Irises: Nature's Living Rainbows

Iris needlepoint by Annake

This has been a difficult time for Annake’s Garden, outdoors as well with staying indoors because of the pandemic. We have lost a beautiful 50-year old crab-apple tree. The late freezes have destroyed this year's daffodils and hyacinths and we are concerned about our fruit trees, grapevines, berries, rosebushes and other plants.  It is evident that we will not be able to work the Farmers' Markets the way we have done for the past several years. The art and craft shows will likely be canceled. Annake's Garden will definitely be starting over and much of that cannot be done until as late as this time next year. That is why I am so looking forward to the irises. They warm my heart.

Irises, which my mother used to call "poor man's orchids", are my favorite flowers. I would rather have an iris in a vase than an orchid pinned on my shoulder any day. Even my favorite perfume is Iris Noir, or "Black Iris". We have three versions of ‘black' irises here in the garden, one of which is truly black. Some of our favorites will be used to illustrate this post.

Rainbow (Public Domain photo)

In Greek mythology, Iris was the goddess of the rainbow. Her name means rainbow. Her father was a minor sea god and her mother was a cloud nymph. Iris was the messenger of the gods. The rainbow was a bridge that she used to carry messages back and forth. She was portrayed as a pretty girl with golden wings, a messenger's rod (sometimes also winged), and winged slippers. She is sometimes shown with a pitcher, and was believed to refill the clouds with water from the sea. She was always shown as good and helpful. We use her name in the word "iridescent", meaning giving off rainbow reflections, like butterfly wings and hummingbird feathers  — and iris petals.

Iris needlepoint in progress

I use irises frequently in needle arts. Now I am going to show you several examples of irises in those arts, while demonstrating the use of various pattern-making techniques that you can use at home — and you can even design your own patterns. Let's start with a charted pattern, which will probably be the one most familiar to you. You can download it here.

This is a charted iris that can be done in counted cross-stitch on checked gingham, monks' cloth, or Aida cloth in any size you like. It can be done in tent stitch on plastic canvas, conventional needlepoint canvas, quickpoint canvas or rug canvas. If you think of each square as a patchwork square, it could become a quilt. If each square were a ceramic tile, you could make a back-splash for a kitchen or bathroom sink..It is designed to be done as a bi-colored iris, but can also be done in a solid color. In fact, it can be done in any colors you like — even imaginary ones.  If you are doing a bi-colored iris, the standards should be in a light color, the falls in a dark color, the beards in yellow or orange and the stem, of course, in green.

Irises, latch hooked wall hanging

There are some things to remember when you work from a charted pattern. Each square on the chart represents a single stitch. Count the squares horizontally very carefully. The white squares on the pattern represent the background color. if you are going to use one. Do the same thing with the vertical rows. Make sure your canvas or fabric is going to be big enough for the finished picture, plus some space for turning over to hem or turning under around a cardboard spacer for framing, turning under for backing a rug, etc.  It is much better to have to trim off some fabric when you have finished the pattern than to find out at the last minute that you don't have enough background for all your work.

The next possible problem is that of losing your place in the pattern and working the wrong row.  There are a couple of simple techniques and devices to help you with this problem. It is certainly important to keep track of the line in the chart that corresponds with the line of stitches you are working, as well as to keep an accurate count of the number of stitches you have completed. Otherwise, your finished project may not look very much like the chart! It is a good idea to keep the chart on a flat surface where it is easy to see all of it from your working position. I use a clipboard to hold mine in place. I keep a pencil with it. If I'm interrupted or have to be away from my work for any length of time, I make a small pencil mark by my last completed stitch.

If you are primarily losing the horizontal line in the chart and are not concerned with losing count of your stitches, the simplest solution is to place a 12-inch ruler with its top edge just under the chart line you are following. If you need to add weight to the ruler to keep it in place, glue a couple of coins to the underneath side of the ruler, near the ends.

For an easy-to-make tool to mark both the horizontal and the vertical lines of your chart, cut two pieces of stiff cardboard about 2 inches (5 cm) wide and 6 inches (15 cm) long. Staple or glue them together so that they form an L-shape. Place the L on the chart so that the bottom part of the L is directly below the horizontal line of the chart that you are following, and the upright part of the L is just behind the first stitch you are going to count. Mentally remind yourself to move the upright part of the L every 5 or 10 stitches you complete. This takes some practice, but will soon become automatic. Slide the bottom of the L up (if you are working from the bottom of the chart) or down (if you are working from the top) one space at the end of every completed row of stitches.

