- It's springtime in Texas, so of course the leaves are falling

Here in the Texas Hill Country we get "fall" in the spring.  The live oaks are currently in the process of shedding the leaves they held on to all winter. It's a great system: the new leaves push the old leaves off and grow in their place. So these trees will bare their branches over the next couple of weeks and then be covered in completely new foliage shortly thereafter ...

Consequently, leaves are everywhere, blown off by the March wind and rain that roared through earlier this week ...

Likewise, much of the ash from the deadwood and brush that we burned last weekend has blown and/or washed away, leaving the burn pit empty, awaiting the next installment ...

Fortunately, before the rain fell I was able to shovel some of the ash onto the inner wall of the burn pit ...

where it now serves as a kind of mortar for another layer of stone ...

And this is the windfall lichen that was spared from the flame, a patch about 6' wide and 12' feet long ...

bound for the lichen farm along the west trail ...

Last, but not least, here's a shot of Don using my wheelbarrow alternative, a 2' x 3' cement mixing tub with rope attached so it can be pulled over rocky ground and wood chip trails alike ...

and an odd bit of wood found along the way ...

Who knows what Don will find to do with it ...

- Getting closer: Close Your Eyes 2 nears completion

Two more page spreads have been completed on Close Your a Eyes 2, A-sides and B-sides ...

I'm particularly happy with the moon rising through the trees, which was started by loosely sketching some live oak branches off the Internet (with thanks to Mo for her recent advice), then roughly cutting the shape out with kitchen shears (which explains the fine job I did ) ...

The branches were then traced onto the B-side and filled in with some of the lyrics from James Taylor's Carolina in My Mind ... 

back stitched with a single strand of floss ...

then filled in on the A-side with needle weaving, seen here with the top two branches complete and the bottom two branches still showing traces of the lyrics from the B-side ...

Don has been busy, too. Initially he was working on a new tile ...

       

and came up with a neat twist on the sun center ...

But somewhere along the way, the sun migrated onto another piece of wood ...

So he now has two pieces in process, I guess.

Then there's this coffee table Georgia O'Keeffe In the West (Knopf 1989) that I found for a song at a used book store, now airing out page-by-page under our laundry room fan ...

Which is to say, we've been keeping busy. 

Last, but not least, here's another Mondegreen moment, Griffin-style this time ...

Meg sent us a text this morning (gently edited to protect the innocent):

I just asked Griffin if he did something and he said "No."
So I asked if he was lying. He roared and said "I'm a lion."

- Hill Country hugelkultur: Likin' lichen

I've become a lichen farmer. Which is to say, I'm deliberately saving lichen-laced deadwood from the burn pile and relocating it to areas that were scoured by heavy rainfall. Hopefully the branches will slow the flow of water and cause soil to drop out of suspension into the spaces between the rocks ... while simultaneously supporting continued lichen growth.

In this photo the newly laid wood chip path runs from upper left to lower right. The windfall branches covered with lichen are spread into the washed out area at the lower left corner ...

The idea had its genesis in Grace's suggestion that we use our brush cuttings for hugelkultur, but we have too many critters that would eat anything we might plant unless we build fences ... which isn't in our current plan. 

But lichen ... now that's something worth nurturing! And where better than along our trails?

Of course, we already hauled a large quantity of deadwood and brush to the burn pile ...

But I've started to pick through it to rescue the lichen-bearing branches. It's not something I'll ask Don to help with ... which goes back to my supervisory days when I used to tell student workers "If I ever ask you to do something and then decide I want it done differently, then I promise I will be the one to re-do the job." It was a good technique which made me think twice about how I wanted things done and made for a good lesson learned if I miscalculated.

So tomorrow is burn day (unless the wind picks up again) and I'll alternate fire tending with lichen hauling. With a little wildflower gazing thrown in ...

                          

And this is for Grace: one of our breezeway anoles admiring the lantana ...

- Oklahoma impression: First in a series of tile assemblages

Don is working on a series of tile pieces, which began with a first attempt at "painting outside the lines" shown at the end of the February 7th post and ultimately resulted in this assemblage ...

Spiritless?

