Tomatoes, Grapes, and Hardware

The tomatoes are all planted. I need to replace a couple of tomato cages. I really like the heavy coated red and yellow galvanized wire ones and I’m hoping I can find more:

From this angle, I am looking straight into the pig pasture. (It’s hard to see the fence, but it’s there.) Our pigs have a very nice place to live while they are here. We pick up piglets on Sunday.

The grapes are leafing out, right on schedule:

I weeded the potatoes until I couldn’t stand the bugs anymore. They seem to be especially bad this year.

I mowed again—I could have waited another day or two, but it’s fun riding that mower around. The backyard takes 20 minutes on the tractor and then I do the trimming with the push mower. I came inside when it got too hot. We hit 86 yesterday. Anything above 75 and I wilt. There is a reason I live in Montana. It’s supposed to be cooler this weekend.

My afternoon project was to begin assembling Slabtown. The first step was easy—make the side pockets and sew them to the side panels. The pockets have a crease from marking, but a quick shot with a hairdryer at the end will make that crease disappear.

The next step was to add some leather accents and hardware. Adding hardware always makes me nervous. There is so little room for error. I bought the hardware kit for this pattern so I would have the correct pieces and the tools to attach them. The line snap—that piece in the center of the leather tab—is one I’ve done before, so that wasn’t too hard. I went out to the husband’s shop and used his anvil as the hard surface.

The tubular rivets on either side were new to me. The require a “tubular peening tool,” which bends the edges of the tube downward and into the leather on the backside of the piece to secure the rivet:

Pretty cool. This bag has a fair bit of hardware, so I’ll get even more practice in later steps.

I would have kept going, but the next step involved attaching the zipper to the front pocket. I clipped the zipper to that pattern piece and discovered that it was too long. I checked the pattern—it called for a 12” zipper. I checked the zipper—it was 14”. (These came as part of the kit and they’re metal, so I can’t shorten them easily.) I know that there have been at least two iterations of this pattern and I’m wondering if I got the kit for the first iteration, which must have had longer zippers. Klum House is sending me the correct zippers, but it’s going to take a few days for those to get here. I’ll just set this aside for now and work on something else.

We delivered the BMW to the transport place without incident last night. I drove it and the husband followed behind me in the truck. We took the back way into town in case there was a problem. The warning message didn’t reappear, but I can tell something is going on with the transmission because the car just wasn’t shifting smoothly. Oh well, it’s going to be the BMW dealer’s problem to fix shortly.