My Apron Frustrations

The stack of things I want to re-write and/or re-design is growing. I intend to be respectful of copyright, but honestly, I can do some of these patterns so much better.

In an attempt to clear my stash of some projects, I pulled out an apron kit I purchased from the small quilt store in Spokane last year. I tend not to purchase kits, but the owner of that store likes aprons as much as I do and she has a lot of fun patterns and kits for sale. I saw this pattern made up and decided just to buy the kit and not fool with buying the parts separately.

This one is a basic half apron with a half a dishtowel sewn into the waistband. The dishtowel is not in the original design but was added to the kit by the owner of the quilt store. I have mixed feelings about dishtowels sewn into aprons. The dishtowels often need to be laundered more than the apron does. Aprons with loops or some other method of attaching dishtowels—so the towels can be removed and washed as needed—make more sense to me. Also, gathering the top part of the apron with the thicker dishtowel fabric took some doing.

Yes, I could have figured this out on my own. Working through other designers’ patterns, however, is sometimes more instructive than inventing the wheel myself. A couple of items of note on this design/pattern:

The bottom border is cut twice the finished depth and attached “burrito style” to the body of the apron. That encloses the seam between the body and border within the two layers of the border. The instructions for creating the “burrito” were vague at best. Were I not familiar with making pillowcases using that burrito method, spatially-challenged sewing Janet would have been totally lost. The pattern included simple line drawings for other steps in the assembly but not this one.

Nowhere on the pattern was a seam allowance specified. This is akin to writing a knitting pattern without giving a suggested needle size to obtain gauge. I used my best judgment.

“Right side” and “wrong side” (or “public side” vs. “private side,” as you prefer) are excellent landmark descriptions and should be used whenever possible. Likewise, line drawings should not only indicate body fabric vs. accent fabric, but also RS and WS of each of them.

Some things are just pickiness on my part, but the devil is in the details. The waistband was constructed from two 4” x WOF (width of fabric) strips. The instructions specified to sew them end-to-end to make a strip long enough for the waistband and ties. That put the seam right smack in the middle of the front of the waistband. I took the trouble to cut one strip in half and sew one half to each end of the other strip, thus placing the seams in the ties where they would not be as noticeable.

I put this apron on the list to re-design and re-write. I am pretty sure I can refine the construction and I know I can write a better pattern, starting with a specified seam allowance.

I’ve made two “Twirl, Girl” aprons recently from the book A is for Apron by Nathalie Mornu. I made a “Twirl, Girl” apron a few years ago, right after I bought the book, and the apron class I took at the big quilt store in Spokane last year was a similar design. Both have a sawtooth contrast bottom. (That was the class where the pattern had several significant errors, including one that resulted in the waste of some good fabric. The designer has not yet released that pattern, as far as I can tell from her website.) Because I’ve made sturdier versions of the pattern pieces out of Pellon Easy-Pattern, it was easy to compare the two. The differences are minor. I’d be inclined to size up the pattern a bit, though, as I think it’s a bit short.

The first one was from this bird print.

I loved the print but only had a small remnant. Fortunately, the pattern requires only small amounts—less than half a yard of the print and about the same amount for the contrast pieces—unless you happen to choose a directional print, in which case, you’d have to cut the fifth panel from another length of fabric to keep the print oriented in the same direction.

The second one was from a cherry print:

I opened the chest of drawers containing my stash of Kona and found the perfect shade of teal to match the print. Alas, I only had a fat quarter, which wasn’t nearly enough. I pulled out my Kona color card—admittedly, a few years old—and figured out that the name of that color was Ultramarine. A quick check of the Joann Fabrics website indicated that Ultramarine had been discontinued. Jade was a close match. I remembered, though, that I had purchased that fat quarter at the quilting store north of town and lucky for me, they still had half a bolt of it.

[Part of the fun of using remnants is the forced creativity and detective work.]

For both of those aprons, I serged the sections together and topstitched on the sewing machine. I’m not crazy about the width of the waistband. I plan to play around with that a bit.

Speaking of Kona, the Kona Color of the Year for 2020 is this gorgeous green, called Enchanted.

I am tempted to buy an entire bolt. Green is one of my favorite colors and this shade pushes all my buttons.

This time between Christmas and New Year’s is all about clearing the decks and prioritizing projects. I have a quilt top to make on commission and it has to be done by the end of January. I am going to start cutting that one today. I also need to get seven comforters assembled for the comforter-tying party on January 18. Those are also at the top of the to-do list. And I need to move on from aprons for a while and start making some small zipper bags.

I’ve now had a week back at work—with Wednesday off for Christmas—and am very happy with how that is fitting into the schedule. I’ve been starting around 6 a.m. and I’m done by 9 or 10. The hardest part has been getting back up to speed on treatment regimens. There have been some significant advances in cancer treatment in the past year. Stretching those brain cells is a great feeling, though.

It's Facebook Official!

Our older daughter, Mariah, and her boyfriend announced their engagement on Christmas Day. Once it was “Facebook official,” we could share the happy news.

We are thrilled. He graduates from the University of Washington School of Dentistry in June and DD#1 has been working as an occupational therapist at a pediatric clinic in Bellevue. Their plans after graduation are still unclear, but we know they will head into their married life ready to take on anything.

Our girls spent Christmas with the boyfriend’s family, who was kind enough to invite DD#2 to join them. She worked Christmas Eve at Nordstrom and has to work today, the day after Christmas, so it was impossible for her to come home. I am so grateful that she was able to be with family (because we already consider his family to be part of ours).

We had a very quiet Christmas Day. The husband worked on the shop and I did some sewing. I’ll have more on that in the coming days, but for now, we’re just going to bask in the happiness of these soon-to-be-newlyweds.

A Transcriptionist Again

I went back to work this morning. I needed a refresher on a few software features and there are some new drug names to add to the text expander, but overall, it’s a lot like riding a bicycle. The keystrokes and mnemonics came back to me pretty quickly. Part of being a transcriptionist is having a large collection of keyboard shortcuts, like astp for “autologous stem cell transplant” and hepe for “hemoglobin electrophoresis.” You can see how the shortcuts save time, but I have to remember hundreds of them.

I checked with my supervisor about what was expected from me in terms of output. The woman I am replacing did 60-80 audio minutes a day, which is the perfect amount. That number of audio minutes works out to—depending on which doctor(s) I get—three to four hours of transcribing. If I start around 6 or 7 a.m., I can be done before lunchtime. That leaves the whole rest of the day for other activities. I’m not going to get rich doing this, but it is nice to have the mental challenge and also to feel like I am contributing financially again.

