Love child

Happy Birthday to the girl who stole our hearts 31 years ago today ...

3 year old Meg with new baby sister Melissa (1986)

Melissa Reid (14 months old)

Ashes of roses

Here's the result of yesterday's dye trial where I was hoping to achieve a pale blush color ...

Madder dye extract at 3% WOF (weight of fiber) with an overdye of Himalayan rhubarb extract dye bath that had already been used to dye another batch of cloth (called an exhaust bath maybe?)

Just for grins, I laid the spiraled petals on top of yesterday's handkerchief blossom ...

Hmmm. Well, I'll see what my daughter thinks before I start stitching anything down.

Today was the last day of this old shed ...

It looks okay in this picture, but the wood was rotting and everything in it was moldy, rusty, or both due to humidity. So we paid Junk Dogs to break it down and haul it away to recycling ...

leaving us with a much better view ...

Showing up

Cloth first. I'm in the process of auditioning cloth blossoms for a baby quilt. The most recent effort (which does not yet have a center to conceal the gathering), was made from vintage handkerchiefs ...

Close up ...

and back ...

Now I'm auditioning some possible dye colors to pull everything together, so stay tuned for more.

Mirrored

There's a holiday coming up, so I once again did handmade cards with Griffin for his preschool class. This year I asked him to write his name, then impressed the reverse image onto a bit of foam tray saved from the grocery store ...

and stamped it onto the back of each of his cards ...

Sweet.

Backing it up

Land of Flood and Drought 2016 is done ...

Hard to capture because it's 53" long and 7" wide ...

But these slightly closer views of the front ...

and the back are a little bit clearer ...

So here's what came to me in the middle of the night that pushed me to get this done: I realized the total annual rainfall of 50.8" was close to the length of the cloth. So I drew a line with water erasable marker showing each month's cumulated rainfall using the 1" patches as a grid from the beginning of the year at the bottom ...

through the end of the year at the top ...

and everything in between, with the seams between the patches standing in for the fractured limestone that is such a critical part of our local aquifers ...

The cloth was quilted using no.12 and no.8 perle cotton (thank you Judy Martin), a middle layer of harem cloth (thank you Jude Hill), and a backing of linen. Which is to say, it's more sturdy than drape-y.

After it was completely quilted, I trimmed back the harem cloth ...

folded the backing cloth away from the front edge and ladder stitched the two together ...

Resulting in this, front ...

and back ...

The final step was trimming the excess backing to a rough 1/4" from the seam, then snipping and fraying to achieve a stable raw edge ...

Now all that remains is creating sleeves at the top and bottom for the wooden supports Don cut for me. I'll be sure to post a picture once it's hanging.

Connecting the dots

First off, a confession: I am one of those "radical militant librarians" who objected to the invasions of privacy that were part and parcel of the Patriot Act (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/us/nationalspecial3/at-fbi-frustration-over-limits-on-an-antiterror-law.html). Which is to say, I am a dyed-in-the-wool liberal. And while many who come here have probably figured that out, overall I've kept a fairly low political profile on this blog.

That ends today. So please feel free to skip over any of my posts that are not of interest ... I will give them an index label "Politics" so you can be forewarned. And if you are on the Kindred Spirits list and would prefer not to be associated with my particular brand of politics, just let me know and I'll remove your link from the list.

Onward.

Inspired by Dee Mallon over at her newly retitled blog Pattern and Outrage  (https://deemallon.wordpress.com/2017/01/31/h-is-for-humor-c-is-for-courage) and Mo's comment citing this article https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/how-our-likes-helped-trump-win, I decided to put together a series of articles that have stuck in my mind over the past several months. You will note that some are mainstream media and some are not. Where possible, I've tried to corroborate facts, but the conclusions at the end are my own.

The first warning bell went off in my head when I read this New York Times op-ed piece in November (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/the-secret-agenda-of-a-facebook-quiz.html). In short, it pointed out how the Trump campaign used Facebook to win the election. This in particular was chilling: "One recent advertising product on Facebook is the so-called “dark post”: a newsfeed message seen by no one aside from the users being targeted. With the help of Cambridge Analytica, Mr. Trump’s digital team used dark posts to serve different ads to different potential voters, aiming to push the exact right buttons for the exact right people at the exact right times.”

 

More recently, an Internet meme purportedly by Heather Richardson at Boston College started making the rounds. I was able to find a verified version of it here: http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2017/01/31/americans-can-turn-tables-steve-bannons-shock-event. She warned that, like a magician’s sleight of hand, what you are looking at in terms of political activity such as the Immigration Ban, may actually be cover for another, more sinister event. 

