Fall colours, the loss of the same, and run up to Xmas

 Ahhhh Blogger, you've updated several times recently and things are now harder to use and my original settings have been changed, hidden or apparently are no longer applicable. Something to keep me on my toes I guess.

We went for a walk on a local trail.   It's one with a nice boardwalk beside the river.   I suggested we take this one because soon our weather will change.  The cold, wet and snow will make the boardwalk slippery and difficult to traverse.   We no longer take this trail in the winter because it's just not fun.  Winter walks on the trails can be a little bit harder, but not so much fun when you're also dealing with ice patches or long lengths of snow covered rutted ice, which is what that boardwalk becomes.

However, in the nice weather, this trail is interesting.  All the Ash trees have been cut and left lying around, so that it looks in places like something out of a bad Sci-Fi movie.   The trail runs right beside a train track and an industrial area, so there is sometimes a non-nature like soundtrack to accompany the walk.   Today though, it was the light creating interesting reflections on the river which caught my attention.   They were very clear, as the water was oddly still.

The trail was pretty despite the many downed logs.  I noticed that there were some new ones which weren't Ash trees, and there were some still standing which should be cut down as they were obviously going to be a falling risk soon.   Mostly the woods have young trees.   There isn't a lot of undergrowth in places, so the visuals of looking through the forest is interesting.  The undergrowth usually obscures this.  

It was lovely tromping through the fallen leaves.   This was just before the windstorm which meant the landscape went from lovely fall colours, to stark, empty trees in one afternoon.  Waking up the next morning to virtually no leaves left on the trees was interesting.  It was like we had an autumn colour season which went from green, to full colour, to bare trees in just over a week.   I didn't even get a lot of photos of the fall foliage just because the timing was so quick.

There is always an exception though.   This maple always colours last, and always holds its leaves.  It's just starting to drop its leaves and the colour is still turning.   It's really lovely this year as it's changed from the usually all yellow leaves, to yellow, orange and red.    I have a loom looking out the window at it, and it's always lovely to weave in the autumn with that view in sight.

I've been working on this year's Xmas cards. I've found if I don't start by the beginning of November, they become a bit rushed and stressed.  I'd trialed several ideas.  I watched a bunch of online tutorials for new techniques and ended up just painting something simple.  I like them well enough, although my brain tells me that they still need something.   I'm not sure it does though.   Only had 2 mishaps, one where the tape stuck and ripped a bit of the painting and the other when I was mucking around with the sky ideas and I ended up with one which was too dark for my liking. 

  I tried the remove background feature and it did, relatively well, although it did dump some black spots on the one card, which aren't there in real life.  Also, I haven't figured out how to not have the original save as the edit.  On my old computer, I could just save the edited photo as a different name, but this one applies everything to the original.  This works really well for when I'm writing things up as but I'll still need to figure out the photograph part of things.   

I did figure it out but I like the photo with the messy background better.  I painted 15 landscapes for Xmas cards, all similar but not quite the same, just to keep things interesting for me.

A day can make a difference

 December was an odd month.   We went to a concert in November and a few days later, we got sick.  Really sick and it was into December before we were well again.   Non-contagious, but still had lingering effects for even longer.   It ticked me off because we'd had our jabs updated several weeks before, so should have been protected.   I shudder to think what it would have been without those jabs.  Anyway,  I ended up not getting all my seasonal cards out, which was too bad because I was really happy with them.  That being said, everything else went okay.  I got socks made for all my kids.  I also dug out a few things that didn't sell at the guild show and the kids scooped up the hats and tea towels very quickly!

The meeting of two water sources

Yesterday we went for a walk along a local trail.   Half the trail is by fields and a little bit of bush, but the
other half meanders by the river.  It's simply beautiful and I always feel like I've wandered into a fairy tale when we walk that half.   It's a circle trail, but we walk the river side part way and then turn around and come back, missing the boring side completely. 

  The river water level was  really high and had flooded over the banks, due to all the rain we've had.  You could see the water marks on the far trees which show the water levels have dropped at least 30 cm..  The path is raised and there was only one little boggy area where we had to walk around a puddle.    It was interesting because there is a stream which flows into the river.  The river is running quite fast and is very silty right now, so you could see exactly where the two water sources met.  It was really interesting to watch the flow and swirls of the currents.  The clear water is the stream and the brown, murky water is the river.

The ground was damp because we've had a lot of mild temperatures and an awful lot of rain.  We were driving to a family gathering and I was truly thankful that the temperatures were warm enough that it was rain, because if it had been cold enough for snow, nobody would have been going anywhere!

The different between yesterday and today is amazing.   Yesterday was yet another cloudy, dismally grey day.   It was crisp and cool but still a nice day to go walking as there was no wind. Today however, we stayed home!  The weather was definitely a little different.   I snapped this photo when I locked up the chicken coop for the night, at 4:25 pm.   These are the blackberry canes.  They're very resilient though and always seem to pop right back up when spring comes and the snow melts away.

  What a different a day can make!

Playing with Block Printing

I should have been weaving by now.  With the last of the samples off the loom, I wound off a warp for 3 rugs, wanting a fun, fast and simple project.   I managed to make a threading error at about 1/3 of the warp and didn't find it until I had 2/3 threaded.   I took it out and have been rethreading.  Then I was tired and it was dark and in frustration, I marked the section of threads which was giving me issues and walked away for a cup of tea and an early night.   I took a day off because I'd promised a friend I'd help her with a dry run of a class she wants to teach.  

There were 5 of us who had never done block printing on fabric before.   We each got a jar of paint, a handle with 5 blades and a piece of soft, rubbery, easy to carve material, from which to make our own stamps.     I'd missed the memo on bringing a pre-chosen design in an appropriate size, but I'd sketched out a couple of pages of designs which were luckily in the right ballpark for size. We transferred our images to the block using carbon paper and then carved away, sticking a block of wood on the back using contact cement when we were done.  Well Percival actually did all the contact cement work, since he was finished first and had the tin of glue and brush in front of him. 

This class was for the SCA, so most people did something heraldic, but I chose this vine design.  If I'd thought it out a tad more carefully, I'd have made sure that the central vine matched up exactly at the top and bottom, but it's close enough to be charming, if not perfect.   The block I carved is on the left and is a reverse of what you actually get when you stamp.  I didn't have a way to properly clean the stamp until I got home, so it's a bit stained. 

The stamping on silk was really clear and clean but there was some paint bleed through to the back.  The grey linen took the ink well, but the image isn't quite as clear in places.  Most of the paint on the linen, stayed to the top of the fabric.

We did a sample on wool fabric, but it was really fuzzy and the test sample on paper, to see if the block stamp produced an image we were happy with, was lovely and clear.   As I was heading home, in the gusty wind, with big flakes of snow swirling around on the road and rushing through the air, I came to the conclusion that these simple stamps would make lovely cards and gift tags.

Westfield had a volunteer enrichment day a couple of weeks ago, where I got to make a very cute, lovely card, using scrap booking methods.  While I liked the outcome, I realized that I really didn't have the time, desire, space and $ to amass the amount of paper, cutters, stamps and inks it would take to do these cards justice.   However, I'd been wanting to make cards for ages and with making and stamping them, all the supplies could be kept in a tiny, little bin, cost would be negligible, and the only real investment would be my time.  Plus, while I enjoyed the cuteness, I think that the fake wood block print is much more my style.