Binding in a Windstorm

I don’t have a hero shot of the purple and green quilt yet. I finished sewing down the binding yesterday as a windstorm was blowing outside, so there was no chance for a picture. The windstorm was intense, although not on the order of the one in March 2020. We didn’t lose any trees. The lights flickered a few times but the power stayed on.

I had a heck of a time finding a good binding for this quilt. I wanted something a shade darker than the outer purple border to pick up the dark purple in the chain blocks. My stash of Kona purples didn’t suit, nor did any of the stores in town have the right color. I looked at Moda Grunge. I looked at Moda Marbles. I held up my swatch of border fabric against every purple fabric in the quilt store and finally one popped out. It was a geometric print (Kimberbell), which didn’t fit with the floral design at all, but when I folded it on the bias, it looked enough like a flower to me that I went with it.

I like the way it looks on the quilt. It’s dark enough to pick up the purple in the chain, but it’s also got a lighter purple in it that is the same as the border color.

And it looks nice with this giant floral-y watercolor print on the back:

Done and done. This design needs a pattern. If the weather forecast holds for the week, we may be getting cold temps and snow again by next weekend, so I’ll be looking for some indoor work. And it’s probably a good thing I never got the peas planted. On Saturday—which was gorgeous—we pulled the black plastic off a section of the garden and I raked up all the dead vegetation and burned it.

Before the storm hit yesterday, the husband and I went out and pulled the plastic back and secured it with bricks and rocks. That half of the garden is now ready for planting. I’ve still got a few weeks, yet, to tackle the other half.

While I was in the garden, the husband was doing more yard cleanup with the backhoe. That was a frustrating process, though, because our fire department kept getting paged out for out-of-control grass fires. We had something like three calls in the space of two hours. He’s got one or two days a week to get things done here, and when our volunteer firefighters—no one gets paid, not even the chief—spend big chunks of their days off putting out other people’s fires, nothing gets done at their own homes. We had slash piles burning, too. I also felt bad for the dispatcher. She was paging out rural fire departments left and right and you could hear it in her voice that she had had enough. The husband finished out the day on a mutual aid barn fire call down the road with the neighboring fire department. He also went to an out-of-control grass fire that got into the timber just as the windstorm was ramping up yesterday.

Grass fires happen, I get it. The wind shifts or increases and things get away. (Yesterday’s windstorm had been in the forecast for several days, however.) People assume that when there is an emergency, “someone” is going to show up in a timely manner. This is especially true of people who move here from larger metropolitan areas. With so many people moving into our valley, our resources are getting stretched thin.

I started the binding on the wallhanging last night. I’ll have it done this evening. I have one more quilt basted and ready to quilt—a charity quilt, not my own design—and it might be a good one for practicing more ruler work designs.