- Land of Flood and Drought

This is what my patchplay has led to ...

a record of the rain that has fallen on our Hill Country land,
measured in one inch patches of blue ...

surrounded by patches of sunlight and sun-baked rock.

It's a far cry from my first arrangement of white linen patches back in August before I added colored linens and over-dyed the patches with Prairie Tea ...

The idea to make the cloth a record of the year's rainfall came early in October ...

Bottom third: January - April
Middle third: May and the Memorial Day floods
Top third: June - September (including 0" in July)

before the Halloween flood pushed the monthly total to 19 inches ... almost as much as the total rainfall for 2011 in the Austin area.

So the end of the cloth awaits the final rainfall for November and December ...

Hopefully not more than 12 inches

Meanwhile, I'll ponder how to back and stitch the piece while working on Christmas presents. 

- A boot for the Blanco

Detail from the assemblage described below

We had friends from Virginia visit for a week and managed to fit a lot into a very short time. The fun part wasn't just showing them around places we love, it was taking time to discover new places for ourselves, too.

One of those new places was Art on 12, a gallery in Wimberley that had escaped our notice until recently. As we wandered through, Gary overheard someone describing a project that involved decorating a Masonite boot cutout for a Blanco River Monument fundraiser. He later suggested to Don that one of his assemblages would be a perfect fit, a notion seconded by Martha and me.

On my next trip in to Wimberley this past Monday, I picked up a boot and asked when the finished product was due. "Thursday" was the answer. "This Thursday?" I squeaked.

Yikes.

Fortunately, Don was up to the challenge. He took some gnarly metal that we bought years ago from By the Bridge, the same antique store that got wiped out by the Halloween flood last month. After cutting the metal in the shape of the boot, he then cut away the paths of Cypress Creek and the Blanco River ...

The shops in Wimberley Square were represented by a wooden nine-patch, 

including two broken pieces representing the buildings destroyed in the flood ...

Note: the panorama photo warped the actual view, but By the Bridge is on the far right

He even replicated the signs that stand at the entrances to the town ...

It was nip and tuck, but the finished piece ...

By the Bridges

made it to the community center on time. And tonight we attended the artists' reception, where we discovered three silent auction bids had already been placed on Don's boot ...

Pretty cool.

- The best pickles ever ... for the record

This one is an old standby ... and when I couldn't find it right away I thought, "What will I do if I can't find it?"

So here it is, for safekeeping ...

Frozen Pickles from the Surrey House

3-4 cups thinly sliced cucumbers (food processor works best)
1/2 thinly sliced onion
1/2 thinly sliced pepper (bell, anaheim or poblano)
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup cider vinegar
1 tsp salt
1 tsp celery seed

Combine and refrigerate. After 24 hours you can supposedly put them in containers to freeze, but ours have never lasted long enough to need freezing.

- Another beginning: Natural dyeing workshop, part 1

The natural dyeing workshop that I attended this past weekend did not disappoint ...

Fabrics dyed by 16 participants in Brazilwood, cochineal and madder (from left to right)

and it will take more than one post to describe it all. For now, I'm waiting on permission from the workshop leader Maura Ambrose to post images of her work.

In the meantime, here are some of my pieces fresh out of the dye pots ...

An indigo dip for "it's only RAIN" stitched last year

Prairie Tea dyed linen shirts dipped in Brazilwood and madder

after triple dipping ...

Double-dipped madder with a final dip in Brazilwood (left)
Double-dipped Brazilwood with a final dip in madder (right)

and not quite dry ...

The back of "it's only RAIN" and an indigo-dyed piece of vintage linen tablecloth
I'm especially excited about the waterline ... more on that later

This panoramic shot includes some other student work along with my first attempt at Shibori ...

My two Shibori pieces are 6th and 7th from the left, followed by a yellow linen scrap dipped in indigo
Note: the indigo vat had gotten pretty tired at the point I dipped the Shibori, which was fine by me

all done with this beautiful view in the distance ...

Texas blackland prairie in Bastrop (site of major wildfires in 2011 and last month)
with a rare bit of sun peeking through (most of the weekend was cloudy unfortunately)

- Heartbreak in Wimberley

Those of you who have been reading the blog for a while know that By the Bridge Antiques in Wimberley is a favorite, both for furnishing our home and garden, and for Don's assemblage art projects.

The building was damaged by flooding over Memorial Day, but Jill Jones and her daughter Amanda worked hard on a comeback until a second flood the day before Halloween did more damage and took away more stock than they could ever hope to replace ...

