Red and White and a Little Green

The tea towels are off the loom, fulled and hand hemmed. The plan was to use up the last of the Curl Brothers 2/8 red cotton and I succeeded in doing just that. Succeeded so well in fact that I completely ran out about 40 inches from the end of my warp, so I got to make a dent in the last of the Curl Brothers green!

This pattern is just wonderful for tea towels, it really puffed up and has a lot of texture and I swear from a distance there is even some iridescence…I would really recommend this pattern, easy to weave, easy to spot mistakes and very lofty. You can see the texture in this close up.

On a completely different track, my tomato plants are doing exceptionally well and are into the 8th leaf set now. The grow lights have kept them from being too leggy, so that’s a bonus. I had to be quite horrid last week and felt so bad thinning each pot to only 1 plant, but sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind….

Photo removed to save space...2012

My dilemma is that although the tomatoes are ready to go into my green house (you can see it on the far left of this photo), the snow on the ground states otherwise. We are still completely covered in snow as you can see. Usually, by this time I can have my plants out in the green house during the day and inside at night, but this La Nina year is throwing me for a loop. We are experiencing temperatures about 10 degrees below normal, that’s huge! Guess I’ll just have practice patience this year.

I went to the Shuswap Seedy Saturday last week; it’s an offshoot of Seeds of Diversity, which encourage saving heritage seeds- these seeds are open pollinators, so their offspring will be genetically the same as the parent plants. The seeds exchanged are never genetically modified, or terminator seeds – these are seeds that have been modified to produce sterile seeds to benefit the agrochemical industry. When you went through the door there was a huge table of seeds in bottles and envelopes, you just helped yourself to them and left any seeds that you had saved. It was wonderful and I was able to add 2 tomato varieties to my collection.

Weaving Words
The word texture is derived from the Latin verb textere meaning to weave.