Winter Approaches

We are enjoying the last golden days of fall before the weather falls off a cliff. Yesterday was sunny and 72F and I drove to Missoula to teach a (very enjoyable) serger mastery class. On the way home, I stopped at the Amish store for a cup of peanut butter chip ice cream, which I ate outside while basking in the late afternoon sun.

By Sunday, highs are supposed to be in the low 40s. It is time to button up the garden and greenhouse. The squash will have to go somewhere. There are flies in my laundry room and I have thought, more than once, of hunting down a barn spider and installing it in my kitchen for the winter. I miss Charlotte.

I’ve put together 3/4 of an On Repeat top. Once again, the lighting is awful.

This linen is lovely despite being wrinkled from handling. You may wonder why I put my sleeves in flat. I have given up trying to set sleeves into finished armscyes. I have been trying for years to do it the traditional way and can’t. I have tried every trick in the book. I set sleeves in flat when I was knitting and I have decided to continue doing it that way because I get a beautifully smooth sleeve cap with no swearing. I will try to take some photos on the next one so you can see my method. I don’t necessarily recommend it as the best way; it is simply the way that works for me.

I also have some thoughts about seam allowances. I am not sure what is leading the charge against 5/8" seam allowances, but I am not in favor of the narrower seam allowances in most garment patterns these days. A 1/2" seam allowance is okay but not ideal; a 3/8" seam allowance is even less so. I have run across one or two patterns with 1/4" seam allowances, which is just ridiculous. We are making clothing, not quilts. I would rather have the wider allowance and trim off any excess with the serger. I may begin adding a bit extra to the seam allowances when I trace my patterns just because I can.

I have not yet decided how to schedule the rest of my week. I have an appointment in town tomorrow at 11, so it makes the most sense to me to wait and run all my errands while I am there despite the fact that the husband is out of the mixed nuts he likes to snack on in the evenings. (He pointed that out to me.) Also—and you did not hear me say this—I am a bit tired of driving. More to the point, I am tired of dodging idiots on the road. I can’t start salsa production until I get some onions and hot peppers, but the second batch of sauerkraut is ready to be canned. I probably will do that today after I finish the On Repeat top.

I watched a YouTube video last week of a sewist in the UK who decided that she needed to reprioritize her schedule to make sewing something she did first every day instead of last. That resonated with me. So often, sewing is the reward I give myself when I finish all my other tasks. The problem is that I am a shining supernova in the morning, which makes morning the best time for me to do focused work that requires a lot of mental energy, like paperwork and writing. Sewing works best for me in the late morning and after lunch. I want to keep that arrangement through the winter but figure out how to put some guardrails around my sewing time so it doesn’t get pushed down the list by something else.

Next to the Last

For the past many years, the first weekend in October has meant a trip to Ritzville, Washington, to help out at the Mennonite Country Auction. Our friends, TS and Holly, own Stampede Packing Company here in Kalispell. One of their products is the Redneck line of sausage. We eat a lot of Redneck Sausage here at Chez Schuster-Szabo despite raising our own pigs, because it is just that good.

TS and Holly make a special applewood smoked sausage to sell at the Mennonite Country Auction along with slab bacon and smoked ham. People line up two hours ahead to be able to purchase these products at the sale. Elaine and I run the cash registers. It’s a mad rush for about an hour until we sell out.

We were set to leave around noon on Friday for the drive to Spokane, where I had reserved a hotel room for two nights. Ritzville is 50 miles west of Spokane and Menno Mennonite—the site of the sale—is another 20 miles west of Ritzville. Just before we were to leave, I got a call from another member of our church who works for TS and also helps out at the sale. There was a load of cheese and a load of sausage to go out to Ritzville. I said I would take the cheese, so after picking up Elaine, we swung by the plant to load the cheese up into the back of the Jeep. Elaine and I were on the road by 1 pm.

I dropped Elaine off at the hotel in Spokane so she could get some work done and continued out to Ritzville. It was a beautiful evening and still quite warm for October. I delivered the cheese and drove back to Spokane as the sun was setting.

On Saturday morning, Elaine and I headed back out to the church, which is a literal oasis in the middle of miles and miles and miles of potato fields. The grounds were abuzz with activity. We walked around, visited with friends, and at 10 am, we were in place and ready to sell bacon, ham, and sausage.

Part of the opening announcements included the sad news that next year will be the 50th—and the last—Mennonite Country Auction. As with so many great events, the volunteer organizers are old and tired and no young people are stepping up to take over. It’s a shame, because this auction typically nets over $100,000 each year for Mennonite Central Committee.

Elaine and were hungry after manning those cash registers. She had a bowl of groundnut stew for lunch and I had a German sausage on a stick with sauerkraut. You would think I have had enough sauerkraut this week but no sir! For dessert, we shared some New Year’s cookies, which are balls of dough fried in lard and dusted with sugar. We watched the quilt auction for a bit until Elaine’s sister, Alice, and her family arrived from Seattle. They had driven out to take Elaine back with them for a visit.

I was too engaged to take pictures (sorry, Margaret) so I don’t have any of the quilts. My sense is that the quilts sold well this year, although there were fewer than there used to be. I always get a kick out of the fact that someone makes and donates poppyseed rolls—kolache—that sell for over $1000 apiece. I am going to try to make and donate a quilt to next year’s sale. We’ll see if I can make that happen.

******

I spent Saturday night in Spokane and drove home yesterday morning. After unpacking and doing a few loads of laundry, I traced the back and sleeve pattern pieces for the On Repeat top and went stash diving for fabric. I am going to use a remnant of lightweight black linen that I got at Pacific Fabrics, which is just large enough.

I have a podcast episode to edit this morning and paperwork to wrangle. Tomorrow, I am teaching a serger mastery class in Missoula, and on Wednesday, I have to start the salsa. After the salsa is done, I will devote myself to sewing for a while. It has been too long.

