- Marking time

Don found a wonky piece of metal on our trip to Llano that has since become a clock for our back porch ...

He may embellish it further, but for now we'll enjoy it as is.

While he was putting the finishing touches on the the clock, I went in to check on my bread, which was a bit more exuberant than usual so I took a picture ...

And in looking at it, the little Kantha patch on the bread towel caught my eye ...

This towel gets used and laundered about once a week (which is why it had a hole in it to begin with), so I was pleased to see how well my mending from a year ago has held up ...

Last, but not least ... Don and I went to Austin yesterday to plant some feather grass, agaves, and Blackfoot daisies at our daughter's house in anticipation of it going on the market (anyone looking for a place in 78704?).

It's been exciting watching their new house go up, especially for two year old Griffin ...

So Don, aka PopPop, snagged some scrap wood and made "Griffin's house" to commemorate the framing of his soon-to-be new home ...

When G tried to open the door, which was glued on, he concluded, "It's locked ... need a key!"

All in good time, Griff.

- Of books and backs

Anne Lamott and Anna Quindlen are two of my all-time favorite authors (see links in the OTHER ARTISTS AND AUTHORS sidebar to the right). So, when I read a library copy of Anne Lamott's Stitches, I thought it would be cool to get my own copy and stitch the best passages, rather than underline them as I usually do. Initially unable to find a copy readily available, I decided to apply the same idea to Anna Quindlen's Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake ...

It's been interesting trying out backstitch ...

and double running stitch ...

versus plain running stitch ...

But honestly, at this point I'm not quite sure how I feel about it ... so I'm letting the idea compost for a while.

Meanwhile, I'm still plugging away on Triangulation (65 squares stitched, 95 to go). Taking a cue from Grace, I hung it in a window (which was only partially sunlit) and took some pictures of the back (so east is to the left and west is to the right) ...

Here's the B-side of the arch in St Louis, where the only thing holding the cloth strips together is running stitch and some embellishing stitches ...

This view shows intersecting horizontal and vertical running stitches - an attempt to better fill the gaps in the cloth weaving ...

Tulsa, Oklahoma at the intersection of I-44 and I-75

And this view shows how much more substantial the back stitch proved to be in stabilizing the cloth weaving (fortunately, I figured that out about a quarter of the way into the initial stitching) ...

The flip side of southbound 35, Austin and San Marcos

As I've mentioned before, never will I ever again cloth-weave sheeting and back it with Harem cloth. Besides which, what was I thinking tackling a piece this size to begin with? But I must say continues to be an interesting exercise in problem solving.

Postscript: Southbound 35 is what I slip in the CD player when we cross the Red River from Oklahoma into Texas ...

- Learning the hard way (as usual): The sheeting challenge

I looked back to check, and yes ... there in the very first comment of the very first post on Triangulation was this warning from Beth at Still Life Pond: "Sheeting can be difficult to hand stitch."

But did I listen? No! 

She was right of course and I have learned by doing that sheeting is a challenging cloth indeed. My needle test did not take into account the doubling effect of cloth weaving. Nor did my running stitch predict the challenge sheeting would pose to a fine back stitch.

Still, I'm too far in to give up now.

By the way, I somehow miscounted the squares (which are 1 1/2 to 2 inches to a side). There are 16 rows of 10, not 17 rows of 11. So, having now stitched 40 squares, I'm one quarter of the way through ...

- A window on my world: Walking the land

I begin most days here, sitting by the front window, my cup of thread ends and trusty Fiskars close at hand ...

However, with the tipping point of spring having been reached, I now find myself drawn outside earlier in the day, no longer needing to wait until afternoon for the sun to warm things up.Yesterday, I walked the land to take some pictures, like this agave for Mo who loves how the leaves imprint on one another ...

Right across from the agave, our crazy wind vane is a favorite perch for the Carolina wrens, so I left them some thread ends for their nests ...

Close by, Don's latest rusted bucket awaited a new tenant ...

while just beyond, the lichen-crusted driftwood anticipated the new crop of mealy blue sage growing up behind it ...

