The Last Couple of Miles of Summer

What a difference between last Sunday—when we were shivering outside at our church service/picnic—and today, when the high is supposed to hit 92. We are forecast to get showers on Tuesday (yay!) with a high of 65, and then it’s only going to be in the 70s for the rest of the week. Hallelujah. Between the heat and the fires and the tourists, this summer has felt like an absolute marathon.

Someone dropped a box of cherries off at our house. Thank you, whoever you are! Neither of us eats a lot of fresh cherries, but they were beautiful and I wanted to do something with them:

I washed and pitted them, cut them in half, then put them in my new dehydrator. They are about halfway through the drying cycle. Dried cherries will be great in cookies and trail mix.

I tidied the house Friday. I won’t say I “cleaned” the house, because most of it needs to be torn apart, vacuumed and washed down to get rid of the dust and ash. There is no point doing that until later in the fall, but I did clean the bathrooms and pick up and organize my sewing area. I recently joined the Mountain Brook Craft Co-Op, which is loosely affiliated with our Mountain Brook Ladies’ Club (many of the same people), and I am hoping to sell some of the stuff I’ve made at the co-op sale in September. I had to be juried in, but it’s a good fit because I think most of what they sell at the sale are sewn items. I’ve got quite a bit of inventory already. If I have some time between now and the sale, though, I’d like to make a few more items. In order to do that, my workflow is going to have to be very streamlined. I’m anticipating a couple of days of marathon cutting followed by assembly-line sewing and serging. If I don’t get stuff done before this sale, then it will get bumped to later this winter for next year’s sale.

I need to figure out what is going on with one of my Juki sergers. I have two of the same model, an MO-654DE, but the second one needs adjusting. I have the first one set up for wovens and the second one for knits. The second one does fine with knits but it refuses to make a proper rolled hem on a woven fabric even when the settings are identical on both machines. It also is much noisier than the other machine and has been that way since I bought it. Unfortunately, there is a fail-safe that doesn’t allow the machine to run when the door is open, and if the door is closed, I can’t see where the noise is coming from.

[I wish I could make three-thread rolled hems on my industrial Juki. It’s a five-thread machine that can be converted to a three-thread machine, but it doesn’t have a way to do rolled hems. Industrial machines specifically for making rolled hems and only rolled hems do exist, but I don’t plan on buying one.]

We had our last Handi-Quilter Ruler Club last Tuesday. Many of us wanted to continue into the fall but we want to do something different so we’re switching to the Amanda Murphy Lollipop templates. This ruler club also comes with a pre-printed panel for practicing quilting with each of the Lollipop rulers. This club doesn’t start until October, which is great because I have no idea how I would shoehorn anything else into September.

The husband found the YouTube channel for Engels Coach Shop in Joliet, Montana, and we’ve been watching some of the videos. (The husband just did a shop foundation for someone who collects old carriages.) The videos are very well done. We watched one where the wheelwright was making the cover to one of the carriages. In part of the video, he was sewing on an industrial machine. It took me a few minutes of stopping and starting the video, but I finally figured out that he is sewing on a Singer 12W, which was the old Wheeler and Wilson 12. The giveaway was the foot style—his machine has the same kind of presser foot as the Singer 9W I’ve been working on, which was the old Wheeler and Wilson D9. (My 9W is almost back together except for the tension assembly.) I am not sure if he was making the tops with oilskin or thin leather, but the machine handled it beautifully. I had a few moments of serious machine envy there.

I had to go to town yesterday morning. While I was at Hobby Lobby, I ran into one of my students from my June serger class. She is also signed up for this week’s class—along with another repeat student—and asked if I could show her which needles to get. I found her the ones she needed and we chatted for a few minutes.

In the few minutes I’ve found here and there to sew, Vittorio has been churning out apron ties. The next apron is going to be out of this very cute chef fabric remnant:

One of the drawbacks of the remnant rack is that by the time a fabric ends up there, the likelihood of it being sold out altogether is pretty high. Sometimes I can order more online, or find it at a nearby store (“nearby” being defined as Missoula or Spokane), but sometimes what I get is all that’s available.