Tracing pattern on canvas

The next type of pattern is one that you can make for yourself. Draw or trace your pattern on lightweight white paper. Tape it, design side toward you, on a sunny windowpane. Tape you canvas or a thin white fabric on the pane so that it overlaps the drawing.  Trace the design. Carefully re-trace the design onto the canvas or fabric. I use pencil on fabric because it will wash out. If you like, you can color the design lightly later with permanent markers that will not run. A semi-transparent fabric like organdy is excellent for this. Even if you don't embroider the design, you can trim the fabric away from the edges of the hoop and hang it in a sunny window. We call those "Window Wonders".

I use permanent marker on canvas because the stitches will cover it, as you can see in the picture on the right.

I carefully wipe off any excess ink, as you can see me doing in the photo on the left.





The kind of needlework I am going to do on this pattern I call "stained-glass stitchery". I'm going to pause here and show you the steps I used to work the pattern of an iris in this technique.

1) Stitched iris  2) Background 'panes' added  3) All sections backstitched in black

Sweatshirt with needlework

Working an iris design on a dark sweatshirt requires a different technique.  First I draw the parts of my design on tracing paper or a good grade of tissue paper. I pin the pattern in place on the sweatshirt, being careful not to pin the front and back of the shirt together. Then I thread an 18 inch piece of white yarn, floss, or crochet cotton into a sharp-pointed needles. Working from the inside of the sweatshirt, I back-stitch all around the lines in the drawing. You cans see that I have started doing that in the picture below, on the left. The completed design outline is in the middle picture.  When the complete design has been stitched, I pull the paper away gently. A pair of small tweezers is good to have to pick out any tiny pieces of paper caught in the stitches. The embroidery work is shown in progress in the picture on the right. Once all the embroidery has been done, filling in the sections of the design, you can snip out the pieces of white yarn.  Or you can simply work over them as you fill in the sections of the design.

There is another kind of pattern transfer — hot-iron transfer. However, it must be done with a special kind of pencil. With the shops likely to carry such a pencil closed and you readers at home, perhaps it is best to leave that one for another day.

Assisi-style iris on canvas

This iris pattern represents an embroidery style called Assisi embroidery. I did this in needlepoint on canvas for a quick demonstration, but if you are doing authentic Assisi embroidery, you would do the stitches in cross-stitch and leave the iris petals empty so that the background fabric shows through. What appears as background here, along with the features of the iris which are  given are done in cross-stitch. I later filled in the iris with additional needlepoint so it could be framed.

Finished iris needlepoint

Graphing a needle arts chart

If you want to make your own graph patterns like the one we started with at the beginning of this article, you will need quarter-inch graph paper, erasable colored pencils, a small pencil sharpener, a good eraser (kneadable ones are the best), plain paper to draw your design, and a hard surface to work on (a clipboard will do if you don't have table space). Curved outlines will need to be "square off". This is easiest to do with a counted cross-stitch design, so I would recommend that you start with one of those. You can use half cross-stitches, either upper left to lower right corners of the square or upper right to lower left corners. I like to back-stitch around the major parts of a cross-stitch design to make them stand out. If you are doing that on your pattern, indicate it with solid lines.

We are going to leave you with a collection of J.D.'s favorite iris photos.

Enjoy,

 This post by Annake's Garden is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Pigments and Palettes: All About Color, Part II

Simple six-color wheel

In Part I of this series we talked about the subtractive qualities of color in natural light. Pigments, on the other hand, are additive. We add one color to another to get a third. As a child, I imagine you were taught that if you add red to yellow, you get orange. Add yellow to blue and you get green. Add red to blue and you get purple. Simple, isn't it? Well, it isn't really that simple.

What happens if you add red to green? Or blue to orange?  Or yellow to violet? If you do it well, you get a nice gray. Gray is considered a neutral color. Other colors besides gray can be neutral as well. Neutral colors can be very useful. A neutral color is one that is very low in intensity. The gradual addition of a complementary color or black or white to a hue or pure color will make it progressively less intense until it becomes neutral.

