Spring Returns

Sometimes in the winter I wonder if spring will ever return.  Even here in north Georgia where the weather is much milder than in many places in the country it seems like springtime will never come again.  Cold, gray and dark the days all seem to be.  Maybe that's only my perception but when new growth begins to show its many faces I am happy. 

Yes, it makes me very happy to walk by this gingko tree (I can't call it the little gingko tree anymore since it must be 15 feet tall now) and to see the first appearance of the new leaves for the year.  I've watched the buds for several weeks now, waiting to see the first tip of the green.  I saw that a few days ago and this morning when I walked by they'd made a great push and broken free to begin unfurling!  They will move so fast now.  Last year there was a freeze after the young leaves were out and they were nipped.  The tree was OK, though, and fully leafed out for summer.  I hope a later freeze like that doesn't happen this year.  Here's a post last year on April 7 showing the new leaves.  The freeze happened during that following week, I think, while I was at the Folk School.

I've done more springtime viewings at a local park, Yahoola Creek Park, recently.  Here are a few photos from those walks--first several views of bloodroot:

After the petals fall off and the leaf has grown.

A bloodroot blossoming and in context in the forest floor--can you see it?

More from Yahoola Creek Park over the past week:

While my eyes are on the woods, ball games and soccer are being played at the adjacent sports fields. As you can see, I've got other things on my mind!

Those lovely springtime distractions have been brief; for most of the past ten days I've been doing a major organization and clean up at my studio, with the help of Jeff, the guy who can do anything.  He installed wider shelving units in one of my rooms so that I could begin to get my flat works under control.  Here's Jeff vacuuming after drilling for reinforcing brackets for the 20" wide shelves:

So that he could get to the shelves to remove the narrower ones I had to take all of the stuff off and park it somewhere--like all over the rest of the room:

It only took Jeff an afternoon to redo the shelves, putting in the new ones and cutting the narrower ones and reinstalling them in another room.  But it's taken me most of several days to go through this stuff, sorting and tossing several years worth of clutter artwork, tapestry designs, and teaching materials.

Here are the newly revised shelving solutions, first the room with the wider shelves at one side:

And then the narrower "skinny" shelf in the corner of another room--yes, I do have to use a step ladder to get to the top shelves in both rooms.

I posted about my new shelves at Facebook yesterday and it was funny to read a comment from a friend, Janette Meetze, who said she'd also been doing a major spring cleaning/organizing at her studio!  Here's a link her blog post about her own organizational doings this spring.

Photos from my February John C. Campbell class and the Florida Tropical Weavers Guild conference class are coming soon, I promise!

I'll end with another favorite spring viewing thing... fiddleheads!  Yes, they're out in abundance here in north Georgia.  My interest in fiddleheads began in 2008 when I first noticed them at the creek house.  Here's a post about the first of the tapestries in this series.  You could find other posts about this tapestry and the other four I've done with this subject by using the search feature in the left margin of the blog.

After weaving five tapestries with fiddleheads as subject I don't believe any of this year's viewings will develop into new tapestry designs.  I don't think...

...but this one looks interesting....