Part of me misses the old way of doing things; we are in an electronic medical records system now rather than transcribing individual reports. I don’t spend as much time on each patient because I am only transcribing narrative portions instead of an entire report. The lab data, medications, and other short pieces of information are pulled in from other places. I am still unhappy about the spelling and grammar errors and how sloppy most records look, but there is nothing I can do about it except to make sure that the portions I am responsible for are done as professionally as possible in the way I was trained to do them.

It is what it is.

I can already tell that I am going to be less likely to fritter away moments of time here and there as I have been doing over the past year. That makes me happy. I like to be busy and I like to be productive. I am, however, a bit mentally wiped out right now.

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The insulation guys showed up at 9 a.m. to do the walls:

The plywood should be delivered soon and then the husband can sheath the walls. Those two concrete piers sticking out from the wall are for the lift, when he finally gets to the point where that will be installed. Having a lift is going to be a game changer for working on vehicles.

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I’ve got my music together for the Christmas Eve service.

I like to print out the order of worship in such a way that I can put my music in where it needs to be. That way, I can follow along and have the music ready instead of fumbling through a bunch of books (we use several hymnals).

The husband and I are negotiating where he is going to sit during the service tomorrow night. Christmas Eve is the only church service he attends. He typically sits with the girls and my mother and sister or his mother and my FIL, depending on who is visiting. We are by ourselves this year and DD#2 is particularly concerned about who he is going to sit with. I half-jokingly told him he could come sit up at the front, because no one likes to sit in the first couple of pews. He thought that was a great idea. However, I do not like to have people—especially people I know who might make faces at me—watching me while I play. We will have to see where he ends up.

Creativity and Ruffles

One of my goals for 2020 is to come up with a good way to manage my sewing projects, especially in production mode. Right now, I do this thing where I say, “I am going to make a bunch of aprons,” so I cut out a dozen or so aprons and get them organized to assembly line together. So far, so good. Then I look at the pieces of fabric that are left from cutting the aprons and think, “Those leftover pieces would make great potholders.” The next thing you know, I’ve cut parts for two dozen potholders, but because I had to dip into the stash for backings, I’ve run across remnants that I want to use. Some of those remnants aren’t big enough for the style of apron I’m making, so I pull out patterns for other kinds of aprons. Eventually, I get sick and tired of aprons and potholders and want to make something else, so I look at Pinterest—the devil’s website—and the next thing you know, I am back in the stash looking for fabrics to make infinity scarves. By then, I am thoroughly frustrated with myself because I have too many ideas and not enough time and that makes me anxious. Also, the fabric room looks like a bomb went off in there. Again.

Too much creativity is as bad as not enough. Sometimes it feels like trying to surf a tsunami. When I am being disciplined, I will rein in my enthusiasm and force myself to complete the tasks in progress. I did that yesterday—I have a lovely stack of finished potholders now and this week, I will finish the aprons that are cut out before I start more.

I am hoping that being back at my transcription job a few hours a day will force me to prioritize more effectively, because this can’t continue.

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I was watching apron videos on YouTube again yesterday while finishing up the potholders. I ran across one video where the sewist used an interesting technique for attaching a ruffled edge. She marked the quarter markings on both the apron and the edging—which had not been gathered—then pinned the edging to the apron. She then divided the quarter markings in half again, so what she had was an apron with a length of edging attached to it at several places, but the edging was longer than the edge of the apron and therefore looped up in each section. She began sewing the edging to the apron by folding up a bit of the excess edging, putting it under the foot, sewing half an inch or so, and repeating that step. The method was halting and stuttered, but eventually she did get the edging attached to the apron and it was ruffled. Sort of.

When I see people doing stuff like that, I have to stop and ask myself: “Is that a legitimate technique that I’ve never seen before and need to learn, or is that person a self-taught sewist who has never cracked a sewing book and is making it up as she goes along?” I am a self-taught sewist, too, so I can’t go lobbing stones at other people, but I’ve been around a lot of sewists in my life and I’ve never seen that before.

Speaking of ruffles—as if being distracted by fabric wasn’t bad enough—I want to put the ruffler attachment on Vittorio and play around with making ruffles. The instruction manual shows how to make ruffles:

And pleats:

I think that if someone went to the trouble of inventing an attachment for making ruffles and pleats, this is probably the preferred technique.

Beans Aplenty

I have thirty-seven pints of beans to show for my efforts yesterday:

Beans are not difficult to can. They are time-consuming, but most of that time is unsupervised. I let them soak for two days, changing the water twice. It takes an hour or so to get the canner ready, boil lids and rings, fill the jars, and load the canner. The canner needs to process for 90 minutes, but that doesn’t include the time required to get it up to pressure, release the pressure, and cool down enough to open. I put the first batch in to process in the morning, went off to sew, and did a second batch in the afternoon. My All-American canner holds 19 pints and I loaded it full both times.

These are some of the beans Cathy gave me over the summer. She got them from someone whose mother had packaged up several hundred pounds of beans in preparation for Y2K, so these beans are at least 20 years old. I noted to the husband that these beans actually seem to be of much higher quality than ones I buy nowadays. I am not sure why that is, other than the general deterioration of everything over the course of my lifetime. I know that many processors use RoundUp as a desiccant on their beans, although if I buy beans, I make sure they are labeled “organic" (for whatever that is worth).

We are well supplied with beans for a couple of months.

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I stopped at Hobby Lobby on Thursday to pick up another piece of Insul-Brite so I could finish my stack of potholders. The man in front of me at the register was buying a sewing machine and paying with AmEx gift cards. I overheard him telling the cashier that all year, whenever he got a little extra cash, he bought a gift card. He said his wife keeps an “eagle eye” on the checking account and buying a sewing machine with gift cards allowed him to surprise her. How sweet is that?

My husband bought me a sewing machine once (a vintage Singer Featherweight). We all know how that ended, LOL.

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Attic insulation happened yesterday morning in the new shop.

One of my blog readers asked, in a private e-mail, why the husband wanted a ceiling-mounted heater if heat rises? I asked him, because I was curious, too, and he said those heaters have blowers on them that blow the hot air down. A floor-mounted heater would take up valuable real estate. I’ve seen those ceiling-mounted heaters in lots of shops around here, so they must be effective.

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Our house sits on a corner—not a sharp corner, but a corner nonetheless, and one where a forest service trail and road veer off into the wilderness. Things happen on our corner. There are the usual kegger parties up at the trailhead on summer nights; I can tell when the party is over when I hear cars come tearing down the access road. Sometimes a sheriff’s deputy sits there and waits for them. On Valentine’s Day a few years ago, the husband and others from our fire department responded to a suicide about a mile up the forest service road. People routinely misjudge the road conditions in front of our house and get their cars stuck in snowbanks. One night, an impaired driver hit a tree in our front yard. His truck spun around and he was ejected and later died.

