Looking up

I'm still going through my photos!
Today's post is about looking up and seeing plants, what look to be complete houses, patterns, designs, etc, at the tops of very tall buildings. You have to be wandering, taking your time and not rushing to be somewhere at a particular time to actually have the chance to look up and see them.

I will have to take my time now that I am home, see if I can wander around with the same relaxed attitude and see the hidden sights here too, enjoy being in the now.

I do love the water containers!

Windy day

It wasn't my plan to do much dyeing at the moment, I don't know what to do with all the fabric I already have.
But yesterday I got together with a couple of friends and we did some eco dyeing. I took along some hollyhock flowers as they looked so gorgeous in the garden and I had used them before. I just over-dyed a scarf that I had done previously. It has not turned out all that well. The colour is ok but I used contact with the petals and the patches of colour are a bit regular because of the way I folded it. It is ok but not beautiful.

Today the weather has been very windy, a HOT wind, and one of the plants split. Not being able to leave them to just go in the compost heap, I have put the flowers in a vase in the hopes that I will be inspired to do some more dyeing in the very near future. I may even over-dye the same scarf, see if I can make it more to my liking.

I am actually hoping to do some tapestry weaving soon. I did buy some yarn while I was away, concentrating on the autumn colours, intending to use one of my pictures as inspiration.

But mother nature has spoken (or blown) and so I will have to consider some more dyeing.

autumn in New York

I will continue to post some images for a while yet  - I have so many.

The newest theme is the autumn colours. It is of particular interest to me because we do not have the total deciduous tree landscape that they have, so we don't get the amount of colour.

I arrived in early October and the leaves in Central Park were mostly green with some colour starting to show.

By the beginning of November, the colour was starting to appear more strongly.

And by the time I left, autumn was well and truly showing. In fact, winter seemed to be approaching - if you looked at the plants. But look at the people and you can see that it was unseasonably warm! Not that I was complaining!!

Talking about good use of space ...

The Highline is a very interesting walk you can do. It used to be an above-ground rail but has been converted into a garden space.

One of the interesting things about it was that the plantings had been designed to look like some of the self-sewn areas that had developed, it is much less controlled than other planted areas in New York (Central Park excepted, of course).

There was also an interesting juxtaposition of natural shapes and the man-made, geometric shapes.

And I couldn't resist taking this photo from the walk - another example of using all the space available.

Lots more patterns!

I am home again and have taken over 1300 photos!  Luckily for you, I am not going to post all of them.

But I will put up some of them. I was so taken by all the lines, curls, circles, etc. New York is soooo geometric. And so contained - by this I mean that there are a lot (!) of buildings, windows, doorways, etc. They make lines all around you.

So here are a few more pictures that I hope will inspire me to produce some work, sometime.

I loved the way the roots of the tree were moving along the spaces between the stones. 

This was a small design along the edge of a flower bed. Even the flower beds were very regulated, the bushes appeared to have been grown in pots till they were flowering and then planted in very regulated rows. Unfortunately, I didn't find them inspiring enough to take photos. 

 New York makes good use of all the space, so you are often under constructions, where there are yet more patterns and lines.