- Leaving on a jet plane

A skinny patch for a short stay with G ...

Patch #40

We're leaving well before dawn, heading for St Louis and J times two.

But before we left, we made some early Valentine cookies ...

from an old family recipe ...

P.S. These days I make a half batch and use parchment paper instead of greasing the pan.

- Washed out and slightly scorched

Which describes both today's patch ...

Patch #39 (revised 2/18/2016)

and the way I feel having just completed our income tax return. Don't get me wrong ... I'm glad we're getting a refund. It's just depressing to see how much we paid into the federal treasury. Ouch.

I was consoled, however, by the arrival of a Deb Lacativa fat baggie ...

Thank goodness for small blessings.

- Such a to do ...

I am a list maker ...

Patch #38

have been forever ... even as a kid, when told to clean my room I would make a list of all the things I had to do and then line them out one by one. Sometimes I would even cut up the list items and draw them out of a hat, rewriting them one by one in the random order they were to be done.

I love crossing things off. Online lists don't give quite the same sense of accomplishment as a paper list full of lined out items. Although I confess I do have more than twenty lists on my iPhone sticky notes app with titles like "Books to (re)read" and "Gift ideas," so I'm not entirely a Luddite in that regard.

At work, my lists had lists. But I often used those lists as a way to figure out what not to do. After all, any item that remained undone after making it onto one list after another was probably not worth doing in the first place, right?

So today's patch is a reminder of my reminders: a tongue-in-cheek, shake-of-the-head gibe at my persistent belief that I can actually control things. As if ...

- Degrees of separation

This isn't exactly right, but it's as close as I could get ...

Patch #37 ... sadly the subtle yellow/blue/green color of the
over-dyed linen has been totally lost in the process of photographing it

Walking out a half hour before sunrise, the stars had fled from the sky ... even Venus was fading. But the crescent moon revealed its shadowed side as a mercury glass mirror of Earth's reflected light. And below the moon, a tiny glint ... at last, the planet Mercury. Between them, the orbs described a classic Pythagorean triangle: three lengths from the moon to Mercury, four lengths from the moon to Venus, and five lengths from Venus to Mercury.

The horizon was golden below a sky that rose above it from green to blue to grey  ... colors shifting like the sea.

Coming back into the house, I grabbed a pen and scribbled ...

Then, after breakfast, hunted down a yellow linen shirt over-dyed with Aquarelle Saxon Blue extract ...

and on a scrap of that cloth, I took the finest stitches I could manage to describe my recollection ...

But time and cloth and camera each imposed a degree of separation from what my eyes first perceived. The patch as memory ended up as most memories do: an imperfect reflection of the infinite subtlety that is first-hand experience.

Likewise, as another week passes by, the weather patches are the merest shorthand ...

for golden days of sunlit dryness broken only by the heavy fog that ushered in February ...

- Rockin' it

A bit of lichen-dyed muslin ...

Patch #36

because it reminds me of Don's rock gardens ...

Kinda cool that a local lichen makes cloth the color of local rock.

Mostly though, I've been working on Melissa's birthday present. Here's another sneak peek ...

Time's slipping away ... here's hoping I make the deadline.

- Remembering High's

Another simple patch, this time intentionally ...

Patch #35 from a lime green linen top which I intended to overdye
... but sometimes brighter is better

because what the February patches remind me of is rainbow sherbet ...

Patches 32-35

Raspberry, lemon, orange and lime ... right? And therein lies a story.

Back in the days before we had kids, Don and I loved to play tennis. Honestly, it was the only sport I could play well enough to enjoy and trust me, early on Don tried to get me interested in outdoor activities, mostly to no avail. Golf? Couldn't hit the ball. Running? Shin splints. Shooting baskets? Ha! Camping? Mosquitos! But tennis I could do.

Sad to say, tennis now seems like a sport in decline, at least in the United States. But 30-40 years ago it could be hard to find an open court, especially after the major tournaments which inspired duffers like us to get back into the game.