Sewing Adjacent

I am getting closer to actual sewing. After I finished up the spiced red cabbage yesterday—12 pints—I went to the cutting table to work on the On Repeat woven top pattern. I began by tracing out the front exactly from the pattern:

Sorry, I know that is hard to see because of that late afternoon sun. And I trace in pencil, not marker. That horizontal line is the lengthen/shorten line. The pattern comes in a tall version, but I still had to lengthen it by another inch.

I always find it helpful to lay out patterns side by side to compare them.

From left to right: The Scout Tee; the thing I (erroneously) have been calling my self-drafted pattern for lack of a better description, which is a mashup of a Burda pattern and the Love Notions Cadence top; and the On Repeat Tee. The Scout Tee and the mashup pattern both fit me, but they fit in different ways. The Scout Tee fits closely in the upper bodice—once I get that top on my body, it does not move around AT ALL. You would think that would restrict movement, but I like the fact that I don’t have to worry about it shifting. The darts on both tops are lower than the dart on the On Repeat Tee; on the Scout Tee, they are horizontal and on the mashup tee, they are angled upward. It’s hard to see because those patterns are face down to match the orientation of the On Repeat pattern piece.

After I traced the original On Repeat pattern, I lengthened it by slashing at the lengthen line, spreading it by an inch, then taping an extra piece of paper underneath the opening. The dart was equally easy to adjust. I drew a box around it.

The plus sign indicates the bust apex. The dot indicates the level where I want the dart point to be. I cut the box around the dart, moved it down until the point was where it needed to be, then taped it into place with extra paper covering the hole above.

I really think I prefer the shaping provided when the darts angle upward—as in my mashup tee— rather than horizontally, but I am not going to quibble about it.

Once I had made the needed adjustments, I retraced the pattern:

I can tell, looking at that side seam and comparing it to the other two patterns, that this top is going to fit more loosely below the bust. I won’t know if I like that or not until I sew it up. (I want to avoid anything that screams “maternity top.”) And I can’t sew it up until I trace and alter the back pattern piece and make sure it matches my altered front pattern piece. I am mostly interested in how the armhole fits, as the armscye seems to be in between the tighter shaping of the Scout Tee and the looser shaping of the mashup tee. Will it be a Goldilocks armscye?

[I have some thoughts about that mashup tee armscye, but they will have to wait for another blog post.]

This is why fitting is one of those areas where you can’t just read a bunch of books, understand the theory, and think you know anything. You have to trace and alter and compare and make muslins and see how garments fit on actual human beings. I tell students in my classes that I can teach them basic music theory and how to read music, but I cannot teach them how to play the piano because they have to do that work themselves. Fitting is the same way.

*****

There will be no sewing for a few days 😩 because Elaine and I are going to Spokane this afternoon. We are helping out at the Mennonite Country Auction tomorrow in Ritzville. Her sister and BIL are coming over from Seattle to meet us there, and Elaine will go back with them for a visit. I’ll spend tomorrow night in Spokane and drive home on Sunday. It is hard for both of us to be gone at the same time because she is my backup pianist at church, but we like to travel together. They will manage without us.

A Day of Cabbage

Yesterday’s task was to deal with the cabbage in its various forms. I had one crock of fermented sauerkraut that needed to be canned and processed, another couple of heads of white cabbage that need to be fermented into the next batch of sauerkraut, and a couple of heads of red cabbage that needed to be prepped for a batch of spiced red cabbage. (That recipe is in the Ball canning book.)

I love properly-fermented sauerkraut. It isn’t unpleasant at all. It smells wonderful and the taste is tangy without being overpowering. I moved the finished batch of sauerkraut to a stock pot, cleaned and scalded the crock, then filled it with the two shredded heads of cabbage I brought in from the garden. I added some of the brine from the previous batch to the fresh brine to jump-start the fermentation process. It all sits in a three-gallon crock on my counter while the bacteria do their thing. I’ve done cucumber pickles the same way.

After the second batch of sauerkraut was underway, I shredded and salted the red cabbage. It sat in a second crock overnight. This morning, I will drain and rinse it, after which it has to dry for about six hours. By the time I get home from town, it should be ready to mix with brine and spices and run through the canner.

My cabbage is lovely. The cabbage heads are large and tight and blissfully free of worms thanks to all the garter snakes on bug patrol in the garden.

Finally, I canned and processed the first batch of sauerkraut. I got five quarts.

Sauerkraut was running about $8 a jar last winter at the grocery store, so I just saved us $40. And mine is all organic.

Cooking is not my favorite activity, but we do eat well here.

Anna brought me some roasted blue kuri squash. I had some with lunch yesterday, topped with butter and salt. It’s very good. It tastes like a squash, LOL. I think I will forego growing butternut squash from now on and just grow buttercup and blue kuri.

*****

I turned on the serger again yesterday afternoon and finished the edges of some yardage that needed to be washed. When I was in Missoula last week to drop off my class samples at the store, I noticed they had some bolts of a hemp/silk blend of fabric. The colors weren’t great—a clay red and a muddy sky blue—but I bought two yards of the red anyway because I hadn’t seen this blend before. The fabric on the bolt was pretty stiff. I mentioned that I thought it would soften up when washed and the young woman helping me said no. She told me she had made a pair of pants out of it and didn’t think it would soften up enough for a top. I washed it yesterday and ran it through the dryer on hot. It still has some body to it, but it did soften considerably. The trick with those bast fibers—linen, hemp, ramie, etc.,—is to wash and dry them at high temps to get rid of the gumminess that makes them stiff.

I haven’t decided what it will be yet. It can marinate in the stash.

I also pulled out the Pattern Emporium On Repeat pattern to prep it for tracing. I am curious to see how this one compares to my self-drafted woven top pattern and the Scout Tee pattern, both of which I used quite heavily this summer. The sizing is comparable, but I can already see that I will have to lower the bust darts. I mean, really—I will be using the full bust adjusted pattern piece, and if my bustline were at the level that the pattern thinks it should be, I wouldn’t be able to see over my chest. I sometimes think that most indie pattern designers are young women who haven’t met gravity yet.

A Tsunami of Squash

Rain was in the forecast for today—it’s raining now—so I wanted to clean up the garden yesterday and bring in the rest of the squash. I spent about three hours pulling squash vines and piling them up to decompose. They will just stay there until next spring.

