Swinging Into Spring

The equipment sale at the auction went well. I came home after church to change clothes, check on animals, and grab a quick lunch and then I headed over to the auction grounds. I love the equipment auction. It’s such a great picture of rural life. The crowd is full of people dressed in Carhartts and boots and swigging large amounts of coffee while waiting to bid on farm equipment and vehicles.

I borrowed this picture from the auction’s Facebook account—if you look closely, you can see the husband in the very middle of the picture. This was early in the morning, before the equipment auction started.

When I got there, the husband was up on the auction wagon with the auctioneers. There are two of them who take turns every 10 or 15 minutes. I sat up on the edge of the wagon and took over writing down bids and bidder numbers from one of the FFs so he could take a break. That job requires a bit of concentration. You have to listen closely to the auctioneers and watch who is bidding. There is a clerk on the wagon, but we also have other people write down the information so we have backup logs in case of discrepancies. I worked up there for a few hours and then headed home to have dinner and wait for the husband.

Now that this year’s auction is in the rear view mirror, we are well and truly out of winter and into spring. The pace of activities picks up dramatically from here on out. DD#2 graduates from college in a month. Yikes. The snow is all gone from the garden. If the weather cooperates, I’ll be out there this week continuing to clean up. My quilting class with Angela Walters is this weekend in Spokane and I am excited about that. The class has some prep work to be completed ahead of time, so I’ll be making up a bunch of quilt sandwiches and collecting all my sewing supplies to take with.

I am still cogitating on that Redwood Tote project. I pulled this chunk of canvas out of the stash the other day and I am considering using it instead of waxed canvas:

It’s some Cotton + Steel (Rashida Coleman-Hale’s design) that I picked up in Spokane. (I see “2015” on the selvedge, so it’s been aging for a while in the stash.) I could combine this with hot pink waxed canvas for the base and hot pink zippers if I can find them. I’d still like to make a Redwood Tote entirely out of waxed canvas, though. I used my McGregor Field Tote to haul all my supplies to the auction on Saturday and it worked fabulously. Waxed canvas bags truly are perfect for my lifestyle.

Our friend Tommy is a firefighter and he was at the auction all weekend. I asked him if I could come over some afternoon and use his Singer 78-1 needle-feed machine. (I still have to topstitch the Bramble Bag I made from the rose gold vinyl.) I bought that Singer because I wanted its treadle base for the Necchi industrial, but I sold him the head because—at the time—I couldn’t imagine that I would need a second industrial sewing machine and he has an upholstery business. Dumb, dumb, dumb. I have been kicking myself ever since. He won’t sell me the machine back, either, but he did say that I could pick it up and borrow it for a few weeks. I am pretty sure I’ll just be able to drop it into the treadle table I have the Necchi in now. I’ll have to make a list of projects I want to sew on it while I have it.