- And still it rains: Gully washers in the Hill Country

It began with the hail, clattering down off the roof. Then thunder and lightning cracking overhead, over and over. Three and one-half inches of rain in a couple of hours ... again. The rain falling harder than we've ever seen it, flowing straight toward the house, then parting at the last second ...

After the deluge

going northeast to the left or northwest to the right through some unseen agency. 

We ventured out after the thunder finally receded into the east, the sun glinting out in the west. Having seen the floodplain roil with water from the distant safety of the house, we sloshed through still-moving water ...

to find Sink Creek twice the width of the last storm, already receding ...

Looking upstream to the west

Debris hanging in the bushes told the tale of the water's passage ...

Let the record show that the water was at least two feet deeper at some point

Then we went down to the low water crossing two houses away ... it is ten feet below street level and usually bone dry. There we found Sink Creek raging through the storm pipes, just a few feet below street level, a dead tree wedged above the water, testimony to a higher cresting point ...

more water still flowing down the street ...

Sink Creek looking downstream

headed for the Blanco River.

Our house is 1000' above sea level, just 100' from the highest point in our neighborhood and a mere 3.5 inches of rain created this roaring stream. I try to imagine the Blanco, at 800' of elevation and five miles away, receiving this much water in multiples beyond my reckoning. And I am once again humbled by the immensity of it all.

Addendum:

Our neighbors headed out to the low water crossing during the final minutes of the storm ...

 and captured this image of Sink Creek at road level, with a wave obscuring the 1' mark ...

- Blue sky and sunshine: Dyeing with thimble flowers and mountain pinks

Yes, that really is blue sky peeking through the leaves of the persimmon ...

Dark maroon Thimble Flower petals wrapped in cotton muslin with copper wire
Pre-mordanted with soy milk, steeped overnight in a copper pot with alum, vinegar and water

and sunshine dancing on the cloth ...

Mountain pink flowers, stems and leaves wrapped in cotton muslin with copper wire
Pre-mordanted with soy milk, steeped overnight in a copper pot with alum, vinegar and water

Addendum (for Patricia):

Rusted metal roadrunner in one of Don's rock gardens (definitely not a chicken)

For those who are interested: Austin American Statesman coverage of the Memorial Day flooding

- Just be(e)ing: Exploring the Art.Science.Gallery in East Austin

Another gray day ... hot and humid ... no rain the the forecast, but raining nonetheless.

More sadness in the papers, more tragedy born of flood.

And in the midst of it all, we found art. More specifically Art.Science.Gallery ... on the east side of Austin, it turned out to be one of many galleries and studios in The Canopy, to which we will surely return.

The Buzz Stops Here was in its last week. Having read that the exhibit was focused on encaustic and bees, I figured it would be worth a look. I figured rightly.

Most of the pieces took full advantage of the soft golden hues of beeswax and honey. Two in particular made me reach for my camera (after ascertaining that photography was permitted, of course). 

The Dead Bee Scrolls by Harriette Tsosie...

from which hexagonal cells of waxen kozo paper ...

fell to the floor like so many dead bees ...

And Golden Harmony by Diane Kleiss ---

with finely wrought dimensionality ...

Note the fine golden thread in the center of the flower

and detail ...

All more artfully photographed and described in this online catalog, but there's something about trying to capture images for oneself that helps recall the quietude of moments spent just looking, appreciating the gift of be(e)ing ...

- Safe: Memorial Day flooding in Wimberley

Note: this post was written on Sunday, May 24. Details on the flood have since been updated in the local news and broadcast media.

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It's never good when your hometown makes national weather news, as we did today in the NY Times ...

Our home, located on high ground midway between Wimberley and San Marcos, is fine. However, flooding downstream has knocked out our internet, leaving us with limited news access. We did drive down Ranch Road 12 toward Wimberley, but were turned back at the bridge ...

The river crested over 40' last night, covering the bridge with water and debris, stripping away guard rails and doing who knows what structural damage.

