- Assemblage doodling: Another impression of New Mexico

Don's already playing around with bits and pieces from yesterday's Junkology field trip ...

Note: the roadrunner is an old adding machine cash register key

He's definitely got New Mexico on his mind ... and I'd better get some rust dyeing done before he bolts everything down!

- Black Friday: The jaunt to Junkology

We've been to Junkology before (see the new index link to the right, along with one for By the Bridge, another one of our favorite suppliers) ... finding bits of board and rusty metal for Don's folk art fish and assemblages.  So how could we resist a 50% off sale on Black Friday?

Resist we didn't ...

And this time I was "all in" looking for metal to use for rust dyeing ... 

while Don got a personal tour of the board inventory from Shawn (who now sees us coming a mile away) ...

'Twill be fun to see what comes of it all ...

- Love letters: Burning words into wood

While I'm pretty new to hand-lettering, Don's been at it for some time. Except where I stitch with needle and thread, he wields a wood burning tool of his dad's that was originally used for feathering duck decoys.

This is his most recent project, intended to encourage us to drink more ...

It's like back stitch in burn marks ...

He's also crafted mementos of significant events during our time in Texas (although this one needs a bit of updating) ...

including these two bits of windfall oak perched on a shelf in the kitchen ...

My all-time favorite poses the perennial question ...

Although today the answer is "Neither ... " because home is where my heart is.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

- A river ran through it: Scenes from a gully-washer

                             

Even though we live in drought much of the time, every year or so we get enough rain that our homestead becomes waterfront property. Of course, by the time the thunderstorms pass through and we get out to the flood plain, there's not much left of it ...

We were fortunate this time around that we didn't get 7 inches, as we did during the Halloween 2013 flooding. Even so, 4.3 inches of rain is enough to fill a copper dye pot ...

freshen up the windfall lichens ... 

beat down the "bad grasses" and leave the little bluestem standing tall ...

wash all the acorns down the driveway ...

where they can be gathered along with the oak galls ...

and douse the burn pit, readying it for another day ...

There's so much promise in the land, just waiting for the seeds to fall ...

                               

- Bell bottom blues: Boro-style saves the day

                                             

My favorite jeans played a supporting role in yesterday's post about Pitt pen lettering and were called out by a couple of sharp-eyed commenters.

So here, as promised, is the back story of how they came to be. As you can see, I wear my jeans a bit on the long side, a habit I acquired over 40 years ago and never let go ...

This particular pair of Levi's was a rare find ... a perfect fit in a soft denim. But after a couple of years, the knees shredded, leading me to patch them last March.  Since then, they've been laundered repeatedly, but by and large the raw edges have held ...

                                              

The knee patches were necessary since the denim had already worn through, but I discovered that they didn't exactly lie flat ...

And so, realizing the thighs of the jeans were rapidly approaching the shred point, I decided to try stitch alone as the way to reinforce them. First vertically and horizontally ...

then diagonally ...

 

  

It worked ... and because the stitching was done in cotton floss, there is a softness that has a very appealing tactile quality.

So there you have it ... the beginning of my journey into a new way of looking at needlework not just as a decorative art, but as a functional one.

- Being brave: Lettering with a Pitt pen

I have never been satisfied with my handwriting ... scrawl really. And so at first I tried using rubber stamps to letter my work, but the size was too fixed, the letters too regular.

Then I tried  writing in my own hand using water erasable markers, but the lines were so heavy that it wasn't much fun.

So this time I decided to use the permanent ink Pitt pen ... worried that I would make a mistake halfway through and ruin a piece of cloth ... deciding to use a scrap of rust-dyed cotton muslin that hadn't taken a strong image of Don's wonky metal thing ... I could always try again.

The point of the Pitt pen was so fine it surprised me when it didn't catch on the cloth. I lettered TRIANGULATION with such care ... holding my breath.

Then stopped and wrote out the rest of the words on paper, just to see. And it looked okay, so I wrote them on the cloth. Faster at first, until I stumbled on the "f"  in "from" at the end of the first line. Then slower.

And when I finished, I wished I had left more room at the bottom of the cloth, but I didn't and it was okay.

I basted the rust-dyed cloth onto a piece of lichen-dyed muslin and began to stitch ... one strand of floss in a short, fine needle ...

stitches so small they made my heart happy ... even the wonky "f" ...

Don asked me if I had printed the text out on the computer somehow ... he has the perfect, regular hand of an elementary school teacher who has written on blackboards for decades ... it was the best thing he could have said.

And the two layers of cloth together ... how is that that I never realized how much easier it would be to stitch through two thin layers rather than one?

                                     

Thank you Jude for this revelation. 

Addendum: Here's the link to the jeans in the background ... I've posted an update on their current condition

- Triangulation: What's in a name ...

The woven cloth pillow now has a name, a story (inspired by maps like this one) and its own index entry ...

                             

And while the cloth is still oblong ...

it will eventually become a square pillow ...

                                         

Of course there are still lots of details to be stitched on ...

and nothing is set in stone ...

but I'd say it's well on its way.

- Back stories: Cloth and stone projects come together

The woven cloth base for the pillow is finally stitched together and ready for the embellishment phase. I decided to hang it in the window for this picture, which clearly shows where I did and did not get the cloth strips close together ...

Live and learn ... next time I will try working smaller pieces of woven cloth and then join them together into a larger piece. Of course, that's what Jude Hill  suggests in Cloth to Cloth, but there's nothing like doing it "wrong" to learn it "right."