A few nights ago, I was sitting in the living room waiting for the news to come on when I heard a gunshot out near the road. Gunshots out here don’t freak me out as much as they might someone living in town—people hunt in the surrounding forests and hearing gunshots is not that uncommon. I put my coat on and started out the door to find the husband. Just then, my phone beeped. It was the neighbor across the road who said that someone had hit a deer but not killed it. They must have finished it off before driving away. The husband located the deer and dragged it across the road to the woods on our side.

Thursday night (also while waiting for the news to come on), I heard someone’s car sliding up the road. (I’ve gotten accustomed to listening for odd noises, apparently.) I put my coat on and went out onto the porch to take a look. Sure enough, someone had pulled their car over up at the corner and was walking around looking at it. Either they slid off the road and hit something or they hit a deer. By the time I informed the husband and he started up there to see if the person needed help, they had driven off.

Yes, I’m careful. I don’t go out to investigate these things when I am here by myself.

The Winter Honey-Do List

I’ve got a heavy-duty clothesline installed in my laundry room for drying clothes. We have eight-foot ceilings in our house, so hanging anything on it requires that I get out a stepstool, but that’s life. Most of my clothing gets dried on the line. I have trouble finding clothing that’s long enough to begin with, so I don’t want to risk shrinking it in the dryer. And I think it lasts longer when it’s line dried. Have you ever seen clothing that’s been “cooked” in the dryer? Yeah. Most people overdry their clothing.

I do put the husband’s clothing in the dryer, though, because it doesn’t seem to shrink as much. On Monday, I put a load in the dryer, turned the timer, and then realized—about two hours later—that the dryer was still running. What’s worse, the clothes were still damp and no heat was coming out. The husband spent about an hour monkeying around with the hose and got the heat working again, but the timer appears to be broken.

This is an Amana dryer that we bought when we built the house—in 1996. Its companion washing machine bit the dust a long time ago, as did that machine’s replacement, because washing machines don’t like to wash concrete-encrusted clothing. I am now on a Speed Queen heavy duty washer that seems to be holding up well.

He is going to hunt down a replacement timer and try to fix the dryer. Gone are the days when he could go down to the “green boxes”—the county dump sites—and cannibalize discarded appliances. The county made that practice illegal. (He fixed several of our appliances that way.) Even if he can’t fix it, I think we’ve gotten our money’s worth after 23 years. I am glad that the dryer waited to fail until the husband had time to work on it.

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One of our employees doesn’t like to sit around doing nothing, so we’ve been having him come over and help with the new shop and around the property. The business has money to pay him and he wants to work. Our other employees collect unemployment benefits for a couple of months when work slows down. The trees that have come down in windstorms this year need to be dealt with. The husband de-limbed some of them and sawed them into logs, then used the forklift to haul all the logs over to the woodshed. This kid split them with the log splitter, stacked them neatly, and covered them with a tarp:

He does any job the husband assigns him without complaint and does it well. He grew up on a ranch east of the mountains, which explains his work ethic. I sometimes wonder if concrete seems easy in comparison to ranching.

Cutting up the rest of the trees will have to wait until spring.

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I’m knee deep in potholders at the moment:

I get faster with each one, although I had to stop and make binding because I ran out. Each potholder takes almost a yard of binding. I’m binding these on the Janome 6600P with the even-feed foot. I make the binding on Vittorio.

My strategy is to pick an item and make a bunch of them until I get sick and tired of making them. I bound this pile yesterday while watching and listening to (and singing along to, of course) a BBC recording of The Messiah on YouTube. For some reason, my Christmas season is not complete without listening to the entire piece.

After the holidays, I’m going to start making some zipper pouches.

Some Christmas Cheer

A group from our church goes Christmas caroling every year just before the holiday. My kids grew up with this tradition, and now we’ve enlisted Ali and Elysian and their two little guys. We set out Sunday evening on a new route that took us to town to sing to some of our older church members. (We used to sing to people in the neighborhood around the church, but we thought it was time for a change.) We discovered early on in the evening that Elysian’s little guy knows ALL THREE VERSES to “Jingle Bells,” so he soloed on them and the rest of us came in on the chorus.

The fun thing about our group is that we sing in four parts—well, three, because we didn’t have any tenors and I was the only alto, so I couldn’t switch to tenor. Still, we sounded pretty good.

I think the boys had a good time. I am sure they will get to an age when this is a drag, but maybe not. They do like the cookies and treats that accompany this activity.

A box of gifts arrived from my in-laws yesterday, but we aren’t putting up the tree this year. I am going to have to find a special spot for them until Christmas Day.

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The husband says he isn’t sure I should write about this on the blog, but I think it’s rather funny. My sister and I have long joked that we are inbred because our parents are distant cousins. My father’s grandmother and my mother’s grandmother emigrated from the same village in Czechoslovakia. One of my mother’s sisters has been working on the family genealogy. She has gone back far enough to discover that their mother and father—my maternal grandparents—were also cousins, because their grandfathers were brothers. My mother told me that when I talked to her on Sunday.

That explains a lot about why my family’s genome looks the way it does. I am glad I married a guy of German descent. At least my kids benefited from some hybrid vigor.

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We are supposed to get hammered with a snowstorm tomorrow afternoon and evening. It’s aiming directly at Northwest Montana with 6” predicted in the valleys and 1-3 feet of snow in the mountains. We’re at a high enough elevation that the mountain snow totals apply to us, so I am expecting at least a foot., Thankfully, this storm isn’t supposed to have wind with it. I’ve got some things to do in town tomorrow, so I’m hoping the snow holds off until I’m done. Canning a batch of beans is on the schedule for Friday. I’ll put them on to soak today and they should be all ready to go Friday morning.

A Brilliant Marketing Strategy

It’s not mine, unfortunately, but I’m admiring it just the same.

A year or two ago, Simplicity, one of the “Big 4” pattern companies, launched a line of merchandise featuring the artwork from some of its vintage patterns. This line included coffee mugs, which I’ve been collecting here and there because they are a great size and shape and we never seem to have enough coffee mugs. That test line of merchandise must have done really well because Simplicity has been adding to it. Now it takes up at least half an aisle in every Joanns store I’ve been to in the past month.

Of course, some of the stuff they’ve included in the expanded line is just frippery—an excuse for them to slap vintage pattern artwork on cheap Chinese goods and sell them. However, some of the merchandise is actually useful, like the pattern weights and, of course, the mugs. In addition, Simplicity also has been bringing back many of its vintage patterns from the 40s, 50s, and 60s. They started with apron patterns but have since added other items. (I suspect some of that is driven by the TV shows The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Mad Men, both of which had killer costuming.)

