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 ...