US II

I'm calling it done, with thanks to Don for touching up the frame ...

the cloth now named US II, a tribute to our 40 years together.

It was originally imagined in a much simpler form, but after the spare outlines were stitched, it began to tell its own story of the places we have called home.

First in Virginia, where we raised our kids ... rivers running through it ...

but a faded outline compared to the lighthouse at Cape Hatteras ...

long my heart's home ... where I've walked many miles by the sea, watched storms roll in, and caught the last rays of sunlight to the west where sea oats bend in the unceasing wind ...

And "can't you just feel the moonshine?"

How perfect then, that we found kindred grasses growing a thousand feet above sea level in the Texas Hill Country ...

prairie grasses that sink deep roots into limestone bedrock formed millions of years ago at the bottom of another, more ancient sea.

We share our Edwards Plateau home with abundant wildflowers ... bluebonnets, Indian paintbrush, and countless little yellow ones... all interlaced with timeless rivers ...

And I dare to say the stars at night are big and bright, here inspired by Hazel and stitched on cloth from a long-worn nightshirt ...

Lastly the sun ... on a bit of Jude Hill indigo (as are the other two) ... a smoldering memory of the 2017 eclipse as seen in St Louis ...

because our hearts live there, too.

The cloth with no name

This is where I am today with the (still unnamed) cloth I began last month as a 40th anniversary commemorative ...

It's been a journey from my original plan, which was to make a new-fangled sampler ...

I even got so far as to stitch the lettering on the bottom half, seen here photographed with one of my new clip-on iPhone camera lenses ...

But even though I was happy with the clouds, created by loosely backstitching marks on the hand-dyed cloth ...

the lettering just didn't feel right, so I tore it out. 

Then, while looking for something else entirely, I came across a long-lost envelope of Jude Hill's indigo-dyed "planets," which sent me running off in an entirely new direction ...

I'm still not 100% sure about the frame, but considering how the size seems near-perfect, I'm thinking it's meant to be.

Addendum: As I waited for this post to load, it occurred to me that the cloth has become an un-sampler ... US 

Baby it's cold outside

It's a good day for wearing warm socks whilst mending ...

I do love patching jeans, especially those with holes worn into the knees by our grandkids, imagining the stitches inside absorbing future falls, like a hand slipped out just in the nick of time ...

Fortunately, padding shouldn't be needed today as everyone's safe inside ...

while everything outside is being slowly encased in ice ...

Don said he saw a local news report last night on how to use an ice scraper (if you had one) and cautioning against pouring hot water on car windshields. Good advice under the circumstances ...

Addendum:

No hole yet, so (sew) a bit of preventive maintenance ...

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.

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. 

- Playtime

This is the last shirt my mom gave me and I've worn and washed it hundreds of times over the past ten years. It's been patched before, but the fabric is starting to shred ...

I figure the only way to save it is by reinforcing all the single thickness areas with lightweight cloth and lots of stitch ...

It will take a while, but I'm learning (and having fun) as I go ...

- Hooked on appliqué

I confess that I began this yesterday, when I spotted the first Goldeneye on the floodplain ...

Patch #50

One of my goals with the daily patch project is to document the approximate first appearance of our wildflowers. I was caught without my iPhone camera, so this patch was crafted using an image printed from the Wildflower Center's online guide ...

As you might imagine, I was happy beyond words to see how well Deb Lacativa's cloth worked, so I drew the image outline with a Pitt pen ...

then appliquéd it to a gray green linen, mindful of the statement about color from the Arts & Crafts Textiles book by Ann Wallace ...

I won't necessarily do future flower patches as precisely as this, since abstracting forms sounds like a fun challenge. Maybe I'll even do one back-to-front ...

'cause I do love b-sides

Addendum: 

After mending J's jeans last week, I  decided I should probably look to my own. Not only were they shredding above the patched knees, but there was a mysterious spot of something that resisted all attempts at laundering ...

Glue maybe? Whatever it is has an annoying look and feel to it ... well worth covering over.

Anyway, I realized how far I've come as I quickly stitched on patches ...

confident that two threads here, one thread there, and a combination of back and running stitches would do the trick.

