- 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."

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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!

- I can draw?

I've tried to draw for years ... tried learning from books, and watching other people draw, and even talked my way into an upper-level drawing class in college. It didn't end well (sorta like Phil Collins' I Can't Dance, come to think of it).

As a result I long ago reached the conclusion that I can't draw.

But some time back when I made a similar statement, Mo told me about Frederick Franck's book The Zen of Seeing and said, "Caress the edges." I really liked that, although even after reading the book cover-to-cover I wasn't quite sure how.

Then Jude posted her original Magic Feather tutorial the other day and I knew I was going to have to figure out what Mo meant. So I got out my new Inktense pencils, stole a turkey feather out of Don's assemblage, and tried ...

What I tried today

The first Madder Brown feather didn't look right, so I tried some other browns until I found one that was better. Then I tried again, and actually kinda liked it ...

Inktense Bark 2000

But looking closely at the actual feather I realized that each barb (I had to look up that term) varied in color from brown to white to brown again, like ikat (poetically described here by Jude Hill) ...

It reminded me of the crewel embroidery long-and-short stitch that I learned from my Aunt Jean more than 45 years ago. She cautioned me not to follow the standard written instructions, but to vary stitch lengths to get a more natural effect ... sort of like the feather. 

So I grabbed a bit of linen patchplay, sketched another feather, and started stitching ...

Note the stitches don't line up as neatly as the actual feather (yet)

I'm not there yet, but I decided to take some pictures and document how far I've come before I go any further. Because really, I guess I can sorta draw after all.

- Hill Country colors

This is a box of rocks ... part of my morning exercise, which consisted of hauling them from the floodplain to a front garden bed. But it's the piece of cloth in the middle that has me really excited ...

Limestone (white and grey rock) and oxidized chert cobbles

along with the other pieces on the drying rack below ...

which were all dyed with Prairie Tea, which came back after a 5" rain last month ...

Notice the grass below has dried out after 4 weeks with no rain

While I was hoping for a yellow like my original Prairie Tea dyeing, I was delighted to find that results this time around reminded me of the colors on the floodplain ...

Not to mention the critters that hang out there ...

Moth(?) feeding on Snow-on-the-Mountain

The closer I looked at the marks left behind, the happier I got ...

And how about this? I bundled up all my loose patches and pinned them into a piece of yellow linen shirting, then hung the Prairie Tea-soaked bundle up to dry, resulting in some strong rust-colored marks ...

Who knows where this may lead ...

West Trail to the floodplain ... purposefully winding to minimize flood damage