- 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 ...

- 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 ...