Covering the Q20 — Janet Szabo

I should have some concrete-pouring content soon, for those of you who are tired of hearing about sewing.

I did not quilt on the Q20 yesterday; the house needed some attention, and in the afternoon, I decided to make a dust cover for the machine. Armed with a pattern from the Q20 Facebook group, I pulled out fabric and foam and got to work. I have a lot of sewing-themed fabric in my stash, but it is mostly in one-yard cuts and I needed more than that for the cover. I had a two-yard piece with reproduction vintage sewing machine ads on it, so I used that.

[Bernina makes Bernina-themed fabric, and the quilt store carries it, but I think it’s a bit ridiculous to sally forth and buy fabric when I am sitting on a mountain of it here. Bernina owners do seem to be a bit obsessed about their machines, if they have Bernina-themed fabric available to them.]

For the lining, I pulled out what was left of the shell fabric I used as lining for the crab appliqué apron. Do shells have anything to do with sewing? No. Am I ever going to use this fabric for anything else? Probably not. I had enough and decided to use it up. This is a lining. No one is going to see it.

The pattern calls for using wool, cotton, or poly batting, but I’ve done enough byAnnie bags with the foam interfacing that I went that route. I quilted the two side pieces yesterday:

The pieces are quilted larger than necessary and trimmed to the correct measurements. I did straight lines about 3/4” apart (using the edge of my walking foot as the guide) on the Janome, with Signature 40wt in the top and Aurifil 50wt in the bobbin.

I’ll quilt the top/front gussets this morning—there are two in order to leave an opening for the thread stand—and hopefully have this put together by this afternoon. And then I can get back to finishing some quilts. I am going to leave the Janome set up for straight-line quilting because I also need to quilt that collage wallhanging from the class a few weeks ago. I’m going to try the Signature MonoPoly thread for that one. I picked some up in Spokane when I was shopping with Tera. I don’t usually quilt with polyester or nylon thread, but that collage calls for less visible thread in the quilting.

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Elysian has been cooking down tomatoes for sauce the past couple of days. She brought over a pint of some Rhubarb-BQ sauce for my birthday, made with a recipe from the Ball Blue Book. She has a huge rhubarb plant. (My rhubarb struggles, for some reason. That’s on my list of things to address next spring.) I popped a pork roast into the crock pot with the sauce she made and cooked it all day. It was very good.

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The homesteading group I belong to on MeWe has had a big influx of members lately—people finding out about it from other MeWe groups as well as people fleeing Facebook. We have an ongoing chat room as part of that group. The people there are fantastic. Everyone is helpful and supportive. It’s not a clique, either. We will happily welcome new people. I am always amazed, though, at the people who just barge right in and start posting in chat without waiting to get a feel for the room or getting to know the other people there. I posted a picture one day of the Noon and Night quilt and some new guy responded that “his neighbor has a side hustle”—it’s all about the side hustles with some people—”as a knitting designer, and maybe you should think about doing that with your quilts.” I had to leave my computer for about 15 minutes while I went away and laughed myself silly. I know he was only trying to be helpful, and I thanked him for his input later, but the irony was a bit much for me.

Then we get the people who join a chat to spam members with ads for their businesses. They don’t tend to last long. We also get a class of men that I describe as 14 year-olds in adult bodies. One showed up the other day. These tend to be guys with a sense of humor that has never developed past ninth grade, and they think the are the funniest people in the room. They also swear constantly. The rest of us aren’t prudes by any stretch of the imagination, but our conversations tend to be elevated beyond potty humor. I suspect this particular guy was asked to leave by the group admins, because he disappeared. No big loss there.

Why do people behave like that?