Eye Candy Tuesday

Here in SoCal we are well into Spring. The roses are bursting out, the deciduous trees (yep, we have some of those!) are leafing out in a hurry, and we've planted tomatoes. Here are a few roses from the yarden Chez CBM. I'm not a great flower photographer, but the pictures are pretty good if you click on them for a larger view.

This is "Audrey Hepburn," a big, beautiful and fragrant tea rose.









This rose was here when we bought the house . We don't know the name, but it makes lovely masses of deep coral flowers, though sadly it has nearly no scent. I'd call it a grandiflora, since these flowers are head-high to me (5ft 2in) We call it Keystone Coral, after the street we live on.






This is "First Prize", an 'old' tea rose or floribunda, in that it won awards many years ago; I googled for the year but didn't find it. The blossoms of this one can be 5in or more wide. They're awesome when it forms a cluster of buds and they all open into huge blooms.




This yellow grandiflora rose is Gold Medal, and it did indeed win prizes, in the 1990s, I think. Like many yellow roses, or so I understand, this one opens as a deep golden yellow and grows more pale as the flower opens and ages.



This is the Stanback Grapefruit Tree. It was a gift last year from a very good friend. It survived the deep frost we had this year. I was so pleased that it didn't die as our year-old avocado tree did. It's blooming, but I don't know if we'll actually have fruit from it. BTW, it takes as much as a year for grapefruit to ripen.




Yesterday Knitdevil and mehitabel and I met for coffee, lunch and SnB and had a great time. I'm teaching Knitdevil to knit socks, and she's picking it up at a fast rate. Yesterday we knitted the heel flap and turned the heel, but we didn't have enough time to work on the gusset. Next time. I'm knitting an ankle sock so I can show her how the stitches go. That's about all the knitting I've done in the last couple of days. Otherwise, I've swatched unsuccessfully, looking for the 'right' yarn for Berroco's Wren; there's a KAL started at 'The Knitting Channel' knitblog, but I haven't found the yarn.

After seeing some of the goodies that Knitdevil and mehitabel got at a local LYS's 50%-off-everything sale, I zipped over to look for Wren yarn and to pick up a Louisa Harding pattern book; I also grabbed some sock-sized dpns. The yarn in the photo is for a small shawl for a friend of mine just starting chemo.

I may have found the 'right' yarn for Wren, Classic Elite's Provence cotton in basil but I had to order it; they didn't have enough in any color I liked. As it happens, WEBS has just started their 33rd Anniversary sale, and the yarn is on sale there, though only at 30% off; follow the link to the yarn and then to the sale. I hope it gets here sooner than May; WEBS gets pretty far behind with their shipping at their big sales.


Mehitabel gave me all this wonderful yarn for my seniors' charity knitting group. There must be a couple of dozen skeins of Lion Brand's Jiffy yarn, plus variegated acrylics of all sorts, including a large bunch of lovely mint green, which will make a terrific laprobe or two.