Never Ask a Lady About the Size of Her Stash

Tera texted me the other day and asked if she could stop by after church on Sunday. She is taking an online Stitches class from Sarah Peasley in a few weeks (what fun!) and needed some Cascade 220. She arrived bearing a large bag containing many goodies.

She finished her octopus wallhanging from the collage class we took in November:

You can’t see on this picture, but she did layer a piece of tulle over the whole thing before she quilted it. If I do another collage, I definitely will add that to mine. You can also see that there is a big difference between a collage made from a kit as opposed to Janet’s fly-by-the-seat-of-your pants method. (Mine turned out fine; I just think hers looks a bit more coherent.) She is going to hang this by her fish tank.

She gifted me some free-motion quilting books!

I need all the help I can get. Tera has been longarming for many years but remembers what it is like to start out. We also looked at my Noon and Night test blocks and discussed options for quilting them. I am glad I followed her advice to add the wool batt. The ruler foot I ordered has come in to the quilt store and I’ll pick it up this week.

In return, I gave her several skeins of Cascade 220 from my stash. I said to the husband after she left that she and I have reached the point where if either of us needs something, we check to see if it’s in the other person’s stash before we sally forth and buy it. I like to think that she and I are adequately prepared for any crafting emergency.

I am keeping an eye on class schedules at the quilt stores in Kalispell, Missoula and Spokane in hopes that the two of us will be able to attend some this spring.

The husband is home this week and the weather for the next couple of days is supposed to be nice—no snow, at least—so I am taking a road trip to Missoula today. I’m going to hit the fabric stores and the book stores and the Amish store in St. Ignatius.

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One of the traditions I look forward to at the end of every year is reading Dave Collum’s Year in Review report. Dave is the Betty R. Miller Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University—he’s no lightweight by any metric—and an astute observer of the world around us. This year’s Review clocked in at 200+ pages and is best consumed in small doses. For those who prefer the Cliffs Notes version, Dave also does an in-depth podcast review with Christ Martenson of Peak Prosperity, where the written review is posted. The podcast, reported to be 2.5 hours in length, has been recorded but not yet released.

I don’t think I’ll post much of a review of 2020 because it doesn’t need more press than it has already gotten. We lost my MIL, which was awful, but DD#1 got married, which was wonderful. The events of this year revealed the true nature of a lot of people in my circle of “friends.” (That’s not a positive, in case you were wondering.) Once again, I was reminded that how people behave is the best indicator of what they believe, even while they are telling you what they believe, and those two things might be very different. I continue to strive not to insulate myself in an echo chamber, although spending time with my tribe—both in person and online—has been a huge solace to my soul.

I am grateful for all of you, new readers and not-so-new readers, who check in on this soap opera of a blog a couple of times a week. I will strive to provide as much interesting content in 2021 as I possibly can.