- A window on my world: Walking the land

I begin most days here, sitting by the front window, my cup of thread ends and trusty Fiskars close at hand ...

However, with the tipping point of spring having been reached, I now find myself drawn outside earlier in the day, no longer needing to wait until afternoon for the sun to warm things up.Yesterday, I walked the land to take some pictures, like this agave for Mo who loves how the leaves imprint on one another ...

Right across from the agave, our crazy wind vane is a favorite perch for the Carolina wrens, so I left them some thread ends for their nests ...

Close by, Don's latest rusted bucket awaited a new tenant ...

while just beyond, the lichen-crusted driftwood anticipated the new crop of mealy blue sage growing up behind it ...

Everywhere I walked I smelled the soft honeyed scent of agarita ...

my eyes catching every so often on bright red Yaupon berries still left after a winter of critter foraging ...

I walked the new wood mulch trails ...

leading out to the flood plain ...

where wildflowers were already  rising up to greet the sun ...

and the bluebonnets showed the promise of more to come ...

Surveying the compost rows ...

I thought to look up ...

then heard the clarion call of sandhill cranes wheeling overhead in a thermal before reforming their northward-bound V ...

Lichen was growing ...

on rocks harvested from the floodplain and carefully placed in the succulent garden ...

although most of our flowers get planted by Mother Nature, like this stand of thimble flowers ...

The grasses were greening up so quickly I could almost see them grow ...

some racing ahead of the pack, already setting seed ...

And when I came at last to the breezeway, where Don was preparing the outdoor shower for the next three seasons ...

I startled one of our anoles into a brown funk ...

But after reconsidering me as friend rather than foe, he reverted to a relaxed green ...

and pulled up a chair ...

the better to enjoy the breezeway ...

- The tipping point: Celebrating spring and fall

It may have been raining outside, but it's been a fun day in the blogosphere ... first enjoying the Hill Country cloth beaming in New Mexico on Windthread, then peering at the delightful thread beads over at Saskia's Birdhut, and finally revisiting some Spirit Cloth lessons as I stitched more Kantha into Triangulation.

But best of all was discovering Cooking with Cats in today's post over at It's Crow Time (where they are tipping into Autumn as we tip into Spring). During our back and forth in the comments, Mo revealed that Rod (aka Old Man Crow) had a killer recipe for Drambuie Pancakes (aka crepes) in the cookbook. I love Drambuie ... and just happened to have some on hand.

Luckily for us, a light supper of onion soup and Torpedo Extra IPA was on the menu, so there was room for dessert.Of course, I never follow a recipe exactly, so with apologies to Rod, I went back to a very early blog post for my favorite crepe recipe, cutting it in half for dessert portions.

I gathered my ingredients ...

Fired up four crepes ...

Discovered that my trusty iPhone is ice cream proof ...

And therefore managed a shot of assembly ...

leading to a delicious finished product ...

And yes, we needed both forks and spoons, lest we miss a single drop. Yum!

- Christmas season continues: A return to Triangulation

Someone posted recently about gift giving (forgive me, I can't recall who it was). The gist of it was that gifts given spontaneously, especially upon completion of a handmade piece, can be much more satisfying than gifts given on calendar-driven deadlines.

Having already embraced the concept of "Birthday Season" it was a fairly short leap to "Christmas Season" ... which is what I am now calling the period of time it takes to complete all the gifts I intended to give last Christmas.

In fact, I only managed to get one handmade Christmas gift given on time: the kitchen towel All Roads Lead to the Beach. But I gave myself a pass on the Close Your Eyes books since my grandsons are still too young to mind the lapse.

So now that I have finished the books for Jace and Griffin, I am returning to a belated gift for Don: Triangulation ...

I'm actually glad I took a break from it since I learned a lot in the process of making the other pieces and in following other blogs. For instance, there is Grace's current project wherein she is intentionally stitching folds into cloth. This released me from the angst I experienced when I realized my insufficient invisible basting had led to excess folds of cloth in Triangulation. Now I'm embracing the folds, happily incorporating them ...

I also discovered during Close Your Eyes 2 that I prefer a single strand of floss to two in many cases. As a result, I am enjoying the rhythmic repetition of single-thread Kantha stitch combined with the mantra "om mani padme hum" (another gift from Grace ...but for those of you who have observed my spiritual pursuits in the past, this doesn't necessarily mean I'm embracing Buddhism) ...

And because my alternating horizontal and vertical blocks of Kantha were inspired in part by Saskia over at the Birdhut, I would be remiss if I didn't include a picture of the B-side for her ...

So settle in folks, I've got 13 squares down and 174 to go. It's gonna be a long Christmas season for sure.

- LEAF: Llano Earth Art Fest

We went to the inaugural Llano Earth Art Fest and National Rock Stacking Competition. The two artistic/freestyle competitors in this Facebook video provide an insight into what was it was like. That being said, I'll let the pictures tell the rest of the story ...

- Closing the book on Close Your Eyes 2

The second edition of Close Your Eyes is complete ...

Since I created links to the previous posts on Close Your Eyes and Close Your Eyes Too, I decided to just show the final two page spreads in this post, A-sides and B-sides ...

I did do some design mending (Jude Hill's very apt term) on the front page. First I removed the metal snaps (which were too large and too strong), then I removed the double-strand, multi-colored split backstitch lettering and replaced it with a simple single-strand backstitch which is more my style and balanced better on the B-side ...

Of course, the part I agonized over the most ended up being the part I liked best: the canvas photograph of Meg and Griffin hiding behind a window of rust-dyed muslin, bordered with a frame of asemic orange stitch ...

which is revealed on the B-side as the opening lyrics of  Carole King's You've Got a Friend (the first cut on James Taylor's album Mud Slide Slim). It was only as I wrote out the words that the phrase "close your eyes" jumped out at me ... a serendipitous echo ...

So, Close Your Eyes 2 is now signed, sealed ...

and delivered at last ...

- 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 ...