My point in telling you this? Well, our after-game beverage of choice was a sherbet freeze from the High's Ice Cream shop. Basically a thick shake made with lemon-lime soda and sherbet in your favorite flavor, it never failed to satisfy.

Of course there was that one night when I made one serve too many and threw my arm right out of its socket. That resulted in us heading to the ER rather than High's and ended with my arm in a sling with orders to lay off tennis for a bit. Then Don took me to a GLM skiing seminar  ... that same evening as I recall.

Somehow I was convinced that short skis would be manageable, leading to our one and only trip to Wintergreen. I got the shortest skis they had, and to be honest I did sorta enjoy myself. That is until a hotshot skier who was half my age (ten), caused me to veer into the trees where I made a very undignified three point landing. Later I discovered a two inch tear in my brand new Levi 505s (which is to say, heavy denim jeans), most likely caused by the aforementioned touchdown. I took it as a sign that there would be no need to move up to the next ski length ... once was enough.

Anyway, High's is long gone, but I actually found an article that brought it all back. Just look at the poster in the upper middle-right of the photograph. Darned if I'm not craving a sherbet freeze right now.

- Making time

Another simple patch ...

Patch #34

but that's okay, because I have an idea for combining the past two days' patches into one.

Most of the day was spent tree trimming (as in removing dead wood) and making Valentine cards with G. I started with some hearts rough cut out of a styrofoam meat tray and glued onto wooden blocks ...

Then G and I scribbled over the hearts and a commercial "G" stamp with pink, red and orange markers (washable of course) ...

The purple was abandoned early on as it muddied the other colors

Then we stamped them on orange cover stock (G's favorite color) ...

With thanks to Pop Pop, who took pictures
and got us over the finish line as G's enthusiasm began to wane

- A whole lotta not much ...

So, Patch #33 doesn't have much to it yet ...

But I'm thinking about how to interpret this lovely in Don's rock garden ...

There's gotta be a way, right?

But in the meantime, there are leaves to toss ...

Did you know they float?

And stones to throw ...

Did you know they don't?

And shadows to catch while you can ...

Because time flows by like water ...

don't take anything for granted ...

- It's not all about me

Since I expect to stitch my monthly rows of patches together, I've decided to end the odd numbered months (January, March, May, etc.) with a named calendar patch as I did yesterday.

Even months (February, April, etc.) will begin with a named patch, as I did today ...

Patch #32
Rose pink linen from a thrifted blouse fussy stitched with one strand of DMC

I confess that I've been planning this patch for a while as a way to begin celebrating Melissa's 30th birthday on the 14th. Please note: in our family we do not use the V-word when talking about a certain mid-February holiday ... at least not in front of Melissa.

As I stitched, I thought ...

Thought that the color of the linen looked just like the foam my mom used to skim off the top of her strawberry jam ... spread on the heel of a freshly baked loaf of bread it was ambrosia.

Thought how it's a leap year, so there are 29 days in February ... that Melissa will not be 29 years old much longer ... and how I was 29 myself when she was born in 1986.

Thought how the red thread just didn't look right on the numbers and letters, so I tore it out. And in the gray light of a foggy morning, what I thought was variegated gray thread turned out to be variegated teal ... which was perfect, since teal is currently a favorite color of Melissa's.

Thought how Melissa returned with a zebra print cowboy hat on her 16th birthday trip to Ft. Worth with Don (who was consulting with the Fort Worth schools at the time) ... how much has changed since then ... 

And then I was done.

The sun broke through and I decided it was high time to photograph Don's assemblage of assemblages ...

aka the Front Porch Series. One piece has yet to be shown here ...

Another was only shown in process ...

And because they're hard to photograph, even in panorama ...

here they are in three takes from left to right ...

- Slip sliding away

So goes January ...

Patch #31
I'm calling this obsessively small stuff "fussy stitching"

one last patch, stitched in the 80 degree sun ...

then joining the flowers in the warmth close to the house ...

keeping good company ...

Addendum:

Backlighting was too fierce earlier, but now I have a picture of January hanging between my stitching windows ...