What’s done is done

February 16, 2022 ~ Liz A ~ 18 Comments

I finished edging E’s coverlet and stitched a tracing of my hand into one corner. There was still some embellishing to do, but I decided to take the coverlet to Meg’s the other day so I could trace E’s hand over mine …

I also brought some variegated floss in pink, green, and yellow so E could choose her favorite (pink won), and stitched her hand print while the Super Bowl played in the background.

Then E tried it on for a size …

at which point it became “my blanket.” And it was perfectly clear that it wasn’t going home with me to be embellished. It was going to bed with Ellis …

which was the whole idea after all.

So I’ll just bring needle and thread with me when we visit and slowly add the moons and stars I had envisioned, along with my name and the date, and then take some more pictures. All in good time.

Meantime, sleep well sweet E.

Where did January go?

February 4, 2022September 8, 2022 ~ Liz A ~ 23 Comments

Goodness, that went fast (click for full images) …

1/20-22: sleet, lemon moon, starry night

Fortunately, there were balmy days when I could sit out on the back porch and dry my hair in the sun, with companionship no less …

although those days were followed in short order by this year’s version of last year’s February Freeze …

The good news is I’m in the home stretch with E’s coverlet, which has also served to keep my legs warm …

And I’m really psyched about continuing my Looking Up patches now that I have these blue sky and gray day linen beauties from Malka at Stitch in Dye (who lives just up the road in Austin, although we’ve never met due to Covid) …

My photo doesn’t do her cloth justice so please go take a peek at her shop. I confess I can never resist her sample packs of linen and cotton …

And wait, what? She has a blog?! Who knew?

What was I thinking?

January 14, 2022September 14, 2022 ~ Liz A ~ 22 Comments

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 …