It's been a longer-than-usual journey, resulting from much discussion between the two of us, although in the end it is truly Don's piece, his vision. 

Here's a picture of the assemblage taken mid-way through the process which shows the rusted hoe and hinge that he bound together to form a "body," the strips torn from cotton-linen cloth used in my first bleach discharge experiment (seen here as a setting sun in one of the lullaby books) ... a bit of plywood painted with primary colors inspired by Robert Rivera ... a small feather "earring" on the side of the "face" (held on by a screw which remains there in spite of my initial, unspoken hope that it might be removed) ... and a string of beads he culled from button boxes and antique store finds, then threaded onto copper wire ...

A similar hoe with fork and blade

G's growth chart, made from the
same plywood as the blue sky panel

"What triggered this?" I asked at one point.

Don said our drive through Oklahoma last October was at the heart of it. From the western end of I-44 at the Texas border to the eastern end where I-44 enters Missouri, he was deeply affected by the signs for the Indian Nations, one after another. No longer reservations, but still, not land chosen by the Native Americans who live there. Land chosen instead by a government that had its view of landownership rooted in the English system of metes and bounds ... land largely defined by latitudes and longitudes, although the rivers sometimes had their way, as the Red River does between Oklahoma and Texas.

As I watched the assemblage develop, I saw more and more symbols of the bounds imposed on Native Americans by a Euro-centric culture and began to think how titling the assemblage might reflect that ...

               

So, on the day Don declared the assemblage done, I asked him what he was going to name it. And then, when he said "Spiritless" I promptly tried to talk him out of it. Which is typical for me because I always look to dictionary definitions and if you look at the meaning of spiritless in m-w.com, it sounds like the antithesis of Native American spirituality.

But then I reconsidered ... how would I feel if I were forcibly moved off of my land? How drained of spirit? How bound by someone else's definition of what was to be my home?

Wouldn't I too be empty?

Spiritless?

Postscript: After writing this post, I asked Don to read it over and add something if he wanted to. Here's what he had to say ... 

The truth of the matter is that I feel rather odd commenting on something I've done that is a step away from my comfort level of folk art fish assemblages. Liz is correct, this piece was inspired by our travels across Oklahoma, yet I do not want to convey that Native Americans are without spirit. Hardly. The spiritless symbolism such as the missing face is rather straightforward, but the piece also speaks to me about strength and possibilities ... the strength of the metal itself, the movement from the darker center to the sunlight in the corner, the river of life running through the middle. Of course, most of this is unintentional ... I think?

- Working both sides: Sunset to sunrise

I alluded to a middle-of-the-night brainstorm at the end of this post that ended up on the sunset page of Close Your Eyes 2  ...

The back story (pun intended) relates to the James Taylor album Mud Slide Slim, on which You Can Close Your Eyes originally appeared. Released in 1970, that album became the soundtrack of my high school years. 

So it wasn't surprising as I stitched Close Your Eyes that music and lyrics from other songs came drifting back (especially Soldiers, which was mentioned in this post-Christmas reverie). Soldiers came back to me once again the other night, but this time it was the opening lyrics that stuck in my head. They seemed like a perfect story-starter ...

It was just after sunrise and down by the sea
Down in the sand flats where nothing will grow
Come drumming and footsteps like out of a dream
Where the golden green waters come in ... (what comes next?)

Then it hit me. One of the hardest things for me to do is stitch irregularly; I get into a rhythm and the stitches just fall into regular patterns. Not so my handwriting, which is about as irregular as my stitches are even. So what if I took advantage of my wonky handwriting for once?

That's how I came to write the sunrise lyrics from Soldiers onto the back of the sunset page. Thoroughly enjoying the freedom of writing less-than-perfectly, I then backstitched to my heart's content ...

Which resulted in perfectly irregular layers of sunset-lit clouds underlain by a grassy meadow composed of the closing lyrics ...

I remember quite clearly when I got out of bed
I said "Oh good morning, what a beautiful day."

I asked Don what he thought about the basting stitches ... leave them in or take them out? His first thought was that the vertical lines above the sun looked like buildings, so ... Perfect! The whole idea of the B-sides is to prompt new stories. Who knows where this one might go?

