- Go Tribe!

Today is my son-in-law's birthday, so I made Patch #202 William and Mary cypher in his honor ...

As usual, I didn't get a card in the mail in time. It's one of my (many) character flaws that I am consistently unable to buy, sign, stamp, and post birthday cards in a timely manner ... even with automated calendar alerts.

But hey, this isn't about me. It's about sons-in-law. Not just Jake, whose birthday is today, but also Paul, whose birthday was March 25th. You could look back to my blog post for that day and discover that I neglected to create a birthday patch for Paul. 

Furthermore, you could look back to my blog post for June 17th, where you would find that I also neglected to create a birthday patch for Don ... my husband ... whose birthday is the day before mine.

But as I said, this isn't about me. It's about Jake, who attended the College of William and Mary ... where he played football ... in Williamsburg ... where he met my daughter Meliss  ... where I too got my undergraduate degree, and eventually (wonder of wonders) became an adjunct faculty member. But it's really not about me. 

Jake's family has a wonderful tradition wherein all the guys have the initials JWW. It's a tradition that has been carried on with our grandsons Jackson Wyatt (fondly known as "J") and Jace Weston (who is rapidly outgrowing his "Baby Jace" moniker).

So Happy Birthday Jake! I'll bake you a cake and make a lasagna when we come to St Louis next month. In the meantime, I don't know if you ever noticed, but if you flip the W&M cypher upside down, there's another W ...

Just what you always wanted, right?

P.S. Paul, I owe you one.

- Mountains or beach?

Retrospective (7/22/2016)

Patch #201 Tuna Tower

Original Post

My belated patch for July 8th is a play on Don's assemblage Beach or Mountains, which I first wrote about two years ago (http://imgoingtotexas.blogspot.com/2014/06/good-very-eye-imho.html?m=1). 

I've turned it around to ...

One way or the other, this question has been asked of boyfriends, and then of potential spouses for our daughters. For many years, the "correct" answer was "beach." However, once we moved to the Texas Hill Country (1000 feet closer to heaven), the answer changed to "yes" because we've come to love both (okay, Don's always loved the mountains, but now I've learned to love the land, too).

Around the same time as Don was making his Beach or Mountains assemblage ...

I was embarking on Jude Hill's Considering Weave. There I met an amazing group of Kindred Spirits who inspire me to this day. Mo at It's Crow Time was working on an illustration of Old Man Crow's music that included a lock and key. So I sent her a bit of rusted cloth, much like this one ...

made while rusting the key for Don's assemblage ...

She in turn used that bit of rusted cloth in The Key Book last year (https://itscrowtime.wordpress.com/2015/05/18/the-key-book/).

Perfect, I thought, I'll use my bit of cloth for a Remember patch (at last). Except ... there was the comment Mo made about how tricky it can be to stitch on rust ... and the size wasn't quite right for the Remember 2016 patches.

So I drew a new, smaller key, colored it with Inktense pencils, carefully lettered the words with a Pitt pen, and stitched a single strand of floss around the edges.

Oh, and there's this ... when I made the Inktense tulip yesterday, some color bled. Not a lot, but not intended. Today, I took advantage of that tendency, letting the colors bleed, as they did in the original rust cloth. And truly, the Inktense was much easier to stitch through than rust.

So, Patch #190 Mountains or Beach? has found its way to the original July 8th post.

As for today, I'm wondering how I might remember this ...

exceptional tuna sashimi at A-Tan Bistro in San Marcos, Texas. Gotta love it ... and the colors!

Addendum: The Key Book by Mo was gifted to me in late 2017 ...  words fail me
http://imgoingtotexas.blogspot.com/2017/11/letting-go-of-dream.html

- A great day for stitching

Retrospective (7/24/2016)

Patch #200 Radio recollections

Belated recollection of a morning memory can be found in the post on July 24.

Original Post 

Five patches popped out today as the thermometer climbed into triple digits.

A tulip done in Inktense pencils for July 7th ...

inspired by this piece of Newcomb pottery ...

The star-studded wall in Amy's Ice Cream for July 13th ...

Scraps from Georgia's Window stitched under the influence of Jude Hill's Spirit Cloth for July 9th and 15th ...

culled from a lap-full of scraps ...

using two different techniques: seaming edges together (top) and layering them on a base cloth a la Spirit Cloth 101 (bottom) as revealed on the B-sides ...

and the neon sign in Riley's Tavern for July 10th ...