Joanns has several different lines of cotton fabric. There are the “novelty prints” featuring kittens, puppies, food, etc.; the Quilter’s Showcase lower-end quilting fabric; the Keepsake Quilting line; and the Premium Cotton line. The Premium Cotton was on sale yesterday, so I wandered through to see if anything caught my eye. Lo and behold—Simplicity has also released a line of cottons featuring vintage artwork. These must be new. They also seem to be fairly popular, as most of the bolts—which start out at 10 yards—were down to only a yard or two. I have some birthday money to spend, so I bought one-yard cuts of half a dozen of the prints. (I didn’t count, but I think there were about a dozen different prints altogether.)

Clearly, this has been a successful marketing endeavor for Simplicity. I’m sure they will run out of cheap Chinese merchandise ideas eventually, but I hope they continue to release the vintage patterns.

I also made a stop at the quilting store south of town. I don’t get there often because I don’t usually travel that way. There, I picked up this cute little needle case pattern:

The designer is a local woman and she’s teaching a class on this pattern at the store at the end of January. The class is over four days, though, and I am not sure I’ll be able to shoehorn that into the schedule. I’ve been wanting a needle case to keep my embroidery needles more organized than they are when I just shove them into a pincushion.

[I have been lax in working on my embroidery in the evenings and I need to get back into that habit.]

Yesterday was filled with errand-running; I had to meet the piano tuner at the church so he could tune the piano there. I have the privilege of playing on a Bosendorfer baby grand that is over 100 years old. The piano belonged to my friend Susan’s mother, and when her mother died, Susan inherited it. She doesn’t have space for it at her house, so it is on loan to the church. I think we’ve had the piano for five or six years now. Pianos are very much living things, each with its own personality, and it took a year or two for this piano to become acclimated to Montana and for us to become friends. It’s a delight to play every Sunday, though.

The piano tuner is coming here on Saturday morning to tune my baby grand. Mine is a Yamaha and is not nearly as old or stately. I chose mine mostly for the fact that it had a lovely, bright sound and a polished mahogany finish. I did not want a sad, sonorous baby grand. Mine has a tendency to get screechy every fall, though, and the tuning has gotten steadily worse over the past month. It’s time to have it serviced.

Watch Janice Sew

Sometimes when I’m sewing, I’ll pick a topic and look for a YouTube video, then let YouTube travel down whatever rabbit trails it wants to explore by choosing the next video for me. Yesterday afternoon, after half a dozen videos featuring vintage apron patterns, this little gem popped up:

It’s entitled Simple Sewing, 1950s, and it features a sewist named Janice making a Simplicity jumper. The narrator, with her pointer and boards, was particularly amusing. (Rocky Horror Picture Show, anyone?) The Huntley Film Archives watermark is mightily annoying (could they not have put it in the corner?) but the video is still fun to watch. And Janice is sewing on a beautiful Singer 301.

At the time I was watching the video, I was working on these:

Adhering to the edict that “Anything worth doing is worth doing in excess,” I cut up all of my Insul-Brite, fabric scraps, and cotton batting scraps and made potholders. This stack represents about half of them. I am trying to amass inventory for a possible market later in the spring. Because I have to swap out the regular bobbin case in my Janome 6600P for the machine quilting bobbin case, I want to get as much of the quilting done as possible in one fell swoop. The potholders don’t take long and they’re not difficult, but there were a lot of them. (For some bizarre reason, I had two yards of Insul-Brite in my stash. Was I planning to make a parka?) This pile has been quilted and trimmed to size. Now I just need to attach the binding. For that, I’ll switch back to my regular bobbin case and my stitch-in-the-ditch foot.

Joanns is having a thread sale. I had a meeting in town yesterday morning and took the opportunity to stop in and buy a few more colors of serger thread. All of their Simplicity patterns were on sale, too, so I picked up this reprint, not currently in my collection:

My apron obsession continues.

I believe we will have a white Christmas. Besides sewing videos, I’ve been watching news clips of the Blizzard of ‘78 from the Cleveland TV stations. The clips are on YouTube and they’re pretty entertaining. I’m so annoyed with our local news station, which doesn’t actually deliver news anymore. It has become nothing but a “show”—and that’s precisely how the two female anchors refer to it—full of carefully-scripted feel-good clips of kittens and puppies with some national news thrown in. We had several newsworthy events in Kalispell this week, including a bomb scare at Wal-Mart, and none of that ever made it to the “news.” I hardly ever see actual reporters out reporting from the street. At this point, the husband and I turn it on for 10 minutes of weather and move on.

[Yes, I’ve contacted them with my concerns. They don’t care. They just want you to “chime in” with your news and photos. I am getting most of my local news now from the scanner and from a Kalispell-based Facebook group.]

The husband is pretty much done with concrete for the season and will work on the shop for the next couple of months. He framed in the access opening to the attic yesterday:

The ceiling looks good:

And even without a propane heater or insulation—both of which are on the list—it is fairly comfortable in there with just a portable space heater. He tells me there will be a propane heater mounted on the ceiling, eventually.

Lila and Rusty are not quite sure what to make of the space. They came in and sniffed around for a bit yesterday but left pretty quickly. I may have to get them ”shop poufs” so they can hang out in there when the husband is working.

Sharing the Planet

During the evening debriefing, I said to the husband that I make a sincere effort to leave the house and head to town with a good attitude, anticipating the best in people. If nothing else, it helps my peace of mind. Yesterday, however, even that sincere effort wasn’t enough. I have a message for my fellow human beings:

NEWS FLASH: You are not the only person on the planet.

Truly, I am at a loss to explain how some people can go out into public and have no understanding of their position in space relative to other people:

• Please take your Costco card out before you get to the entrance so you don’t hold up the line. You had that whole journey across the parking lot to get it out and have it ready.

• Please do not walk into Costco and come to a full stop to put your card back in your wallet.

• Please do not leave your cart in the middle of the aisle while you walk over to look at something. (Men—why is this a thing with men?)

• Please do not bring your entire family to Costco and walk five abreast at a very slow pace.

• If you run into an old friend at Costco, by all means, visit with them—I’ve been known to do this—but pull your carts out of the way, first.

That frustrating visit to Costco was topped off by a visit to the grocery store where, as I was heading to the exit with a full cart of groceries, a young woman was walking toward the door. She got close enough to the door to activate it, then turned around and stood there in the doorway, looking out at the parking lot, obviously waiting for someone else. Just as I was about to say, “Excuse me, please,” the man she was waiting for walked up and pointed out to her that she was blocking the way.

