Treasures

Mo's card arrived yesterday, along with a number of additions to our assemblage pantry ...

Merry Christmas to us!

Icons

Don: "What are you making?"

Me: "I'm not sure, but I'll let you know when it's done."

Grace-less

I miss Grace. And I'm sure I'm not alone in wandering over to Windthread, even knowing she's no longer there. The Rolling Stones song Wild Horses plays in my mind's ear. Grace always did say she liked Mick Jagger.

Surely she has made her way home to The Hill by now. Tay and Tazmeena and the goats exploring. Grace and Emrie getting acquainted, at long last. A family reunited.

So while waiting for word, this cloth unexpectedly demanded to be made ...

Grace will surely approve of the glue stitching that has bound these Texas-dyed cloths together with Deb Lacativa's hand dyed harem cloth backing. 

I'll let you know what becomes of it.

US

It's done ...

and hung ...

the wonderful puzzle ...

that is US ...

a sampler in bits ...

and pieces ...

of love avowed ...

40 years ago come December 30th ...

Snow!

Two days ago it was 85 degrees ... snow is a rare thing in the Texas Hill Country ...

20 minutes later ...

One hour, one inch ...

and counting ...

Collaboration

We've enjoyed many house guests this year. In order to show why we've fallen in love with Texas, we take them on whirlwind journeys to favorite haunts and we've-been-meaning-to-see sights.

So it was that we found ourselves at Uncommon Objects

http://www.uncommonobjects.com/

(sadly no longer on South Congress Avenue in Austin) where we scored an old Post Office box door. It's been sitting in the garage since last spring, biding its time until the perfect assemblage opportunity presented itself.  

It didn't take long. Don is now in the process of creating a piece to honor our upcoming 40th wedding anniversary. The PO box door was a perfect fit. But what to put in the window?

After poring over old photos, we decided some rust dyed cloth and stitch might be a better fit ...

Can't wait to show you where it ends up ...

Need

I sat with the cloth, The Land as the Crow Flies, for a long time. Hours I think. Looking at it, trying to figure out what it needed. Well, I knew actually, it just wasn't what I wanted to know.

It needed to be quilted. The raw edges of the linen, even after multiple passes of Jude's glue stitch, were simply too unstable.

I had already stitched the elevations of the land in the upper and lower corners, so those became the points between which I drew a single line and began stitching ...

Kantha, one strand of Deb Lacativa's magic floss (sorry Deb, it's too beautiful to call it "dirty") and one strand of variegated floss. Greens and golds above shading down into browns and grays below ...

The lines running in the direction the water flows through the land during heavy rains, from 1015 feet of elevation down to 994 feet ... a 20 foot drop over less than 1000 feet.

No wonder the flood plain becomes a river ...

Then I added up the elevations, because that's how my mind works. 

          1015 + 994 = 2009

2009, the year we came to Texas.

It's magic.

Noticing

I had hoped to see the almost-full moon set this morning, but found instead a gauze-covered sky.

So on to coffee, breakfast and the newspaper, a NYT xword, email, Facebook, blog reading ... every day small things.

And thereby found a poem, nesting in the sidebar, the Kindred Spirits forming themselves into ...


The Best Laid Plans

Fire fighting resolution:
don't think ...
jump, default, journey
keep charts 

Christmas trees and taxes
on the outside looking in
gratitude
earth and air
grunge
my kitchen window
 
Spirit cloth past
a little piece of peace
drawstring bags for the dream

Another year
first snow
faux somehow

Giving thanks
patience is required ...
time for
angst, blessings, retreat

From caring hands, threads ...
letters to the otherworld 
passing, becalmed, changing

Wordlessly wondering
peace
gentlework
resist

On my mind
permission
protection
flux
working
perseverance

A pause in judgement

----------------------------------------------------------------

Looking again, the line breaks shift and with them the meaning. I add and delete, delete and add.

Then stop and let it go.

How I (don't/can't/won't/never) follow recipes

I've mentioned many times before how I am seemingly incapable of following recipes, to which the following links attest:

http://imgoingtotexas.blogspot.com/search?q=Follow+recipes

Nonetheless, I love having recipes as a jumping off point. This morning, it was this from Austin Kleon ...

I walked around the house with this in mind, thinking how I've been "stuck" recently ... with so many projects that I can't choose which to work on, so I do nothing.

