Here Comes the Produce

My friend Anna gifted me with a huge bag of shelling peas. This really is a gift because mine did not produce. The heat did them in.

I’ll shell and blanch these today and get them into the freezer.

I spent a couple of hours in the garden yesterday morning while it was still cool and (relatively) bugless. The corn and beans needed weeding, so I tackled that first. I also pulled up the arugula that had bolted and gave it to the chickens. I re-seeded that row with more arugula. I’m hoping that after Sunday, we will be done with the excessive heat. When I was done in the big garden, I came back here and weeded the herb garden.

The tomato plants are an absolute jungle. Pig manure is a wonderful soil amendment. I’m expecting ripe tomatoes in another week or two. Some of my Pixie cabbage are almost ready to harvest—that is a variety that produces softball-sized heads of cabbage. I brought in a bunch of zucchini and have been baking zucchini bread every afternoon to go into the freezer.

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The need to rearrange and organize and finish projects seems to be hitting other people, too. In today’s e-mail from Cheryl Arkison—one of the authors of Sunday Morning Quilts—she notes that she has suspended work on anything new until she clears out her scrap bin, finishes some existing projects, and organizes her workspace.

I feel so much more productive working in a neatly-organized area. I shouldn’t have waited so long to rearrange my setup. I’ve got a pile of works-in-progress and I am drilling my way down through them. Yesterday, I finished making the units for the English paper piecing project from my Garden of Quilts class (three years ago!). A few more evenings of sewing and that one will be ready to quilt.

I stopped in at the quilt store on Wednesday to buy feet for the 880. They will have to order an edgestitch foot for me, but I bought a piecing foot, a Teflon foot, and a specialty zipper foot that rides the zipper teeth for perfect topstitching. Bernina has multiple options for most of their feet—regular feet, dual-feed feet, etc.—which can be overwhelming, but our store owner always has good advice and is more than willing to demo the feet before the customer purchases anything.

Bernina of Naperville also has an excellent YouTube channel where they feature different presser feet on “Footloose Friday.”

Brother is getting ready to release their top-of-the-line machine, the Aveneer, in a little over two weeks. That model reportedly also has a price tag of $20K. I really wonder about these expensive machines as a business strategy. I guess we will find out. And if it weren’t for sewists trading in and trading up, I wouldn’t have an 880, but how sustainable is that?

A friend of mine sent me a video about this new release, the Bernette B08.

She has been kicking around the idea of getting an industrial machine. This one is very impressive! It has many of the same features as my Juki 1541, but scaled down in size. And it can sew through 16 layers of canvas. The engineer who came up with the idea for this model is brilliant—this machine will appeal to those sewists who want to make bags but don’t need the speed and power of something like a 1541.