The husband said that the next time I am at Costco and someone’s cart is blocking the aisle, I should move it to the next aisle and see if they notice. Although the idea is tempting, I do not want to be blacklisted from all the stores in town.

The complete lack of self-awareness of some people confounds me.

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I was at Joann Fabrics perusing the remnant rack when I overheard a conversation between a woman and one of the salespeople. The woman had asked for some assistance in choosing a sewing machine. I mind my own business, of course, but some of the things I hear make me roll my eyes even though I know it’s the job of the salesperson to sell new machines. I do not need to be an obnoxious vintage sewing machine evangelist everywhere I go.

This particular conversation, however, went sideways the moment the husband inserted himself into it and began telling the salesperson what his wife wanted. (The wife did not look as though she was happy about this, by the way.) Can you imagine me going to Home Depot with the husband and telling the salesperson what kind of power tool the husband needs? I am sure this guy thought he was being helpful. I finally had to walk away. I don’t know if they bought a new machine or not.

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The husband and the crew made good progress on sheathing the shop ceiling yesterday.

They plan to finish it up today.

I watched this system with interest. When I first came in, the husband was on the floor handing a sheet of plywood up to the guys. As they lifted it into place, he scrambled up the side of the scaffolding and grabbed the nail gun. Watching him move, you would never know he is 53 years old. He moves faster and with more agility than a lot of 20 year-olds I know.

I am so glad I re-started my yoga exercises. Without the daily workout in the garden, I was starting to freeze up again. Even a simple 15-minute routine helps a lot. (Thank you, JC, for recommending SaraBeth Yoga—she is by far my favorite.)

Working With Challenging Fabrics

I’ve decided that dedicating a week to sewing Christmas gifts is the best strategy for me and one I will use in the future, although I will work harder at scheduling it earlier in the season. If I try to intersperse gift-making in between other projects, I get too distracted. I knocked out several items yesterday and I’m just about ready to get back to aprons and pattern development.

As it turned out, all of yesterday’s projects involved working with some very challenging fabrics. Thankfully, the requested items were not complicated. If I had had to deal with construction issues in addition to difficult fabrics, I might have given up sewing altogether.

I don’t have pictures of the actual items as they are all gifts, unfortunately. Project #1 was a pillow for DD#2 out of fake fur. This is to match the seat cover I put on her makeup table chair last year and she knows she is getting this, so I can talk about it. The fake fur was still in the stash. To make it “easier” on myself, I thought I would back the pillow with something plain and only have the fur on the front. I had a remnant of some fake suede and decided to use that for the back, making an envelope closure that required two simple hems.

Do not make the mistake of thinking that fake suede behaves like real suede. It doesn’t. Also, some kinds of fake suede are actually knit fabrics. Yes, you read that correctly. Check carefully before you begin sewing. If it’s a knit, a leather needle is going to be worse than useless. Use a ball point needle. (Zede and Mallory, at Sewhere.com, recommend a Microtex needle for some of the newer synthetic knits. Experiment.) However, even with a ball point needle and the even-feed foot on my Janome 6600P engaged, the fake suede was sticky enough that it didn’t want to feed easily.

My Necchi industrial machine has a Teflon foot and a Teflon needle plate, so I moved over to that machine. I don’t have ball point needles for that machine, but the material fed much more easily and the type of needle wasn’t really an issue. (As the husband says, sometimes you just need a bigger hammer.) If you don’t have a machine with a Teflon foot, you can also try sewing with a layer of tissue paper between the fabric and the feed dogs and/or putting a piece of tape on the bottom of the presser foot to make it slicker.

After I had hemmed the two pieces of backing material, I cut the fake fur to the appropriate size. The trick to cutting fake fur is to cut only through the backing—which is a knit—and not the pile. Use a pair of very sharp-tipped scissors. I went back to the Necchi industrial, increased the stitch length, and sewed the front to the backs. It worked best to have the fake suede on the bottom where it was feeding along the Teflon needle plate. I tried it on the top, first, and it stretched too much despite lightening the presser foot pressure.

The pillow turned out really well. I think if I were to do this project again, though, I would use a more stable fabric like linen or twill for the backing. Learn from me.

Project #2 featured some rayon challis. Sewing with rayon challis is like ice skating. The coefficient of friction of that fabric is zero. It wants to slide everywhere. I was using a remnant and had to piece two sections together—matching the print across the seam!—but rayon challis also frays like nobody’s business. Rather than make a French seam there, I serged the two pieces together. I’ve come up with a system for my serger threads: The needle threads are a neutral taupe-y gray color that is invisible on most fabrics. Those threads don’t change. I swap out the looper threads as needed so they match the color of the fabric. I’ve gotten good at tying on the new looper threads and running them through the machine, so changing looper colors only takes a minute or two.

I went back to the Janome for the remainder of the project, swapping out the ball point needle for a thinner Microtex needle. I had no issues with the sewing other than I had to sew slowly and keep a death grip on the material.

Project #3 was a minky pillowcase for my sister. (She knows she is getting one and even saw the material over Thanksgiving because I wanted to make sure it was the right color.) Minky is also a knit fabric. It will shed little bits all over the place when you cut it so keep a vacuum and a lint roller handy. I’ve got a fair bit of experience with minky, having made a number of baby blankets with it, and I know that sewing with the even-feed foot engaged, a longer stitch length, and a ball point or universal needle makes the process go much more smoothly.

[The default stitch length setting on my Janome is 2.2 (mm) which I find awfully short, even for piecing. When machine quilting, I bump it up to at least 3.0 or even 3.2, and for minky, I increase it all the way up to 4.0.]

What did I learn from all of this? The right combination of equipment—machine, needles, thread—contributes hugely to the success of the project. As much as I love my vintage sewing machines, they don’t handle newer synthetic knit fabrics well at all. Vittorio, my Necchi BF, pitches a fit if I try to sew minky on him. Very few vintage machines have walking foot attachments, and while it’s possible to Rube Goldberg a walking foot to some of them, I’d rather just use a machine I don’t have to argue with.

If you’re contemplating a project using an unfamiliar fabric, it goes without saying that you should Google some background information. There is a wealth of it out there. Two of my favorite sites for tips on sewing with specific fabrics are ThreadsMagazine.com and Sew4Home.com.

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I know some of you are only here for the manly shop content, so here is your update. The husband and his crew are going to be putting plywood on the ceiling in preparation for the insulation company to come and blow insulation up there. The scaffolding is in place:

I am going to go to town so that I won’t be here obsessing about people falling off scaffolding. That is not helpful.

