- Remember

For the past several years I have chosen one-word "resolutions" for the new year ahead: Create (2012), Blog (2013) and Stitch (2014). Easy to remember, flexible in their application, and ultimately successful, they have been gratifying. More to the point, they have become lifelong habits. Stitch even became a new index term in 2015, replacing the more traditional term Needlework in recognition of my journey toward new forms of creative expression as documented in the examples below.

So picking the word for 2016 should have been easy, right? Not so much. There are so many things I want to do: learn to draw (better), organize photographs (finally), start some of the many project ideas that have accumulated (maybe even finish some others), and gracefully enter the next decade of my life (yes, I will turn 60 just before the summer solstice).

Today the word for 2016 finally came to me: Remember ...


Remember to create, blog, and/or stitch every day ... remember the good times from the past 59 years ... remember to have fun ... remember to organize the pictures ... remember to celebrate what has already been accomplished.

Therefore, without further ado, I will begin remembering with a look back at what I stitched in 2015, some done, some not, but all of it a wonderful learning experience (with thanks to Jude Hill for pointing out that I "Learn by Playing").

The new year began with the completion of several Christmas presents
(note: the pictures have links to posts related to the making of each cloth) ...

Close Your Eyes I for Jackson

Close Your Eyes II for Griffin

Triangulation for Don

Don and I collaborated on a number of his assemblages, including this homage to Pueblo kachinas ...

One of many pieces inspired by our travels in New Mexico

Sash details

A series of explorations into Jude Hill's techniques resulted in the Table Series as they all ended up serving time in the dining room ...

Tea dyed linen

Rust dyed from a cheese grater

Linen cloth weaving, ultimately lichen dyed

The Turquoise Trail, another New Mexico memory piece

Dyeing was a major component of the year and was a contender for 2016 word of the year ...

Dramatic results from Thimble Flowers that later faded away

Gifts also figured into the year ...

Blue Heron ... a 70th birthday gift

7809 Orisha ... 
a housewarming gift from the Kitchen Towel Series

Some projects got started, but then were put aside ...

Austin Skyline

Armadillo Road

Rightly making way for more important projects ...

Hearts for Charleston

By the Bridges II

While the peace flag made in 2014 made its way to India Flint's Solace Project in Australia ...

Sew/Sow Peace, end of 3rd row/beginning of 4th row

Last, but far from least, I began the Patchplay series of posts that documented the development of my own take on traditional patchwork ...

Beginning to put it all together

Embellishing with hand-drawn stitch

Becoming The Land of Flood and Drought

There was more, enough to fill a year's worth of blog posts (128 and counting) with some left over to begin the new year (Christmas presents and more of Don's assemblages from the Porch Series chief among them). But I'm going to stop here so I can get ready to go out and celebrate our 38th wedding anniversary ... another remembrance.

- Seeing things another way

A couple of years ago I persuaded Don to buy a funky, but beautifully patinated chaise lounge at By the Bridge. My plan was to cut off the back and convert it into an outdoor coffee table for the breezeway. Long story short, it didn't work out.

So, the chaise sat on the back deck, unused. Until one day, one of us saw it another way ...

It is now a container garden populated by herbs happily soaking up the Texas sun ...

because of course we just happened to have long, skinny containers that fit perfectly between the bars of the seat. The potted plants we purchased in October have settled in quite well. The top row is planted with arugula (making a comeback after being harvested for a Christmas dinner salad with roasted carrots) and cilantro. The middle row has shallots (which substitute well for chives or scallions), leaf lettuce (started from seed) and parsley. The bottom row has mint, more leaf lettuce, and thyme. 

And yes, the lettuce is recovering from the hail storm two nights ago. We may get to eat it yet!

- Awww hail ...

I knew I should've taken a picture of our lettuce sooner ...

Hail stones somewhere between pea and small marble size

- Stitching the Land of Flood and Drought

I couldn't wait to start stitching, so I didn't ...

A single piece of linen has been basted onto my patchplay and I've begun adding Kantha to the beginning of the cloth while waiting for the final days of 2015 to reveal  its ending.

