April - Where Did It Go?

I certainly don't have an answer to that. It seems like one day we were musing over April Fool's Day pranks, and now we're nearly ready to celebrate the merry month of May. I've been busy with fiber and garden activities, so here's one last post for April - a gallery of photos.




The branches of our cherry trees were festooned with blossoms a few weeks ago. That could mean a crop of tasty pie cherries in a couple of months for us or the birds, whoever gets to them first!




I have a warp of cotton/linen blend yarn on my rigid heddle loom and am weaving washcloths, using my handspun cotton yarns as the wefts. The inspiration for these first two cloths came from an article in Weavezine. I love the loopy texture that I can wiggle my fingers in, but it is not a fast weave. The cloths I'm weaving now are far less textured and much faster. I'll have pictures of them once they are off the loom.



The redbud trees look fabulous every year but this month it was hard to find a sunny day to take their picture and also hard to get a good angle to show off their rich color that is even more striking after the monotones of winter.



For a couple of weeks I was struck down by hay fever and washcloth fever. This combination resulted in 6 of these Double Bump washcloths, pattern by Missy Angus. The yarn is Knit Picks Simply Cotton Worsted in the four natural colors. Knitting this easy pattern in these soft yarns was just about all I could handle while dealing with the allergy attack. (Between these washcloths and the ones on my small loom, I had thought of naming this post "It's Good to Be Clean.")




I can't resist one last photo of the daffodils. We have a fairly large variety which means we have some sort of daffodils blooming for about a month. The variety pictured has multiple blooms on each stem and smells quite fragrant.





I did finish one other knitting project just yesterday. It's the Anita Caroline Scarf, pattern by my sister Bonnie. The yarn is Frog Tree Pima Silk, knitted on US4 needles. I especially wanted to knit this lace scarf because Bonnie had designed it in honor of our creative Mom whose birthday was last month.

I'm going to end this last post of April with one of my favorite spring time quotes from Herbs and the Earth by Henry Beston -

"The odor of a ploughed field in the spring is like a hand laid upon the heart, having in it all the beauty, the poignancy, and the tenderness of earthly living, all the poetry of the melancholy and ecstasy of spring, of the branch, the new leaf and the warm wind, and the sinking of some last great and solitary winter star."

Here in Missouri it's a golden morning. I hope your last few days of April are golden too!