I haven’t been inside the new shop since the doors went in and the lights were installed. That is one big-ass garage door:

This will be a lovely space for the husband to work in.

Website Development

The husband’s new website is about 80% done. My grasp of concrete and framing is limited to what I’ve gleaned from running the business side of things, so I completely understand the frustration of web designers who have trouble getting their clients to provide the content. Fortunately, I don’t have that problem. The husband looked over the first iteration and added and changed a few things. Now I need him to look it over again with those changes in place. He is also better at “big picture” stuff. I had made a list of services—including, of course, of all the specific tasks he does—and he added “consulting” to it. That never occurred to me, but it is an important part of what he does.

He has often said that if I weren’t running the business end of things, which he doesn’t enjoy, he’d be part of the underground economy. I depend on him, though, to keep me from getting bogged down in the details. When I start obsessing about minutiae, he manages to distill everything down into something much less overwhelming. He is the keeper of the five-year plan and the overall vision. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have input—we do have an Architectural Review Committee, after all—but projects go far more smoothly when he says, “Let’s do XYZ,” and I figure out how to pay for it. The division of labor works well for us because each of us is playing to our strengths.

However, I do have days when my job would be much easier if I could get inside his head. When I do the monthly billing, I organize all the invoices according to supplier, then he goes through each invoice and writes the job it pertains to on it. That is so I can track expenses in Quickbooks according to specific jobs. In theory, it works; in practice, sometimes not so much. Each job has a general contractor, a physical address, and a homeowner name. Sometimes he does more than one job for the same contractor at the same time. Sometimes the homeowner is acting as the general contractor. Sometimes he knows the general contractor and physical location of the job, but not the homeowner’s name. He has all of this stuff arranged in his head so he knows what jobs he is working on at what time for which person—i.e., the big picture—but the details don’t always sift down to me. I might get the general contractor’s name and a vague location of the job, but it turns out that the job he’s doing for that GC at Eagle Bend (the golf course) is different than the job he did for that GC at Eagle Bend last spring. If all I get is the contractor name and “Eagle Bend,” chaos ensues. It also happens that he might do part of the work, like the foundation, at the beginning of the project and the remainder—a driveway—at the end of the project several months later, so sometimes it is the same GC on the same jobsite.

I ask a lot of questions.

I used a Squarespace template for his website. The irony is not lost on me that his website looks far more artistic than mine do, but that’s just how it worked out. His website template is based on a handyman/craftsman site, and it worked well to incorporate those artistic touches even though one doesn’t normally think of a house foundation as being artistic. (The husband does not do stamped or other decorative forms of concrete.) Building a house for someone tweaks specific emotional strings, though, that buying a knitting pattern doesn’t, and I think the site needs to reflect that. But we’ll see—some of those template features may find their way over to my websites.

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This came in the mail the other day:

I want to plant ALL THE THINGS. (It’s snowing this morning; nothing like a big dose of reality to squelch those plans.) I will make a big wish list and then whittle it down to something realistic. I do know that I want to incorporate more herbs and flowers into the big garden. Some of them will get moved from the existing herb garden, but I’ll likely add some new varieties, too.

I can’t get distracted by gardening just yet. This week has been a bust thus far, productivity-wise, for a variety of reasons. I did get some Christmas gifts mailed yesterday. I have a few more to make today so they can be shipped tomorrow. Once the Christmas sewing is done, I am going to get back to making inventory for 2020. I would like to try at least a couple of craft show/farmer’s markets in the spring to see how that goes. If it works, it works; if not, it doesn’t, but I can’t do those events if I don’t have anything to sell.

I am Not Alone in the Struggle

I got quite a giggle over my coffee when I read Barbara Emodi’s Sewing on the Edge blog this morning. Her post is entitled Flypaper Thoughts Illustrated From the Production Room. She nailed how it feels to be a sewist at this time of year. And the funniest part is that “in the middle of all of this,” her husband has learned to sew. He bought himself a Singer Touch and Sew machine.

I don’t think I need to worry about the husband taking up sewing. Thank goodness.

That mystery item from yesterday’s blog post was a potholder. I took four of them to church for some field testing during our fellowship meal yesterday. They were deemed suitable by all of the experts there, so I am going to stick with that design. That was as close to sewing as I came; we had our church service, then a fellowship meal, then a business meeting to approve the 2020 budget, and finally, choir practice. I didn’t get home until 3 p.m. This is a typical Sunday in December. The good news is that my small but mighty choir of 10 people (we were missing some personnel) gamely accepted the challenge I set before them. The piece we are working up for the Christmas Eve service is an acapella arrangement.

[I was selfish this year in choosing a choir piece; I never get to sing because I am the accompianist, so I chose an arrangement that doesn’t come with accompaniment. The Mennonites have a long tradition of acapella singing, so this isn’t as shocking as it might have been to another group of singers. It remains to be seen whether I will sing alto or tenor or bounce back and forth. Much depends on who else comes to practice.]

I also got the list of songs for the Christmas Eve service, so I’ll spend some time this week getting my music in order. I like to keep it all together in one binder so I’m not fumbling around with multiple books, but that requires making copies. And we have Christmas caroling scheduled for next Sunday evening.

I had sewing on the schedule for today, but something has come up and I will have to spend some time in town. I am hoping that resolving this particular issue won’t take too long.

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The husband and I went out to dinner Saturday night, and while we were waiting for our food, I attempted to explain Instagram to him. The husband makes only occasional visits to the world of social media. Much of it is foreign territory to him. I probably wouldn’t spend as much time there as I do, either, but being fluent in these areas is somewhat necessary to running a creative business. When I am feeling sorry for myself, I lament the pace at which technology is forcing us to move. I started my creative business in the heyday of print desktop publishing. A few years later, I had to morph everything to digital publishing. I’ve built websites. I could retire this week if I had a nickel for every person who told me blogging is dead. Now it seems that Instagram is where it’s at. The older I get, the less enthusiasm I am able to muster for adding these things to my life. I can do it, but there are other ways I’d rather spend my time.

[Did anyone else notice that today has been dubbed “Green Monday” by the marketing people? I’ve seen it in several places already. What is this about?]

Speaking of websites, it looks like I’ll be building one for the husband. That was the other item of discussion over dinner the other night. He hasn’t needed to advertise because all of his work is either repeat customers or word of mouth, and he has plenty to keep him busy. One of the services he offers, though, is concrete cutting. He has specialized tools for this. There is one other guy in the valley who does concrete cutting. However, this guy doesn’t answer his phone or call people back. Eventually, most customers find their way to the husband. We would like to make it easier for them to do so.

