Catching up

This little guy has a real smile of contentment. When we visited him on Saturday at the NH S&W he was bouncing off the sides of his pen and bleating loudly. Turns out he missed his mates. Sunday all three black lambs were there together and quiet reigned in the pen. His older neighbor with her jaunty red coat was there, too, keeping an eye on things.

Sunday was the day of the Sheep to Shawl contest. I didn't get down to the museum until after 11 AM so just caught the tail end of things. The kids were all decked out like farm animals and seemed pretty pleased with their accomplishment.

The Gogh Gogh's in their pajamas and nightcaps were almost finished with their shawl. They spun a soft gray yarn for the weft and had handpainted the warp. It was quite stunning! The brightly colored knotted fringe really set it off nicely.

Later in the afternoon I ran into Paula Roberts in the Home Ec building. She was wearing a 'coat of many colors' made by a friend. As you can see some of the squares were larger and some were quite small. Lots of color!

I had the opportunity to talk with a lot of people while I was working on my 'crayon sheep' tapestry in the guild building. Some wanted to know if I would have it done by the end of the day. Tapestry weaving is like painting with wool. You make a plan and then make decisions about what colors to use and where to put them as you go along.

Sunday I was working on the shaded side of the sheep's mouth working mostly with blues. By combining a lighter blue and a darker blue I was able to create a third color that was in between the two. This is called 'optical blending' and it really gives a weaver more choices for creating modeling affects.

Another technique used to blend colors is called 'hatching' and you can see that in the lower left side where the yellow area changes to yellow/green and then to green. I used the same technique on the lower right side but you don't see the hatching as much because the colors are very similar.

Hopefully I will complete this tapestry some time this summer. All the sheep tapestries I have woven before had natural colored sheep so it will be interesting to see this weaving as it develops.

Another thing that happened last weekend was that all the tadpoles hatched! This noon it was warm and they were swimming all around but when I went out this afternoon we had clouds and lots of wind. It wasn't really warm any more so they were hanging out at the edge of the gully. The black spots are all tadpoles.

I zoomed in with the camera to catch this one in case some of you have never seen a tadpole up close. He'll grow a lot bigger in the next few weeks and then we'll be looking to see if his hind legs are beginning to grow. It does take a while for him to become a frog!

In the meantime I have been doing more work on the pond yacht. The sails are on, the varnishing is complete, the base is done and it just needs a few more details to be all done. Yesterday I carved a tiller and made the rudder this afternoon. There was enough wind today for a great sail!