- Orange you glad ...

The skies may be gray, but the day is sure to be bright when we spend it in Austin with ...

Patch #6

Which reminds me: Don gifted me with a sprightly little fellow at Christmas ...

At first I called him a right jolly old elf, but then a song from long ago and far away came back to me. 

"Up in the air junior birdman

Up in the air, upside down ... "

Yep, a perfect fit ...

- Seeing red

I'm thinking ahead to tomorrow, when we will spend the day with our three-year old grandson in Austin. G's favorite color is orange, so tomorrow's patch color is pre-ordained.

Which led me to think about doing a Roy G Biv series of patches, starting with red today ...

Patch #5

It wasn't as easy as I expected. Even though I had sorted through my linen and linen/cotton stash, putting it in order by color families ...

Note: that lovely watercolor lighthouse was a $65 find
at the Williamsburg Antique Mall many years ago

still, I found it challenging to find a good, strong red ...

Two of the reds from the natural dyeing workshop in November look far better in this picture than in the cloth, as the dyes were hardly as saturated as they appear. In the end I chose the commercially dyed linen/cotton up top, tearing it to avoid the more orange-leaning strands.

It turned out to be a good choice in another way ... the darker brown/black strands shooting through the red ended up reminding me of the tree branches that stood out against the early morning sky when I made my daily walk to the end of the driveway today.

And since red was on my mind, I thought to document another assemblage in Don's Porch Series ...

The better to be seen in this angled close up ...

Turkey on the car

- Moondance

I do love walking down to get the paper. Today the pre-dawn sunlight had already washed all the stars from the sky, which was itself turning from gray to blue. The waning crescent moon and two planets still held enough light to be seen: Venus low in the east and a smaller Jupiter higher to the west ... the moon almost, but not quite aligned between them, the points of the crescent at 10:00 and 4:00.

I remember this, holding it in memory for today's patch ...

Patch #4 vintage table cloth linen
indigo dyed at Maura Ambrose's workshop

along with a single sunny patch, anticipating the day ahead.

Don did some moonlighting of his own for Christmas ...

creating wooden nine-patches, unaware that this would be the first full moon Christmas since 1977 ... the year of our wedding on December 30th.

As he did with the wooden block houses, one Moondance was saved for us ...

This one, because I loved how the moon had skated over the edge ... 

- Three down and then some

The first three patches of 2016 have been stitched and joined together ...

Patch #1 - #3

I don't think I expected them to be quite so wordy, but that's what fell out of my fingers (to paraphrase Mo, who had some incredible stuff fall from her hands here).

"It's only rain" played in my head all day yesterday after I drove to the food store and noticed the dark rims of the raindrops on the windshield. I tried replicating the effect using a Pitt pen ...

followed by backstitch and Inktense pencils ...

Patch #2 close up

It was another first-time experiment and I'm realizing this cloth will probably end up being a sampler, whatever else it may become.

This morning I awoke to find the clouds parting in the west, with a promise of sun to come. Walking out to get the papers, I found 0.6" in the rain gauge and splashes of new growth in the lawn. So I got bold (for me) and picked an uncharacteristically bright thrifted linen blouse from my stash. Tearing off a strip, I was delighted to find it to be two colors woven together, seen here on the back of the patch ...

Patch #3 B-side

The quote stitched on to the front is from the autobiographical song Mother Blues by local songwriter Ray Wylie Hubbard that seemed to fit how I'm feeling more and more often ...

And the days that I keep my gratitude

higher than my expectations ...
well, I have really good days"

That walk down the driveway also triggered a decision to try stitching one inch patches representing each month's rainy (blue) and sunny (yellow) days ...

The first five gray squares are "blanks" added to facilitate the calendar format

We'll see how that goes.

Meanwhile, here's one of Don's Christmas projects ...

Trios of snow-y houses with warm yellow light glowing in their (wood burned) windows ... one set for each of the girls and a third set promised for our collection.

The houses were cut from an 8 foot long 4x4 beam Don spotted in a tree down the road. No doubt it was washed in during the Halloween flood and wouldn't be missed by the owner of the vacant lot on which it landed. So Don salvaged it and cut random rooflines with his new (this year) table saw ...