He doesn’t need a fancy website, just a couple of pages with information and a contact form. I told him that he has to write the content for me, though; I sort of know what he does but I don’t want to make a hash of it. He’ll know what he needs to communicate to potential customers.

I have no current pictures to show you, but I did run across this one from a few years ago:

This was right after Christmas—we had gotten a huge snowstorm that dumped several feet of snow in a short period of time. The husband and I had to go out with the roof rakes and pull the snow off the porch roof. The snow was deep enough that we needed snowshoes, but I was a bit of a snowshoe novice at that point. A few minutes before this picture was taken, I had been out in front of the house attempting to turn around on them when I fell over and landed on my back like a turtle. In a snowbank. (DD#2 said, “One moment you were there and then you were gone!”) The girls had to pull me up. They found me because I was laughing so hard at myself.

I think I’m a bit steadier on my feet now. We’ll see if we get another storm like that this winter.

The Annual Struggle

Cue yearly agonizing over Christmas gift making…

I’ve said before that Christmas is not my favorite time of the year. Most of the work to get ready for the holiday traditionally has fallen on me, and while I don’t want our friends and relatives to think that we didn’t enjoy having them be part of our celebrations (we did), I am not going to gloss over the fact that it added a lot of stress to an already stressful time of year. I have yet to meet a church musician who is happy during the month of December. There is no getting around that.

I also hate the overwhelming commercialization and consumerism. I am someone who tends to buy things for people whenever I see something I think they would enjoy. “Hey, I saw this and it made me think of you,” is a much better reason for getting someone a gift than, “Hey, I had a list of people I had to buy for so I got you this thing out of a sense of obligation.” I’ve started picking up gifts throughout the year and setting them aside to gift at Christmas, although I’d much rather gift them in the moment.

And finally, as someone who enjoys making things, I’d much rather give a handmade gift, especially if I can figure out what I can make that the person will actually enjoy receiving and using. (I do not want to be the aunt or grandmother who makes the pink rabbit PJs for Ralphie for Christmas.) I love it when people tell me what they’d like me to make for them. My sister wants a minky pillowcase. DD#2 has put in an order for a faux fur pillow to match the faux fur cover I put on her makeup table chair last year.

It is the curse of makers, I think, that we cannot go to the store and buy a cheaply-made Chinese product when we could make something like it that would be so much better. It’s hard to spend money on something that you suspect will disintegrate after the first trip through the washer.

I think I am getting closer to finding a balance this year. Some people on my list are getting books, ones I’ve picked up as I’ve run across them. Other people have asked for specific (purchased) items and I am happy to get them what they want. And that leaves a few people for whom I will be making something this year. That was the focus of my sewing over the past couple of days and I’ve really enjoyed myself. Of course, it means that I can’t show you much of what I am working on. I can show you this, however, which is a bit of product development thrown in as an attempt to use up some larger fabric scraps:

I am feeling the itch to do some more machine quilting.

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The husband got the estimate for insulating the new shop and I am pretty sure that’s going to get done some time in the next couple of weeks. He tells me that once that’s done, he can sheath the walls with plywood and begin moving stuff over there from the old garage.

He has the plans for the bathroom tacked up on the wall:

I probably will never use the bathroom in the new shop because that round thing on the left side of the picture is the air compressor. I hate that air compressor. It is a huge air compressor that exhausts itself—very loudly—every 10-15 minutes, usually right at the moment I have come into the garage to get into my car. The surprise of it exhausting has just about put me into cardiac arrest on more than one occasion. The day it gets moved from the old garage to the new shop will be a happy day for me.

And this means that I can start thinking about creating an actual sewing machine workshop out in the old garage. I have a few ideas; I’ll probably start in the spring by gathering all of my machines from their existing locations and putting them on shelves so I can inventory what I’ve got.

Practicing My Hand Quilting

The first Thursday of every month is our Mennonite Women sewing day and meeting at church. Our ladies hand quilt on commission to raise funds that are donated or used for special projects. Not everyone enjoys quilting, so we also try to have a comforter ready to tie. Those usually get donated to Mennonite Central Committee.

Yesterday, we worked on two projects. Mennonite Central Committee is celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2020. As part of the celebration, they would like to collect at least 6500 tied comforters. They have asked churches to consider hosting a comforter-tying party. We ordered bolts of plaid flannel for the front and a poly/cotton broadcloth for the backing, and yesterday morning, Elaine and I cut enough fronts and backings for seven comforters. I’ll put them together with batting some time between now and the middle of January, and on Saturday, January 18, we hope to have a comforter-tying party and potluck dinner at church.

[January in Montana requires that we come up with creative forms of entertainment.]

Pat and Holly also put in a new quilt on Tuesday. Holly bought the top at an auction a few months ago, but it was a bit wonky. She had to take it apart and sew it back together to straighten it out. We’ll quilt it and probably donate it back to a relief sale like the one in Ritzville. It’s a very pretty quilt:

Most of the fancy quilting is being done in the sashing strips between the blocks and in the corners of the blocks. (It looks fancy when it’s done, but it’s a lot of straight lines, so it’s actually quite easy to do.) After Elaine and I were done cutting fabric, I gave in to peer pressure and sat down and helped quilt. My hand quilting is getting better. I am nowhere near as good as Margaret, but I no longer quilt like a beginner, either. Shirley lent me a needle that had belonged to her mother. Her reason for using it is not just sentimental—when compared with more modern needles, that vintage needle is a bit thicker and less prone to bending. I found it much easier to quilt with her vintage needle than a modern one, so I am going to go through my collection of old needles and see if I can find a similar one. We do tend to get very attached to particular tools. I have one thimble that fits me perfectly and if I ever lose it, I’ll be so sad.

Quilting is also a great time for visiting and telling stories. Karen, who is Shirley’s daughter and about my age, asked me if I had ever made lefse. Lefse, if you’re unfamiliar, is a traditional Norwegian food made from riced potatoes that are made into a dough, rolled out, and cooked on a grill. We have a lot of people of Norwegian heritage here in the Flathead Valley—the Lutheran church I play for during Advent and Lent is called Eisdvold Lutheran—and lefse is a popular offering. I told Karen that yes, I had made lefse once or twice. Back when the husband first joined the fire department, I joined the corresponding Ladies’ Auxiliary. At that time, the Ladies’ Auxiliary was made up of wives of firefighters and other community women. (It has since morphed into a different kind of support group for the fire department.) Most of the women were many years older than me. They quilted, cooked, and helped with the annual fundraising auction. Lefse was one of the foods sold at the auction, so we had to get together several weeks ahead of time and make it. Pat, who is one of the quilting ladies at church (she quilted the quilt I made for the Ritzville sale in October), was also in the Ladies’ Auxiliary because her husband was a firefighter. The first time I went to lefse making, Pat was walking around behind all of us brandishing a rolling pin and yelling, “Roll it thinner!” because thick lefse is not appetizing. I remember thinking to myself, “Who is this woman?” and I went home and told the husband I wasn’t sure I wanted to go back.

