Today is the official last day of summer on the calendar, though summer has been gone up here on my mountain for quite a while.

We have lots of fall color happening, this year we seem to be missing red. Many of our alpine plants that display red foliage in the fall are instead various shades of orange or brick. With all my love of science you would think that I would know why the colors of autumn are different from year to year. Not a chance.

Even without red I am enjoying the changing colors. Our fall color display is very meager compared to what happens in the northeast. Mostly the color change is subtle with the evergreens becoming a darker green and the old needles adding a tinge of rust color before dropping.

The aspen trees are gold again, though some of the trees on our property skipped the gold stage and went straight to brown. Others were speckled heavily with dark brown spots. Fortunately for my photography attempts there were a few making a pretty display against the blue sky the other afternoon.

In hopes of improving some of my photographs I bought this set of lens to use with the camera on my phone. The set has 3 different lens, a Fish-eye, wide-angle and macro. The macro lens is actually part of the wide-angle lens. In fact, that has been the only issue I have with the set so far, it’s a bit tricky getting the wide-angle lens attached to the macro lens.

They all fix very compactly inside the handy carrying pouch, and it is all small enough that I can put them in my pocket when I am taking photos.

I decided to try some of them out yesterday on my way home from “Casual Crochet Wednesday” at the Longmont Yarn Shoppe. I’ve been wanting to get a good photo of a particular section of the mountainside along the road up to my house. These scrubby bushes have been showing some beautiful orange leaves the past week and I knew they would be gone very soon. It was a little over-cast this afternoon, but I had a lot of fun clambering around and taking photos.

I used the fish-eye for this shot.

This is a similar shot using the wide-angle. You can see how the Fish-eye lens distorted the trees. I don’t have any macro shots for you right now. The macro lens is for really close-up shots, like less than 2cm from the object.

This is a shot of the same scene without any additional lens. In many ways I thought the regular lens captured the color of the foliage better.

Once I was back home I got to admire my new yarn purchases. I needed a couple more colors of Berroco “Vintage” for my project I’ve been working away on. I’ll be able to share more about that in a couple of weeks.

I also got this lovely ball of Ella Rae “Seasons”, this is a fun color changing yarn that you may recognize from my Corner-to-Corner Scarf projects last fall. I worked a couple of samples with it. This ball is destined for a little experiment that is related to the project I’m using the “Vintage” for.  Are you curious now? Don’t worry all will be revealed.

Of course, just to give myself a bit of a carrot, I purchased this awesome tube of colorful fiber from Frabjous Fibers out of Vermont. I’ll be using it for needle-felting. Now I have to stay focused on the other projects before I can play with it.

That might not have been my best plan though. I really want to play with this gorgeous fiber. Each color has lovely tonal changes in it and is going to be perfect worked into some fun sculptural pieces. I’ll be combining this fiber with some of the fiber that I got on my trip to the Scotts Bluff Valley Fiber Arts Fair.

Before too long I’ll likely be posting photos of our first snowfall, though I’m really hoping it will wait until October. I hope those of you that have been tormented with extremely hot summers are experiencing some cooler temperatures now. Enjoy the autumn colors, I know I am.