- True (indigo) blue ... at last

I've thought about doing some indigo dyeing for a while now. Not for the first time, as I participated in eighteenth-century colonial-style indigo dyeing with Kathy Smith back in the 1980s. A true purist, Kathy conjured a vat with stale urine. I wasn't so brave.

More recently, I tried my hand at Maura Ambrose's indigo vats (one chemical, one organic), dipping pieces of vintage linen tablecloth in and coming out with this for one ...

Patch #10

I left the hemstitched edge intact, liking the look of it, wondering how it might play out. And I may add some stitch later ... well, now actually ...

Snow falling in East Hampton, New Year's Day 1978

The b-side maybe even more realistic than the front

So, having mentioned the dyeing workshop, here at last are my photographic impressions of it (Maura's artistry shown with her permission) ...

Coming into Maura's home for the first time,
this was what hit me

Followed by this wonderful display of potential

and instruction

Works in progress abounded ...

and while most were machine-sewn, some were hand-stitched

and all had colors to dye for

Samplers of a sort hung on the walls,
some perhaps dating to Maura's days at SCAD

Bits of memory enshrined behind glass

Notebook pages that spoke for themselves ...

a full range of potential

carefully curated

artfully presented

Truly an inspiration ... to be continued

- At a snail's pace

Irony abounds ... I am now writing this post for a second time having somehow lost the first pass. Ah well, I think I remember what I said.

Choosing a blue for today was made easier by the knowledge that I could save the indigo blues for tomorrow. I ended up using a heavier linen, in part because it somewhat matched the feathery blue fringe in yesterday's patch ...

Patch #9

And while I'm not sure how the weight difference will play out later, I'm going with it. The cloth came from one of my mom's favorite summer tops ... which looked great on her, but never did much on me. Here it's perfect and I'm looking forward to making patches with some of the other motifs in the future.

I also finished this week's weather patches ...

and I'm realizing Saturdays will be extra fun as I add each new week to the one before!

I'm also starting to think about how all the patches might fit together eventually. Right now, the spine and front cover of a book come to mind ...

and already I can see how photographing the whole piece is going to be an ongoing challenge.

Revision: I just didn't like the way the last two patches were oriented, so they have been flipped over ...

Okay, I feel better now.

- G is for green(ish)

Having no selvedge to guide me (I prefer this spelling to selvage, btw), I didn't know if this thrifted linen blouse was green shot with blue, or vice versa ...

Either way, I much prefer the blue to the green and fortuitously tore the cloth in such a way that it left a feathery blue edge. So I wondered "what if I made a patch that showed that edge?" ...

Patch #7 and Patch #8

Here's how it looked on the b-side ...

It will be interesting to see how it wears.

Oh, about the butterfly ... that flew in yesterday after I took a walk in the sun and noticed little sulfur butterflies flitting in the purple lantana blossoms. It was one of those days when I couldn't help saying yet again, "Have I mentioned how much I love Texas?"

And now that I look at the close-up photos in the butterfly link, I realize that the two hindwing spots look just like Jude's outlined thread beads ... so even though I didn't notice them yesterday, I've added them in ...

- Habit forming

It's been one week ...

Patches #1-7

I just Googled "How long does it take to form a habit?" The answers ranged from 21 days to 66 days to "as long as it takes for you."

Definitely not one week. Still, my patch-or-two-a-day hopes are holding. I haven't given up yet, so that's gotta be a good sign, right?

Likewise, I'm diving into bolder colors, having found that I actually liked the pre-walnut dyed versions of my linen stash in this post from last summer.

So, keeping it short and sweet today ... I've got a couple of other nascent habits to tend to.

- 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.