Standing 40 yards from the still-roaring Blanco River, we looked around us and realized there was debris caught in the tree branches over our heads ...

bark had been flayed from wood ...

cloth hung suspended ...

a house was torn from its foundations ...

just one of 350 many homes swept away. Three Wimberley residents are still missing. Twelve people died.

We are humbled by this incredible show of nature's force ... and thankful to be safe.

- Only one out of eleven, but no complaints: Wildflower dye trials

Well, the re-dye trial results were pretty disappointing overall. The steel wrapped cloths were gray-day sad and most of the copper wraps were ho-hum yellows.

But there was one happy exception: the burgundy and gold petals from the Mexican hats ... 

So the new plan is to wash out the steel wraps ...

and the copper wraps ...

then over-dye them all with as many Mexican hat petals as I can harvest before the flowering season ends. Shouldn't be too hard to do ...

- In a pickle: Taking a second pass at the dye trials

I decided to do some re-dyeing using cloth from the less-than-wonderful results of my earlier dye trials (I did keep all six of the lichen and onion trials, along with one alum-mordanted Salvia amistad), So seven new bundles for good luck: 

• Mountain pinks (I think) from the floodplain
• Twin-leaf senna ditto
• Mexican hats aka Thimbleflowers with dark burgundy and yellow petals from the side yard (bundled in what I think was the alum-mordanted red cabbage cloth from the previous trial)
• A second Mexican hats bundle with yellow petals only
• Lantana and Indian blankets from the floodplain and garden (mixed together)
• Arugula stems with coffee grounds (fished out of the compost bowl)
• Mealy blue sage (reapplied to the previous alum-mordanted mealy blue trial)

All wrapped in copper wire and steeped in a copper pot for half an hour with alum, vinegar and water (aka pickle juice) ...

Then, four more bundles added later, because there were still some other pieces of cloth that weren't all that great ...

• Dried rosemary (from a spice jar that I think came with us from Virginia six years ago)
• An unidentified woody floodplain herb (probably a weed, but I love the resinous scent ... later identified as Prairie Tea)
• One whole prickly pear flower (which I discovered has spines ... ouch)
• And uh ... something else ... oh, now I remember ... large pieces of windfall lichen (I've used smaller bits in the past, but the recent rains have gifted me with several lichens over 1" in diameter)

All four were re-bundled in the bungled steel wire dye trials, re-wrapped in steel wire and put in the copper pot, which was then rewarmed on a hot plate for 20 minutes or so. A few hours later, because I couldn't leave well enough alone, I tipped all the bundles upright, left them overnight, then found them looking like this in the morning ...

Most (but not all) were labelled with a sepia Pitt pen before being rolled up ... it should be interesting to see if it survives the dye pot. Also, all the dyestuffs were laid out and folded as they were here, but at right angles to the previous dye trials, fold lines from which were still visible in varying degrees of faded-ness. I was hoping to get a nine-patch effect, but at this point I'm sort of disappointed to see that there isn't much happening along the fold lines.

Now the question is, how long to wait ...

- Measure twice, stitch once: Building a house of cloth

I love precision. The careful counting of threads on an unmarked cloth  ...

Single strand of DMC cotton floss back stitched on 50 count linen

And I come by this obsession honestly. First, influenced by my cousins, whose Norwegian relations introduced them to counted cross stitch long before it made its way to the States. Then, as an aspiring Needleworker for Colonial Williamsburg (where I created my own dream job, then walked away ... long story), influenced by the Ann Pasteur Maupin sampler acquired in 1981 and pictured here. Worked by a ten year old, the b-side of the sampler was virtually the same as the front. You can also see the sampler reproduced here in kit form  (I just discovered the link today).

In the beginning of my own counted stitching I had relied on even-weave cotton cloths like Hardanger and Aida to regulate my stitches ... then graduated to evenly woven linen, with its variations in thread thickness. I quickly learned that cross stitches could slide under a tabby weave, the desired diagonal becoming an undesirable straight stitch if pulled a little too tight. And thus it became clear to me why Ann Pasteur Maupin was taught a three-part cross stitch: by repeating the first diagonal of the cross the stitch was "locked in" before adding the opposing diagonal, thereby achieving something close to a mirror effect on the b-side ...