Next up?  My take on Don's Beach or Mountains for July 8th ... still working on that one.

- A lot to remember

Retrospective (7/24/2016)

Patch #199 Quail

There's lot of room for growth, but I'm happy to document where I am in the journey.

Original Post 

A new trio of patches for July 4-6 fell from my fingers today ...

And, as you can see, Don has been working with much the same palette in his latest assemblage ...

I'm finally comfortable with the process that has evolved of blogging every day, sometimes with a patch, sometimes not. When I get around to working on patches for the days I've skipped, the blog posts trigger the ideas that end up in stitch.  

It was the beach towels that I blogged about on July 4th that got re-imagined with my latest thrift store linen find ...

Then the safety pin on the July 5th post caught my eye. I sketched one, but it turned out to be a bit too big. Rather than try to redraw it, I reduced the image to 75% on my copier, pricked the outline, and marked it into cloth ...

I've learned that I trust my eye more with needle than with pen in hand, so I just followed the general direction of the dots using Jude's split backstitch, finessing the single strand of floss as needed ...

My last patch for the day involved the picture-book quilt in the July 6th post. When I brought it up on my iPhone, it occurred to me that I could enlarge the picture to fit a 1 3/4" patch and lay it on my copier to get a perfect-sized image to work from ...

Then I once again pricked holes in photocopied image ...

and used water-erasable marker to convey the design to cloth ...

A bit of practice with two-strands of floss convinced me that the marker dots were too hard to follow, so I sketched in blocks with my XS Pitt pen ...

with a very satisfactory end-result.

And just so I have something to work with for today's patch (whenever I get around to it), I took a picture of our first-ever pair of quail, spotted by Don just as we were sitting down to lunch ...

If you squint, you can just make out the male sitting on a rock directly above the airplane on the left (and no, Don didn't make the mobile, though I'm sure he could) ...

The quail are well worth remembering, but I'm not yet sure if this is how it will go ...

I'll let you know what I come up with ... eventually.

- The jury's still out

Retrospective (7/24/2016)

Patch #198 Weather wise

I guess the new patches are here to stay.

Original Post

I'm reserving judgment on the newest weather patches made from the thrifted linen dress I bought last week ...

They're the Sunday, Tuesday, and Saturday patches in the last row, meant to depict overcast mornings followed by blazing hot Texas afternoons. I may keep them ... I may not. We'll see.

Meantime, I indulged myself in a look at my current works in progress ... which are all too long to show in their entirety, so they've been strategically draped and folded ...

Clockwise from the upper left:

   - Unnamed (2016 weather patches)

   - Georgia's Window

   - Land of Flood and Drought (2015)

   - Remember 2016

And I'm thinking I need a design wall ...

- Backlit

Retrospective (7/18/2016)

Patch #197 Georgia's Window Scraps II

Original Post

How Georgia's Window will look once it's hemmed and hung ...

and another look at the original ...

- Learning as I go (it's all about process)

Retrospective (7/20/2016) 

Patch #196 A patch of blue sky

An early piece of embroidery from the 1960s, when I was on the first of many learning curves.

Original Post

Georgia's Window is coming together slowly, but surely ...

The sash bars of the window surrounding each pane proved to be the biggest challenge, requiring front seams to be sewn on both sides of a very narrow strip of maroon linen ...

created by overcast stitching each seam (14-18 stitches per inch) with the front sides facing out ...

After which the inside edges are trimmed ...

leaving the lower-most edge twice the width of the other three interior edges ...

Finger-pressing the top two interior edges downward first ...

the wider of the lower interior edges is then folded over the narrower edge ...

so the sandwiched lower edges can be folded over the top edges ...

pinned in place ...

and stitched over the upper edges (which I believe to be akin to French or felled seaming) ...

All that so that the front can continue to look exactly the same as it did before ..

while the back goes from looking like this ...

to a much tidier finish ....

This reimagining of Georgia O'Keeffe's painting Door through Window (1956) was influenced by looking at pictures and videos about Pojagi, a form of two-sided quilting used to make wrapping cloths in Korea. Any wonkiness introduced by my idiosyncratic methodology leads me to categorize this as "Pojagi-influenced" in my blog index (with an additional entry for "Bojagi" as there are those who use an alternate spelling).