awwwww

Today was meant to be a dye post. Yesterday I started dyeing with dandelion root for no other reason than curiosity as I'd never tried dyeing with roots before. But it was only looking like a boring beige so I added dandelion leaves to see what happened - and now it's another boring beige! So I'm just stewing up some onion skins (I've been saving them all winter!) to overdye the beige and see if I can perk it up a bit. But for today I have nothing to show for my efforts so I'll show you some of my favourite pictures from Tuesday when Miss Mouse and I took a quick trip to Kittochside (that is, the National Museum of Rural Life) to see how spring is doing on the farm.

All my pictures of this calf are blurred because he kept stretching towards us - the Ayrshire calves at Kittochside are so friendly. They get used to lots of visitors and love the attention.

And the Pyrenean valerian is on its way up (and up - it gets quite tall eventually). There's loads of it there. From what I've read it was a plant that was introduced, presumably for ornamental reasons, by Scottish landowners and did well, so you'll find it on estates and in the planted woodlands of southern Scotland. Kittochside wasn't farmed much after the 1950s and so never underwent the big changes of modernisation that other farms did. As a result the plant life is particularly rich and you get oddities there that perhaps would have been cleared out elsewhere.


And finally the bluebells (or harebells, if you must) are looking gorgeous. *happy sigh*