L is for..

Lilies! These specifically are the Asian lilies that grow near our gas meter. I don't recall them blooming last year, and have been trying to patiently wait for them to bloom this year. The buds first appears many weeks ago and I've watched them grow and lengthen, but show no apparent signs that they would actually open. As my trip to DC grew imminent, I was afraid I would miss them altogether and that they would bloom while I was away. I'm ecstatic that they decided to open a few days before I left.



I'm similarly pleased that the orange/tiger lilies I got from a friend who was digging them up this past spring are blooming. Jack has a preference for orange lilies and these now border the front of the garden by the porch where he's most likely to actually see them.

Of course, there are other things blooming in my oh-so-well-planned (but not by me!) garden:



These hollyhock are back in the rose bushes by the garage. I'm told hollyhock are biennial, and I seem to remember that last year we had dark purple. They're a beautiful splash of color now that the roses are through.



Most of the phlox is still pre-bloom, but this patch is quite lovely. There's a vining something that's threatening to consume one of the phlox plants toward the back of this patch, but at the moment it has a lovely red trumpet-like flower so I'm letting it live. I'll have to look it up to figure out what it might be.

L is also for "lace-weight", as in the singles that I spun from the cochineal-dyed roving from Carol.



The blue strand across the skeins is KnitPicks Gossamer for reference. I'm quite happy with how consistently I managed to spin it, especially given how fine it seemed to want to be spun. I'm still learning how to dictate the weight or thickness of my spinning, so this is just the weight that this yarn seemed to want to be. *shrug* I have another ball of roving like this to spin and then I need to figure out what the make with it. I think I'm going to set the twist in the singles and work from there. Since it was dyed with period dyes and hand spun, I'm trying to figure out something period to make from it that could be donated to an auction or fundraiser.

L is also for lace socks, this time out of alpaca and silk:



They're quite lovely and soft, but since I tend not to wear socks in the summer, they may have to wait until fall to get worn and shown off.

If I really want to stretch this, I s'pose L could also be for "lack of bushes". The first weekend I was away in DC, Jack, my dad and Derek (our nephew) cut down lots and lots of old, ugly, overgrown evergreen bushes along the side and front of our house. I don't have a really good before and after shot of the porch, but here's the side yard, before and after:



They didn't have time to dig out the stumps, so dad's planning to come back down in a week and a half to start that process. It will be made a bit trickier by the fact that our electric runs just to the outside of the line of stumps - about three or four feet out from the base of the stumps, but who knows how close to the roots. You can see the red flags in the "before" picture - that's the electric line. We'll need to have them flag again before we dig, and we're planning to just cut the roots off instead of actually trying to dig them all out, but it still makes me a little nervous.

I'm going to need to figure out what to put there, too, since we're not planning to re-sod in that area (the evergreen bushes apparently make the soil very acidic and we've been warned not to try to grow grass in that space for a few years). I also foresee a trip to the local green dump to pick up lots and lots of composted soil to fill in the holes.