And that was just one of his projects, so stay tuned.

- One down

The first patch is done ...

Patch #1
Rosemary-dyed linen, 1 3/4" x 1 3/4"

Only 365 to go (I would have to pick a leap year, right?) Or maybe 730 to go ... because maybe I'll do two patches each day. Who knows?

But for now, this one patch is enough. It took very little time and it's not "perfect" (which is something I'm getting better at accepting). It started with rosemary-dyed linen, which is close to the background color of the blog.The grid was running stitched freehand. The lettering was inked in, then backstitched in red to match the Remember post two days ago. I'm pretty happy with how well the tiny (3/10ths of an inch square) 2016 came out...

Extreme close up

As noted above, the entire patch is 1 3/4" square, a size that I settled on after trying quarter-inch increments from 1 to 2 inches on the Land of Flood and Drought. Other patches may or may not be square, but for now I'm sticking with 1 3/4" for one of the dimensions.

Here's how it played out on paper ...

followed by a good night's sleep, during which my mind came up with ...

Ruth Munson Barnett was my mom,
MR is Don's nickname for our younger daughter
and EEEEEEE ... well, you know

This is gonna be fun!

- Planning to Remember 2016

This year's Christmas ornament turned out to be prophetic:
Rosemary for Remembrance

I have an idea for a new cloth, but it isn't my idea. Rather, it was inspired by the many blogs I read, written by the KINDRED SPIRITS listed in the right hand column just below the Profile, Index, and Search widgets. Every day I look forward to seeing whose posts have risen to the top, wondering what I'll see and/or read next.

The idea is to create a large patchwork cloth over the course of the year, making one patch for each day in 2016 by choosing a color or stitching a word or drawing an image that reflects my experience of that day, sort of like the ornament pictured above. This form of cloth journaling is nothing new, of course, but its expression will be unique to my experience of this year and this place in the Texas Hill country that I now call home.

The spark of the idea was kindled, first and foremost, by Jude Hill, a fellow Long Islander who has written something like 3000 posts in ten years at Spirit Cloth. If you have not taken one of her classes (which have countless video and audio clips), consider that she is offering Spirit Cloth 101 on a donation basis and give it a try. Jude will open your mind to new ideas such as her paperless piecing, which has in turn inspired my own patchplay.

Then there is Judy Martin in Canada, whose latest quilt top over at Judy's Journal is breathtaking in both color and form, the latest in a long line of inspirational works.

Rhonda Ayliffe has delighted me as she spent the past year looking up at the Australian sky ... while Grace Forrest in New Mexico has made me appreciate the wisdom of a daily practice by writing years of her life on Windthread.

I love that Dana in Washington lives the ethos of "the table comes first." While Saskia in the Netherlands alternately weaves tales of the Old Bird King and creates ripples of Kantha across eco-dyed cloth.

Cindy Monte in the great Northwest, faithfully stitched words of 2015, a reprise of her words of 2013 (not to mention that she conjures the most magical boats). Likewise, calligraphic and book artist Fiona Dempster, another Australian, showed me how gracefully words can express peace.

Deb Sposa in California and Mo Crow in Australia, both gifted artists, encouraged me to dare to draw. And Sharon Tomlinson in Texas gave me further encouragement with her Inktense tutorials.

The dyers continually inspire me to keep trying ... Patricia in North Carolina, Maura Ambrose in Texas, Alice Fox in the UK, and India Flint who coaxes color from plants wherever she goes in the whirled.

And there are others who have inspired me to look at life more carefully ... Dee Mallon in Massachusetts with her self-proclaimed outrage, Amy Meissner in Alaska with her keen-edged truth telling, and Velma Bolyard in upstate New York who spins poetic tales with luminous photographs.

There are more besides ... over fifty KINDRED SPIRITS in all. Each one has piqued my curiosity, taught me something new, or simply delighted me with their artistry. Cumulatively, they have enabled me to become more creative and I thank them, wishing them all the best in the new year.

May I be worthy of their gifts.

Addendum: I knew I would forget someone ... Marti in New Mexico does not have a blog of her own, but her graceful words appear in comments here and in many of the other blogs listed above. She, too, is a gift.

