ancient tech, ancient enemy

This little fellow is eating all of my asiastic lilies. It's called an Asiastic Lily beetle - what an original name. I hope the lilies come back next year when I'll be prepared to kill the beetle, now that I know how.



Let's hear it for ancient technology! This little bit of wood is based on an artefact in Viking Artefacts (James Graham-Campbell, ed.). The original is just 10cm in length, but this recreation is just a little longer to fit my hand better. It's called a pin beater.



I've been weaving for a few years now, and I admit it, I'm slow. I just didn't see the purpose or usefulness of pin beaters. But since I've been using this one, I'm in awe. It's a great tool, both for weaving on the warp weighted loom and as I'm using it here to beat the tablet weaving header of my new project. Both the new pin beater, and new weaving project are part of the preparations for our trip to L'Anse aux Meadows.

Ahh.... yes. :)

Forward Into the Past XX, and unknown flowers

The 20th anniversary Forward Into the Past has come, and gone. It was fun.

Awesome amounts of fun! And utterly exhausting.

Sadly, I was too busy to take photos.

Now, there's been a warm streak happening in Ontario and my garden is starting to grow. Again, I'm faced with I-didn't-keep-the-tag-and-I-don't-remember-what-that-is. Bad gardener girl.

So, dear readers.... help. What is this?

Fleece, Garden

The reporting is getting a bit behind the reality. It was a few weeks ago now that I was at the Woodstock Fleece Festival, where I found this delightful fleece waiting to be taken home by someone. The vendors and displays inside weren't nearly as much fun as the creatures on the outside of the building. No pictures there. And although I didn't find a new spinning wheel, which I was hunting for, I did gather some new Shetland rovings, which I need like I need a hole in the head.



Came home that weekend to discover that somehow we'd managed to overlook this nest all summer long. Can't imagine how. We did notice an increase in wasps in the yard, but I guess neither of us ever looked up.

It's gone now. I had some guys from the local nursery do some yard work last week, and handed off the task to them amongst the other chores.



Leaves, of course, are everywhere. Neil got this new gadget that sucks and mulches them. It's been very handy.

But this one leaf paused on the way down to attach itself to the bird feeder.

Pretty.

Bird feeder by Darrell Markewitz at Wareham Forge. Advertising is intentional - he's our friend. And I really like the bird feeder!

It's September and....

The students have returned to the campus, en masse. *sigh* To be that young again.

I haven't seen The Tool yet. Usually the engineers have to strut obnoxiously through Arts Quad at least once with the thing. But it is still early in the term.

Still early in the term, and one of my more unflappable co-workers has already been heard to mutter something to the effect of "I think they're trying to kill us."

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The September long weekend, created compliments of Labour Day, brings it's usual trip up north for the annual SCA event at Bonfield.

Vikings everywhere, oh my.



Well, just Viking tents apparently.

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My tomatoes are starting to hit the production level. Sort of. Finally.

It's been a bad year for the tomatoes. Big plants, but relatively few tomatoes - I think I'm seeing the results of a critically reduced bee population. Next year I may take the precaution of pollinating by hand.

But between my own and the farmer's market, I've managed to stock up enough pasta sauce to last for the year, I hope.



Yes, that is an entire shelf in the upright freezer. Maybe a few more batches?


Karen

Bubbles and the garden

On the weekend, I went with the menfolk to Cedar Hills Park in Wiarton, to watch the bubbles while they went scuba diving. Isn't it a pretty place? And a beautiful day? *sigh*



Da boys had fun. :)



And they taught me something - it took us 3 hours to get there, and they took another 40 minutes or so to get their equipment on and tested. Same in reverse afterwards. All for about 40 minutes underwater where the real fun is.

I should apply this to my weaving. The warping takes a good solid 8 hours of work. And it is a terribly picky fidgity boring annoying thing to do. But really, in perspective.... a small price to pay for the joy of weaving.

Anyhoo... I digress. I was up to my usual tricks of trying to tag the wildlife too. This seagull graced me with his presence. I sense he was disappointed 'though that I didn't try to bribe him with food.



Back home in the garden, this sunflower is thriving under the birdfeeder. Apparently the birds missed one or two of the seeds...



And.... my tomatoes are starting to ripen!! Hooray!

Back home

Have you ever been someplace that's so special, so different, that it's hard to let it go when you go back to your normal life?

