Atlanta Blooms 2018

Let's take another break from stitching and look at some lovely tulips! Every year, the Atlanta Botanical Garden plants thousands of bulbs.

They generally bloom from mid-February through the end of March. This makes early March a particularly good time to visit the Garden, since Orchid Daze, which starts in February, is also still going on. The pictures in this post were taken on March 10th this year. Some of the tulips had already finished blooming, and there were a few that still had not bloomed.

I love the ombre effect they created around the great lawn.

Here's a closeup. I'm not usually a fan of orange, but I love these orange/pink tulips.

You can still have color even if you are constrained to container gardening!

The flower walk back to the fabulous new Skyline Garden was my favorite this year, though.

There were some really amazing varieties of tulips back there. Time for the pictures to do the talking....

It was a real rainbow of colors!

I love the frilly pink edges of these tulips!

I hope you enjoyed seeing some highlights of Atlanta Blooms!

A Break from the Madness: Orchid Daze 2018

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Let's take a break from stitching and look at some beautiful orchids, shall we?

The Atlanta Botanical Garden's annual Orchid Daze is happening right now, through April 8th, so you still have some time to immerse yourself in the piles of orchids...

...mounds of orchids!

There's no "theme" this year as there has been in years past, but that's fine, because it lets the orchids really shine.

One cool thing they did this year is to try to help you tie together which different orchids are part of the same species. I'm not sure if you can see it well in this shot, but some of the orchids are displayed on 3D wireform shapes. Then, throughout both orchid houses (regular and high elevation), there are signs of the same shape (triangle, octagon, etc.) next to the orchids of the same family.

There are hanging orchids, orchids in pots,

orchids peeking out from behind leaves...

Compared to the main display area, it's really like a treasure hunt in the high elevation house.

But your efforts are amply rewarded!

I highly recommend visiting the Garden during Orchid Daze, because not only will you see tons of beautiful orchids, you'll also get the benefit of Atlanta Blooms, where there are literally thousands of tulips blooming.

I know, I'm such a tease, but there will be tulips pictures...right after another March Madness update!

JiffNotes
A little break from March Madness with some beautiful orchids!

Sadness and Random Crafting

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Thank you for your commiserations on the Super Bowl. Before the game, I did some "old school" crafting with Shrinky Dinks.

I ended up with some earrings that I wore to work on Monday, which was gray and rainy as the sky wept for the Falcons. We're still proud of them, though, and hope the Brotherhood will Rise Up again next year!

I attempted to stitch on Curios during the game...

but since I spent all except the first quarter and the beginning of the third quarter standing up or pacing, I didn't get a lot done!

I tried something new last week...embroidery on felt. This is completely Amy's fault (I get in a lot of trouble following her blog), as she showed a "maid-a-milking" she was working on, and of course, I had to go check it out, since I love 12 Days of Christmas ornaments!

Here's a link to the designer's blog, in case you want to be enabled, too. =) Her pattern instructions are GREAT; the only tiny complaint I have is that she doesn't give you the felt color names/DMC numbers that she used for each ornament in the directions. However, she is very responsive to questions; I asked one on her blog and she answered that day!

I found this picture and had to post it because so many of you complimented my color choices on my Butterfly Wing shawl.

I replied to most of you that my pajamas had subliminally influenced my color choices...this is the moment when I was knitting and looked down and realized I'm not so brilliant after all!!

JiffNotes
The Falcons may have lost the Super Bowl, but they're still winners to us! And after all, we get to live in beautiful Atlanta with the League Most Valuable Player instead of having to live in frigid Boston with a guy who doesn't know how to handle his balls.

Rise Up!

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Last weekend, we sent the Falcons off to Houston in style...

Today, we are ready to cheer, with Falcons Spirit Cake!

And just so there's some stitching content here, here's a shot of my progress on Prancer. We last left him here:

And now he is here:

But Heather, I hear you saying, that is just a stocking! Where is the deer? Where??? He's hiding behind there somewhere....

JiffNotes
For those of you who 1) aren't from the USA or 2) couldn't care less about football, my home team is in the Super Bowl!! And, there is a stitching picture at the bottom of the post for you. =) There is much excitement and nail-biting here. And hopefully there will be much celebration later!

Festival of Lanterns

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Well, it sounds like from the comments that I was not the only one who was under the weather at the end of last year and the beginning of this one! I am feeling much better, although the fatigue continues.... I hope you all are feeling better as well!

We live very close to Centennial Olympic Park in downtown Atlanta, so when we found out a Chinese Lantern Festival was there, we knew we wanted to check it out.

Then, we waited until the very last day we could possibly go. =) So the night before I was leaving for my girls' weekend, I raced home from work, dashed around packing and making some food, and then we headed over! We arrived just before the last performance of the night (9pm). The performances were mixed; the dancing was just OK, but there was a face changer and an instrumentalist that were both great!

The lanterns varied widely in terms of both subject matter and size, and it made for a beautiful display. They ranged from "normal" sized hanging lanterns...