The second of six two-page spreads is now complete, A-sides ...

and B-sides ...

I'm pleased enough with the end result that I'll be going back to the James Taylor catalog for the B-side of the rising moon page.

Any guesses?  (Hint: this time I'm not using Mud Slide Slim)

- Oh snap! Or, you learn something new every day

The first two-page spread of Close Your Eyes 2 is done, A-sides ...

and B-sides ...

As you can see by the color quality, it's a gray day here, but that plus Don's willingness to do the shopping left me plenty of time for stitching.

The front cover came first, with Roy G Biv colors for Griffin, who just learned red + yellow = orange (his favorite color) ...

Then I turned to the B-side, with a second title still undecided:

• Two Sides to Every Story?
• Every Picture Tells a Story?
• Both Sides Now?
• The Inside Story?
• Or, or, or ... what?

Here's what ultimately flowed out of the Pitt pen onto the the verso of the title page ...

After which I ladder stitched the cover to the first page along what will become the spine.

And as I prepared to sew the snaps onto the corners, I realized I had no clue about how to proceed. None!

Fortunately, there were Instructions for Attaching ...

Which I'm quite sure Don's Nana never bothered to read. How silly it would have seemed to her ... everyone knows how to sew on a snap, right? Not anymore!

And as I stitched each fiddly piece, there was no "Aha!" moment of recollection, no muscle memory ... the task was totally new to me. Cora Inman Ackert surely would have shaken her head over that, but hopefully she would have approved the final product, as I always admired her and valued her opinion ...

Coda: Don's Nana passed away over thirty years ago, shortly after her great-granddaughter Meg was born. I think these pictures in her button box may be of Cora and her parents (although I'm not sure, there are no notes on the back) ...

The things we leave behind ...

If that's true, then the woman in the pictures would be Don's great-grandmother, my daughters' great-great-grandmother and my grandkids' great-great-great grandmother.

Though her name is lost in time, a small scrap of her story is now stitched into mine ...

- Looking inward: Close Your Eyes 2 continues

I found a treasure in the wooden cigar box that belonged to Don's Nana ...

Twelve beautiful brass snaps ... exactly what I need to make the inner pages accessible in Griffin's lullaby book.

I'm having crazy fun working the a-sides with an eye to the b-sides ...

Even the "problem" of the extra stress that snaps will put on the corners is a fun mental puzzle. For now, I'm adding cloth reinforcement to the edges without concealing the b-side stitches that already exist ...

And because every action causes an equal and opposite reaction, the construction of the spine is being rethought, too ...

Last, but far from least, I had a middle-of-the-night brainstorm about the b-sides of the setting sun and the rising moon, but showing will work better than telling so that will have to wait for another day.

- Bare earth clothed

We've been helping my daughter and son-in-law prep their South Austin condo in anticipation of putting it on the market this spring.

The retaining wall above their driveway didn't always look like this ...

The patch of ground below the wall would get scoured whenever it rained hard. So we put in some water breaks (brakes?) and added 1/2 cubic yard of Thunder Dirt (a mix of local soil, compost and decomposed granite) ...

Creating a rim of rock around each sprinkler head ...

As well as another water break further downslope ...

All capped off with a thick layer of hardwood mulch and some repurposed agaves ... 

Still to be added: feather grasses and Spanish daggers transplanted from our Hill Country digs once the weather moderates a little more.

Now we just have to wait and see how it all holds up to the next gulley-washer.

- Re-vision: New pictures for Close Your Eyes

When I did the first edition of the lullaby book, I printed photos of my daughters with Jace and Griffin on a commercial cotton cloth on an adhesive backing designed to go through the inkjet printer. The quality wasn't great, but the pictures were adequately recognizable.

Of course, after finishing Jace's book, I found an inkjet canvas that worked much better, so that was what I used for Griffin's book ...

It made the photo in Jace's book pale by comparison (literally), so I cut Jace's picture out, printed a new picture and slid it into the resulting hole ...

The resulting edge is a little wonky, but the picture quality is much better ...

And as Don pointed out, the whole book is wonky, so it all works.