said when the class started was that we wanted to be able to predict our project results, rather than just do color by the seat of our pants. Laura has showed us color as used by painters, and today we begin to see how color works for fibers artists.

The hardest of all the exercises for me has been to determine value, i.e., where the color equates to the gray scale. Deb Metz says that a little yellow goes a long way. That's because, while it looks like a strong color, yellow is very high on the value scale. Laura illustrated with these strips. These strips are the same but don't appear to be so because of the different grounds.
She hypo-
thesized that a client's favorite colors were the strips and wanted them woven into a runner on the ground of her favorite red, but when her favorite colors were on the red, they no longer appeared to be her favorite colors. Laura would have to substi-
tute so that they appear to be the same.
Look at this - it's crazy. The bottom strips are the substi-
tutes. We have now begun to talk about "optical mixing." It's how the cones of our eyes see colors, the same colors that printers use. We took our lunch break here and then came back to apply what we had "learned."
In this exercise we selected an imagine from the Houston Art Museum. We were limited to no more than five colors from the color cards and had to create a representation of our piece.
What impressed us to a person was how the colors we selected when we held our prints up to the colors cards at the table were not the colors that our eyes saw at a distance. That's when I realized how powerful the "value" of color is - i.e., where it fits on the gray scale. It's not obvious and it matters. I have some work to do. The one thing I know I will take away from this that any colors can go together as long as you adjust the proportion and saturation, i.e., use a tone or a shade.

While it was serious, it's been a long time since I laughed so much in the course of a day. I came away knowing that optical mixing is key to selecting successful warps and wefts, and I don't understand an nth of what I just said.
Ian took the dogs for the mail before I left and came back with a package for me. Thanks to Theresa's encour-
agement, I contacted Jenkins Woodworking. The website stated that Ed no longer makes shuttles, but Theresa said I should push, so push I did. My email went unanswered for a month, then Wanda came back to say that Ed had decided to make the two shuttles I had requested - what woods would I like. I said - not canary wood - you choose, so I have Brazilian cherry on top and and quilted maple on the bottom. While they look the same, the top shuttle has a lot more heft, and they both feel like a cuddled animal that you'd like to take to bed with you. Sundays are a designated reading day so I won't get to try them until next week. Drat.

Color Theory

Thank you all for your encouragement. I took the towels to the guild meeting last night to ask for advice. They liked them and took the towels, opened them up fully stepping away from me. I was surprised how pretty they suddenly became.

Laura Viada, a fiber artist from Houston, is teaching our color theory class and was also our speaker last night. She gave a very visceral and heartfelt talk about finding ourselves in our art and making a place for it in our lives, knowing when to say no to other demands by deciding if the no matters and if it should matter. If we decide it should matter, then take another look. It's not good to say no if we're going to feel guilty about it. If we do decide it's okay say no to a demand, then we need to accept without guilt and with no self- recriminations. One of the reasons her talk was so heartfelt was that because of her change in marital and employment status, she has discontinued workshops. They are now a no for her. We are the last one. Wow - just wow.
This morning Laura lectured for about an hour on color theory. We've all had color theory lectures in the past but it was good be refreshed. She used a color wheel with the primary, secondary and tertiary colors, so 12 colors in all. Since there are 15 of us in the class, she put one of the each of the hues plus three duplicates in a bag and we drew our color for the day. I was yellow-green. Next we went to the table with these color cards and selected what we thought was a tint (white added), shade (black added) and tone (gray added). Almost everyone got tint right but not one of us got all three right.

Two people drew yellow and these are their choices. Fifteen people today were stunned to realize that khaki is not green but a shade of yellow. The light flipped on for me when I realized why I have such a hard time making the greens I'm after. I need to add black or gray - not blue or yellow!
It was a difficult exercise but this is a group very comfort-
able with one another and there was no competition and much laughter. These are the 12 hues with correct tint, shade and tone. We were surprised to learn that violet has only a tint, no shade or tone. But then we were surprised a lot in this exercise.
Then Laura did a quiz of sorts by sticking up a color card on the white board and asking us what hue it was. The only one I ever got right was red. Once a hue has been mixed with black or gray, it becomes surprisingly difficult to identify.

It's the yellows that took us all by surprise. Before the exercise, we were helping Laura lay out the color cards on the table, and I picked up one of my favorite colors saying that it was my favorite shade of green. Laura laughed and said - that's not green. I knew I was in trouble right then.
So then we rolled up our sleeves and went to work. We got tubes of acrylic in our assigned color and it's complimentary color. The exercise was to make a gray-scale but using our assigned color and its complimentary color instead of the traditional black and white - what the heck?! I didn't realize how effective a few drops of a complimentary color could be in toning down a color that was is over the top - if you've done any dying, you know what I mean. That's when I'd add black and would get something I didn't want.
So these were the two orange and violets. In each one of these exercises it became clear that there was a middle muddy color that we just couldn't say where it belonged. Can you see orange? Can you see blue??
These are my color mixes. The left card is my assigned color - yellow/
green blended in gradations with red/violet (I got tired of the squares) and my right card is yellow/green blended with gray. I came home with a head full of buzzing bees. The weather sucks. As we ran out of the building in the rain and wind for our cars, I heard Laura call - I thought ya'll lived in the desert. I am headed to bed so I can crawl out and go back for another eight hours. I had no idea there were so many steps to color theory.