B-side of three-part cross stitches

But these days I'm sorta over cross stitch. Been there, done that. Movin' on ...

And yet ... and yet ... I do love precision.

So what's next? A new Kitchen Towel series to warm my daughter's new house, which is currently under construction ...

The living room looking out onto the patio

Local limestone worked by some very talented stonemasons

First in the series will be a rendering of the house plan designed by my son-in-law and drafted by the builder. The base cloth is a piece of Belgian linen from a repurposed duvet cover, the color neither blue nor green ... a color as variable and sensitive to light as the sea and equally hard to capture in a photo. After copying and pasting the house plan PDF into Word (I've just never gotten into PhotoShop, so I make do with what I know) ...

I blocked out the extraneous bits and reprinted the house plan on some "vellum" inkjet paper that I bought some time back, figuring it might come in handy ...

It took a fair bit of time prepping the cloth, first hemstitching the towel at the rate of fifteen doubled stitches per inch over the 14 x 24 inch dimensions (that's 28 plus 48 times 30, almost 2300 stitches) based on one of my favorite towels from the original kitchen towel series ...

After which, harem cloth was obsessively basted to the back: about fifty rows of thirty stitches each ...

In other words, there were nearly 4000 stitches in the cloth before I even began to stitch the house plan ... the plan that had been re-sized and printed to match the towel size without too much thought to ultimate stitch size, believe it or not. But the printout ended up scaled almost perfectly to sixteenths of an inch. Which was helpful, since the linen averaged about three threads to a sixteenth of an inch.

I began stitching the dining room since it was somewhat central, using the dimensions of the inner walls as a guide after discovering that the printed plan was pixilated to a degree that required some fudging of details. Likewise, the variations in linen thread thickness from whisper-thin to slubby added another dimension of uncertainty ...

Still, I found my rhythm and soon began intuiting quarter-inch doorways and single-stitch window frames, inner walls and outer walls, which details to leave in and which to edit out ...

Even so, I was somewhat surprised (and more than a little relieved) when I found myself back in the dining room with all the walls matching up after circling clockwise from bedrooms to great room to master suite to garage. Not that I actually measured twice and stitched once. I confess there were many times I retraced my steps after stitching a line too far. But I'm well pleased with the results ...

A-side

And delighted to learn-by-doing that the harem cloth added a degree of stability that made my counted work much easier than it ever was on plain linen ...

B-side

B-side close-up

Now all that is left to do is add a few more details, baste on another layer of harem cloth as a backing, and quilt the three layers together ... but that's for another day, another post.

- Worth waiting for: On the banks of Sink Creek

Looking upstream

In the nearly five years that we have lived on our homestead I have never seen Sink Creek. Oh, there was evidence of its existence on the aptly named flood plain, but whenever there was a gully washer I was either at work or it was the middle of the night or there was too much thunder and lightning to safely go outside.

Until yesterday, when the storm clouds dumped 3.5 inches of rain in a  few hours, making a river out of our front yard ...

then quickly pushing off to the east, enabling me to finally take a look before the water soaked into the aquifers below. 

Our fire pit, which has stood unused through the recent years of drought, became a nascent mosquito pool ...

So I undammed one end to let the water drain out ...

Slogging through the recently mulched West Trail lichen farm, we were glad to see that our efforts were worthwhile as the water pooled under the branches without breaking through and washing out the path as it had in the past ...

But it was the flood plain that inspired the most excitement. Water was moving, rapidly ...

The creek already receding ... sinking into the earth

and up to a foot deep, carrying with it seeds and silt, Mother Nature's best planting method ...

Indeed, last year's heavy rains carried bluebonnet seeds from upstream where they bloomed for the first time on our property earlier this spring ...

With this most recent deluge, I have no doubt new seeds have been spread even farther downstream.

But it was the voice of the water, chuckling through the rocks, that most delighted me (if only I could figure out how to insert a video into Blogger, you could hear it, too). Instead, I'll just leave you with one last look from the headwaters of Sink Creek ...

Looking downstream

already gone, but not forgotten.