Which brought to mind Remember 2016

http://imgoingtotexas.blogspot.com/search/label/Remember%202016

where one small patch a day added up to something worthwhile.

And the Peace Pin Project

http://imgoingtotexas.blogspot.com/search/label/Peace%20Pin%20Project

which likewise became more than the sum of its parts.

So I sat down, tore off a bit of cloth, and wrote "each day one small thing" ...

which is what Austin Kleon's quote had become in my mind.

But as I started to stitch I realized that my days, the good ones anyway, add up to far more than one thing. By the time I started stitching this I had already made myself breakfast, read the paper, started a load of wash, called (and called and called and called) my senators ...

through ten minutes of busy signals and voice mail boxes before getting through to live staffers and lodging my opposition to the insanity they call tax reform.

And so the cloth got edited and became "each day many small things."

I'll probably have more to say about that, hopefully soon. For now, I'm going to go do some small things ...

Thank-full

We've been working the land, which has made for a long dry spell both stitch and blog-wise. But on Thanksgiving day I was determined to do at least one small thing, so I asked G for some help.  

"I've got this new cloth with lots of colors. What should I use?"

G considered and chose "the purple right here."

"Well then, what thread should I use?"

"Orange, like a longhorn."

Well, of course. So as we "rested" I stitched my recollection of 1 Thessalonians 5:18 that a long-ago boss particularly liked because it is often misconstrued as "be thankful for everything no matter what" but makes more sense as:

"Be thankful in all things"

And among many other things, I am indeed thankful that I connected with FASA: Fiber Artists of San Antonio

http://www.fiberartistsofsanantonio.org/

who had a "cobweb sale" at their last monthly meeting. There I found Jean Dahlgren 

http://jdahlgren.com/

selling $5 bags of hand-dyed cloth ...

and a room-full of living breathing kindred spirits. And when I learned that they had Elaine Lipson (yes, she of The Slow Cloth Manifesto) 

http://handeyemagazine.com/content/slow-cloth

at FASA's last monthly meeting, I wondered why I've waited so long.  

Anyway, getting back to Thanksgiving. G and I also crafted a cherry pie together (it's the one with the circles on top) ...

Sadly, dinner didn't make it on to the photo roll as we were too busy eating, drinking, and making merry. But a post-dinner lap nap ...

and a first-ever ukulele lesson, complete with rousing rendition of Old MacDonald had a Farm ...

were captured for posterity.

Last, but far from least, we returned home to find this waiting for us in the mail ...

a hand-wrought gift of fall foliage from Pam, a long-time friend who (with husband Wade) recently made the trek from their home in Colorado to visit us in the Hill Country. I envy her fall leaves ...

and hope we'll get to experience the beauty of their place someday.

Now "we've got to get ourselves back to the garden" ...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3aOGnVKWbwc

Work in progress

We built this fire pit early on in our tenure ...

and named the immediate vicinity ...

But then came drought in 2011 and with it our realization that the fire pit was ill-advised. So we turned to other projects and the Rocky Road filled with King Ranch bluestem ...

KR bluestem is a non-native grass. Better than nothing, it does hold the soil, but is shallow-rooted and crowds out more desirable native grasses. So this week Don decided to start pulling the KR out and I joined the party ...

exposing and then moving loose rocks around the zexmenias ...

little bluestem ...

milkweed ...

side oats gramma ...

and best of all, yellow Indian grass ...

just in time to let the good seeds fall on newly disturbed ground ...

Golden.

Getting back to "The Land ... "

Working on the pennant for Mo's project put The Land as the Crow Flies on a back burner, as you can see from the date ...

http://imgoingtotexas.blogspot.com/2017/07/homesteading.html

Now that I'm back to it, trees are beginning to crop up ...

And the cloth has been trimmed down ...

to fit within the space where it will eventually reside ...

The plan, for now at least, is to leave it hanging except when I am actively working on it. We'll see how that goes.

I also popped off a couple of simple projects to get back up to speed. Jeans mended with vintage cloth from Glennis Dolce ...

along with a little darning on the side ...

And a patched shell woven with Deb Lacativa's dyed floss ...

requested by G for his birthday ...

bringing back memories of Jude Hill's Considering Weave class in 2014 when I first met many of the Kindred Spirits who reside in the right sidebar.