I ended up with four blue hubbard squash. What I thought was a fifth one was a large blue kuri squash.

The husband loaded the hubbards into the wheelbarrow and hauled them to the greenhouse for me. He thought they were about 20 pounds apiece. Two of them are spoken for. I am curious to see how the blue kuri squash taste. I am giving one to Sarah so she can try it, too.

I also ended up with a dozen acorn squash, about a hundred little white decorative pumpkins, a total of 15 blue kuri, and another dozen Georgia Roasters in addition to what Anna and I had already brought in. I am not sure what to do about this one. 🤪

The butternut squash were a disappointment. There were a lot of them but they didn’t ripen in time. It’s always hit or miss with them. I am going to give up on them and just grow the squash that I know do well here in Montana. I have about two dozen Winter Luxury pumpkins, too.

I told Anna I would leave the squash in the greenhouse until the end of the month and she can use what she wants. I’ll put a few of each in storage for us, too. What’s left will go to church so people can take some home, and the remainder will go to the food bank.

I didn’t put in a lot of plants. All of this came from one—or at most, two—plants of each variety. Pig manure is great fertilizer.

And this is very weird. The photo is blurry but it is a Jonagold, one of the Costco apple trees I bought in February when I was visiting DD#1:

I bought four Costco apple trees in the spring, two from the Costco in Sequim and two from our Costco. The husband planted all of them in the garden. The Lodi and the Ambrosia did really well, even after the deer nibbled on them. The other two—this Jonagold and a Fuji—spent the entire summer looking and acting like they were dead. About two weeks ago, I noticed that the Jonagold was leafing out. (This is not the root stock; I checked.) Apparently, it decided that life was worth living after all. How absolutely bizarre. Thankfully, the husband, who is usually very efficient about pulling things he thinks are beyond saving, hadn’t gotten to these trees yet. I am going to leave the Fuji in over the winter even though it still looks dead. Who knows? It might leaf out next spring. If not, I’ll buy something to replace it.

[I believe this has something to do with the trees not breaking dormancy properly or on time. I need to talk to Susan and find out what she knows.]

The tomatoes are still in the garden. The turkeys are feasting on them and actually do a reasonably good job of cleaning up, so I will let them. I also brought in two white cabbages and four red cabbages. The batch of sauerkraut I started two weeks ago is ready to can. That will be today’s project, and I’ll start another batch in the crock using the cabbages from my garden. (Of the two dozen seedlings I planted last spring, only six survived the marauding deer in June.) The red cabbages will become a batch of spiced red cabbage. I also had one celery plant in the garden that produced a ton of leaves, which is fine with me. I will wash them and put them in the freezer to be used when I make stock.

One of the local grocery stores has a case sale every fall and every spring. I stopped there yesterday and loaded up on evaporated milk, mushrooms, and other items I don’t can or don’t want to can. I’ll probably go back again tomorrow.

Happiness is Pushing Boulders Up Hills

I am making headway. I actually turned on the serger yesterday, although I turned it off again after deciding the knit hat project had priority. I am going to have to overcome a bit of inertia after not having sewn for a month. Inertia can be overcome by starting with a small project—an easy win—before jumping back in with a larger one. I see some zipper pouches in the near future.

I also talked to someone locally about doing more Facebook advertising for the sewing school. Trying to navigate ad placements on social media is a full-time job. For a very reasonable amount of money, this person is going to create the ads for me and run them for a month. I am trying a few different avenues to see which ones generate the best response.

Things are happening. I am trying to complete at least one task every day that moves the needle on each of my projects. I will complete more tasks if time allows.

I started following a guy on Twitter named Justin Skycak, and he posts a lot of content about productivity. This recent post resonated with me. When people ask me how I get so much done, it really boils down to this kind of approach:

The husband operates much like this, too. We are two peas in a pod. Someone summed up this post with the phrase, “Imagine Sisyphus happy.” Happy to be pushing those boulders up all those hills.

This is another way of saying the same thing:

These are the things I think about while I am awake, LOL.

*****

We got a very respectable crop of nice-looking apples from the Golden Delicious tree.

I thought I might make another batch of apple pie filling, but I need to get salsa made, first. The husband can take these for lunch.

Fall, Officially

I think we can safely call an end to the 2026 gardening season. The thermometer read 30F when I got up yesterday morning and again this morning. I am not unhappy about this as I am more than ready to hibernate for the winter. The rest of the squash will get put in the greenhouse. The husband rolled up hoses for me and got the last of the apples off the trees.

Our kids were here this weekend along with future SIL’s parents. We had a wonderful time visiting and getting to know them. (I had met his mom a couple of times before in Seattle.) The craft co-op also had its sale this weekend and Sunnie came up from Texas to participate. It was so good to see her again; I missed her visit over the summer because of bike tour.

Things should slow down now, at least for a few weeks. I don’t have as many non-negotiable or time-sensitive projects on the calendar. The items that are on the schedule are all directly tied to sewing classes, the podcast, or stuff here at home, like salsa production.

This was a very educational summer for me. I learned a lot about professional relationships and what some people think passes for acceptable adult behavior. I stopped volunteering with an organization that took my work—hard work that produced spectacular results—for granted. The world does not operate the way I do and I have to stop expecting it to do so. You would think that I would have learned that lesson a long time ago, but perhaps I am perpetually optimistic.

Going forward, my energy is going to be directed at me and at my projects.

*****

I am re-knitting the hat project. I didn’t like the way the other one was going. The new version is much better. No photos of the new one until I decide how I want to shape the top.

I might try to sew this week or I might just wait until October and spend the last few days of September getting ducks lined up.

Kennis, the designer behind Itch to Stitch, just released the Salas Jacket, a wonderful quilted jacket just in time for fall. Once again, she hit it out of the park. I don’t know if I will make this one, but I love all the options:

When I do start sewing again, I am going to finish projects that are already in the pipeline before I start anything else. Some of them just need an afternoon’s worth of work and it is silly to let them languish.