- Remember

For the past several years I have chosen one-word "resolutions" for the new year ahead: Create (2012), Blog (2013) and Stitch (2014). Easy to remember, flexible in their application, and ultimately successful, they have been gratifying. More to the point, they have become lifelong habits. Stitch even became a new index term in 2015, replacing the more traditional term Needlework in recognition of my journey toward new forms of creative expression as documented in the examples below.

So picking the word for 2016 should have been easy, right? Not so much. There are so many things I want to do: learn to draw (better), organize photographs (finally), start some of the many project ideas that have accumulated (maybe even finish some others), and gracefully enter the next decade of my life (yes, I will turn 60 just before the summer solstice).

Today the word for 2016 finally came to me: Remember ...


Remember to create, blog, and/or stitch every day ... remember the good times from the past 59 years ... remember to have fun ... remember to organize the pictures ... remember to celebrate what has already been accomplished.

Therefore, without further ado, I will begin remembering with a look back at what I stitched in 2015, some done, some not, but all of it a wonderful learning experience (with thanks to Jude Hill for pointing out that I "Learn by Playing").

The new year began with the completion of several Christmas presents
(note: the pictures have links to posts related to the making of each cloth) ...

Close Your Eyes I for Jackson

Close Your Eyes II for Griffin

Triangulation for Don

Don and I collaborated on a number of his assemblages, including this homage to Pueblo kachinas ...

One of many pieces inspired by our travels in New Mexico

Sash details

A series of explorations into Jude Hill's techniques resulted in the Table Series as they all ended up serving time in the dining room ...

Tea dyed linen

Rust dyed from a cheese grater

Linen cloth weaving, ultimately lichen dyed

The Turquoise Trail, another New Mexico memory piece

Dyeing was a major component of the year and was a contender for 2016 word of the year ...

Dramatic results from Thimble Flowers that later faded away

Gifts also figured into the year ...

Blue Heron ... a 70th birthday gift

7809 Orisha ... 
a housewarming gift from the Kitchen Towel Series

Some projects got started, but then were put aside ...

Austin Skyline

Armadillo Road

Rightly making way for more important projects ...

Hearts for Charleston

By the Bridges II

While the peace flag made in 2014 made its way to India Flint's Solace Project in Australia ...

Sew/Sow Peace, end of 3rd row/beginning of 4th row

Last, but far from least, I began the Patchplay series of posts that documented the development of my own take on traditional patchwork ...

Beginning to put it all together

Embellishing with hand-drawn stitch

Becoming The Land of Flood and Drought

There was more, enough to fill a year's worth of blog posts (128 and counting) with some left over to begin the new year (Christmas presents and more of Don's assemblages from the Porch Series chief among them). But I'm going to stop here so I can get ready to go out and celebrate our 38th wedding anniversary ... another remembrance.

- Seeing things another way

A couple of years ago I persuaded Don to buy a funky, but beautifully patinated chaise lounge at By the Bridge. My plan was to cut off the back and convert it into an outdoor coffee table for the breezeway. Long story short, it didn't work out.

So, the chaise sat on the back deck, unused. Until one day, one of us saw it another way ...

It is now a container garden populated by herbs happily soaking up the Texas sun ...

because of course we just happened to have long, skinny containers that fit perfectly between the bars of the seat. The potted plants we purchased in October have settled in quite well. The top row is planted with arugula (making a comeback after being harvested for a Christmas dinner salad with roasted carrots) and cilantro. The middle row has shallots (which substitute well for chives or scallions), leaf lettuce (started from seed) and parsley. The bottom row has mint, more leaf lettuce, and thyme. 

And yes, the lettuce is recovering from the hail storm two nights ago. We may get to eat it yet!

- Awww hail ...

I knew I should've taken a picture of our lettuce sooner ...

Hail stones somewhere between pea and small marble size

- Stitching the Land of Flood and Drought

I couldn't wait to start stitching, so I didn't ...

A single piece of linen has been basted onto my patchplay and I've begun adding Kantha to the beginning of the cloth while waiting for the final days of 2015 to reveal  its ending.