Grays mixed from complementary colors

12-color wheel

If we expand our color wheel, we find interesting color pairs directly opposite each other. Red-orange is opposite blue-green; yellow-orange opposite blue-violet; yellow-green opposite red-violet. The RO/BG combination is believed to be the most eye-catching combination of all. If you want to make a poster guaranteed to capture attention, you now know what color combination to use. However, it is also fatiguing to  eye muscles, so people won't look at it for long. Make your message short and to the point.

Red-orange & blue-green message sign

The term value is used to describe the amount of light reflected off an area: that is, the amount of lightness or darkness regardless of the hue or intensity. A value scale can be made for any pure color. This starts with a very light version of the color, followed by medium light, medium, medium dark, and dark. For a more complex scale, begin with white before the light color sample and end with black after the dark one. A simple way to judge the values of an object, scene, or composition is to think of it as a black and white photograph. Which areas are the lightest? Which are the next lightest? Continue until you have found the darkest areas.

Value scale for green

Let's move on to the mixing of pure colors with the absence of color (white), the neutral value (gray), and the other non-color (black). Pure colors are known as hues. Mixing pure colors with white produces a range of tints. Mixing it with gray or other neutrals produces a range of tones. Mixing it with black makes a range of shades. If I'm painting a tree in acrylic, I mix a wide range of yellows carefully with a touch of black, not blue, to get lively summer greens. Will that same tactic work with pastels, watercolors, or embroidery flosses? The only way to make sure is to experiment.

A painter's pallete

Now to the subject of palettes — not the objects smeared with paint that artists use while painting, but the selections of color that individuals choose. Most art books will at least hint that you should choose one set of colors and stay with it. As a teacher, I take a very different view. Since I have taught so many kinds of artwork, I am well aware that I don't choose the same colors even for related materials. I don't choose the same colors for chalk pastels that I would for oil pastels, or watercolor pencils for tube watercolors. I would much rather that my students explore all the colors available to them in any medium and find uses for as many of them as they can. For one thing, it doesn't make sense economically to buy a whole set of colors — as most people do — and not use half of them. Isn't it better to try all sorts of color combinations and make note of what they produce? (Many children will do this instinctively.)  If you keep a reference sheet of the combinations, over time, you will know what colors to choose when you need a special effect. Mother Nature is the grandest artist of all, so we are going to illustrate some of our comments with her work from our garden.

One view of Annake's garden

I have found when mixing tints that I get the best results by starting with white and adding a tiny bit of color at a time until I get the tint that I want. On the other hand, when I mix shades I start with the color and add a bit of black to it until I get the shade I want. Tones can be a bit more difficult. I usually start with nearly equal amounts and adjust them as I mix. If I want a warm neutral, I use a little more of the warm complementary color (red/orange/yellow) than I do of its cool complement. If I want a cool neutral, I use more of the cooler complements (green/blue/violet).

If I'm using tube colors with names like raw umber, burnt sienna, or alizarin crimson I put a sample of each paint and one of the mixed neutral on a plain white index card, write the names of the colors used, let it dry completely and file it for future reference when I need a similar color for another project.  When I am mixing flosses or yarns for a special effect, I glue a small square of worked canvas and samples of the floss or yarn to a card and file it the same way. You will be surprised how much time this can save you later.  It is also a great help when you are trying to match materials that have run out. Just drop it in your wallet or purse and take it to the shops.

Color wheels are most useful when you are devising color schemes, whether I'm choosing colors for decorating a room, designing a painting, making a rug pattern or putting together accessories for a special outfit. The simplest color wheel has only six sections, the primary colors of red, yellow' and blue, and the secondary colors orange, green, and purple. Secondary colors are made by mixing two primary colors. To be effective, you will need a color wheel with at least twelve colors. The added colors are tertiary colors, made by by mixing a primary with one of the two secondary colors nearest to it, as mixing red with either violet or orange. The tertiary colors are red-violet, red-orange, yellow-orange, yellow-green, blue-green, and blue-violet.