Even More Bears

I went to Missoula yesterday. I didn’t have to go, but I am teaching the Christmas stocking class again at the quilt store there in a few weeks and they asked for the class samples to display. I am hesitant to mail anything anymore because apparently, all mail now goes to the moon (in the name of efficiency) to be individually hand stamped before coming back to Earth to be delivered. I have had several pieces of mail—mailed from the main post office in Kalispell, no less—go astray over the past couple of months. Even when mail does make it to its destination, the journey takes forever.

I also took some boxes of books to The Book Exchange and traded them in for credit. The store had a ton of quilting and knitting books but very few sewing books. I did get a book of canning recipes:

The recipe that roped me in is for Curry Tomatillo Pickles. I didn’t grow tomatillos this year, but I like them a lot and I love curry. That sounds like a winning combo to me. The Other Janet and I may have to have a pickle-making day next summer.

On the way home, I spotted a black bear in someone’s vineyard, happily munching on grapes. The bears are everywhere this year.

******

I need to work on the podcast website soon. That website is still on Squarespace 7.0. In order to take advantage of some new features, I have to upgrade to version 7.1. Squarespace will move everything over automatically, but I will have to spend a few hours cleaning up pages and making sure everything looks and works the way it is supposed to. I don’t have time to do that right now even though I am itching to get it crossed off the list. Hopefully, I can get to it in a week or so.

I’ve got three podcast interviews scheduled today. I don’t usually stack them like that, but it just happened that all of the guests had today free.

Sew Expo teachers got some of their class information this week. I am very excited about the changes the organizers have made. Class descriptions and grids will go up the second week of November, with registration opening in December. This is a change from past years when registration didn’t open until January. It also sounds like the number of class offerings have expanded significantly.

Things are happening.

Overrun with Squash

Our friend Anna lives across the road. She has a catering business and she uses almost exclusively fresh local produce. If I have extra of something, she’ll buy it and plan a menu around it. She loves the Georgia Roasters and any other squash I grow. Squash was one crop that did exceptionally well this year. (The pig manure we spread on the garden might have helped.) Yesterday afternoon, Anna and I brought most of the Georgia Roasters, the spaghetti squash, the blue kuri squash, and the buttercup squash into the greenhouse to cure. The Georgia Roasters are those long orange squash. We picked at least 30 of them.

There are at least another half a dozen Georgia Roasters out in the garden yet, but they were mixed in with the butternut squash—which still need a few days to ripen—and I didn’t want to trample the vines. I thought I had planted red kuri squash, too, but either it was mislabeled or I didn’t plant it after all. We are both excited to try the blue kuri.

Anna will use some of the Georgia Roasters fresh and freeze some. The blue hubbards are still out in the garden, as are the pumpkins, the acorn squash and the butternut squash. The beans are drying on those racks on the far side of the greenhouse. They look good. After I pulled the buttercup and some of the Georgia Roaster vines, I found several cabbages and some pepper plants. The cabbages grew nicely and probably will end up as sauerkraut.

We did not get the potatoes dug because the husband changed the oil in my Jeep after I got home from church. They can wait. I also brought in another wagon load of tomatoes. We have guests coming this week, but after they leave, salsa production begins. I am hoping to have all the canning done by the end of September.

We still haven’t had a frost. Unusual, but not unheard of. And I watched Ryan Hall’s video yesterday about the slight change in the El Nino forecast. This El Nino is still historic, but he noted that the tongue of warm water is closer to Japan than to the US, and when that happens, it’s possible that our part of the country will get more cold coming down from Canada instead of being warmer than average. Theoretically, if some of that cold combines with an atmospheric river, we could get snow and a lot of it.

[This is me praying for a hard winter to clear some of these transplants out of here. 🙏🏻]

The snowiest winter on record in Seattle happened during an El Nino winter (1968-69) when Seattle got 67.5 inches of snow. (Knowing what happens there when all they get is snow flurries makes me think the whole place must have shut down for weeks.) Spokane got 93 inches of snow that winter. An El Nino winter doesn’t guarantee the weather will be warmer and drier than normal.

******

Still no sewing. We’re so close to the end of National Sewing Month that I am not even going to try. I’d rather get all the canning and cleaning done and go into October with a wide open sewing schedule.

No Sewing During National Sewing Month

I had coffee with The Other Janet yesterday morning so we could catch up on what has been happening. She showed me photos of her reorganized sewing room—at least one of us is sewing. 😩

[The irony that it is National Sewing Month is not lost on me, believe me. If I had chosen the month for sewing, it would have been January or February. In my world, September is National Canning Month.]

And it’s not like I am sitting around doing nothing. I am knitting a bit in the evenings again, which I haven’t done in a long while. The hat is coming along nicely:

This is the upper part of the hat; I am going to pick up and work the ribbing later. I would like to make a quieter version, too, but I do not have very much muddy earth tone yarn in my yarn stash. Shocking, I know.

Otherwise, it has been a week of paperwork, of cleaning, of cooking, and not much else. Cabbage was on sale this week at the grocery store, so I have a crock of sauerkraut fermenting on the kitchen counter. I had no other good place to put it where I wouldn’t forget about it. I also need to bring in another wagon load of tomatoes today.

This will pass. Canning season will end, the weather will keep me indoors, and I will have time to sew again.

*****

My friend Robert asked me if the deck at the rental house was done, because he hadn’t seen pictures of it on the blog. He and Deana stayed in the house over the summer when the deck consisted of large sheets of plywood over the joists. I took some photos for him and will share them here:

And the front:

We chose a neutral color of the recycled decking material because at some point, we are going to re-side the house and put on a new metal roof. I like the “beige with a bit a green” combination. It blends nicely with the surroundings.

The Knitting Stash is Deep

My hair is once again under control; I came out of the salon with my head feeling about 10 pounds lighter. Before my appointment, I met with a friend of mine who used to work at the quilt store. We talked about the sewing school and I asked if she would be interested in helping to organize serger retreats and other events and she was very excited. It was good to see her again and hear about what she’s been doing.

