Colours of April

April has been mostly a beautiful month with lots of warm days and a few cold, almost snowy days thrown in.

 Early in the month the mountains had new snow and the trees had new spring green leaves

Our yard has beautiful flowers and bright green grass.

flowering almond                   apricot tree

The hills in the main valley around Kamloops are starting to turn green, but higher up there is still not much growth and there is still snow around.

April showers have meant lots of golden light against dark skies.  These pictures are looking at the trees behind our house from our sundeck at 8 pm one night.

Sue at lifeloomslarge.blogspot.com/ has more pictures of the colours of the month from around the world. It's fun to look at all the flowers blooming.

Tuesday Studio Pictures

She arrives in my studio to supervise like clockwork everyday at 3:30.

 I'm afraid I'm going to cut her tail with the rotary cutter.

The last of the silk scarf on the loom. I finished this warp today and will put another on tomorrow.

Geocaching on Sunday April 18

We were supposed to be replacing windows in our house this weekend , but they did not get delivered in time. Instead we did a short geocaching trip in the hills behind Barnhatvale on Sunday. There were a lot of campers at Scuitto lake, which was open of ice. The hills higher up still looked like early spring, with out much growth.

Katie at Scuitto falls. The cache is in this picture.

The view from the Old Campbell Range school cache.

Gus's Rat Barn cache --- a very pretty meadow and old homestead that we had never been to before.

View from Buse Hill. There were 2 caches up here.

This was probably the last caching trip for awhile because we are going to be busy with household chores and gardening.

Our yard in April

Our apricot tree has never had so many blossoms!

We spent all weekend working on our pond/waterfall project. It's almost finished. We just need a few more plants and rocks.

A pair of mallard ducks were checking out our yard yesterday. They walked up and down the driveway and then went over to the neighbour's yard.

More pictures of April work

I finished my first knitted scarf. It's the Brooklyn Tweed Noro scarf in 1x1 rib.

I wove 3 plain weave scarves with soft knitting sock yarn and fleece artist mohair for weft. I had one skein of la Boheme Fiesta yarn ( rayon boucle, brushed kid mohair) in sapphire from Art of Yarn in Kelowna, that I used in the warp. One is for me for next winter and the other 2 will be for winter sales.

I also finshed 2 sets of 6 summer and winter placemats in blue plus a 32" runner. This warp was for orders and I wove some more for sales after the order was done.

April Weaving, Silk Scaves

I finished a warp of 3 silk scarves .  These are from a warp I painted last August. They are 2/8 silk from the Silk Tree, sett at 24 epi, 5" wide.  I put on 10 yds for 3 scarves plus samples. They are woven in 2 block twill on my  8 harness Baby Wolf loom. The weft is hand dyed 2/20 silk from Treenway. I dyed the silk in  a crock pot  outside on my sundeck in February. Silk has a strange smell when it is dyeing, so I like to do it outside. I use Lanaset/Telena dyes for my silk.  I use the 2/20 doubled on a bobbin for the block scarves and singly for the collapse weave.

collapse weave with single 2/20 weft

I am twisting the fringe on 2 more scaves at the moment and weaving another two in 12/2 silk.  I should have this warp off today and plan to put another warp on tomorrow. That will leave one more painted warp to finish up this spring.

Fossils and Geo -caches

April 11

We went fossiling for a couple of hours at Split Rock.  The fossil bed is on a very steep slope at the top of a hillside.

There are very interesting rock formations along this valley. The grass and sagebrush are starting to turn green but the wind was still very cold.

We carried on and did a few geo caches in the area as well.

On the way home Rick investigated some rocks and discovered a new fossil bed. He found 3 ginkgo leaves.

view from the new fossil site

Easter egg hunt

Here are a few pictures from  hunting Easter eggs in our yard on Sunday.

Easter Weekend Trip to Penticton

We drove to Penticton on Friday and came home Saturday after having a family visit. We did 24 geocaches there and back. It was very cold and windy ,with new snow down on the mountains. We were planning on coming home via the connector ,but with the winter conditons we decided to stay down low and drive home through Keremeos and Princeton. The lakes still had ice on them all through that valley. The Okanagan was green and had blossoms growing, but the day was too gray for pictures.

The red bridge at Keremeos has a cache nearby.

We finished up the 7 series cache along the old Hedley road to view the pictographs. This series was great and we never would have seen the pictographs on our own.

We spent some time at Kentucky- Alleyne provincial park . I sat and painted for 1/2 hour while Rick found another cache.

We had dinner in Merritt and did some more caching in the evening . We drove home in the dark and arrived about 9:30.

Geocaching on the Last Sunday in March

These pictures are from a fun series of caches we did on a trail near Tranquille.