Ruler Club and the Swish Template

I had a nice chat with our pig supplier yesterday morning. I am planning a trip to Alaska to see DD#1 and DSIL and wanted to make sure that the dates of my trip don’t coincide with more livestock arriving on the farm. We confirmed the order and the dates and I went ahead and made my travel plans. I will have to get a covid test before I go, but that shouldn’t be a problem.

It was sunny yesterday, but still cold. I got a bunch of paperwork sorted and organized in the morning, then went to town and ran errands. The farm store is awash in chicks now—oh, the irony—and the cashier tried to get me to take 10 more at 30% off. I hope they don’t decide to stop carrying chicks because it has been such a hassle for them the past two seasons. Apparently, after two months of not being able to get chicks delivered on a regular schedule, they got a chick shipment every day last week.

[I would have taken more chicks, but our brooder box is full.]

I ran into my friend Debbie at one of the nurseries. (She did the flowers for DD#1’s wedding.) She was buying some shrubs and I was there just to see what they had. I was surprised to see that their stock is much thinner that it used to be and I wonder what is going on. I think the owners want to sell and retire, so that may be the reason. I wandered around the greenhouses and enjoyed seeing and smelling the flowers and herbs.

The traffic, though—I know people in big cities laugh when they hear me complain, but as I explained to the husband over dinner, I have an idea in my head of how long errands should take based on having lived here for 28 years. That schedule has gone all to pieces in the last year or so. It took me 15 minutes to drive a one-mile stretch of road yesterday. Part of the problem is (special) people who insist on trying to drive and park in places where they don’t belong, which gums up the traffic flow for everyone else.

I made it to the quilt store in time for my ruler class, though. This month, we got the “Swish” template, which joins the On-Point template from last month.

Handi-Quilter runs these ruler classes in six-month blocks, from September to February and then again from March to August. I probably will keep taking them as long as the store keeps offering them. Each series has a theme. The theme for this series is “Borders,” which is great because I can never figure out how to quilt designs in a border. Our instructor showed us some very cool ideas for this curved-line template, though, so I might try it out soon. (I really need to learn to quilt feathers.) I picked up a “center-zero” tape measure at this same store, which will help me lay out and mark my designs.

I think I like ruler work because unlike free-motion quilting—which is done without a net—ruler work provides some underlying structure to the design. “Quilting,” as it pertains to putting designs into fabric with thread, will never be my strong suit, however. For me, it’s a means to an end, not a way to express my creativity. That happens with the fabric and piecing.

The husband watches a YouTube channel put out by some guy in southern Oregon who owns a heavy equipment/big rig repair business. He drives up and down I-5 in Oregon and California fixing stuff. I can tell just from the few episodes I’ve watched that the guy is brilliant, although I wish there were subtitles because half the time it’s like watching a film in a foreign language. I ask the husband a lot of questions. Last night, I learned how to chase down a broken solder joint in the electronic control module of a logging truck. Who knew. The husband reminded me that every trade has its own terminology.