When I got home from town, I canned up another 10 quarts of tomato sauce. I think I may call that good and move on to making salsa. We have enough sauce for spaghetti once a week and an occasional pot of chili. I need to put away the canning equipment for a while so I can clean the house for guests.

I bought patterns from two new-to-me companies and had them printed while I was in town. Do I need more patterns? No. Is it helpful for me to sew patterns from different companies so I can give informed recommendations to my students? Yes. (I can rationalize with the best of them.) The first pattern is the On Repeat top from Pattern Emporium:

I haven’t made anything from Pattern Emporium yet, but this one got rave reviews on its release.

The other pattern is the Piper Tunic and Dress from Wardrobe by Me. When I finally nail the ultimate dress pattern, I am going to make about a dozen of them, probably all in linen.

Of course, in order to make anything, I have to actually touch a sewing machine. Perhaps that will happen this weekend, or perhaps I will be rolling up hose in the garden and digging potatoes.

Sew Expo has plenty of sewing-related classes happening the day before Expo opens, so I am going to offer a knitting class, instead. We are going to make a slip-stitch hat—it will lend itself well to scrap knitting and all sorts of fun color play. The pattern is literally only two rows/rounds, which makes it quick and easy enough even for beginners. After an inch or so, the work almost goes on autopilot, which is good for a class where people will want to visit and learn more about knitting in general.

I have to make a sample, so I went to my stash yesterday evening and dove into my totes of beloved Brunswick Germantown. That was one of the first yarns I used when I began knitting and I bought up all I could find when the mill went out of business. Lion Brand Wool was the only other yarn that ever felt to me like Germantown when I was knitting it. I pulled out some partially-used skeins and cast on for a hat after dinner.

I’ll take a photo after I’ve done enough that the color switching shows up.

Sew Something Studio

Today is launch day! The website is live, the Facebook ads are running, and now I wait to see if anyone in the Flathead Valley wants to take sewing classes.

Local peeps, you can help me out by liking or following the page on Facebook. Share it widely. Local sewing peeps, you can go to the website and sign up for the newsletter. If you want a specific kind of class, please let me know. I will get it on the schedule. Right now, I just have the Beginning Sewing classes listed.

I am meeting this morning with someone who has both sewing and event planning experience to see if she would be interested in helping me to plan a serger retreat for next year. I’ve already had someone from California ask me to be on the list to be notified if I schedule one. 😮 Retreats are the “special events” part of what I am offering.

I am juggling a thousand tiny little details and I am sure I missed something, so don’t hesitate to let me know if you see something egregious.

I enjoyed teaching at the quilt store, but that arrangement reached a point this summer where it wasn’t working any longer. The Mountain View Mennonite Church basement wasn’t being used and we had plans to renovate the bathrooms for the bike tour, so I approached our Leadership Team about having classes there. I think it will work well. I can store tables and machines in the space, the entrance is off the lower level parking lot, and the church is only four miles from my house and just a bit more than that from town.

*****

The Sew Expo class coordinator e-mailed me yesterday and asked if I would be interested in teaching a four-hour class on Wednesday, the day before Expo begins. We are discussing possible classes that would fit in that slot. It will make for a long week—I am already scheduled to teach six other classes—but if I am going to be there, I might as well teach. I can manage my stamina level.

I cooked down another batch of tomatoes yesterday. The sauce is waiting in the fridge for me to can it, hopefully this afternoon. It looks like we are in for a stretch of nice—and dry—weather. Still no frost in the forecast, so I’ll keep harvesting tomatoes as long as I can.

I have a lot going on right now, yes, but it’s a good kind of busy.

Rooster Training

As it turns out, the chicken that was camped on the floor of the chicken coop was on her way out. She was not protecting chicks. I found her dead in the corner of the coop yesterday morning. Sometimes, it is hard to tell what the behavior means. I still have several hens sitting on eggs so I remain hopeful that there will be chicks at some point.

And the best way to describe my training program for the baby roosters is that I talk to them. I talk to all the chickens, constantly. I talk about the weather, the deer and the turkeys, what’s in the bags of scraps that my friend Anna brings over for them—it’s basically a running commentary that gets them used to hearing my voice. By the time the baby roosters are old enough to start being aggressive, they have heard me blathering on for six months and don’t see me as a threat. In their minds, I am just the lady that makes a lot of noise and gives them food. Even the year that I had nine juvenile roosters in the coop, I didn’t worry about going in there.

Dave knew his name. I could say, “Dave,” and he would stop what he was doing and come over to me. When I go into the coop in the morning, the rooster is standing by the door to meet me. I say, “Good morning chickens! It’s time to go out! Follow the rooster!” and the rooster trots over to the door to the chicken yard and stands there until I open it. When it’s open, he starts clucking and encouraging the hens to go outside. When I leave the coop, I say, “Okay, ladies, the rooster is in charge!”

Do the roosters actually understand me? Probably not. Their brains are not very big. But we have a routine and they are used to it and I think that keeps the anxiety and drive to protect the hens from me at a minimum.

One of my roosters used to demand to eat scratch grains from my hand.

*****

I canned up the ham stock yesterday afternoon and put a few more bags of tomatoes into the freezer. I’d like to make the second batch of tomato sauce today although I might not can it until tomorrow. The schedule this week is fluid. I do have an appointment tomorrow to get a desperately-needed haircut. I try to get in at least every eight weeks, but it has been more than three months and my hairstyle right now is most charitably described as “poodle meets Newfoundland.” My hair has multiple personalities depending on the humidity level. I have always had thick hair and a lot of it, but it became a lot curlier after I had chemo. Here in Montana, when the humidity level is less than 25%, I can wear it straight if I blow it dry and use the flatiron. Anything more than that and it curls up no matter what I do to it. (I don’t even take my hairdryer to Seattle with me because there is no point.) Thankfully, the woman who cuts my hair knows how to layer it properly to take some of the bulk out of it.

The Jeep has also been loaded with the first batch of donations to take to one of the thrift stores in town. Books are next on the list. I’ve gone through mine and the husband said he will try to cull his collection, too. Those will go to one of the used bookstores, either here or in Missoula.

