June Green Challenge

For the month of June I’ve challenged my Icy Delights students to make a combo with a green and another color. This is a good exercise in seeing how the colors play together, and a great way to find a new favorite combo. Because of how the dye colors split in ice dyeing, you never can be sure what you will get unless you try.

Everyone who participates will be in a drawing for some dye and other goodies.  I decided to join the group by playing too.

I’m not a big fan of Lime Squeeze, so I combined it with 14 other colors to come up with 14 different combos. I do like the majority of the pieces. Here they are all together.

I would never know that Lime Squeeze is in every piece. At the end of the month we’ll all have more combos to play with.

If you’d like to join in the challenge, check out my Icy Delights class here. 

Meanwhile, I’ve decided to play a bit with resin. I’ve been wanting to do this for several years, but hated to drag myself away from my dyeing. I saw something on Facebook that convinced me that I needed to try it. So this past weekend I played with the resin on a tile. The flecks in the tile are glitter and they really sparkle. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to capture that in my photograph.

Anyway, I feel it’s something I need to explore further.

In the gardening arena, we continue to wage our war against the deer. The shade garden contains a variety of hostas we’ve purchased over the years. The hosta addiction started back in 2009 when I was chair of the local master gardener’s garden walk. One of the gardens on the walk was almost all hostas. We both fell in love with this plant and decided to dedicate part of our new shade garden to hostas. The deer in our area seem to think the shade garden is a buffet just for them. We’ve done about everything we could do to keep them away from food and plants in our yard. The main garden is fenced. The blackberries are netted. Dave has purchased a variety of concoctions spraying them every couple of nights to keep the deer away. We’ve done everything but fence and throw down human hair. So last night we gave up. We went out and cut down all of our hostas. I thought I was going to cry. We decided if we can’t enjoy them, neither can the deer. I’ll be digging the hostas up either this fall or this spring, and finding something else to plant there that is less deer friendly. Below are before and after pictures of a few of the hostas in this area.

We may need to turn this into a fern area since the deer don’t seem to care about them. We’ll see. We’ve got plenty of time now to decide what we’ll do with this area.

Thanks for dropping by and letting me whine about the deer!