Which brings me to this article in the Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-fires-ice-acting-director_us_589004a0e4b02772c4e8e7db, which actually appeared before many in the more traditional media picked it up https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/us/politics/thomas-homan-immigration-and-customs-enforcement.html?_r=0. Thomas Homan has been appointed the new head of ICE, which is responsible for deportation. This is what the Washington Post had to say about him in April 2016 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/04/25/meet-the-man-the-white-house-has-honored-for-deporting-illegal-immigrants/?utm_term=.e61a79da19c3. 

Here’s what I’m getting at. I’m pretty sure that advisors such as Steve Bannon have more on their minds than winning an election. For instance, all that psychometric data collected by Cambridge Analytica in 2016 could now be used to send “dark posts” to individuals who would be inclined to identify people they think might be illegal immigrants. Which is not to say that those people actually are illegal, as the recent chaos at national airports over the Executive Order on immigration clearly demonstrated. But even if purported "illegals" were eventually cleared, their lives would be significantly disrupted.

Is this a wild-eyed conspiracy theory? Or have I connected some dots that need to be explored?

I fear that those halcyon days of the FBI having to go through legal protocols to obtain personal data are long gone. Because if it is indeed true that the Cambridge Analytica data will be exploited by the Trump administration, what other nefarious ends might be realized? And how would we ever know?

A choice

From the life-changing magic of tidying up: "Does this spark joy?"

For the new Land of Flood and Drought the answer was "no."

But five grandkid quilts?

Yes!

Addendum: This never happened ... at least not yet (noted 3/30/2018)

Reverie

Family first. Showing up. These things matter.

And so this, taken at Christopher House hospice ...

a butterfly with a broken wing climbed into G's hands and up his arm ...

Nature's lesson that some things can't be fixed, but that gentleness can suffice for a golden moment.

We grieve the loss of a gentle man, my son-in-law's dad.

Cloth is a consolation. 

Simple repairs to protect four-year old knees ...

A gossamer crib quilt ...

in the process of becoming ...

for a grandchild soon to be born.

This is how life goes.

Unfurled

The cloth I have been calling Remember 2016 took some sun today ...

It's hard to believe how far it has come from the first strip posted at the end of last January

http://imgoingtotexas.blogspot.com/2016/01/slip-sliding-away.html

and then again last February ...

It's now 25 inches high and 58 inches wide across the top, and ummm, 61 inches across the bottom. Mission creep? 

But there's something else that's new in the persimmon. Just over the middle ...

A nest ...

A little messy, but it obviously served its purpose. A metaphor perhaps, for cloth that came together in spite of a less-than-tidy plan.

And then there was this today ...

Hanging Land of Flood and Drought - 2016 in the window to take one last look ...

at the light shining through ...

Surveying the back one last time, the result of using Jude's paperless piecing ...

Tomorrow I will quilt its 7 x 53 inches using perle cotton for the first time. More to learn ... always!

Ending the year with JOY

I've actually finished the patching of Remember 2016 ...

All that remains is to hang it out on the next sunny day to celebrate it in its wholeness. But for now, there's some catching up to do on the final patches.

December 24 Star of wonder

http://imgoingtotexas.blogspot.com/2016_12_24_archive.html

December 28 Centerpiece (I know, I skipped December 25-27, but those were the last patches I made, so I'm saving them for last)

http://imgoingtotexas.blogspot.com/2016_12_28_archive.html

December 29 Wylie words

http://imgoingtotexas.blogspot.com/2016_12_29_archive.html

December 30 What 39 years together looks like

http://imgoingtotexas.blogspot.com/2016_12_30_archive.html

December 31 I did it!

http://imgoingtotexas.blogspot.com/2016_12_31_archive.html

And finally, ending the year with ...

using the last of the pre-made patches which, of course, fit perfectly into the last remaining space.

December 25 The beginning of JOY

http://imgoingtotexas.blogspot.com/2016_12_25_archive.html

December 26 In the midst of JOY

http://imgoingtotexas.blogspot.com/2016_12_26_archive.html

and December 27 Complete JOY

http://imgoingtotexas.blogspot.com/2016_12_27_archive.html

It's been an amazing journey, one filled with laughter and tears, almost 10,000 miles in the air and countless more spent on the road. I learned much and was grateful for the presence of the Kindred Spirits who came by and cheered me on.

There is still backing and stitching to do, but for now I'm calling Remember 2016 done and moving on to Enjoy 2017.