Iceland's like that. I've been back for almost a week and I feel like.... without seafood and restaurants, I don't know what to have for dinner. Without the clean, clear, fresh air - I don't know how to breathe. It is incredibly hot and muggy here. Without being in Iceland, I don't know what to blog about!

*sigh*

Have I mentioned yet how two weeks of near constant rain and summer temperatures affect a garden? We didn't ask the house/dog sitter to do anything other then water the garden if the weather didn't do the deed.

The lawnmower broke just before we went on vacation anyway, and I didn't want to educate a city boy on how to care for the tomatoes.

So.... the grass was overgrown and the tomatoes were every which way out of control and there were weeds.... everywhere.

We hired a friend's 13 year son - Peter - to help with the weeding this weekend and got started. Peter cleared the driveway, the path to the back gate, the flagstone pathway and the front garden. Neil handled the fenceline garden, and cut the lawn with a rental lawnmower until ours can be fixed.

I weeded, and weeded, and weeded, as much of the rest of the gardens as I could. And staked the tomatoes, and cut their suckers. And discovered why the irises didn't bloom much and died abruptly - I think they are too crowded, too covered in mulch and plant remains, and two weeks of constant rain have rotted many of the bulbs.

Anyway... things are mostly back under control.

Neil's freshly weeded fenceline garden.



Neil's shade garden. It's his thing. We have distinctive garden preferences.



The tomatoes - back under control, sort of. While I don't have a person standing in the shot to give you perspective, consider that I am 5 foot 4 inches tall and standing to take this photo. It is not angled up in any way.



Something else that I found strange upon returning home are these black eyed susans. It just doesn't seem like it's the right time for them. It feels too early yet in the season. For me, black eyed susans are the harbinger of fall.

Day 2 - Botanical gardens and Vikingaheimar

Again, blogging a day behind the pictures. I'd hoped to catch up tonight but the only place the signal is connecting is nowhere near a power outlet so I'm limited by battery power. There's supposed to be signal in every room, but alas, it appears to be not quite the reality.

Yesterday then, we went to the botanical gardens in Reykjavik and found a few things to photgraph. A pretty rock garden....



A humble bumble bee doing it's thing...



Lots and lots of pretty flowers....



This bird ....



......splashing around in this lovely water garden.



There were also children aplently pulling the leaves and sometimes the plants out of the water feature in the botanical garden cafe (not pictured to protect their destructive little identities) and dropping their plastic cars in the pond.

Snorri made it to the Vikingaheimer with us to see the Islandingur, a replica Viking ship. More on the museum and the ship on the DARC blog when Neil gets around to blogging.



And of course.... in Reykjavik, there are cats everywhere. Ragnarr the cat visited us again briefly this morning before we checked out of the Erikr Rauði. This kitty was found in a wool shop in downtown Reykjavik.

Trillium War, making beads, garden

So... we're on the eve of taking off for two weeks in Iceland, and I'm trying not freak out about not being packed properly or leaving a clean enough house for the house/dog sitter. I've decided to blog about the past few weeks instead. Just to take my mind off of it for a bit.

By the by, I'll be blogging from Iceland whenever the spirit moves me, and we have internet access.

Back at the beginning of July, we went to an SCA event called the War of the Trilliums. As is becoming usual for this event, Neil made a bead furnace and invited anyone who wandered by to try their hand at making beads.

This is the furnace.....



And these are some of the beads that people made.....



We got 1/3rd breakage rate - 12.5 beads broke, and 25 survived. That's a definite improvement over the years, but it's still pretty high. And those that do survive are often pockmarked with ash in the process. I don't think we have the hang of Norse bead making yet, but it's fun trying. :)

Our friend Steve gave us this fellow to take to Iceland with us - Snorri is the suggested name. I've called him Snorri Steveson in the Icelandic fashion. At Trillium War, he was guarding our camp.



Coming home to the garden, we have some lovely astilbes in bloom - they are shade plants.



The cosmos and the clematis are still in full bloom.



We had so much fun with working beads at Trillium War and managed to take the furnace home intact that we decided to do it again a week later with a smaller crowd so that we could test a few things - reheating an already existing furnace, and videotaping the tesserae method.

This is a still from the tesserae method of making beads. Rob is just lifting one of the tesserae pieces from a piece of flat new charcoal and starting to wind it around the mandrel. There's more information on the bead making process on DARC's bead pages and on DARC's blog.



