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19:24
Today's patch was the color of warmth as we thawed out from our week in St Louis ...

Patch #48

Just after we left, Melissa's refrigerator died so they had to pitch all their food, even though temperatures outside were low enough to do the job. Irony abounds.

As promised, I revised the patches made during the trip, with half of the famed arch appearing with our arrival ...


bracketed by the other half of the arch upon our departure ...


In between there is blue jean mending on Patch #43 ...


Melissa's kitchen towel saying added to Patch #44 (which I still need to document more fully) ...


and the complete do-over on Melissa's birthday Patch #45 ...


After which I wondered how my random patch lengths for February were adding up compared to the last seventeen January patches. Amazingly, the difference was less than half an inch. 

Who needs rulers?
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15:23
We left sub-freezing temperatures and gray skies in St Louis and returned to 80 degrees and blue skies in Austin ...

Patch #47 (far right, revised 2/17/2016)

I'm looking forward to stitching the February patches to bring them up to date. The embellishments promise to be a way of reliving a wonderful week with our grandsons (not to mention their mom and dad).
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13:52
For the first time in 45 days, I'm really not happy with a patch. So today's patch will remain unattached until yesterday's patch can be redone (when we get back to Texas since I don't have enough fuchsia linen left) ...

Patch #46

I chose green because we're already talking about when we're heading back to St Louis ... most likely in April to do a good Spring pruning.

And here's a quick look at the reveal for Melissa's kitchen towel ...


I cropped the initial photo lest she never speak to me again. After which we tucked in to birthday eats.

Dinner was lasagna with homemade sauce and pasta. Dessert was strawberry trifle with candles ...


and ginger snap cookies ...


A fuller accounting of the towel will follow soon, but with only hours left of our time in St Louis, there are more important things to tend to. Off I go ...
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14:05
I grabbed a few bits of linen to bring with me to St Louis, but managed to leave the Valentine's pink at home. No matter. It turns out that today's patch was destined to be this color ...

Patch #45 (replaced 2/17/2016)

since Melissa's pre-birthday night on the town was spent in this jacket ...


Which turned out to be a pretty close match (although it's not as apparent here since one picture is day lit and the other is not).

So Happy Birthday, Valentine ...

Meliss, 15 months old (Easter 1987)

May every day of your birthday season bring you this much happiness!
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13:30
I finished Melissa's birthday gift on deadline, just as Don predicted ...

Patch #44 (revised 2/17/2016)

so today's patch was made from the same blue/green/gray linen as her birthday gift and will be stitched later (as most of the February patches will be since I've been preoccupied with the birthday project.)

Since we're in St Louis, I arranged the first thirteen patches of the month in an arch over the weather weeks, which are really starting to add up ...


Birthday cookies (hearts, race cars, planes and trains) have been baked and decorated with expert assistance from 3 year old Jackson ...


and a sponge cake awaits assembly into a strawberry trifle, long Melissa's birthday cake of choice. You can read more about it and get a glimpse of Meliss here:  http://imgoingtotexas.blogspot.com/2009/08/just-trifle.html

, , ,

12:55
J saw me taking a picture and he wanted in on the action ...

Patch #43 (far right ... revised 2/17/2016)

Today's patch is indigo-dyed linen that I used to mend the hole in his jeans from the inside ...


out ...


As is often the case, the other knee was just a bit thin, so I added some reinforcing stitch, backed with a little more linen ...


Now, let's get back to having fun ...



, ,

08:53
Continuing the simple patch theme, today's red patch completes the Southwest (Airlines) triad ...

Patch #42 (far right)

And I came up with a solution to the Texas versus St Louis weather conundrum ...


a sunny, dry day in Texas with a snow note for STL. Since I left my trusty Pitt pen at home, I cadged one of J's colored pencils to guide my stitches ... thanks buddy!

On the menu tonight: homemade meatballs, homemade pasta, homemade bread. The sauce I'm leaving to Aldi (food store) since they have caramelized onion on special this week. Guess I'd better get cracking.
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14:39
Just a quick post today since there are grandsons to play with and chicken soup to make ...

Patch #41 (revised on 2/17/2016)

I anticipated being busy, so this is a pre-made patch. It was a toss-up whether I was going to stitch Southwest Airlines colors or a St Louis arch, until I spotted this outside the plane window ...


Do you see it? The reflection of the blue on the wing made a perfect (half) arch. Don't know when or how it will get done, but I love the serendipity.

Meantime, I'm also puzzling over how to do my weather patches, because as Meliss so aptly posted on Facebook ...


And not only is the temperature a bit different, the precipitation has a different feel to it ...



A few hours later I saw a sight I haven't seen for quite a while ...




Ha! There's nothing like the sound of a plow blade to bring back memories of snow days past!
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21:00
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.
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15:06
Which describes both today's patch ...

Patch #39

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.
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13:07
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 ...
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11:48
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 ...

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15:43
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.
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14:30
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's 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.
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