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 ...
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| 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 ...
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| 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 ...
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| 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 ...
