Garden Tour

I took my camera with me this morning as I checked out the plants in the various flower and vegetable gardens around my house.  Come along with me.

First, the container plants.

 This is a clematis.  It must have 30 blooms on it.  It is growing in a large container with a study trellis.  It's been in this pot for about 4 years and appears to be doing just fine.  It really is lovely and so nice to have flowers on the deck already.

Next to the clematis are the chives.  These are the regular onion chives and they have nice pinky-purple blooms on them.  These are edible as long as you haven't put chemicals on them.  Flowers in your salad!

 The blueberries are coming along nicely.  This is a dwarf bush, bred to grow in a container.  It's starting its 4th year.  Last year I got about 2 quarts of fruit from this small bush - a handful at a time.  It's just wonderful to go pick fresh blueberries for breakfast.  I got this blueberry variety at Park Seeds.  They will start ripening in late June.

Just to prove that my peach trees do bear, here's a tiny new little peach.  I will never get to pick it, because the squirrels will get it when it's about the size of a ping-pong ball.  It's a battle every year with those rascals and they seem to win most of the  time. Plus I'm fighting a wild grape vine that like grows in the peaches. 

Look what I found in the daylillies.  It's my cat, Poppie.  He like to sleep between the plants.  You can't even see him until you're right on top of him.  It's a good place to snooze.

Finally, I found an Iris blooming.  This variety is called Swazi Princess.  Some years it's much darker - nearly black and some years, it's more on the burgundy side.  I think iris are so beautiful, orchid-like sometimes and such great colors.  I saw more buds on my other colors, so more blooms are on their way.

I'm so glad to see color in the garden and green on the trees and in the yard.  Winter was cold this year and very gray and brown.

Spring Blooms

Spring has sprung in my yard.   We've had temperature in the 90's and the pine pollen is everywhere and covering everything.  We call it the "yellow haze".   The good thing is that with the warm temperatures, all of the trees have "let go" all at one time.  So it'll all be over with soon.

My cherry tree is covered in the most beautiful pale pink flowers.  This is a double weeping cherry tree.  I often see my neighbors riding down to my end of the street to take a look in the spring.









Daffodils are blooming.  This is an open corona type.

Grape Hyacinths.  Such great color.

Yes, this is a daffodil.  It's kinda' hard to find these bulbs, but just look at that bloom.

Coming in for a Landing

I'm calling it finished.  This is a osprey coming in for a landing in the nest.  Her chicks usually hatch about 2 weeks apart, so I tried to make one chick younger than the other.   I had so many problems with this piece and I'm not exactly sure why.  I used Bristol board.  It was ok, but I think I like the Magnani  Portofino watercolor paper better.

The light is all over the place in this.  It's coming in from the  right side, but it also looks like it's comming in from the top and the left side.

Then there are the clouds.  I just couldn't get them the way I wanted them.   I put a couple of layers of 10% cool gray on them, followed by the shadow colors and pure white for highlights.  The biggest problem is that they seem kinda' flat - not puffy.

This will be going to the North Carolina Aquarium on Roanoke Island.  If they like it, it will be part of a summer exhibit that will also be shown at the Aquarium at Pine Knoll Shores.  The theme for the show was "High Tide on the Sound Side" and should be composed of wildlife and plants that are found along the sounds in North Carolina.

This is all colored pencil.  I was hoping that it would be good enough to enter into the CPSA show too, but I don't think it would be juried in.

I'm glad I'm done with this.  Definitely and exercise in perseverance and determination.

Wings to go

Making progress.  This has been one of the most frustrating pieces that I have done in a while. 

I think some of the problems have come from the paper, which is Strathmore Bristol.  Bristol is often recommended for colored pencil, but I'm not so sure that I like it.  It doesn't hold as many layers as the Tiziano I've used for other pieces.

Light source has been a problem too.  The light in this piece is coming from the left side, but it's not too evident.  And there's some amount of backlighting from the reflection of the cloud.

I'm planning on getting the body finished tomorrow.  Then comes framing.   Acceptable, but I'm certainly not happy with it.

This one's finished!

This is my shawl I've just finished in the last few days.  It's made with Cherry Tree Hill Alpine Baby, a mohair, silk and nylon sport weight yarn.  It's such loopy stuff that it's almost like trying to crochet with velcro.  It's almost impossible to unravel.  It took me a while to find a pattern that I thought would work with this yarn.  I finally settled on the Country Cotton Shawl from Lion Brand.  I tried several sizes of crochet hooks before determining that a size I would handle this loopy stuff.

So here is the finished product.  My skein of yarn has about 1000 yard in it and I used nearly all of it.  Even though I hated crocheting with the yarn, I really do like the finished product.  The color path runs from greys to blues to a speck of white here and there.  This shawl weighs less than 8 ounces - isn't that amazing  for the size.  It's warm and light weight.  I'm thinking of adding a button or two to the front so that I can keep in closed a bit easier.

This and That

Wow!  It's been more than a month since my last posting. 

Persistence is what I've been practicing.   I've started over on the osprey piece 4 times, finally settling down on a purely colored pencil piece.  That might have been a mistake, as it took me weeks to get  the sky done.  The clouds have been nearly impossible, although they are coming along.  They don't look very cloud-like to me.  I'm starting on the bird now.  I hope this will pull everything together.  Maybe I need to practice the 10-10 rule.  Every 10 minutes, step back 10 feet and look at your work.

Some of you know that I have another blog, doviesaprons.blogspot.com.  I find that I can't keep both going.  So I'll just be posting everything to this blog.  That means that there will be more than just art here.  I also crochet, knit, sew and occasionally cook gourmet.  For example, this winter I've made 3 shawls and I'll be posting about them soon.  Just recently I  made French moelleux au chocolate.  

Thanks for being patient.

WIP

I sincerely hope that my few readers have had great holidays and a good start to a new year.

I'm starting on a new piece.  The drawing has taken me quite a while - several weeks in fact.  This is an osprey and chicks.  Composition is sometimes a problem for me.  I had several other versions of this.  But I figure that the more drawing I do, the better I get at it.  Hopefully this piece will be accepted for a summer touring show at the NC Aquarium.