Liz Ackert – I'm Going to Texas (version 2.0)

Looking Up took on new meaning this week as the moon waxed full. Our dear friend Mo has often written “fly free” for those who have departed this earth. Now we join with her in bidding farewell to Rod, known to us all as Old Man Crow.

And so, as this project continues and the months go by, especially when each full moon rises, I will continue to hold them in my thoughts … as will so many others in this community of kindred spirits.

January 14-16 … a beautiful dawn … a way to patch the wind … frost glittering in a tree …

plus the “windy much?” video …

and photos that inspired the patches …

January 17-19 … the full moon rising over rooftops … the waning moon setting … and a pre-dawn cloudy sky backlit by the moon …

with a successful moonrise photo on the left … no photo to be had for the moonset … and a less-than-satisfying photo of the pre-dawn cloudy sky on the right …

So I zoomed in on the second image and checked to see if any of the filters would improve the image to match what I had seen …

Obviously the camera and I had a significantly different view of the sky … though it does make me wonder what created that image out of the pixels.

It’s a new year and there are some new readers here, so I thought I’d do a little looking back … and then forward.

My original blog started out as a way to provide recipes for my newly-wed daughters and a record of our epic move from Virginia to Texas back in 2009.

It languished after a while, but found new life when I discovered Jude Hill’s Spirit Cloth in 2014. At that point the blog became a record of my stitch adventures interspersed with the joys of living in the Texas Hill Country and grandparenting six great kiddos (please note, those were two separate activities).

More recently, around the time of our move to the Austin suburbs, I migrated over to WordPress so I could more easily compose posts using my iPhone. However, I do still maintain the old blog, chiefly for its sidebar list of Kindred Spirits in Cloth …

Which brings me to the here and now. I’m currently trying to finish hand quilting a baby clothes coverlet for out youngest granddaughter, Ellis …

Even so, I’ve also got my mind working on a dormant work in progress: a bed cloth titled my heart’s compass. The base for one side is done and ready to be embellished …

but the middle and the other side have a long way to go …

and the top edge is completely blank, which is where my current patch-a-day project called Looking Up comes in.

I woke up at 4:00 this morning, my head buzzing with ideas for Looking Up. Why stack the patches into weeks and months when my days flow in one long, continuous stream? What if I just keep stringing the patches together until they span the width of the cloth?

And what if I just appliqué the resulting strip of patches onto my heart’s compass and then start another strip of patches, and then another and another until I have a whole year’s worth of Looking Up patches?

And what if I put this wonderful gifted batik cloth underneath the strings of patches, sorta like this?

Last, who am I trying to kid by not talking about the individual patches? Of course I want to tell their stories … although I think it might be better to tell them in clusters rather than individually.

So without further ado, here are the patches to date.

January 1-4 … the dawn of a new year … followed by three sunny, blue sky days (taken on my beloved soumak rug, which provides the backdrop for most of my photos) …

January 5-8 … two nights of the waxing crescent moon (called the banana moon in our family) as seen from the back porch … followed by two rainy days when only short glimpses of blue sky were possible …

January 9-12 … a mostly cloudy day … the appearance of the first quarter moon (aka the taco moon) … a golden dawn that brought the sad news of a dear man’s passing (rest in peace Adrien) … and Parker’s moon from this Wednesday …