I love the crisp brown leaves againts the stark grey sky. It always amazes me that something so fragile can hang on in spite winter's attempts to take over.
Officially, it's not spring yet...but these blossoms are marching to their own beat regardless of what the calendar says!
My son was well enough to manage the short walk today. As I wandered he collected flowers for my flower press...gotta give him 10 points for that:) Thankyou to everyone who has sent him well wishes, he's finally been diagnosed with glandular fever. I can't see the light at the end of the tunnel just yet but atleast we have a label for the symptoms he's been having. I'm sure the lights there somewhere....
The magnolia's are also in bloom. With the harsh light and bright white of the flowers I thought they'd make a great black and white shot. It was so good to get out with my camera today, I planned a longer outing but just after these photos were taken the skies opened up and we were forced to make a hasty retreat!
As often as I can I like to take a walk with my camera. I do this partly for my daily photo blog and partly for inspiration and a moment to...take a moment. To just listen, walk slowly and watch. Winter seems to have gone by so fast this year and Springs leaving her mark everywhere already. I wish I could share the heavenly scent of the sweet magnolia blooms that I could smell as I stood and admired. Note the butterfy that was kind enough to flutter into my photo! It was quite blissful being out here and spring has more promises to come. How can one not be inspired?
My daughters op has been cancelled for the 2nd time...looks like I'm here to play for a bit longer:)
We decided to give the marigold dye a go as you can see! (By we I mean the kids and I as they are home from school for the holidays. )I picked 20 or so big marigold flowers and the kids pulled them apart. We put the green bits to the side as we wanted to make orange dye not brown:)
I pour about 750 mls of boiling water over the petals (enough to cover the mix but hopefully not over dilute the mix!) and my daugther gives it all a stir. I took some samples of the water at 5mins to see what the colour was like and then again after 1.5hours. To my suprise there was no difference. The marigolds smell was all over our hands but the smell of the water was not very 'marigoldy' at all. I was suprised at that too.
The petals soaked for about 3.5 hours for no other reason than I didn't want to heat up the element just to boil the petals. I waited till I already had the element hot and then gave them an hour. The resulting pulp was less than 1/2 a cup and the resulting dye was a dirty orange.
In the morning the mix had settled but some of the particles had suspended themselves in a sort of cloudy gel in the mix.(Which you can see below) I'm not sure what caused this but I would need to strain the dye through a cheese-cloth to get rid of the remaining sediment.
