A Lot of Water

Parts of the Flathead Valley are flooding. There have been some road closures and evacuation orders. The rain finally subsided to a slow drizzle overnight. We had a system parked over us for most of yesterday and the rain just kept coming and coming. If the clouds clear enough this morning, I will be curious to see how low the snow levels got and how much snow might be up in the mountains as a result. Temperatures are supposed to warm up today—81 by Friday—and all of that precip is going to come roaring down into already-swollen rivers.

I’ve seen many comparisons to the Flood of 1964. That year, a cold spring left most of the snowpack up in the mountains until June, when it warmed up suddenly and the remnants of a hurricane came up the Rockies. Evergreen, the eastern part of Kalispell along the Flathead River, was underwater. (That’s where Joann Fabrics is now.) I don’t think this is quite as bad, but this is more water than I’ve seen here in a long time.

I have not been out to the garden since Sunday.

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My serger class on Monday went reasonably well. I am always a bit nervous when teaching a new class for the first time because I don’t know where the hiccups will be. We were making the Cookin’ in Color Apron by Sue O’Very. As it turned out, the copies of the pattern that the store ordered hadn’t yet come in, so we had to work from my pattern. (The students each bought a pattern and will get that copy when it arrives.) I was supposed to have three students but one had to cancel due to illness. All three of them had taken my earlier Serger 101 class.

The second issue was that the apron is designed to be made entirely on the serger. There are pros and cons to that approach. Constructing something completely on the serger is one way to demonstrate its capabilities. Paradoxically, that also gave me the opportunity, in this class, to pontificate on the serger’s limitations. The apron pattern includes a zipper pocket. Can a zipper be put in using a serger? Yes. Is that the best tool for the job? I don’t think so. Doing zippers on the serger requires a special piping/cording foot. One student had ordered the foot but it hadn’t arrived yet. The other student didn’t have one. I had anticipated this problem and brought my Juki serger with the piping foot and a sample of a zipper I had done using that machine. I set the machine up and told the students they could do their zippers on my machine.

[I made two of these aprons ahead of time, one on each of my sergers, and even between those two machines, the process of putting in the zippers was vastly different.]

The serger is a tool. In a sewing room, I would expect to be able to use whatever tool is appropriate for the job. I also like to topstitch my zippers, and sergers can’t topstitch.

That issue aside—inserting the zipper is the first step in the pattern, so we got that out of the way early—the rest of the class went smoothly. That store also wants more classes, so I am in the process of putting those together.

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It’s almost time to start working on another embroidered chicken:

I still have to add beads in the crosshatch section, but the threadwork is done.