I also discovered that the running stitch was not nearly as effective as backstitch in stabilizing the cloth ...

Close-up detail of back ...
note that I'm not too concerned about cutting off thread ends

which I realized about a quarter of the way through ...

The lower quarter worked in running stitch,
the upper three-quarters worked in back stitch

I also found myself more comfortable doing back stitch, which you can see here was discontinuous, so it actually resembles a running stitch ...

The square shown here is about 2" to a side ...
the stitches are worked with 2 strands of floss, not necessarily the same color

Next up: I have some "opportunities" in the form of those gaps between some of the cloth strips ... it will be interesting to see how stabilizing them becomes part of the cloth's story.

However, now that it's cooler we are in prime landscaping season (which hopefully means we're somewhat less apt to encounter snakes ... or that they'll move a bit slower if we do). So there will be more time spent outside cutting scrubby brush (acacia, Yaupon, persimmon, and agarita) and whacking prickly pear cactus to encourage growth of our prairie grasses (little bluestem, yellow indiangrass, side-oats grama, and buffalo grass, among others).

Don has also started another rock garden bed out back by the burn pit ...

using home-grown compost and some decomposed granite (from the walkway project) to enrich the clay soil ... limestone and chert nodules "harvested" from the side yard ... red yuccas rescued from a nearby neighborhood garden renovation ... and leftover landscape cloth. Which means the total project will require no current out-of-pocket expenditure ... just a little (ha) effort to get everything together ...

And while Don places each stone by hand, I'm working on covering the ugly composite concrete in the burn pit (see yesterday's post) with bucket-loads of floodplain stones. Final pictures pending ...

- Getting back to basics: Brunswick Stew

When I first started writing this blog, it was mostly about food and the recipes I wanted to share with my daughters. These days, I refer back to the blog recipes rather than look in my old cookbooks, but today I was surprised to find that I had never blogged Brunswick Stew. Nor could I find it in written form, so this is my attempt to replicate it.

A little background. Long ago, my kids attended Williamsburg Community Child Care, which was located in a little frame house and sort of affiliated with the College of William and Mary. Everyone paid on a sliding scale and there was never as much money to run it as was needed. And so, there were the inevitable fund raisers.

Fortunately for us, we had some creative folks on board. Ed and Emily Pease suggested we make Brunswick Stew, cook it all night over an open fire, and then sell it on a fall football Saturday. They had a recipe, we had lots of able hands, and somehow we managed the pull the whole thing together so well that we repeated the fundraiser for years afterward.

- Scent-sational: Clean sheets and wood smoke

There's been some talk over at Grace's Windthread about the joy of air-dried sheets ... to which I would add the scent of wood smoke on a cold clear day ...

This was a fairly modest burn pile, only 6-8' in diameter and about 3' high. We got through all the accumulated  dead wood and brush in only three hours, compared to our last burn which was an all-day affair.

Since we don't have water piped out to the flood plain, we damped down the fire with cactus pads ...

 and having finished so quickly, we've already started piling up more brush for the the next time.

- Triangulation: An idea for the pillow takes shape

It really is too big at 22x38 inches, but I'm determined to finish the woven cloth base for the pillow (shown here and here). There are parts that do not lie flat, but I've already envisioned stitching down tucks in the cloth, like folds of land.

Because what this is becoming in my mind (at least for now) is a record of our journey from San Marcos to Santa Fe to Saint Louis and back. The squares remind me of fields and their edges remind me of latitudes and longitudes ... the colors remind me of New Mexico's purple mountains and golden trees ... the stitches remind me of the endless miles of highway.

Then the most recent dye patch came out looking sun-like, which in turn made me think of a small woven patch I made last summer that is just like the crescent moon that rose over the Sangre de Cristo mountain range on our last morning at Ravens Ridge.

And as I pondered these things, Don came in with a half-sawed bit of rusted metal garden tool destined for his next folk art fish saying, " I know you like to get pictures in progress ... and wouldn't this be a cool shape for your dyeing?"

Yes and yes ...

- Cutting to the chase: Progress on dyeing

I've been taking pictures as I go and realized today that I have a fair bit of catching up to do. So I'll cut to the chase ...

Rust, red onion, and windfall lichen on linen

The picture above shows samples my more successful dyeing attempts, including vinegar-induced rust on Don's grody road-find ...

Grody road-find to the left is 3" in diameter

Love Potion #9 alum and red onion "preserves" ...

I wanted to see if fresh cut onion works as well as onion skins.
Turns out it does as long as the onion is firmly in contact with the cloth

and India Flint inspired windfall lichen bundled in linen and poached for an hour in a hotpot full of tap water (after which it was left to cool overnight) ...

Note: I gathered well over two quarts of windfall lichen on our property in less than one hour
The canning jar to the left has water added to it, the one to the right has clear household ammonia

The acacia cassia pod dyeing was far less successful, as the three end products shown below were absolutely not worth the gag-inducing stench that accompanied opening up the canning jars ...

Original sheeting color (top)
Copper wire wrapped (1), Steel wire wrapped (2), and alum mordanted (3)

So, the grody thing has already been restaged with some indigo cotton and a rusty metal cap (found yesterday in the side yard, it nests into the grody thing like they were made for each other). Next time I won't get soooo excited about the results that I forget to put gloves on before picking up the cloth (my black-edged fingernails will be around to remind me for a while, I'm afraid).

I also went ahead and cut my 60-count linen weaving experiments off their shadowbox frame, since I now have a bead loom that is much easier to warp ...

and because one of the bits is needed for another dyeing project. More on that later ...