Everywhere I walked I smelled the soft honeyed scent of agarita ...

my eyes catching every so often on bright red Yaupon berries still left after a winter of critter foraging ...

I walked the new wood mulch trails ...

leading out to the flood plain ...

where wildflowers were already  rising up to greet the sun ...

and the bluebonnets showed the promise of more to come ...

Surveying the compost rows ...

I thought to look up ...

then heard the clarion call of sandhill cranes wheeling overhead in a thermal before reforming their northward-bound V ...

Lichen was growing ...

on rocks harvested from the floodplain and carefully placed in the succulent garden ...

although most of our flowers get planted by Mother Nature, like this stand of thimble flowers ...

The grasses were greening up so quickly I could almost see them grow ...

some racing ahead of the pack, already setting seed ...

And when I came at last to the breezeway, where Don was preparing the outdoor shower for the next three seasons ...

I startled one of our anoles into a brown funk ...

But after reconsidering me as friend rather than foe, he reverted to a relaxed green ...

and pulled up a chair ...

the better to enjoy the breezeway ...

- The tipping point: Celebrating spring and fall

It may have been raining outside, but it's been a fun day in the blogosphere ... first enjoying the Hill Country cloth beaming in New Mexico on Windthread, then peering at the delightful thread beads over at Saskia's Birdhut, and finally revisiting some Spirit Cloth lessons as I stitched more Kantha into Triangulation.

But best of all was discovering Cooking with Cats in today's post over at It's Crow Time (where they are tipping into Autumn as we tip into Spring). During our back and forth in the comments, Mo revealed that Rod (aka Old Man Crow) had a killer recipe for Drambuie Pancakes (aka crepes) in the cookbook. I love Drambuie ... and just happened to have some on hand.

Luckily for us, a light supper of onion soup and Torpedo Extra IPA was on the menu, so there was room for dessert.Of course, I never follow a recipe exactly, so with apologies to Rod, I went back to a very early blog post for my favorite crepe recipe, cutting it in half for dessert portions.

I gathered my ingredients ...

Fired up four crepes ...

Discovered that my trusty iPhone is ice cream proof ...

And therefore managed a shot of assembly ...

leading to a delicious finished product ...

And yes, we needed both forks and spoons, lest we miss a single drop. Yum!

- Christmas season continues: A return to Triangulation

Someone posted recently about gift giving (forgive me, I can't recall who it was). The gist of it was that gifts given spontaneously, especially upon completion of a handmade piece, can be much more satisfying than gifts given on calendar-driven deadlines.

Having already embraced the concept of "Birthday Season" it was a fairly short leap to "Christmas Season" ... which is what I am now calling the period of time it takes to complete all the gifts I intended to give last Christmas.

In fact, I only managed to get one handmade Christmas gift given on time: the kitchen towel All Roads Lead to the Beach. But I gave myself a pass on the Close Your Eyes books since my grandsons are still too young to mind the lapse.

So now that I have finished the books for Jace and Griffin, I am returning to a belated gift for Don: Triangulation ...

I'm actually glad I took a break from it since I learned a lot in the process of making the other pieces and in following other blogs. For instance, there is Grace's current project wherein she is intentionally stitching folds into cloth. This released me from the angst I experienced when I realized my insufficient invisible basting had led to excess folds of cloth in Triangulation. Now I'm embracing the folds, happily incorporating them ...

I also discovered during Close Your Eyes 2 that I prefer a single strand of floss to two in many cases. As a result, I am enjoying the rhythmic repetition of single-thread Kantha stitch combined with the mantra "om mani padme hum" (another gift from Grace ...but for those of you who have observed my spiritual pursuits in the past, this doesn't necessarily mean I'm embracing Buddhism) ...

And because my alternating horizontal and vertical blocks of Kantha were inspired in part by Saskia over at the Birdhut, I would be remiss if I didn't include a picture of the B-side for her ...

So settle in folks, I've got 13 squares down and 174 to go. It's gonna be a long Christmas season for sure.