...to 20 foot (7 meter) tall "palace lanterns".

I'll save the very largest one for the end of the post. =)

There were a lot of couples taking selfies under the heart arches. :)

I really liked this display, inspired by Chinese porcelain, even though it was outlined in LEDs rather than being a traditional lantern.

The giant ferris wheel is not part of the festival; it's just across the street from the Park and is semi-permanent. To the left, you can see part of the snowflake walk (which was kind of a mish-mash of LED snowflakes and reindeer and Santa Claus lanterns). The only criticism we had about the Festival (well, along with the price!) was that the displays weren't visually separate enough in some cases. I think they would be better displayed in a garden setting where you had trees or bushes to break up the views so the different vignettes didn't compete with each other so much.

I liked these fish.

The sign beside them told me (verbatim!), "The form of each festival is a sedimentation process of the history and culture of a country. ... The pronunciation of fish in Chinese is the same as surplus which means people can have remains in wealth and food for next year."

Which was informative and hilarious. I'm kind of surprised they didn't have a native speaker help with these signs, since the Festival was sponsored by the Hilton Garden Inn and had its logo plastered on each sign.

Of course we had to have a dragon!!

You can see how detailed some of the bigger lanterns were. This dragon was actually as long as his counterpart...

the phoenix!!

Isn't he spectacular?? Both the dragon and phoenix were about 50 feet (16-17 meters) long!! I kind of expected there to be a rooster since the Year of the Rooster is coming up, but this guy was definitely an acceptable substitute. ;)

JiffNotes
I'd tell you to go see the Chinese Festival of Lanterns in Centennial Olympic Park, but of course we procrastinated going to see it so long that we went on the last day.

Of Gifts and Gorgeousness

For more information on this stunning and serendipitous SAL, please click on the graphic!

Well, I kind of disappeared there again, didn't I? I think what happens is that a "deadline" comes up...for instance, I was taken completely by surprise that the Alphabet Club's "first Saturday of the month" was the SECOND of this month...I am unprepared, and so I delay while I try to think of what to post, and many other posts go into some mystical queue behind the post I "need" to write, where they languish! So I am going to try to not beat myself up if I miss a SAL post and just soldier on!

So anyway...the lovely and talented Jo at Serendipitous Stitching has invited us to share our projects we are working on that have been gifted to us, that we are gifting to others, or that we can in any way possible shoehorn into the category of gifting!!

What's great about having a birthday at the end of a month (mine was at the end of February) is that you can usually claim the next month as a birthday month as well (and if you're really doing well, the month after that as well). In March, my DF Jean gave me a lovely birthday package:

Look at the little squirrel paper clips!! My journal is now covered with them. I immediately went to Ravelry to find the perfect thing to knit with that extraordinarily gorgeous yarn, and I think Pamuya will fit the bill! You might think I would have picked a plainer pattern, but I get bored if something is too plain (too much stockinette or garter stitch). And how about that blinged-out squirrel magnet!! He is already in action on my Curios, a mystery class with Kathy Rees (we don't know what the project will look like once it's finished):

This is just the first part of the first lesson. I am woefully behind! This is the project that is using all those gorgeous threads I showed you in my last GG post.

And now my gift of knowledge to you for this month...you might remember the two-colored hat that was in progress last month. (I have finished it, but it hasn't had its glamour shot yet!) I want to make a pair of mittens in the same colors. Now, the hat was a mosaic pattern, where you only need to hold/knit with one color of yarn at a time. The mittens I want to make, though, are done in a Fair Isle pattern, where you must hold two colors at once. I watched the most brilliant and clear video of how to do this! There's your gift of knowledge. ;) I picked a(nother) hat pattern for my final Loopy Academy project this semester that has a small band of Fair Isle on it so I could practice but not be in over my head. So, this is happening...

I will not describe the fits and starts I went through with this, from trying to wrestle my clumsy hands into holding yarn in a way I could live with, to discovering I had made a mistake close to the beginning of the first round and needing to rip back, not once...not twice...but THREE TIMES!! And then when I finally had knit it correctly, realizing that I had skipped the increase row before that completely. *cries a little* I am on my way now, though. My tension is terrible, and it looks pretty bad (I picked the best part to photograph, of course ;), but it's getting done. The very observant of you may have noticed, though, that this is NOT actually Fair Isle...some of those bands have THREE colors in them. So, I quickly moved from learning to hold two yarns to three...good thing I had bought a yarn guide ages ago, or I never could have managed it.

My final "gift" of the month is a preview of what is coming to the Atlanta Botanical Garden next week!

A very "gifted" artist, Dale Chihuly, who makes large glass art pieces, will be setting up art around the Garden! (Or, to be more accurate, his team will be setting them up.) I can't wait to see the whole show; as members of the Garden, we get to get a first glimpse of the sculptures all lit up at night as well!

That's it for me for the month! If you'd like to see more Gifted Gorgeousness, go back to the top of the post and click the graphic!