Tertiary colors

Let's begin with the simplest scheme, the monochromatic scheme.  Suppose your favorite color is rose and you want to use it liberally in your project. Rose is a tone of red; it is red mixed with a neutral color. A beige neutral will give you a warm rose, while a gray or blue neutral will give you a cooler one.  This is especially important if you are decorating a room. If the room is naturally sunny, you may want cooler colors. If it is shady, you may want warmer ones. Or you may want to vary your color scheme in a single room differently for summer than for winter. (The colors red through yellow-green are considered warm colors. These colors appear to advance toward the viewer and are associated with energy and activity. The colors green through red-violet are considered cool colors, these colors tend to recede from the viewer and are associated with calm and serenity.)

This rose is rose

Since you have chosen rose as your tone, it is time to choose the tint and shade that go with it. The tint is red mixed with white and the result is a range of pinks from the palest pastel to in-your-face hot pink. A shade is red mixed with black to give you such colors as burgundy and maroon. Make a sample of your tint, tone, and shade with paint, fabric, paper, etc. Those little paint chips from the hardware store are ideal. Then decide which of the three you plan to use the most and which you plan to use just for an accent color. For example, if you are fixing up a bicycle for a little girl, you may want the body to be a bright pink, the saddle maroon, the basket white with a decal of roses, and rose-colored streamers on the handlebars. If you are planning a hooked rug, you may want a burgundy background with figures in rose and highlights in soft pink.

Monochromatic orange lilies

As recently mentioned, I will from time to time discuss a contemporary painter whose work has inspired me to try a new project. I want to feature California artist Erin Hanson (www.erinhanson.com) in conjunction with monochromatic color schemes. She is a contemporary landscape artist with a talent for blending modern Impressionism with modern Expressionism. She is especially fond of painting scenes from our national parks and monuments. Not long ago she set a task for herself to make a gallery show of a series of paintings done primarily in tints, tones, and shades of the color orange, with surface detailing in black. The works ranged from autumn trees to places like Bryce Canyon and Monument Valley. I was delighted to see some favorite places in the American West in my favorite season of Autumn! I've been inspired by all that orange beauty to plan a monochromatic project in greens.

Iris in blues and blue-violet

The next scheme is about analogous colors; that is, colors that are next to each other on the color wheel, like green and blue-green or blue-green and blue.  I recently came across the work of an Australian artist, Clair Bremner, (www.clairbremnerart.com) who lives near Melbourne and paints lovely fantasy-touched landscapes using a palette of analogous colors — largely blue-greens, blues, and blue-violets. She paints with fast-drying acrylics in large swirls, carefully controlled drips, and planned splashes. She says she usually doesn't have a particular landscape in mind when she begins a project, but approaches the dry background she has painted and introduces delicate flowers and leaves with scores of tiny brushstrokes. She likes analogous colors because she feels they best reflect the harmony of nature.

As soon as I saw her paintings I envisioned a flat background with delicate top-stitching in varied stitches! (Much of what I do is taken from Nature, so I may do a slightly different approach, like yellow-green, gray-green, and blue-green for foliage or red-brown, orange-brown and yellow-brown for fur or feathers.)  An analogous color project is already on my to-do list!

Otter, colored in analagous browns

Red poppies in a green meadow  (photo by J.J.)

We have already discussed complementary colors, directly across from each other on the color wheel, in the first post on this topic(August 14, 2019).  They are red/green, blue/orange, and yellow/violet. All of them can be very striking combinations. They can be a bit overwhelming when both are used used full strength, but work well when one dominates the other in some way.

Mums in a RV/BV/Y color scheme

But I have a fondness for split complementary schemes. An example of this would be using red-orange and yellow-orange across from orange's complement blue, or yellow-orange and yellow-green opposite yellow's complement violet. The other combinations: blue-green/blue-violet/orange, red-orange/red-violet/green, yellow-green/blue-green/red, and red-violet/ blue-violet/yellow. I find those combinations more subtle than straight complementary colors.

Our last color scheme is triad. It is made up of three colors that are equal distances apart on the color wheel. We have covered primary colors and secondary colors. The other two combinations are made up of tertiary colors. One groups together yellow-orange, blue-green, and red-violet, while the second is composed of yellow-green, blue-violet, and red-orange. These are more unconventional than the others, but can be effective in geometric and abstract designs, posters and logos, ceramic glazes, floral combinations, etc. One way to approach this is to chose the color range of one of the three and use it for the background, either pale or dark Then use smaller amounts of the second color range — but a larger variety of tints, tones and shades — for the focus of the design. Finally, use the third color group as accents, outlines, lettering, etc. (Practice on a small sample before you begin.)

