The First Warm Day

It was such a lovely day, the first warm day in ever so long. I sat on the back porch preparing rag strips for weaving and had to take off my sweater and put on sun screen as my face was feeling way too hot. Had to search for the sun screen as it's been so long since it was needed. I know that before long I'll be complaining that it is too hot. Having grown up in the Pacific Northwest anything over 75 degrees makes me feel faint.

I thinned seedlings in the greenhouse. The picture above is a flat of aster seedlings. I hate thinning as I'm always sure I'm throwing out the prettiest ones, but long experience has taught me that if I don't give plants enough room to grow they don't do well. If you are thinning plants where all the seedlings are the same color you want to choose the strongest plant, but if you have a mixture of colors, the pastel ones can be smaller and paler so you want to be careful to leave some big ones and some small ones or you may end up with all purple.

Joel planted 120 strawberry plants that our daughter brought us from the mainland. Partly June bearing Shuksan and partly the day neutral varieties Seascape and Tristar that will fruit all summer and into the fall.

I also finally got started weaving the next batch of rag rugs. These will be my rainbow rugs with the colors in color wheel order. The warp is stripes of purple, red-purple, red, orange, yellow, yellow-green, green, blue-green, and blue.
The rag strips are the same colors. It takes quite a while to collect all the colors I need to do this pattern so I don't do it very often. I can dye some of the missing colors but this time I found every one that I needed at the thrift store over the winter.