The leaves will soon be gone. These are from a maple outside the parking garage where I work. I zoomed in really close. There are still leaves on about half of my trees at home but they continue to drift down. The wind has been picking up lately and usually sometime in November we have a few days of bitterly cold rain and wind and they all come down within 24 hours. Today it is beautiful. Sunshine brightly shining, the temperature just cool enough to need a sweater or jacket, and the leaves are offering their last shout of glory.

Friday night was opening night for our lace display at TAF. I'll post more about that later. Saturday I met with lace member Sally again and we dyed our little fingers off! Sally has a new house that she's been in for only a few months. Last time we did the dying in her garage, with the door open to let the light in and a light breeze. It was too windy this time and without the door open, there isn't enough light so she decided we would do this in her kitchen. "Brave woman," I thought to myself but we learned before the afternoon was over that the dye didn't take on either the counter top or the floor. She didn't think it would because of the materials it was made of but we couldn't know for sure until something happened. One of her rubber gloves tore at one time and there were a few drops on the floor that cleaned right up. Some dripped when getting some out of the basket container and that cleaned up easily too. Our fingers didn't fare so well, however.

I actually started with some odds and ends of old lace that was damaged, mostly crochet but there is another woven piece that even Sally (a textile expert) wasn't sure about. I wanted to get the feel of it again before getting to the pieces I cared about.

Do you know how FAST time flies when you're having fun??? We were 3 hours into it before I realized how long we'd been at it and I still didn't have my favorites done!

I ended up working on all these pieces faster than I should have since Sally had another commitment and we were both getting tired. Even so, I'm happy with most of it. These maple leaves truly do reflect the bright autumn colors of the real thing. I just realized that if I'd had a 5th leaf, I could make a single maple out of the five!

Here are the oaks. Oak leaves usually aren't as colorful as other kinds. I decided to stay with browns and greens. Next time I will go for some golden greens too.

The small leaves were quick and since I didn't know exactly how I will be using them, I stayed with greens. We had used up all the lemon dye earlier so I just used the chartreuse for the yellow/light green accents. The lighter colors give the illusion of new leaves.

Again, I wasn't sure what I would use these for so I stayed with the traditional greens. I should also mention that we used a stronger mix this time. I think we can go with less next time. I also didn't do as much diluting and mixing of colors although they mixed a lot on the lace itself.

I like how these turned out but I would have liked to have played with these more. Next time I will play with values more. Time was getting short at this point though.

I scanned this one separately since it's different and with the tassel, it just made the rest of the bookmarks fuzzy when scanned together. The top is oxblood red and the bottom is deep orange. I just dipped each end in the color and let them come together in the middle.

I'll show some of the crochet bits in another post. I'm thinking they'll probably be used in embellishing something that hints of CQ. So, next time, along with shade values, I hope to work with warms and cools. Seems like the majority of my tatting is going in the dye pot these days!