- The morning after the night before ...

Lovin' the cousins ... and wondering if they slept in their boots.

- By the Bridges again

Addendum: Sale of the flags raised $15,000 for the monument. A picture of the flags on the Blanco can be seen here.
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Don's boot for the Blanco ended up raising $175 for the Blanco River Monument. Since there was a second fundraiser involving peace flags, I decided to make one, too ...

Grace will recognize the rusted cloth that makes up the boot, but it will take close-ups to recognize the Subaru radiator insides that make up the two bridges ...

The upper right patch is dyed with rosemary for remembrance ... for the
now-razed By the Bridge antique store that was irreparably damaged in the Halloween flood

Grace also figured in the Wimberley sign, which was dyed with her black walnuts

The Shibori dyed indigo was made during the natural dyeing workshop at Maura Ambrose's last month ... 

Panorama view

One last look at the back ...

 

then it was taken over to Art on 12 one hour before the deadline. I hope to post a picture of all the flags flying over the Blanco River, planned for early 2016.

- Good news, bad news

Mo's most beautiful Christmas card arrived ...

Transported VIA AIRMAIL from the land down under ...

So carefully crafted one can almost feel its textures, wishing it could be so.

It has been a consolation, getting lost in its tracery whilst contemplating the bad news ...

our new car, with a mere 197 miles on it, the agent of a randy buck's demise at 55 miles per hour. 

- Freestyling an Inktense palette

I've said it more times than I can count, but I've never met a recipe that I followed exactly. So why change now?

Sharon Tomlinson is doing a wonderful free online class over on her blog The Cloth Side of Me and today's video was about creating an Inktense color library since the color at the end of each pencil is not a reliable guide.

For better or worse, I actually have a 48 color set of Inktense pencils, which is why I gulped realizing how challenging it was going to be to keep track of them all. So I changed Sharon's suggested technique a bit by making a square of each color on wet linen ...

then brushed the colors out with a damp paintbrush, touched them up with a bit more pencil, ironed them dry, and cut them into thin strips ...

After that, I attached them to the pencils with Matte Mod Podge, twisting some of the strips around as I belatedly realized that it would be helpful to have the most intense color visible over the name on each pencil ...

I'm halfway through and cautiously optimistic this will do the trick ...

- Let your light shine

Oh my goodness ... I just looked through my photos and realized how much I have yet to post! First off, an addendum to the last post, in which I neglected to show a backlit version ...

Note: I've also started to stitch months next to the rainfall totals

and the B-side...

It warmed my heart when three-year-old Griffin looked at the cloth Land of Flood and Drought and said, "It's beautiful. It looks like the blocks PopPop made for me." Here's a picture of that as a work in progress ...

and in its final form ...

Not the best lighting

The colors are a bit truer in this close-up, which shows Griffin inserting the removable orange G block (his favorite color, which you would expect from a kid growing up in longhorn territory) ...

I also have gotten permission from Maura Ambrose to post pictures of her work, so I'll be writing a follow-up about her natural dyeing workshop soon.

But for now, here's a picture of Spike, our unicorn deer neighbor ...

He's not saying how that happened ...

- 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.