- From our home to yours ...

Wishes for peace, love, and happiness ...

- The morning after the night before ...

Lovin' the cousins ... and wondering if they slept in their boots.

- By the Bridges again

Addendum: Sale of the flags raised $15,000 for the monument. A picture of the flags on the Blanco can be seen here.
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Don's boot for the Blanco ended up raising $175 for the Blanco River Monument. Since there was a second fundraiser involving peace flags, I decided to make one, too ...

Grace will recognize the rusted cloth that makes up the boot, but it will take close-ups to recognize the Subaru radiator insides that make up the two bridges ...

The upper right patch is dyed with rosemary for remembrance ... for the
now-razed By the Bridge antique store that was irreparably damaged in the Halloween flood

Grace also figured in the Wimberley sign, which was dyed with her black walnuts

The Shibori dyed indigo was made during the natural dyeing workshop at Maura Ambrose's last month ... 

Panorama view

One last look at the back ...

 

then it was taken over to Art on 12 one hour before the deadline. I hope to post a picture of all the flags flying over the Blanco River, planned for early 2016.

- Good news, bad news

Mo's most beautiful Christmas card arrived ...

Transported VIA AIRMAIL from the land down under ...

So carefully crafted one can almost feel its textures, wishing it could be so.

It has been a consolation, getting lost in its tracery whilst contemplating the bad news ...

our new car, with a mere 197 miles on it, the agent of a randy buck's demise at 55 miles per hour. 

- Freestyling an Inktense palette

I've said it more times than I can count, but I've never met a recipe that I followed exactly. So why change now?

Sharon Tomlinson is doing a wonderful free online class over on her blog The Cloth Side of Me and today's video was about creating an Inktense color library since the color at the end of each pencil is not a reliable guide.

For better or worse, I actually have a 48 color set of Inktense pencils, which is why I gulped realizing how challenging it was going to be to keep track of them all. So I changed Sharon's suggested technique a bit by making a square of each color on wet linen ...

then brushed the colors out with a damp paintbrush, touched them up with a bit more pencil, ironed them dry, and cut them into thin strips ...

After that, I attached them to the pencils with Matte Mod Podge, twisting some of the strips around as I belatedly realized that it would be helpful to have the most intense color visible over the name on each pencil ...

I'm halfway through and cautiously optimistic this will do the trick ...

- Let your light shine

Oh my goodness ... I just looked through my photos and realized how much I have yet to post! First off, an addendum to the last post, in which I neglected to show a backlit version ...

Note: I've also started to stitch months next to the rainfall totals

and the B-side...

It warmed my heart when three-year-old Griffin looked at the cloth Land of Flood and Drought and said, "It's beautiful. It looks like the blocks PopPop made for me." Here's a picture of that as a work in progress ...

and in its final form ...

Not the best lighting

The colors are a bit truer in this close-up, which shows Griffin inserting the removable orange G block (his favorite color, which you would expect from a kid growing up in longhorn territory) ...

I also have gotten permission from Maura Ambrose to post pictures of her work, so I'll be writing a follow-up about her natural dyeing workshop soon.

But for now, here's a picture of Spike, our unicorn deer neighbor ...

He's not saying how that happened ...

- Land of Flood and Drought

This is what my patchplay has led to ...

a record of the rain that has fallen on our Hill Country land,
measured in one inch patches of blue ...

surrounded by patches of sunlight and sun-baked rock.

It's a far cry from my first arrangement of white linen patches back in August before I added colored linens and over-dyed the patches with Prairie Tea ...

The idea to make the cloth a record of the year's rainfall came early in October ...

Bottom third: January - April
Middle third: May and the Memorial Day floods
Top third: June - September (including 0" in July)

before the Halloween flood pushed the monthly total to 19 inches ... almost as much as the total rainfall for 2011 in the Austin area.

So the end of the cloth awaits the final rainfall for November and December ...

Hopefully not more than 12 inches

Meanwhile, I'll ponder how to back and stitch the piece while working on Christmas presents.