We moved the nightstands into the spare bedroom at the rental house. They look nice there. The husband installed the lights in the rental house garage, although we still need to get one more fixture. Home Depot only had two in stock. Next weekend, because the weather is supposed to be nice, we have to dig potatoes and put hoses away. I am trying to decide if I should cut the grass around the garden one more time. It would make it cleaner and easier to work out there.

Bears Everywhere

I have instituted a version of Swedish Death Cleaning because I am getting tired of being overrun by stuff. Also, we have people coming to visit, which always motivates me to do some thorough deep cleaning. The husband brought back a beautiful walnut roll-top desk from his dad’s house last fall and we wanted to put it in the living room so it didn’t have to spend another winter in the rental house garage. In order for that to happen, though, several other pieces of furniture had to get moved, in a specific order. I couldn’t move them without help or this already would have been accomplished.

I made a list of what needed to happen, in what order, and we tackled it yesterday morning. We started by moving a vintage sewing machine in a cabinet from our bedroom to the garage. Some of my machines need to get released back into the wild (taken to the thrift store or sold to people) and this was one of them. Many years ago, my father made me a map chest that holds all of my knitting needles. It needed to be moved from the corner of the living room up to the spot in the bedroom previously occupied by the sewing machine. We took all of the drawers out—I have to go through them now and organize my needles—and the husband moved the map chest upstairs. Also in that corner was a double-wide rocking chair. I don’t want to sell it because I used to sit there with the girls and read to them when they were little. That rocking chair went over to the rental house to one of the bedrooms.

Once the corner was empty, I mopped the floor and touched up a few holes in the walls where pictures had hung. The husband went over to the rental house garage and began loading the pieces of the desk into the truck. I helped him with the pieces that needed two people to move. A few areas on the desk needed re-gluing, so he set up some sawhorses on the porch to make those repairs. In the meantime, I strained the ham stock that had been simmering in the roaster and put it in the fridge to cool so I could scrape the fat off the top before I can it.

After lunch, I brought in another wagon load of tomatoes to ripen inside and put ripe ones in the freezer. While he was waiting for glue to dry, we got the apples and pears off all the trees except the Golden Delicious. Those apples need another week or two yet. The last task on my list was to clean up some nightstands. They had been in Sunnie’s house and given to Robin when Sunnie sold her house last year. Robin offered them to me. I have been looking for nightstands for the rental house all summer with no luck. I picked them up from Robin on Friday. They need to be stripped and refinished at some point, but I don’t have time for that right now. Instead, I washed them down with some Murphy’s oil soap, went over them with fine steel wool, then gave them a coat of Howard’s Restore-a-Finish. That stuff is pretty amazing. It doesn’t completely refinish the wood, but it brightens the existing finish and fills in any spots where the finish has worn away. I’ve used it before on sewing machine cabinets. The nightstands look fine for now and I’ll put them in the rental house bedroom today. (Thank you, Sunnie and Robin. 😊)

The husband and I reassembled the desk in the late afternoon. It looks very nice in the corner of the living room. We need to find a chair to go with it.

Our reward to ourselves for all that work was dinner in town and a trip to Home Depot. On the way to town, I spotted a black bear in a meadow, so we stopped to watch it for a minute:

I don’t know if this is the same bear I saw a few weeks ago or the same bear that wandered through our woods. (They don’t wear name tags, unfortunately.) Someone in our neighborhood had reported a black bear with a cub in that same area, but I didn’t see any cubs with this one.

A front is coming through today with cooler temps and more rain today, but after that, we are supposed to get about a week of really nice weather. I am hoping the rest of the tomatoes will ripen because there are a lot of them out there.

And I suspect we may have some peeps. I have had several broody hens sitting on eggs for the last couple of weeks. One of the formerly-broody Black Australorps was parked in the middle of the chicken coop, on the floor, when I went in there yesterday. She refused to move. That usually means a hen has chicks under her, although I didn’t hear any cheeping. I checked again when we got home from town and she was still there. Perhaps I’ll see some chicks this morning.

I leave you with a photo of the huckleberry mud pie we had for dessert last night. The bears aren’t the only ones who love huckleberries:

A Tribute to Dave

One of my blog readers, Karen, sent me an e-mail a few months ago about a project she was working on. She said that she has always loved chickens but lives in a place where they are prohibited. My posts about Dave inspired her to piece a wallhanging using a box of silk dupioni pieces she had collected. It is embroidered with DMC satin floss. She shared a picture of the finished wallhanging with me this week and it is stunning! Karen says she plans to enter it in the Georgia National Fair in October. It deserves a prize.

For those of you who are new here, Dave was my previous rooster and father to my current rooster. Dave was one of 19 eggs I incubated back in April 2020 when there was not a chick to be had anywhere in the county. I typically don’t incubate eggs because I get a lot of roosters that way, and of the 17 eggs that hatched, 9 were males. Dave was the best of the lot and truly, the best rooster I’ve ever had. This is a pic of him from 2022.

Little Roo, my current rooster, is also good, but doesn’t have quite the personality his dad had. I don’t know what I will do if this bloodline ever dies out because it has produced some good roosters. My roosters are not jerks because they go to Janet’s Finishing School for Baby Roosters.

Thank you, Karen, for commemorating Dave this way. 😊

*****

I am fighting a bit of a losing battle but I’m fighting it anyway. The kids are coming for a visit in two weeks along with DD#2’s future in-laws. I am trying to clean the house. I am trying to clean the house during canning season and I am pushing the biggest boulder up the highest hill only to watch it roll down again. I will have to do some last-minute cleaning just before they get here, but for now, I am trying to tackle the big, once-every-six-month projects. Yesterday morning, I had the husband take the pot rack down for me so I could clean it. I have to put it in the bathtub to do that. It’s a big job, but the rack accumulates a lot of grease and dust and needs to be cleaned periodically.

Today—because it is raining again and we were awakened at 3:30 this morning by the loudest clap of thunder I think I’ve ever heard—I am going to make a roaster of ham stock for canning tomorrow. I’ve got a bunch of bags of ham bones and scraps in the freezer and I need to do something with them.

