Happy birthday J!

From my daughter's Facebook post ...

J's birthday cake request was for Strawberry Shortcake from the book Cook-a-Doodle-Doo by Janet Stevens (a perennial read-aloud favorite when I was an elementary school librarian and now a go-to storybook with my grandkids) ...

in which the great grandson of the Little Red Hen bakes a cake with the help of his friends ...

and they all lived happily ever after ...

Homesteading

This is The Land as the Crow Flies as it stands right now (about 40" wide by 19" high) ...

Over the past few weeks it has morphed considerably from green grids of cloth weaving laid out linearly ...

to various trials at angles ...

along with a fair bit of design mending as I realized I wasn't happy with some of my fabric choices.

There was also consideration of how and where to eventually place the house ...

and how to represent the stone wall boundary lines (torn strips of linen rolled between the fingers and couched down with two strands of floss), as well as the topographic elevation contours (detached backstitch worked with two strands of variegated floss) ...

So far, so good.

Stitching the floodplain

The first part of The Land as the Crow Flies (20" high x 15" wide) has been basted down using Jude Hill's glue stitch ...

I played around by imposing an angled frame with a 4 1/2" square opening and a 5 1/2" exterior over each cloth-woven square ...

basted down the raw edges up to the inner frame dimensions ...

which is easier to see from the back ...

then cut away the excess ...

and started overlapping the pieces so they were effectively 5" to a side ...

After which I played around with different arrangements until I settled on one that represented some of the major features on the floodplain (dry creek bed channels, scoured bedrock, poverty weed patches, etc.) ...

Next up will be the greener, tree-covered part of the property, as depicted in these composite shots ...

Here's hoping I'll be as happily surprised by the results as Parker is here ...

(Seriously, I'll use any excuse to include grandkid pictures in my posts)

Process

This was my Father's Day gift to Don ...

an incomplete label that promised a piece of cloth to be finished this year.

As we flew home, I couldn't help noticing the patchwork of land and cloud shadows, so much like the vision I have for this new cloth ...

So when we got home, I walked out to the flood plain ...

taking pictures of droughted milkweed ...

the few patches of green amongst rock and dried grass ...

the sereness of it all, like a Wyeth winterscape ...

Then took a screen shot of the accumulated images, cropped and rotated it ...

comparing it to the first piece of woven cloth (in the manner of Jude Hill) ...

considered the cloth strips already assembled, made more ...

and continued ...

on and on ...