Tag: Stitch: Patchplay

Happy days

~ Liz A ~ 13 Comments
February 22, 2021 – My H-E-B (revised 4/20/21)
February 22, 2021 – My H-E-B

Texans are proud of a lot of things, chief among them being our homegrown H-E-B grocery stores. Named for founder Howard E. Butt, they have a great tagline: “Here Everything’s Better.”

When the weeklong freeze hit, many folks wished H-E-B could take over the logistics. And the feel-good story of a local store that lost its power just before the storm made national news due to their generosity in letting everyone just leave with their groceries …

But the patch for Monday, February 22nd commemorates a significant milestone: after 11 months of having our groceries delivered, I finally went shopping. It was wonderful to be able to pick out my own produce and meat, but I have to say the H-E-B personal shoppers were a godsend for the many many times we used their services.

More good news: I finally reworked the iced pelican from February 19th …

by zooming in on this image …

Then inserted the new patch into last week’s patchplay …

I feel better now 😉

At last

~ Liz A ~ 19 Comments
February 20, 2021 – Soccer star stitches February 21, 2021 – Black box

Last week ended at last, but this week has proved to be busy indeed. So I’ve been keeping track of patch ideas and stories to tell and am just now catching up.

The Saturday patch is about Jackson, who starred in the January 2nd patch by virtue of having his appendix taken out. After one loooong month of recuperation, he is back to playing soccer …

Score!

And while watching online can make it hard to tell who is who, J is the only one on his team with red shoes.

The scattered white stitches remind me of the many steps those red shoes take as J runs up and down the field of play …

And if you squint (which I do a lot when watching a game online), you just might be able to make out his jersey number in the blank spaces between the stitch steps (14).

The second patch is a tribute to the mechanical genius of Meg’s husband Paul. When water main breaks in Austin caused the city to turn off their water, he figured there had to be a better way to flush their toilets than hauling buckets of pool water.

So while Meg and the kids were at our house last Sunday bathing and doing laundry and dancing around …

Paul rigged up a pump system …

I’d call that MacGyvering in the best sense of the word! Fortunately they didn’t need it for long, but it served them well.

Process notes: I didn’t have any bright green cloth in my stash to match Jackson’s soccer jersey, so I found some as close to it as possible and then touched it up with Inktense pencils …

The pool water was considerably easier … I just dipped into my stash of Deb Lacativa’s cloth dye magic and came up with the perfect blue.

So ends the penultimate week of February patches …

and yes, I kept the wonky bird. And I can see where he just might get to keep his head when all the patches are put together.

The difference a day can make

~ Liz A ~ 14 Comments
February 18, 2021 – Frozen tree limb February 19, 2021 – Meltwater

Thursday was dark and gloomy, punctuated by rolling power outages and a steady freezing mist that encased everything in a sheath of ice.

It was all terribly beautiful. But water became an increasing concern, overshadowing the intermittent power supply. We were urged by our local officials to conserve water even as they warned us to keep faucets dripping to prevent our pipes from freezing.

We did our part: no showers and no laundry. Hedging our bets, we put a plug in the tub to conserve the water dripping from the tap. Then we waited.

Friday the sun came out. And even though the temperature remained below freezing, Texas sun can be a formidable force, even in February. The sky was its bluest blue and as the ice melted from each branch, the droplets of water caught the sun and glittered like fairy lights.

Electric power became a reliable utility once again. And if the cupboard was getting bare, there was a certain satisfaction that came with being able to let others get to the stores first. We could wait, so we did.

The biggest concern was our Austin daughter’s water situation. Broken water mains cut off all water to their neighborhood. But that’s a story for another patch.