Little Gold Crabapples

Day 84: Not far from one of the places I park when hiking in the Cowlitz Wildlife area near Mossyrock Dam, I noticed branches overhanging the road, heavily laden with some kind of yellow fruit. Curiosity got the better of me, so I pulled over and got out to take pictures, thinking I'd try to identify the tree when I got home. As soon as I zoomed in, I said, "Crabapples! Little gold crabapples!" and then confirmed it by picking up a mushy one from where it had fallen to the ground. The ones out of reach may still have been firm. I had no way to find out, but I'm thinking that next fall when they're in their prime, I might come back with a long-armed grabber to harvest enough of them to make pickled crabapples. These are just bite-sized!

Nature Reclaims

Day 83: Ma Nature does her best to clean up the mess we humans are making, but we are giving her too much to handle in a short span of time. For whatever reason, this car was abandoned in what was once a farm field, and is now a "natural area" protected by Cowlitz Wildlife. A forest has grown up around it: tangled salmonberry vines and big-leaf maples, scrubby alders, patchwork blankets of moss and fern and piggyback plant. It's always damp here, and some day, even the rusted framework of this old car will be reclaimed by the process of decay. But how much can we ask Nature to absorb before she rebels and becomes outright unfriendly toward our presence? For now, she is merely annoyed with us, and reprimands us with storms and temperature extremes, warnings that if we keep this up, she may get really, really angry.

Button-down Elf Cup

Day 82: One short section of trail in the Cowlitz Wildlife Area near Mossyrock Dam is a favourite with me because it nearly always produces something of interest, probably because the dominant tree is Big-leaf Maple rather than the Doug-firs I usually find myself among. Scarlet Elf Cup (Sarcoscypha coccinea) is easy to identify: a salmon pink/red cup with a whitish tomentum (fuzz) on the outer surface. Typically, it fruits in the cooler months, and grows on decaying wood. This specimen appeared to be "buttoned" to its substrate, and gave me a chuckle only another mycophile can appreciate. We take our amusements where we find them, and Ma Nature can be quite a humourist at times. Fungus with a belly-button! Whodathunkit?

At Last: Plagiothecium Undulatum

Day 81: And a happy New Year it is, because I finally identified Plagiothecium undulatum (Waved Silkmoss). It's been troubling me for at least a decade. As long as I was going after Chinese for my traditional New Year's Eve dinner and the weather was clear, albeit nippy, I decided to take a walk on my favourite Cowlitz Wildlife Area trail near Mossyrock before going to the restaurant. There were several old maples to crawl over, and a few to duck under, victims of a combination of heavy rain and winds. Many of my landmarks were no longer upright, and the trail was much more open and bright due to the decrease in canopy. However, Plagiothecium has always had a window on the sun, brief at times to be sure, but there it was in all its glory on its stump, that pale yellowish green taunting me again. I had not thought about it before I left home, so was stuck without a hand lens, and that meant it was time to get up close and personal. I did the best I could, glasses off and the moss held within an inch of my eye. That was sufficient to determine the shape of the leaves. Also missing from my bare-minimum pack was a test tube, so I did not bring a sample home. As I said, I hadn't really thought about identifying moss when I left the house. In any event, I gathered enough information to make an ID with roughly 85% confidence. Bryophytes are not my "thing," so I reserve the right to be wrong, and I won't be too ashamed to admit it if someone corrects me. That's how we learn.

Same Threading As Overshot

Day 80: When I put this initial warp on Daisy, I was planning to make two identical towels in a Finnish Twill, using a darker blue for the weft (inset, top right). I liked the way it turned out, but as I was doing the hemstitching on the nether end, my mind was working on possible variations. For the next towel, I alternated with bands of plain weave in blue changing to white for a twill section (inset, top left). When I finished that towel, I saw that I had quite a bit of warp left, and a thought was growing in the back of my mind. What if I wove it as an overshot, repeating each pattern throw twice? What's the worst that can happen? I'd have to pick it back, and that's easy enough to do. After weaving about a third of a repeat, I knew I was going to like it. What you see here is the same treadling as the narrow white band, except that each pattern throw is repeated, with tabby between...the "extended version," if you will. As experiments go, this one was a smashing success.

Lenticulars and Snow

Day 79: The Mountain is once again clad in white, the rugged, stony spines of ridges and outcrops now hidden from view. For the last several years, each summer has exposed more of the bare bones as glaciers not only recede but become thinner. It does my heart good to see snow covering naked rock now, although I know that even a record snowfall would not build the glaciers back to their former status. Glacier-building is a long process, not something which can occur to any great extent in a single season. Lenticular clouds such as these approaching the Mountain from the south often presage a change in the weather, although in this case, it was not immediately to come. The photo was taken yesterday. This morning, the sky is clear, save for a few barely discernible wisps of high-altitude cloud.

Autumn Oranges, Quilting Done!

Day 78: This is a "for the record" post. I finished the quilting of "Autumn Oranges" this morning despite multiple interruptions. I began this phase of its journey on November 7 as close as I can tell, meaning that I completed the hand-stitching in just under 8 weeks. There's a reason ladies used to get together for quilting bees, half a dozen women working side-by-side on a single quilt. Nobody in their right mind would try to stitch a whole quilt by themselves. This year alone, I've made two fully hand-stitched quilts, plus a hand-stitched (EPP) quilt top (not yet backed and batted), as well as finishing up this one. I still have to apply the binding, machine-stitching it to the front, but hand-sewing it on the back. That should take 7-10 days. For now, the quilting frame has gone back into the closet until such time as I can make a run to Ben Franklin after something to back it with. Meanwhile, I'll be working on "Memory Wreath," another EPP quilt (i.e., fully hand-sewn, but smaller).