It barely qualifies as Saturday morning, since I slept late then went to the Greensboro Farmers’ Curb Market, but I do have coffee.
That market just keeps getting better. Susanne has set up a booth where she sells her books, marbled papers, and handmade papers, many made with materials from the other vendors’ farms or produce or flowers. I’m happy that she is doing well there! I bought a few more plants to plug in to my garden, since Pat had her plants at half price. What I don’t yet have in my garden that I usually plant are really hot peppers, like habanero and serrano. The department head loves to eat super hot peppers, and I love the way that they look in my garden.
The rest of the weekend will be devoted to weaving, I hope. I finished warping my loom for a long ten-inch wide huck threading and started weaving on Thursday night. I am thrilled to be weaving on my loom again. We are going to try to fold it up and take it to the lake with us if it fits behind our front seats in the Honda Fit. I suspect that it will. It’s quite amazing how much we have gotten into that car since we bought it.
It is starting to get hot again but while it was cool I made some headway on the back forty clean up. Sandy cut down a pretty hefty part of my next door neighbor’s mulberry tree last weekend and I cut it up for the city to pick up on the curb. I don’t want him doing too much more than that though because I am worried about his heart. I pulled out a lot of thick grapevines and honeysuckle vines that I wove into a couple of baskets. The honeysuckle vines were thick enough that I was able to strip enough bast (inner bark) from them to make some paper, so they are doing double duty. Today I’m going to cook the bast with some soda ash for a few hours and Susanne will help me beat them into paper pulp. She might lend me her Critter for the summer! I am very excited about being able to use this great little beater. Mark Lander makes them one at a time in New Zealand, and I doubt I’ll ever save enough money to buy one for myself, but it is perfect for my needs and Susanne is not using it right now.
Last Sunday we went to an international festival downtown called the Mosaic Festival. It was full of different kinds of food to try and music to listen to and crafts from other cultures. These two ladies were spinning and weaving intricate pick up bands on a backstrap loom.
I’ll try to start posting more of my fiber and book art work now that the Ireland trip is behind us. I certainly have enough inspiration to carry me for a long time. I don’t think that I could have extended that trip one more day because I was filled to the top – I would have had to take a least a week to rest! Someone asked me if I wanted to go back, and I said, “Only to live there.”