Note the purple "Wimberley Strong" flag  on the porch actually made it through the flood

Having no flood insurance, they are now trying to raise funds through this website, which has more images and information if you feel moved to contribute.

- Grass (not wool) gathering

We have friends coming to visit from Virginia, so we're fixing things up a bit and I decided to show off some of the grasses that grow on our homestead. This is the view from the kitchen window with a westering sun back-lighting the (mostly) single stems, the better to see the incredible diversity of forms ...

Our funky balsamic vinegar vases on the front porch beams needed refreshing ...

so I filled them with stems of purple top, yellow Indian grass, and little bluestem ...

"Do you think they need to be cut down a little?" Don ventured. 

"Not at all." I replied, "I want to show how incredibly tall they are."

Add caption

A bit of Lindheimer's muhly ended up on the breezeway ... 

I gathered some more love grass and just let it arrange itself ...

... at least I think it's love grass

And ended by picking out stems of switchgrass broken during the recent storm (which dropped a foot or so of rain), adding them to the dried blades Don cut last year ...

when my eye caught on Don's latest assemblage (upper left of the previous picture) not yet documented here, so I snapped one last picture ...

Time to call it a day.

- Trick or treat?

We don't get many trick or treaters in our neighborhood, so we were pleasantly surprised to see someone coming up the driveway ...

But he bypassed the front door and made tracks for the compost heap. 

Smart as a fox ...

- All washed up

I rinsed out a bunch of linen patches, some dyed in black tea, others in Prairie Tea. and laid them out to dry ...

Note: the patches in the upper left started out as shades of tan, lower right started out as yellows,
and the upper right and lower left patches started out as shades of white

It was a bit of a pain, but honestly some were too crusty along the edges to stitch and I needed to see how much color they would retain (or lose) before going any further. As they dried, I realized I needed a better plan for subsequent dye passes, so I stitched them together with what I can only think to call chain basting ...

Then dipped everything in a new batch of Prairie Tea ...

And yes, the feather went into the dye pot, too.

- Flying

It's been a great day: six inches of rain in the gauge and an afternoon lost in stitch ...

Rio Grande Turkey feather continued from here

I'm also starting in earnest following the lessons in The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards, which was recommended by Deb Sposa ... because I really enjoyed stitching my own drawing and very much want to do more and better.

Last but far from least, many thanks to Jude Hill for her continued support and encouragement ... I do indeed love learning by playing, not to mention playing by learning. 

- Inching along

I was a strange little kid, made more so perhaps by my father's insistence that there be no TV in the house for the first five years of my life. He was a marketing director for a toy company, so I guess he knew very well how manipulative advertising could be. My mom was the stay-at-home parent who had to cope with two pre-school kids 24/7. Consequently, we visited neighbors (and their TVs) quite a bit, particularly on rainy days.

But we also played a lot of make believe, "helped" my mom bake cookies, and listened to records. We had one of Greer Garson reading folk tales, of which Dick Whittington and His Cat was my favorite. Apparently I memorized it because I recall my grandfather egging me on to recite it on more than one occasion. We had music, too, of course. And one of those songs, sung by Danny Kaye from the movie Hans Christian Andersen, has been going through my head as I stitch because I've fallen in love with little one inch square patches ...

One inch square linen patches on top of my first nine-patch

I have to confess that I don't make them exactly like Jude Hill does, although her ingenious paperless piecing is at the heart of it. Instead of cutting and ironing individual squares, I tear strips of old cloth and iron the long edges over a one inch wide piece of cover stock (see this post for details on ironing).

Then I finger-press the raw edge at the end and tuck a one inch square of cover stock into the fold ...

finger press the other end around the square ...

cut the patch ...

and voila!

At which point I follow Jude's instructions by removing the paper and basting the edges to secure the patch ...

The new inch patches will eventually join my less conventional rectangle patches for a dip in Prairie Tea, which has taken an interesting turn. I had dyed a bunch of patches and left them in a colander to dry ...

after which I found this ...

Oh, I liked that. So I set about making more intentional ones by deliberately pressing the patches against the holes to dry ...

which resulted in this ...

They haven't been rinsed out yet and I actually hope the marks mellow a bit, but I'm pretty pleased with how things are going. Where the patches will all end up is becoming clearer, 'though still some ways off.

So I'll leave it at that and end with a piece of patchplay that Don just finished ...

2" square cedar post cut into 1, 2 and 3 cm blocks, some colored with milk paint

because two can play at this game!