I haven't woven since I left to teach at MAFA. Instead I planted some things my neighbor gave me (coleus plants of various colors and something new to me, dwarf taro bulbs). I think the coleus plants will make it. I am not sure that the taro which would prefer more water than I am willing to spend on it will. They are out in the area between the sidewalk and the street, the parkway. Mine is 18 feet deep and planted with drought-tolerant plants. The question, then, is: can dwarf taro take a joke? We'll see.
I have been doing laundry, cleaning, and picking raspberries! There were a few raspberry canes here when I bought this house late in 1989 and now they are growing in mad abundance. I eat some on my breakfast food each morning. It is too hot to consider making jam but these will bear again in the fall when I need to make more. I eat little of it but like to give it to friends.
Bob and Lola are now settled again after my absence. I need to break the news to them that next week I will be going to teach at the Intermountain Weavers Conference (IWC). It will be held in Durango, Colorado, an eight and a half hour drive from here. I am driving, something I rarely can do because most teaching jobs are too far away. I plan to take two days so that I can do it in a leisurely manner. For example, I know that at the Crescent Junction rest stop (where you turn right to go to Moab) there are almost always horned larks. I never see them anywhere else. The second day I will pass through a tiny town in western Colorado called Dove Creek. It bills itself as "the pinto bean capitol of the world" and it may be. There is a store there where I will stop to buy pinto beans but also black beans and the beautiful anasazi beans. Anasazi beans were found in an anasazi ruin and grown so that now they are a crop. They are about the size and shape of pinto beans but they are creamy white and deep reddish purple! Gorgeous--and delicious, too.
Can you tell that I am looking forward to this trip? And I get to teach, too. I am presenting the workshop on designing and weaving stripes. We start with design principles and practice making several different kinds of stripes with strips of paper (black on white), introduce a color and then a second color. Finally the participants turn to their looms where they can weave the designs they have made. They will weave several different structures to see how different structures affect the stripe sequence. It's fun.
Tonight I widened the brick driveway a bit near the sidewalk so that the folks who deliver my newspaper each morning won't be driving on the grass and making a mud hole there. It's a miserable enough job to have to be up and out before the sun is up delivering papers. This should protect the sprinkling system and keep that area mud-free and looking nice. Sweaty work though! Time to hit the shower.
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