An ending and a beginning

The Land as the Crow Flies is done and hung ...

giving us something else to look at beside (or perhaps I should say "over") the blather on TV ...

And now, at long last, I'm indulging myself in quilt math and patch trials for Moon Myth ...

an imaginary tale written for our grandkids about the moon in all its phases.

Working The Land

Deb Sposa at Artisun asked to see a close-up of the stitches on The Land as the Crow Flies ...

At the time I replied that I wasn't sure I wanted to show them ...

because they're not what I consider my "best work" ...

But I reconsidered, because these pictures detail a learning process I want to remember. How the thrift store linen clothing, torn into strips, would not be held by Jude Hill's invisible basting alone. Nor by kantha stitches worked in Deb Lacativa's "Dirty Threads." Only a final application of single-strand overcast stitch along all the raw edges finally effected a cloth that felt capable of fully being.

It will soon be done and shown it in its final state. But I will never again love it as much as I love it now, my hands traveling over its imperfections, working The Land.

Miscellanea

There's not much new to show as I keep adding stitches to The Land as the Crow Flies ...

but it is slowly getting stronger, becoming more itself.

So I thought a little catching up might be in order. First, there's the matter of a breezeway newcomer crafted by Don ...

using old ceiling fan blades ...

and a repurposed wooden organ pipe ...

I must say, though, my favorite part is the woodburned and milk-painted eye ...

While taking pictures, I noticed a visitor in the Herb Garden ...

And if any of you were wondering where I've been, we had grandkids visiting last week ...

One of their projects was repainting some rusted metal airplanes (from a lawn ornament) and a  Kokopelli lamp stand (which are not going to remain together except for this photo) ...

Their efforts, supervised by Pop Pop, are worthy of close-ups ...

Of course, as I took these shots, my eye once again caught on something else: this time a metalwork roadrunner we gifted to each other that has found a home beside Don's pueblo assemblage ...

Lastly, a lovely gift appeared in the mail from Sue (Blessings of Thread) which my muddle stitching finger will appreciate (pun intended) ...

Sue had also gifted me with a delightful bag when she was last in Texas. It has since been made into a much-needed ukulele case ...  

I do love repurposing!

No apologies, just "write"

So you might have noticed I've been gone for a while ... having fun with our grandkids mostly. They range in age from 13 to 5 to 3 years old, down to Little P who has somehow managed reach 9 months already. We put way more than 2000 miles on the car in the past 3 weeks. And yes, it was all worth absolutely every minute of the beautiful racket (with credit to Mary Chapin Carpenter for the phrase, which captures the wild joy of kids at play).

Now it's finally time to be just me again, which includes looking back on last year and looking forward to the year ahead. The first post of 2017 included a list of past resolutions and an overly optimistic new resolution (at the end of this post):

2013 - Create

2014 - Blog

2015 - Stitch

2016 - Remember 

2017 - Enjoy 

In hindsight, I would rename my resolution for 2017 "Imagine Peace" for the project that ultimately reached over 70 individuals in six countries and twenty states ...

There was also the completion of two projects from the previous year: Land of Flood and Drought 2016 ...

and Remember 2016 ...

Followed by new grandchild projects like this pillow ...

and these nursery wall hangings ...

for the arrival of Sweet P in April ...

I surprised myself by actually finishing a new bag made from linen shirt plackets ...

while only making a start on The Land as the Crow Flies ...

and the Pojagi-inspired Peace Pin Project Shawl ...

Fortunately, I can also report the actual completion of the pennon for Mo's Dream, seen here in a picture from her blog It's Crow Time ...

And in spite of the two projects-pending above, I started yet another in December to commemorate our 40th wedding anniversary (which has since passed, but the project is yet to be completed) ...

Which brings me to here and now: the year 2018 and my resolve to "Write" ... which will include sending "real" mail to kindred spirits in recognition of how much I appreciated the "real" mail that arrived in my mailbox last year ... a continuation of the Peace Pin Project Shawl, which will most likely be renamed the Commonplace Shawl as I intend to stitch words and phrases that I wish to recall in the coming year ... a book for our grandkids tentatively titled Moon Myth ... and last, but far from least, continued posting here on the blog.

So belated best wishes to all for the new year ahead ... may it prove memorable in all the best ways possible. However it turns out in the end, though, I am grateful for your presence along the way.

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.

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. 

Sometimes you've just gotta ...

... say "wow, thank you" to kindred spirits like Gillan

http://www.artbygillan.com/

(from Hearts for Charleston) ...

... marvel at dye magicians like Deb Lacativa 

http://morewgalo.blogspot.com/

(for Cassini threads and cloth) ...

... and shout ...

"What do we want?

Health care!

When do we want it?

Now!"

loud enough to make it onto the local news 

https://www.ksat.com/news/politics/sa-protestors-demonstrate-against-proposed-senate-health-care-bill

Although, as often happens, they only got the story half right. I was certainly in front of Senator Cruz's office to demonstrate for a "no" vote on Graham-Cassidy (which Cruz might do ... for all the wrong reasons). But keep my health care the way it is? No thank you at $25k per year, plus $12k deductible!

"ACA ... mend it, don't end it!"

And sometimes you've just gotta stitch how trees might be ... 

as in this study for The Land as the Crow Flies ...

made possible by wild peace floss.

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.