Love is in the Air

Watching the tom turkeys strut around attempting to impress the females is very entertaining. They puff up their chests and display their tail feathers and make lots of gobbling noises. The hens seem uninterested.

We have a mating pair of pileated woodpeckers in the yard. I heard them calling to each other a few days ago when I went out to get the mail, and then I spotted the two of them in the trees. I make the husband nuts because I insist that we leave a few dead trees in the woods for the woodpeckers (and the owls, who apparently nest in them as well), although we did lose the biggest woodpecker tree last year when it blew down in a storm.

I’ve also got a broody hen, although it remains to be seen if she will stay on her nest. She’s been there for a week now.

All the tomatoes, cauliflower, broccoli, and cabbage have been planted. We just need some sunshine and warmer weather. I’ll put in the squash and cucumbers in about 10 days. They don’t take long to germinate and get big, and I don’t want them to get rootbound before the plant sale.

I did eighteen pints of beans yesterday morning:

Beans are easy except for the fact that they take 90 minutes to process, and that’s after the canner exhausts and gets up to pressure. All told, it takes about 2-1/2 hours. When they finished, I shut off the stove and ran up the road to our sewing group for a few minutes. Sarah had some cucumber plants for me—they went out to the greenhouse—and I had three chicken feed bags for her. She’s going to try making some tote bags out of them. I also picked up the raffle quilt. The Mountain Brook Ladies Club makes and donates a quilt every year that the Homestead Foundation raffles off to raise money. I’ll get a photo of the quilt soon; I usually take it to church and have someone hang it over the balcony so I can get a shot of the entire quilt.

I came home and prepped for the class I’m teaching this afternoon. I had requests for a class explaining the different kinds of knit fabrics—so people know what they are looking at when they shop the Walmart remnant rack—and I need samples of fabrics for students to practice sewing. I cut those up from my leftovers. Next Tuesday, I am teaching a class on threads. I am a Wonderfil educator and when I was at Sew Expo, I visited with their teacher coordinator about this class. She put together thread kits for each student. These are not glamorous classes, but I think they are important skill builders.

I also got an e-mail with my Backstitch access code. That’s the new app for sewists that is in beta testing:

I went ahead and signed up for a yearly subscription so I could get access to the premium features. I like what I am seeing so far. Jen, at Sewing Report LIVE, did a quick YouTube video about it yesterday. She also seems to be impressed with its potential.

And I put a guest form on the podcast website. Having a guest form was some excellent advice I got from Nicole Sauce at the Living Free in Tennessee podcast. Working with guests—and potential guests—is simultaneously fun and frustrating. I put up a notice in a couple of the Facebook sewing groups I belong to, encouraging anyone who had an interesting story to tell to fill out the guest form. I said I was looking for people with small businesses, people who are proficient in uncommon sewing techniques, etc., not just people talking about their sewing hobby. Almost immediately, several people posted in the comments that they would love to be guests on the podcast and described what they do that relates to sewing.

“Great, would you please fill out the form?”

The form is there as a way for me to 1) Decide if a guest is a good fit for the podcast and 2) Keep all the contact information organized in a database on the back end of the website. I am not going to chase people down. If someone wants to be on the podcast, he or she can fill out a form. Also, it lets me know who is capable of following directions. 😉

I’ve received several submissions and I’m in the process of scheduling interviews.