- This old shirt

Note: Click to listen to Mary Chapin Carpenter sing This Shirt as you read ...

After the intensity of working on Hearts for Charleston, I needed to decompress. So I decided to mend this cotton shirt from LL Bean, one of the last gifts from my mom, who passed away in 2008 ...

Mostly used as a night shirt, I recently realized it was getting threadbare ...

which I guess was understandable after seven plus years ...

I wish I had realized it sooner as I could have reinforced the thin spots with kantha stitch alone, but given the holes it seemed best to back the mending with thin cotton cloth ...

to support the stitching ...

And then, because I really just wanted to keep on stitching and have a little fun, I added cloth patches on the front over a couple of stains and some frayed edges ...

I even used some fabric from a deconstructed blouse of my mom's that had also served as a night shirt until it started to fall apart ....

In hindsight, I wish I had mended that blouse instead of tearing it apart, but at least I'm able to wear a bit of it again.

By the way, those of you who have been following the Hearts for Charleston posts might recognize this repurposed fabric from the first set of strips made to honor Ethel Lee Lance. In a way I'm glad it worked out that way as I now have a keepsake from that project.

- Potholder take 2: Nana Kantha and the Texas Two Step

Well, here's where I ended up on this latest potholder trial (repurposed in August 2015 as part of the Table Series) ...

And maybe all you need to know is that it consists of four layers of tea-dyed tablecloth linen and eight layers of eco-dyed sheeting stitched together with floss. Or you can follow me through the process, since I want to document it before I forget what's hidden in all those layers.

The project started with cotton sheeting from last year's dye trials torn into 7" squares. My first idea was to stitch pairs of the sheeting together, pile them up until I had a good thickness for a potholder, then stitch them all together zokin-style.

Except the cloth didn't feel like it would work the way I envisioned, so I tore up 7" squares from an old linen tablecloth and tea-dyed them so the colors would meld with the sheeting ...

Tea-dyed tablecloth linen on the left, eco-dyed sheeting on the right

Then I tried pairing the sheeting and linen, but it still didn't "feel right" ... so I tore two squares of the sheeting into three strips each, wove them together into a nine-patch, invisibly basted them to a piece of linen and Kantha stitched them. Much better, but still not quite right ...

Next I tore two squares of sheeting into four strips each, wove them together into a sixteen-patch, basted them to the linen and tried the Combination Stitch from the end of this post which I soon began thinking of as "two steps forward and one step back stitch" ...

Not only did it look kinda cool on the a-side, it had a pretty neat effect on the b-side ...

Figuring "nothing ventured, nothing gained," my third take consisted of two squares of sheeting torn into five strips each and woven into a 25-patch ...

invisibly basted and then stitched to the linen square with variegated floss ...

That's when it hit me that the stitches reminded me of Morse Code. Curious, I looked up "dash dot" and "dot dash," which just happen to stand for "n" and "a" respectively. Nana! Nana Kantha! 

And the back? Texas Two Step of course ...

Thoroughly full of myself and my corny word play, I put the three three-layered cloths together. Only to find they still didn't feel thick enough to make a trustworthy potholder. So, one more pass was needed ... but what?

There was a piece of tea-dyed linen that I especially liked, so I backed it with two squares of sheeting woven into a sixteen-patch, basted them together, and started (discontinuous) backstitching around the edges of the stains ...

When it was done, the b-side was almost (but not quite) as interesting as the front ...

Twelve layers (four cloths of three-layers each) finally felt like enough thickness, so I contemplated which of the eight a-sides and b-sides would become the final a-side and b-side of the potholder.

Since they were the least inspiring, I didn't think twice about basting the nine-patch and the sixteen-patch together to be the invisible middle of the potholder. And yes, I used invisible baste with a backstitch ... not for the sake of appearance, but because I've discovered that basting with a tiny backstitch is virtually impossible to undo and therefore gives the most stability.

It was a given that I wanted the outlined tea stains to be visible on one side of the finished product. But I surprised myself by choosing the b-side of the 25-patch to be the on other side of the potholder ...

It must have been something in the wind(thread) ...