A Good Dog

The house is very quiet this morning. Out of habit, I came downstairs and walked over to open the kitchen door to let Lila out, except that Lila isn’t here. We lost her yesterday to a sudden and unexpected medical emergency.

The day started out normally, but midmorning, I heard an odd noise on the porch. I went out to find Lila lying down, breathing hard. She struggled to her feet and managed to get inside, where she flopped down on her pouf. I called the husband, then the vet, then our renter, who came over and lifted her up—dog bed and all—and put her into the back of my car. The vet took her in immediately and said she would call me as soon as she knew something.

That took most of the day. By late afternoon, they had determined that Lila had a tumor on her heart and that it was causing bleeding into the sac around the heart and into her chest. She was in a bad way. We had had no absolutely no warning as Lila hadn’t been behaving any differently than a 13 year-old dog would. The vet gave us the option of bringing her home but said she might not survive the trip and that it would be more compassionate to have her euthanized there. We agreed. The husband went to the vet’s office to be with her and bring her home.

She was such a good dog, one of the best we have ever had.

RIP, Lila. You will be missed.

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I managed to pull it together enough to go ahead with my serger class on rolled hems last night. I had seven students, four of whom were students from my first class. I’ve taught enough classes to have a sense of what the class is going to be like before it even starts—while the students are getting set up—and I decided to lower expectations right from the outset. I had planned for rolled hems on both woven and knit fabrics, but I told the students that if all we mastered were rolled hems on woven fabrics, they would be 90% of the way there.

I had seven students with seven different sergers: A Brother, a Huskylock, two Babylocks (different models), two Berninas (different models), and a Necchi. I had brought my Juki. A couple of the students either had never used a serger or never used the serger they had brought to class. Having that many different machines in one class is a challenge, and one that requires me to think on my feet. I was able to get everyone’s machine up and running save one, and—oh, the irony—it was the Necchi. We got the machine threaded and making a good serger stitch, but in order to make a rolled hem, you have to disengage the stitch finger. On most machines, that is done by moving a lever from one position to another. We could not figure out how to disengage the stitch finger on that machine. There was a lever but another piece of the machinery was preventing it from moving. That student didn’t have the manual with her and I could not find a copy online. She was very gracious about it and said she would go home and try to figure out how to do it on her own now that she understood the basic concept.

Several of the students were able to finish the edges of a set of napkins. (We all cheered when someone held up the first completed napkin.) A few more were able to get a good rolled hem by the end of the class and planned to do their napkins at home. Toward the end of the class, I took some time to explain the difference between rolled hems on wovens and rolled hems (lettuce edges) on knits and how to switch from one to the other.

Overall, I was pleased with the way the class went. The students must have been pleased, too, because they started asking what the next class would be even before last night’s class ended. I need to look at my calendar and talk to the owner and class coordinator, but I suspect the next class is going to be a draft-your-own T-shirt class. (I wore one of my me-made T-shirts to class.) That one probably will be on a Saturday as it’s going to have to be a longer class.

The mama hen wasted no time in getting the chick out to the chicken yard yesterday. I checked the rest of the eggs and they were infertile, so one chick is all we have right now.