I will get back to sewing soon. I am juggling about a thousand details with regard to the podcast and the sewing school right now and my bandwidth for actual sewing is fairly narrow. The raincoat is on the list because it’s raining and I don’t have a raincoat and I knew that would happen. I might start with something small, though, like a zipper pouch, just to remind myself that I know what I’m doing.

A Bear in the Yard

A black bear wandered through our yard last night. Our neighbor, Ali, saw it as she was on her way over to get eggs and alerted the husband. I was upstairs, reading a book, so I didn’t get to see it, but he snapped a pic just before it ran off:

I need to get the rest of the apples off the trees today. They should be ripe. We did not have a good huckleberry season and the bears are down here looking for food.

I have to run back into town this morning for a couple of hours to get a big rock chip filled in my windshield. It happened as I was driving down I-90 past Ellensburg, Washington, on Saturday. The chip is about the size of a dime. Safelite can get me in this morning, so I am going to get it fixed before it has a chance to run.

******

The class coordinator at Quilting Mayhem sent me an e-mail yesterday and asked for more classes because the ones I taught last week were so well received. We are aiming for classes in early January. I could also piggyback classes onto my trip over to teach at Sew Expo in March, although I would rather people came to Sew Expo to take classes.

And I am letting my big secret out of the bag this morning. I am going to begin offering sewing classes here in Kalispell.

This has been in the works since June—I have been building the website and familiarizing myself with the scheduling software over the summer. I will schedule some Beginning Sewing classes for October and will add more classes as I advertise and determine what people want. My Kalispell sewing peeps are welcome to spread the word. Let me know if you want any specific classes. Classes will be held in the basement of the Mennonite church in Creston. There is ample parking, and the basement can be accessed right off the parking lot so it will be easy for students to bring machines. I will provide machines for beginners who might not have one.

More information will come in the next week or so. I should have the website link and logo ready soon.

Vintage Sewing Books and Weird Knitting

I bought several books on this trip. I have been trying to avoid accumulating books—I have two large bookshelves of knitting books in my office and no room for more—but I have decided that when I find worthy sewing books, especially vintage ones, I am going to buy them. AI is spreading so much slop these days that I feel it’s important to have sources of correct information on hand.

There are three Half-Price Books stores I frequent in the Seattle area: Lynnwood, Tacoma, and Tukwila. I happened to be going through Tacoma on my way back to Seattle last Wednesday, so I stopped at that HPB and picked up three books for $23:

I’ve only glanced through them, but they look like they will be very useful, especially the pattern alterations one.

I’ve noticed something in the past several years with regard to teaching knitting classes. I didn’t teach knitting for almost 15 years and it’s only been recently that I am being asked to teach it again. I start every knitting class now by watching each student knit. I had to begin doing that because people were showing up in my classes having taught themselves to knit by watching YouTube, and some of their methods were so far off base that we couldn’t get to MY class material until I corrected what they were doing.

I don’t care if you knit with the yarn in your left hand or in your right. I can do both, although I prefer to throw because it’s how I learned 52 years ago. I really don’t care how you make the stitch as long as you understand what is happening with your stitch formation. However, I had one woman show up in a lace knitting class at Sew Expo a few years ago and tell me that she couldn’t knit lace because the holes always closed up. After watching her knit, I determined that she was twisting her stitches on her purl rows and indeed—she was closing up all the holes she had created on the previous row. I showed her what she was doing wrong and how to “read” her knitting, and she found me at Sew Expo the following year to show me a beautiful lace shawl she had made.

Last week, a woman came into my Knitting Tune-Up class and said she was trying to knit socks but she couldn’t get them over her heel. The alarm bells went off again. Sure enough, she was twisting her stitches on her purl rows. When the stitches are twisted, the knitting loses its elasticity. I gave her some options for fixing that problem and by the end of class, she had learned to make her purl stitches so that they didn’t twist. (She was also a rabid crocheter and we think that was contributing to the problem, because she wanted to make the same wrist motions in knitting that she did in crocheting.)

I never saw these issues 20 years ago. I have seen more bizarre ways of knitting in the past three years than I saw in the previous two decades.

Get off my lawn, LOL.

******

Vacation is over and I am back to work. Yesterday, I caught up on construction company paperwork, recorded this week’s podcast, and canned 14 quarts of tomato sauce. I plan to do another 14 quarts of sauce and that should be enough for this year because we still have some left from last year. Any tomatoes after that will be going into salsa. I probably need to can up a good 50 quarts of salsa this year because we’re almost out.

We’re supposed to have a couple of dry days before another system moves in this weekend. Tomorrow and Thursday have to be devoted to getting squash and beans moved into the greenhouse. I should have pulled the beans as soon as I got back, but I didn’t think we were going to get as much rain as we did yesterday. The beans will dry out in the greenhouse. The current system has been sitting over us and dumping water. Overnight temps are still in the 40s—not warm, certainly, but at least we don’t have to cover the tomatoes.

Four Thousand Miles Later

I have been traveling. I left August 25th and drove to Seattle, where I spent the night in a hotel by the airport and flew to Cleveland the next day. I was in Cleveland until Sunday evening, when I flew back to Seattle, spent the night in the hotel again, then drove over to the Olympic peninsula to spend two days with DD#1 and DSIL. On Wednesday, September 2nd, I drove back to Seattle, checked into the Airbnb, and taught four classes on Thursday and Friday at Quilting Mayhem in Snohomish. I had dinner with DD#2 and her fiancé on Friday evening, then drove home to Montana on Saturday.

[The kids and DD#2’s future in-laws will all be here on the last weekend of September for some wedding planning.]

I have a lot to cover from my trip, but I also have a lot to do here to catch up. This post is mostly to let you all know that I am still alive. I don’t like to advertise in advance that I am going to be away, or for how long. I could blog while traveling, but honestly—I enjoy the break. I have to remind myself to read my e-mail or I would ignore that, too.

I did some fabric shopping. My classes went well; the students were engaged and eager to learn and we all had a good time. I had many quiet hours of driving and did much thinking and planning.