This is a delightfully composed and poorly shot (it's not in focus!) picture of the beads that I made. One survived whole and one didn't - it's in the background in two pieces.

In the garden and the living room

This is one of Neil's pictures. He says the birds act funny when they know their picture is being taken. :)



This is largely what I blame for the last month's worth of fatigue. Imagine if you will, because I don't have a 'before' picture, the trim is 50 odd years of layers of white paint, and the walls are a pale taupe.

We've been renovating. And please don't get me started on hiring a person who said he'd get it done in two days, and didn't, leaving us to spend weeks finishing it.



Of course, the garden has been a pretty busy place as well. Neil keeps bugging me to post larger garden pictures - this is the round garden, the triangle garden, and the tomato garden in the background. Three for the price of one picture! Remind me to take another one like it in the fall when all the annuals are at their peak.

The long promised tomato experiment

Before:



After:



The Problem: The already established 'veggie' garden is right out by the fenceline, to the right of the 100+ year old maple tree. Said maple tree is currently reduced to about 1/4 of it's root system (due to road and driveway work) and it's all in the yard. In the past few years, I've tried growing tomatoes out there, but they fight with the tree roots for nutritients and don't do as well.

Plus..... that garden space is increasingly being taken over by flowers and woad. I'm running out of room!

The Solution: A new garden space, in a raised bed, with fresh soil. Obsessive hobbies are fun. :)

Squirrels and Chipmunks and Birds, oh my!

Okay... I've had these pictures and the Garden Notes paragraphs at the bottom of the post ready for two weeks, but without any other content here. Then I got busy.

It happens. Apparently... somewhere between June of last year, and June of this year, I managed to forget to take my vacation time. The workplace gets a little annoyed with things like that.

Anyway, the bird feeder has delightfully increased the life in our yard!

We have squirrels....



.......chipmunks,



....cardinals,



and blue jays, oh my! And I am having a great deal of fun with the new lens for the camera.



Now, the flowers here have come and gone, but they were beautiful as usual.

This is Fritillaria Imperialis - it's an interesting flower. It hangs down, as if from a pedestal, and in it's early growth - it stinks. The banner for my blog is a snippet of the flower from two years ago. It seems to be a reliable perennial.



Tulips, of course, are the mainstay of many Canadian gardens. This yellow-red combination is fairly common.

I had some beautiful pink tulips along the fenceline at the sidewalk, and some inbred redneck teenagers appear to have alternated between snipping them or ripping them up and leaving them on the sidewalk. It certainly makes me understand the urge to violent revenge in the human race - if I could catch them, I'd be tempted to do some damage to their heads.



Last year, I dug up much of the grape muscari that had multiplied and spread it out in a different area - lots of colour! I think I'm going to find some more and continue this line down the garden.



Garden Notes:
Temperatures unusually high for this time of year, but we're still getting the occasional frost warning for evenings. This is Canada, after all. I haven't bought any annuals yet. That's next weekend's project, I hope.

Planning a raised bed for the tomato / green pepper crop. Haven't figured out where to put it yet. (Have done it - next post :) )

Last week and this week

Okay, I'm behind on last week's photos and getting ahead of this week's photos.

Chokecherry blooms and house - I really like the depth of field. I can't remember whether this is one of the wedding trees or not. I think so.



Okay....the weekend before last, we headed off on a new adventure in Peterborough. A friend arranged to have her teacher give a private class in wheel thrown pottery and a grand time was had by all!

This is the very first thing I've ever thrown on a wheel! It's not yet dry or even trimmed in this photo. It's a little lopsided.

But I love it. I loved throwing pottery! I came home from the weekend and started looking for classes/studio time here in town.



These are the hubby's hands doing his own thing.



We came home from the weekend to the neighbour, with a large branch of the maple that's just over the property line on her side down in her driveway. Close inspection proves it was a lightening strick! Neil volunteered to chain saw it and take it away. He's a sweetie sometimes. Or very politely deranged. Your choice.

And two fence sections torn out by the wind. Shame that isn't as easy to fix as a bit of chainsaw activity.

But on the bright side... two days away and I swear all the plants grew six inches!

First tulip of the season! (Don't worry, there will be many many more.)



Yellow Primrose....



Apricot blossoms with the church steeple in the background..... again, a beautiful depth of field.



And just for fun - my new view at work! After 18 years...... I finally have a window!