Planning My Fall Sewing

The temperature never got above 41F yesterday, and it rained all day. (I think it was the same system that hit Ketchikan over the weekend.) If I hadn’t been thinking about fall before, I am now, although we are supposed to be back up around 87F by Monday. 😵‍💫

I had five students in my thread class on Tuesday afternoon. I do love teaching that class. It is full of lots of “A-ha!’ moments and I get so much satisfaction out of watching the students experiment with threads on their machines. One lady figured out how to program her machine to sew her name. She made personalized thread samples. Ryan, the store’s machine tech, was also in the class. He always asks such great questions.

But now I am thinking about fall sewing. I wore one of my Jalie Nathalie tops yesterday and it was all I could do not to pull out my bin of French terry and sweater knits and start sewing up cool-weather clothes. Instead, I spent the afternoon corralling and cutting scraps. The 5" square bin needed to be restocked and I had a stack of leftovers waiting to be run through the die cutter. That was a good task for a cold, rainy day.

I’ve added one project to the queue, to be started after the baby quilts are finished. Hobby Lobby has this lovely quilted fabric, and every time I see it, I think I should make a jacket from it:

I am not much for pastels, but it depends on the color. Clear, icy pastels—not the muddy ones Joanns carries—work with my coloring, and I do like this fabric. I think it would pair well with this pattern:

I like the idea of a zippered jacket, although I would probably ditch that front patch pocket. Of course, I am going to have to source and order zippers, because the pattern calls for a 29" separating zipper and two 7" zippers for the pockets. Finding matching zippers here is going to be next to impossible.

*********

We talked to DD#1 yesterday evening. Ketchikan is a small town, and she and DSIL have jobs where they interact with the public, so they know, personally, some of the people affected by that landslide. And getting around is going to be much more difficult. Ketchikan sits on a narrow strip of land between the water and the mountains. The main road through town is currently torn up for work on a water main, but the landslide blocked the bypass that routes traffic above and around downtown. Add to that thousands of cruise ship tourists—the kids have a calendar on their fridge that shows what cruise ships are in port each day, with the number of passengers—and traffic is going to slow to a crawl.

We are having the septic tanks pumped today, which is a necessary but not very glamorous job that needs to be done before winter. I’m going to see what needs to be done in the garden and perhaps make one last batch of zucchini bread.