The husband put tomatoes into the freezer for me while I was gone. Sauce production begins today. We have been getting quite a bit of rain here. The squash look great. We tried a watermelon yesterday—not quite ripe—and something like a honeydew melon that the husband ate. I am not sure how much longer the actual growing season will be. We might get another warm spell before the end of the month, but for now, it is cool and rainy.

This is one of the Blue Hubbard squash, which is the size of a small child:

The Georgia Roasters are ripe and need to be brought in. I despair of the butternut squash ripening unless we get some heat. I will get some pics of the Gargomel and Thunder Mountain tomatoes, because they are very pretty.

I am still unpacking. I probably will have photos of my fabric purchases to share, because I found a few treasures, but it might take a day or two. For now, I have to hit the ground running.

A Deep Sewing Stash

Yesterday began with a structure fire call around 6:30 am. The husband left to go to the fire and I headed to the grocery store to get some sandwiches and fruit for the firefighters. I was home again by 9 am. I got the apples off the State Fair and Lodi trees; the other trees have apples but they aren’t quite ripe yet. The Lodi tree had about two dozen apples, which is enough for a batch of apple pie filling, but I did not have apple juice on hand and didn’t want to run back into town to get some. (Bad planning.) I’ll stop at the store before church this morning and make the pie filling this afternoon. The State Fair tree only had about a dozen apples on it. I am not sure why apple production this year is so poor. My trees typically produce every other year. Two years ago, both trees had much more fruit.

I spent the rest of the day going through the house and cleaning up clutter and putting things away. Stuff comes in and stuff goes out and stuff just generally needs to be dealt with. I sorted through the boxes of sewing supplies I received from Kathyrn’s daughter, which included packages of blanket binding, rick-rack and other trims. Before long, I found myself in the midst of this:

I have so much bias binding and trim—my mother gave me all of hers, I got my mother-in-law’s sewing stash after she died, and I have my own collection, none of which has ever been sorted or organized. Now it is. I sorted all the packages and put them into their own zip bags and then into storage totes. If any of my Kalispell peeps need binding or rick-rack, call me. I probably have what you need. 🤪

I am not a hoarder, truly. I have a deep stash and it is reasonably well organized.

I went through my pattern library, too. It’s going to be time to start sewing cooler-weather clothing. I need to make some new long-sleeved Lark Tees. The Scout Tee expansion pack includes a pattern for long sleeves, but I think I am going to switch back to sewing knits for a while.

******

I spent some time on Pinterest the other day, thinking that I would put together some Pinterest boards of sewing and fitting resources to share with my students. In theory, a good idea; in practice, I found that Pinterest has been flooded with all sorts of AI slop, some of it really awful and featuring obviously incorrect information. I am going to recommend books, instead, and I am going to suggest that students start accumulating a library of good vintage sewing books. My top three are the Reader’s Digest Complete Guide to Sewing (any RD book, really), The Vogue Sewing Book, and The Singer Sewing Book.

******

A dry front came through last night with wind but no rain. Watch Duty—an app for tracking wildfire activity—showed 12 new fire starts west of Kalispell. I don’t see anything on our side of the valley, thankfully. The long-term forecasts are hinting at some pattern changes which could bring cooler and wetter weather. Let’s hope that materializes. I am tired of hot, dry summer.

A Grab Bag of Stuff

You have no idea how happy I am that September is right around the corner. This summer has felt like a marathon. All summers in Montana are like that, really, but this one has been particularly marathon-y.

[The bike tour raised over $30,000 for Mennonite Central Committee, by the way, so I would call that a big success!]

I think that some (much?) of what I find so wearing is all the peopleing. During the winter, we all tend to hibernate in our houses and socializing has to be more intentional (and desirable). During the summer, people are everywhere. I have taken to doing as many of my errands as I can as early in the morning as I can. The farm store, grocery store, and Walmart are all open at 7 am. I’ve had a couple of days where I have managed to get everything done and be back home by 10 am. Glorious.

The mail brought some fun things this week. I had Robin Long of Robin Ruth Design on the podcast last week. Robin lives near Ritzville, WA, and has developed a way of making mariner’s compass quilt blocks with strip piecing instead of paper piecing. I am no fan of machine paper piecing—which is different from English paper piecing—so I am interested in any methods for getting around that. As a thank you for having her on the podcast, she sent me one of her Fat Robin rulers and the pattern book for making the mariner’s compass block. I plan to start one of these this fall when things calm down a bit. And I am also hoping to connect with Robin in person, perhaps at the Ritzville relief sale in October.

Unfortunately, the USPS managed to break the second ruler that was in the (padded!) envelope, so she is sending a replacement of that one.

I also got this book. My mother will recognize the name on the cover:

Jaroslav Vajda’s father was the pastor at the church I grew up in, but long before my time. I think he was pastor there in the early 1900s because Jaroslav Vajda was born in Lorain, Ohio, in 1919. In the latter half of his life, he became a prolific hymn writer. His hymns are in Lutheran, Baptist, Mennonite, and many other hymnals. I mentioned him in the sermon I did a few weeks ago at church. Afterward, I decided to peruse the Concordia Publishing House website for other resources and found this little gem. One entire chapter is devoted to the Slovak hymns that he translated, including one called Čas Radosti, which our congregation sang at Christmas. This book is an inch thick, at least.

I traced off this pattern yesterday (view B):

When we were in Missoula a few weeks ago, The Other Janet bought some wide-wale corduroy in a gorgeous caramel color at The Confident Stitch. She is planning to make a skirt from it. I have corduroy in the stash, so I went searching through my pattern library and unearthed this McCall’s pattern. This isn’t high on the priority list, but the pattern is ready to make a muslin whenever I decide I have time. I like the culotte version, too, but I’ll start with the skirt. Culottes are awesome to wear with boots in the winter.

Once again, I love that sewing frees me from having to follow whatever trends are in the store. No navy blue pants or skirts this season? I’ll make some. Culottes are scarcer than hens’ teeth? I’ll make some. Nothing but crop tops for sale? I’ll make some that are long enough for me.