Time Traveling: Hurricane Ridge/Washington Lavender Farm

It was a lazy morning for me yesterday. After breakfast, I spent some time on my slow-stitching. Sometimes, it makes me sleepy in the way reading a book can cause me to nod off. Eventually, I slid down on the couch for a morning nap. It was late by the time I woke up, and I briefly considered not doing my workout. When I get into arguments with myself about whether or not to exercise, I realize I'm on a slippery slope to quitting altogether, and so I forced myself to do it. It meant I didn't get into the sewing room until well into the afternoon.

When I head downstairs, the kitties follow me like a thundering herd. One might think they're anxious to get on with sewing business, but no. They're really anxious for me to open the utility closet so they can go in search of mousies. It's rare, but sometimes they find one.

Even before I had the door open, Sadie was already in sneak-em-up mode. 

Before I could do any sewing on the Ties & Tails quilt, I had a couple of other little sewing items to take care of. Can we talk yet again about masks for a moment? Mike and I are in that rapidly decreasing portion of the population who have not had COVID. It isn't because we've been super careful. We've continued social distancing, and we use hand sanitizer like there's no tomorrow. But we threw down our masks the instant mandates were lifted in our state, and we have not returned. Until now. Now, we're planning a long and busy sight-seeing trip in less than a month. Now, we're ever more serious about not getting sick. And so we're returning to wearing masks indoors, and it seems the N-95 mask is the mask all fashion-conscious maskers are wearing these days. We are trend followers, if nothing else.

And that brings me to this box of ten N-95 masks we purchased. They're the kind with the straps that go around the head. Those don't really work for me. I don't like having my hair smashed down by them, but mostly, the straps just won't stay put on my head. As I've mentioned, my hair is thin and fine...and slippery, it seems. I can't keep those straps in place when they're sitting on my slip-n-slide hair.

My solution for this is to cut both straps to 3-1/2 inches in length.

Then I stitch back and forth across the cut edges, and voila! I have the ear-strap mask of my dreams. I made myself four of these yesterday. That should keep me masked up for our trip. 

Also, I realized my "short" embroidery project won't keep me busy for long. Next up is the center flower vase for the Pieces of the Past quilt. It seemed prudent to at least take a look at what it will take to get it ready for stitching. Here's the picture from the pattern cover.

I was chagrined to see that applique was involved, and this was going to take some time to prepare. After reading the instructions all the way through, the last few lines said something like, "or....you can just trace, color, and stitch as usual." Sounds good to me. There were no detailed instructions for the choice of colors. I just took my cues from the pattern cover and traced and colored mine. The ribbon at the top was supposed to be three dimensional if I'd done the applique. I'll stitch that too. Now my piece is ready to go, and I can commence with the first stitch the exact moment after I take the last stitch on my current project.

Okay, and that left precious little time in the day to work on the borders for Ties & Tails. I was only able to add one...the yellow with white polka dots you see there on the right.

Nothing will stand in my way today, and I should be able to finish this off before the close of my sewing day.

Okay, now I promised you a trip in the time machine today, and so let's just talk about our visit to Olympic National Park last week. Or don't, if you're not interested. You might want to stick around for the lavender farm at the end, though.

Mike wanted to drive up to Hurricane Ridge. He'd been there before many years ago. I never had, and so it seemed like a good idea. We stopped off at the visitor center, and I picked up my one and only refrigerator magnet of the trip.

Okay, and after leaving the visitor center, it was a 17-mile drive to the top of the hill. And holy moly. Practically the first thing we came to was this tunnel. Now, if you've been traveling with us for a while, you know we get pretty darned excited about tunnels.

And just as I was taking this "light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel" shot, another one came into view! Whoa!

But wait! There's more! This was a triple treat tunnel!!! (Apparently triple treats require three exclamation points.)

Well. Don't you know that had us in the mood for exploring. When we reached the top and walked across the parking lot, this is what we saw. I took a pano of the area. (That's just some guy I picked up along the way.)

In the image above, you can see the visitor center just to Mike's left. We walked up there where we could see a sign with the names of the peaks.

Here's the pano I took standing just in front of the sign.

And just one more shot of the range to the right. It was such a pretty day. Warm and not too windy.

Wildflowers were blooming all over. This is Broadleaf Lupine...a favorite of mine.

It was growing in tufts all over the hillside.

We took a little trail over to the other side of the ridge. Now...we need to get the rules straight. Please don't make me tell you twice.

Along the way we passed this "Cow Parsnip." I would have thought this was yarrow, and I would have been wrong.

It grew in big bunches.

Here's a bud just opening...it was about the size of my fist.

And there was more. I believe these are marigolds.

Not surprisingly, these are the same wildflowers that bloom on Mt. Rainier, about 200 miles away, as the crow flies. This is Indian Paintbrush.

I may have seen this next one before, but I'd never identified it. When I noticed it was fragrant, I yelled to Mike to take a sniff, and then I read the rest of the sign. Okay. Never mind.

It was windy, and I tried several times to get an in-focus picture. They're small...about the size of a standard cotton ball.

From the other side of the ridge, this is what we saw. That sliver of white toward the bottom of the picture is a small glacier.

Here are a couple of signs explaining what you're seeing.

We took a short looping trail back to the parking lot. Along the way, I noticed this tree stump. It looked out of place there with the evergreens.

This sign was nearby.

Here's another view of this side. That's British Columbia off in the distance.

The path was paved through a tunnel of trees.

It took us back to the parking lot, and we headed back down the hill after a short visit. We had other things on our agenda for the day. I wanted to visit at least one lavender farm. As it turns out, Sequim is the lavender capital of North America. Conditions are favorable to its growth in this part of Washington, and farmers have answered the call. The weekend before our arrival was the Lavender Festival. We picked up a driving guide while we were at the visitor center in Port Angeles, but then ended up stopping at the first farm we came to.

When we planned this trip, we didn't know anything about the lavender grown here, and so this was a nice surprise. And, oh, the color. Lavender is one of my favorite things in the whole wide world...next to cats, of course...and so it was a treat to visit this farm.

This particular farm also happens to be a Bed & Breakfast. There were rows of lavender plants.

And also rows of wildflowers.

And don't you know that this was bee heaven. They seemed to be growing a mix similar to my bee garden from last year.

There was godetia.

And poppies.

And more colors of godetia.

And blue cornflowers.

And pink cornflowers.

I really wanted to check out the gift shop. Outside was this display of bird houses.

Inside there were all sorts of products...lotions...teas...butters... lotions. I was interested in some culinary buds for when we make our Bees Knees cocktails. I had some from our own plants drying at home, but this was clean and prepped, and so what the heck?

Okay, and from there, we headed to a quilt shop. I'll tell you about the quilt shop tomorrow.

Today I need to get out and whack back the sage plant for the second time this year. It has grown so large it is inundating the chive plants again. I want chives for chive blossom vinegar next year. And, to be clear, I want chives for chives too. There's one other small housekeeping chore on today's calendar, and then I want to finish off those borders. It's another busy day ahead, and it's going to get hot today. It's best to get started early on the yard work. The basement sewing room will be nice and cool this afternoon.