Photo composition in yellow-green, blue-violet, and red-orange

With all the tints, tones, and shades available, you have quite a variety to manipulate. I hope you have enjoyed this discussion of color and have found it useful and thought-provoking. These principles apply in a large variety of creative projects.

 This post by Annake's Garden is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Cross Stitch, Creatures, & Craft Shows - Early Autumn Q & A, 2018

Autumn comes to Thunder Mountain

You haven't mentioned cross-stitch lately.  Are you still doing new designs?

Yes, indeed. In fact J.D. and I did a small showing quite recently that featured some of his close-up photographs of flowers from our garden and some of my embroidered pillows with flower designs. I used different techniques for the pillows, but some were done in cross-stitch, with some parts done in double cross-stitch (also called star stitch, and St. George-and-St. Andrew stitch), where I worked what is essentially a plus sign (+) on top of the conventional X. I love the appearance of colorful stitching on checked gingham and used that for these pillows. Here you can see the Iris, the Poppy, and the Sunflower. [Sorry, the Iris pillow sold before we got a photo - J.D.]

Cross stitched pillows

I also did some miniature needlepoint pictures of flowers.  These were framed 3 inch X 5 inch pictures (7.5 cm X 13 cm) done in conventional tent stitch with some back-stitching. No sunflowers this time, but an iris and a poppy were included.

Needlepoint flower "minis"

Finally, here are a couple of J.D.'s photographs from the exhibit.

Flower photos by J.D.

What's on your screensaver? (Asked by a teenager at a recent show.)

Is this a trick question being asked by the younger set of old-timers like me to determine if we are "cool" enough to spend a few minutes with? Yes, I recognize that "cool" is an obsolete — even archaic — term of approval,  and that the current one is probably something I wouldn't even recognize.  (I am glad that "sick" has apparently fallen out of favor!)

Anyway, I do have a story about my current screensaver. It is one of J. J.’s photographs. She loves to take pictures of the sky and clouds. (Look for some of her photos in the post on "Skyscapes in Needlepoint" later this year.)  She saw a large cloud formation that looked to her like a dragon breathing fire and little puffs of smoke. She hurried to capture the image before it could change. When she down-loaded the picture, she was startled to find that she had also captured at the very bottom of the photograph the silhouette of a bicyclist riding along the top of a ridge. We decided to entitle the picture "Racing The Cloud Dragon".

"Racing the Cloud Dragon," photo by J.J.

We framed a print of the picture and offer copies of it in our print catalog, so I was able to show the young man the original. He smiled and thanked me and walked away — not seeming to feel that he had wasted his time.

Like J.J., I have always treasured the pictures seen in clouds and the patterns I see everywhere. When I was a young teenager I used to slip outside on clear summer nights after my parents had gone to sleep. I would climb to the top of our winter wood pile and sit for hours watching the stars. I would pick out the constellations that I recognized, but then form imaginary new constellations from the visible stars and watch them move across the sky. I hope that teenager sometimes looks up from whatever screen he is watching to look at clouds and stars, too.

Are you going to start writing three blog posts a month again, instead of just two?  You said you would when your busy season was over.

I will do that as soon as I can, and I will apologize in advance because it is going to be later than I had planned. This has been by far our busiest year since we started Annake's Garden! The Farmers' Markets stop at the end of September because of the short high-country growing season. (And I wish I could have sent every one of you some of our sweet seedless grapes, which were especially good this year.) But we still have art and craft events scheduled into early December and I have many new projects to complete for those.

I have started a series of needlework "portraits" of our Rocky Mountain wildlife that I am eager to share with you in a few months.  I'm working on more abstract,  geometric,  mosaic and optical illusion designs.  Part II of "Seascapes in Needlework" is in rough draft and will be followed by "Skyscapes" and "Cityscapes". I'm gathering materials for a couple of do-it-yourself projects that I hope you will enjoy.  But I do have to sleep sometimes, so my writing has to be worked into what I laughingly call my "spare time". I'll keep writing, you keep reading, and I hope we will all be happy with the results.

Bighorn needlepoint, ready to frame

Happy Autumn (or Spring, as the case may be*),

*For our Southern Hemisphere readers, of course.

