If at first you don’t succeed

Try ... and try ... and retry again.

Ellis comes to our house once a week after school to play games, create art, and eat dinner (always followed by  a scoop of ice cream). Her favorite thing recently is to go through my very limited jewelry box to try things on …

Not that there’s a lot to try on, since most of what I had has already been given to our daughters. I did keep this ring, though …

Now let’s see if my workaround with photos sticks 🤞 ... Dang it … obviously not

Okay, maybe the third time's the charm. Yep ... that did it ... for now.

And now this …

 ICE has come to town …

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1ZtumarP9q/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Blocked

Well, this is new … Google will not let me add photos to my blog posts unless I turn off my iPhone settings that currently block Google from tracking me and having full access to my photos.

So no. Not doing that.

I am pondering next moves.

Dailyish

The universe has a great sense of humor. Right after I wrote yesterday’s blog post, I picked up a book I’ve been reading titled Meditations for Mortals (which also made a recent appearance in Lyn Belisle’s Shards blog) …

and read a chapter “On doing things dailyish.” Talk about affirmation! I underlined:

“… the obvious that if you want to get good at something, you should do it a lot, preferably more days than not.”

“Deep down you know that doing something twice a week doesn’t qualify as dailyish, which five times a week does, and in busy periods, three or four times per week might get to count.”

“Balance the need for order with the need for individual freedom … [the] need for solitude with the universal human need for a social life.”

“The point isn’t to spend your life serving rules. The point is for the rules to serve life.”

Which leads me to the next two dailyish patches, one which reads “PEACE” in Fiona’s alphabet, the other which will serve to remind me that dailyish is a good enough rule to Remember 2026 …

A plan … sorta

Yesterday I was busy baking cookies and cleaning house. So as I expected, no post was written. And I’m okay with that.

Today I was expecting to be at a reunion (which was part of the reason for the cookies), but last night I had the first recurrence of a retinal/ocular migraine since a year or two ago. No headache, but very unusual visual effects lasting about half an hour. Which is why I’m not going anywhere today as driving didn’t seem like a great idea.

Instead, I’m posting about the tentative beginning of a not-quite-daily stitching project …

The patches to be inspired by whatever catches my interest on any given day. Like Fiona’s postcards on New Year’s Day and the Run Out Soup …

Likewise the fair linen I’m making for St Liz and the starfish that topped our Christmas tree …

There will be more, which I’ll post whenever I have  few to show.  Unlike past birthday patch cloths, I’ve decided to make all the patches the same size and to alternate light and dark patches. Or not … I’ll just see how it goes.

The weight of the world

The news just keeps getting worse … and in spite of completely swearing off television news (local, national, and MSNBC), it’s hard to avoid since I still read the New York Times every day.

Thank goodness for Jon Stewart and the Daily Show … although even they can’t completely gloss the reality.

My personal news is more pedestrian. It was a relief to go to my annual physical and have absolutely no questions or concerns. Although I did ask them to check my height and discovered I’ve shrunk 1.5” from my one-time height of five feet six and a half inches (I always added that half inch, like a proud child announcing their age). My grandkids will likely be delighted that they’re even closer to surpassing me in height.

Sadly, my weight is trending in the opposite direction, necessitating multiple purchases in a new clothing size this past year. But my doctor commended me, saying more weight-bearing is good for my osteoporosis. I’m skeptical, but whatever you say Doc.

In stitching news, I dismantled these two bags, made 8 years ago …

and plan to repurpose them into table placemats …

since the placemats I made 14 years ago are getting threadbare. Nothing is forever, but I do like to keep using and re-using cloth as long as possible. Besides which, I’m over carrying large shoulder bags weighed down with “stuff” now that I’ve converted to a much lighter crossbody bag (a $100 leather bag found at a local antique store for $25). It doesn’t take much to make me happy. 

Kindred Spirits

I began blogging in 2009 when Don and I moved from Williamsburg, Virginia to the Hill Country near Austin, Texas. The early blogging years focused on recipes and learning about the land, but in 2014 I found my way to Jude Hill’s Spirit Cloth blog and thence to a group of like-minded stitchers and creatives. Many of them continue to blog, as evidenced by the Kindred Spirits sidebar to the right (if you’re reading this on a smart phone, scroll down to the bottom and click on “View web version”).

Among them is Mo, who taught me much about blogging and led me in turn to Fiona Dempster and Barry Smith, Australian artist/creators who were (and continue to be) tireless advocates for peace. Over the years they have been a steady presence and have inspired many of my own creations. 

Fiona’s recent post had an intriguing bit at the end about a square alphabet that she created last summer … which I had missed, being otherwise occupied with helping after my daughter’s surgery (from which she has made significant recovery).

Better late than never, I happily took on the challenge of deciphering a bit of text that Fiona had created …

Then pondered stitching a bit of peace of my own.

Morning meditations

 

As I was sitting in my stitching chair, reading and commenting on the Kindred Spirit blogs (see the sidebar to the right), a comment popped in from Beverly. And this is why I do what I do … this sense of community from people I may never meet irl (in real life), but who are nonetheless friends, truly kindred spirits.

Winter, such as it ever is in Texas, has left its mark, graying the vibrant colors of spring, summer, and fall. Happily Don has upscaled the bird bath to make it more visible over his wildly successful garden …

And when there are no true feathered friends about, we have some others that keep the beds company …

The first, a hen from Williamsburg days beneath the prayer wheel for peace, created three … no, four long years ago at the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The second, a Williamsburg rooster perched atop a leaning peace pole created by Don. And yes, the dwarf pomegranate was quite fruity this past year.

Last, the pelican painted by our grandkiddos, below which the latest addition to the garden: firefly lights, which gather in the sun and then shine through the night …

May peace abide.

My stitching chair

It’s been over 20 years since we bought a couch and two chairs at Ethan Allen. The couch is long-gone, but we still have the chairs, of which the swivel rocker has always been, and will forever be,“my” chair.

It sits by a southern window, where the Texas sun pours in, bleeding color and life out of its fibers. On the rare chilly days, it is my greatest pleasure to sit in sun. But better yet, on any given day, it’s where I stitch.

I’ve written before about mending my chair, so this is the latest installment of an ongoing saga. The two arms, which get the most abuse from sun and from the friction of my presence, needed some serious attention. So I patched one arm with leftover piecework from the table cloth project …

While the other arm got a log cabin block that I pieced some time back using cloth gifted by Deb Lacativa  and others …

In the background, the other Ethan Allen chair and another fair linen that is my current project for St Liz. My stitching nest is rarely tidy, but there’s always a project or two close at hand … as are my pins and needles.

O Christmas tree

 As usual, I had help decorating the tree …

And what I most notice is the bottom, which is no longer a mass of ornaments. Our grandkids are growing taller (besides which I’m no longer leaning down as far as I used to).

This year’s paper ornaments were inspired by Mood Body Studio on Instagram, thanks to which I got to buy lots of fun new art supplies: tempera paint sticks, washi tape, big hole punches, acrylic paint markers. Such fun (but hard to photograph to show they’re dimensional) …

So today I’ll take all the ornaments down, mentally traveling memory lane from the glittered walnut shells I made in first grade and the blackwork ornaments stitched in college, to the ornaments crafted from outgrown grandkid clothes and those made for us by those same grandkids. Not to mention everything in between. I could write a book (hmmmm … maybe I should write a book).