- Unearthed

They say rocks don't rise up out of the soil. Rather, the soil is washed away, thereby exposing the rocks ... un-earthing them.

Patch #53: Rust-dyed linen

The story behind today's patch is actually two stories. It began when Don found an unusual rock on the floodplain, surely a fossil.

"Look it up," I suggested. And so he did, finding first an image ...

Fossil a-side

and then a description ...

Fossil b-side

that both seemed to fit what he had in hand. Pleurotomaria glenrosensis most likely, since the Glen Rose formation outcrops in our area. And the Lower Cretaceous dating also fits with our location in Hays County  (although I was later proved to be incorrect as my college roommate showed this post to my Paleontology prof who dissed my ID) ...

How old does that make it? 100-145 million years old. Definitely worthy of a commemorative patch ... but how?

I started pawing through piles of cloth (no other word for my search methodology), which yielded some potentially interesting dye experiments on muslin. Still, they weren't exactly what I had in mind, so I headed back to look some more. And there on the floor, I spotted a small scrap of rusted cloth that had worked its way loose from the overlying cloth strata. I recognized it as a one-time contender for a compass rose on Triangulation ...

but fortunately, it didn't make the cut for that project. Because really, when turned to the back it became the perfect solution ...

Wouldn't you say?