 This post by Annake's Garden is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Still Life in Needlework, Part V: Inspiration Is Everywhere

Two photos by J.J.

You have now had enough experience with still life compositions to know whether you want to continue translating them into needlework. Now it is time to broaden your horizons a bit. Beside these first paragraphs, you will see a couple of photographs that you might not have considered as still lifes... but they are. I want you to extend your thinking about what constitutes a still life and where to find them. Still lifes do not have to be table-top compositions or pictures of items confined to the interior of a room. Any collection of items that are not going to get up and move away while you are sketching them (or photographing them for later sketching) will qualify. My grandfather, whose sketchbook I inherited, made some charming compositions of simple items like garden tools leaning against a fence. A collection of modern tools, including motorized ones, would make an even more intricate composition. (And, of course, you can always make a sketch of your drawing or needlework tools.)

Amaryllis, in the style of a 19th century lithograph

If you will bear with me, I will point out some more history that applies to our subject. By the 1830’s, technology had begun to affect the European art world. Artists had made prints of various kinds for several centuries. The Dutch Masters, for example, and the great German artist Durer had made good use of them. Now lithography made print-making even more attractive. The Romantic painters Delacroix, Corot, and Millet had etchings made of some of their work. The Impressionists, including Manet, Degas, and American-born artists Cassatt and Whistler, popularized prints even more. Art shows began adding entire exhibits of prints. Museums were delighted to sell prints of their treasures to a growing middle class. Newspapers, book publishers, and scientists cataloging plants, animals, and fossils were demanding good illustrators.

And then Louis Daguerre, through an unlikely — but happy — accident, discovered a whole new way to produce images, and what was to become a whole new art form, photography, was born. Some of the art world felt panic. People, they said, would no longer sit long hours to have their portraits painted; they would readily sit for long, uncomfortable minutes for the much cheaper photographs. Portrait painters did, in some cases, suffer from the new trend, but only temporarily. People did sit for those photographs, but people also began to buy more paintings of all kinds. And, as for Daguerre, the first daguerreotype he made to show the world was... a still life. (J.D., of course, considers this only right and proper!)

Still life in the style of a daguerreotype - an homage to Louis Daguerre

The Impressionists made significant discoveries about color. Remember when I advised you to put complementary colors into your shadows? That was one of many examples of their discoveries. By revisiting sites and painting them in all seasons, all weather, at different times of day, etc., they learned a great deal about how changing conditions altered colors. The pointillists discovered that putting tiny dots of mixed colors into an area of a painting gave it a more realistic aspect. Those dots are the “ancestors” of the pixels on your screen. (Latch-hook work is pointillism in action!) Although few of these painters concentrated on still lifes, their contributions improved overall understanding of the effects of light and color. In return, these also led to great improvements in the reproduction of both paintings and photographs.

J.J.'s photo of a rose, and the latch-hooked pillow-top based on it

We need to honor one more individual painter for his contribution to still lifes, the Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cezanne. He freed artists from the last restrictions on traditional still life compositions. In effect, he “tilted the table” so that everything on it was visible… and nothing fell off! J.D. is going to show you how he does some of this by changing perspectives with his camera.

Different views of the same subject; only camera position and lighting was changed

Pine cones by J.J.

Sometimes simply changing the scale of what you are observing brings up subjects you might not have thought about otherwise. Try “thinking small”. Look at individual plants, seashells, pine cones, mushrooms, etc., and their immediate surroundings. Often this will give you a new perspective on what constitutes a still life.

Now you have seen examples of 'translations' from observations, sketches, photographs and prints into samples of embroidery, needlepoint, latch-hook and other forms of stitchery. It is time for you to put what you have learned into serious practice. Use what you have learned to make an outline for a simple still life on cloth or canvas (even plastic canvas). Then fill in those outlines with your choice of yarns, flosses, or other materials, in your choice of colors, using your choice of stitches. When it is completed, you will have made something that would not exist in this world if you hadn’t created it. If that doesn’t make you feel good, I don’t know what will!

For more tutorials and suggestions, look for our next series of 'translations', Part I of LANDSCAPES, beginning later this spring.

"Wheels" by J.J.

"Resilience" by J.D.

 This post by Annake's Garden is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.