A Day in Missoula

DD#2 and her friend and I spent the day in Missoula yesterday. I’ve been wanting to get down there for a while and they were happy to come along. We stopped at the Amish store on our way to do a resupply of chocolate-covered espresso beans for the husband. I also picked up this helpful item:

I looked at these when Margaret and I went to the Amish store last month and didn’t get one. I’ve been kicking myself since. A thread catcher falls under the category of “things I need but probably wouldn’t take the time to make.” They have these next to each workstation at the quilting store in Spokane and I have become accustomed to how handy they are. This one is cute and well made, a perfect example of an instance when I was happy to buy something even though I could have made it myself.

I dropped the girls off at the mall and headed over to Joann Fabrics but didn’t see anything I needed. I stopped at the used bookstore, though, on the way back to the mall and found this for a dollar:

There are two little boys in the neighborhood who are avid book lovers. An adult will have to read this to them, but I am pretty sure they will appreciate the story. I picked up another book that will be a Christmas present for someone later this year.

DD#2’s friend struggles with some really awful food allergies—allergies that went undiagnosed or were diagnosed as other medical conditions for a number of years before a naturopath finally figured out what was going on. She says the best way to describe what she can eat is that she is a “vegan who eats meat.” We settled on the Good Food Store, which is Missoula’s huge natural foods grocery store, for lunch. They have a food court with all sorts of yummy offerings. DD#2 had a mushroom and pesto panini and her friend had a big salad. I ordered a wok bowl with rice noodles, lots of veggies, and Thai peanut sauce. It was fabulous. I commented to the husband that that was one of the few times I ate a meal out and didn’t feel “off” afterward. I don’t have near the kind of food allergies that DD#2’s friend does, but I am sensitive to a lot of additives in processed foods and dressings. (Soy, canola, and maltodextrin are big triggers for me.) Everything at the Good Food store is made fresh and the ingredient lists are readily available.

[I made some potato salad for dinner the other night with the 100% avocado oil mayonnaise that I picked up at Coscto last week, and I am tempted to go back and get an entire case. It was delicious and didn’t have any soy or canola oil in it. How sad that we have poisoned our food supply in this country.]

After lunch, we ventured into downtown Missoula. The girls wanted to ride the carousel—always a favorite destination when my two were little—and I was on a hunt to find The Confident Stitch, an independent fabric store. The girls checked out a nearby street fair while I did some fabric shopping. The store is not huge, but it is well stocked with a variety of quilting cottons and garment fabrics. I had fun looking around and came home with fabric for another apron—a fairly complicated vintage Vogue pattern.

Waiting for me when I got home were two packages. One is a part for my Victorio food mill. That part and the reason I had to order it deserves its own blog post, so watch for that in the coming weeks. The other package contained this:

The Singer 78-1 that my friend Tommy is letting me borrow only came with a cording/welting foot. It’s possible to sew with it—and he does a lot of upholstery so he uses that foot a lot—but I thought I would get him a straight stitch foot as a thank-you for letting me use the machine. Cutex Sewing Supplies had one, but it was listed as unavailable on their website. Sewing Parts Online, another one of my go-to suppliers, had the foot listed as available, so I ordered it from them. It took six weeks to get here. I suspect they had to get it from China. It’s actually a two-piece foot. Each piece is attached to a separate mechanism, but they work in concert to move the fabric through the machine. I’ll play around with it and report back.

Today is a “work in the garden” day. The temps have cooled off to the mid-70s and it’s quite pleasant to be outside.