Pat laughed when I told that story (she remembered that day). She and I have similar working styles so we get along just fine. She’s one of the few people I can stand to share a kitchen with.

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It’s back to the sewing machine for me today. I want to get the Christmas sewing done and out of the way so I can go into 2020 with a clear idea of what I want to do. Or perhaps that should say, “Go into 2020 with a clear idea of what I want to do so the universe knows exactly where to screw up my plans,'“ because clearly I wasn’t expecting to go back to work as a transcriptionist, even part time. Stay tuned.

Out of Print Prints

The rest of the Thanksgiving trip was fine; we had a relaxing day at the Airbnb on Thursday before braving the crowds on Friday. I was feeling optimistic as my mother, sister, DD#1, and I headed for University Village, because traffic was light and shoppers seemed cheery. A few hours later, though, we got caught up in a mess on our way to see DD#2 at the Nordstrom where she works. Someone had driven up onto the sidewalk and hit a pole on the access road next to the mall, shutting down that road for several hours. I ended up dropping everyone off and going to fuel up the car. By the time I got back, traffic was marginally better but still not great. There is nothing to do in those situations but be patient and avoid contributing to the problem. We managed.

Saturday was my mother’s 78th birthday. Because my birthday is so close to Thanksgiving, we often end up celebrating together, but none of us could remember the last time we were all together for my mother’s birthday. My sister and I treated her to dinner at a lovely French restaurant. They both flew home on Sunday and I headed for Spokane.

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Fabrics go out of print just like many other items (yarn, patterns, books, etc.). I have learned that if I find something I absolutely love, I should buy as much of it as I can. We’ve all heard stories of a bolt of OOP fabric selling for some outrageous price in eBay. Ever since Joanns stopped carrying many designer prints and switched to a house brand (a dumb idea, in my opinion, but I don’t run the company), it’s been a lot harder to find specific fabric designers, especially in my neck of the woods. Occasionally, I’ll visit a Joanns that has a stock of older prints. The store in Moses Lake, for example, which has only been open for about two years, has some fabrics I haven’t seen in quite a while. I picked up the last of a bolt of Tim Holtz fabric in the entomology print. Our store hasn’t had any Tim Holtz fabric for several years. And I ran across some of this Quilter’s Showcase fabric, which also has been out of stock at our store for a long time:

(Not the best representation of the colors, but I do love the print.) I had a yard of this fabric and used it for the Mary Apron class I took at The Quilting Bee in Spokane last February. Alas, that was the class where the pattern was full of errors. I ended up wasting quite a bit of that original yard of fabric because the pattern said to cut each piece 17” long when each piece only needed to be 10” long. The leftovers went to the scrap bag, but I was a bit annoyed. When I spotted this at the store in Moses Lake, I bought what was left.

I haven’t been to Missoula lately to see if it is still open, but there was a quilting store there that had so much back stock of fabric that some of the bolts never had their plastic wrapping removed. It has gotten rather ridiculous in recent years. New fabric lines used to come out once or twice a year. Now, some fabric manufacturers are releasing new lines once a quarter, and smaller quilt stores have a hard time rotating inventory that quickly.

The last time I was in Spokane, I picked up a fat quarter of this fabric at Sew E-Z, Too, a fabric store north of downtown:

Don’t ask me why, but I think it’s charming. I’ve discovered that fat quarters are a good way to see if I like a fabric. If I buy a fat quarter and then decide I should have bought yardage, I’ll look for a supplier. I could have ordered more of this online, but I popped into the store when I went through Spokane last Tuesday. They still had it, so I bought a yard. I think it’s going to end up being a quilted cover for one of my sewing machines.

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I spent Tuesday catching up on paperwork, cleaning and organizing, and running errands to stock up on feed for everyone, husband included. And then I had a moment of anxiety when I realized that there are only three weeks until Christmas. Yikes. It almost always sneaks up on me anyway, but this year, with Thanksgiving being so late in November, I am way behind the curve. It’s time to manage expectations:

• No one is getting a quilt from me this year.

• Some of you will get handmade gifts. You may get them AFTER Christmas.

• I did wrap half a dozen presents yesterday—bought throughout the year—so YAY ME.

Going back to work will throw a wrench into the works, but how big a wrench remains to be seen. It is one of those strange paradoxes that when I have a lot of free time in my schedule, I am less productive. Having to work a couple of hours a day will no doubt help me to better prioritize some of my activities.

I went down to the organic market Tuesday to pick up some veggies for a salad and to drop off a supply of business cards. I noticed how nicely the owner had displayed my aprons! They were in a basket with the apron ties done up in fancy bows, and a hand-lettered sign to indicate that they were done by a local maker. The local paper did a profile on the store this week if you’d like to read more. (And from the small world department, the Mary Jo mentioned in the article is the sister of my computer guru, Greg.)

Winter Driving Conditions

I had one eye on the weather forecast last week; I am no stranger to bad weather road trips, but I like to know what I’m getting into. There are three mountain passes between here and Seattle. I’ve driven over each of them in a snowstorm at least once (and once over Snoqualmie in a snowstorm in the dark). Thankfully, the drive over on Tuesday was through mostly bare and dry conditions. I didn’t actually hit any snow until Spokane, and then it was just light flurries. While watching the news that night, though, I found out that there had been a 60-70 car pileup on I-90 just west of Spokane earlier in the day. A snow squall had come through around 2:30 p.m. bringing whiteout conditions. That stretch of highway is congested anyway because the speed limit drops from 70 mph to 60 mph there. The resulting pileup closed the highway in both directions for several hours. Fortunately, there were no serious injuries (besides to the cars).

I’ve got some opinions on winter driving. In 38 years of driving in general, I’ve never been in an accident of my making. I was rear-ended twice in the Jetta, both times because someone else wasn’t paying attention. I am a good, defensive driver. I watch the road conditions, and when it’s bad, I slow down. We have a saying in the fire department that “slower is faster.” I’d much rather arrive an hour late than not at all.

Contrary to popular opinion, driving at highway speeds on icy roads is not the mark of a skilled driver. It’s the mark of an idiot—and hopefully an idiot that doesn’t cause an accident. On my way out of Seattle and up toward Snoqualmie Pass, the wind picked up and it started to snow. I positioned myself in the far right-hand lane going 60 mph (the speed limit there is 70 mph) so that I could ditch onto the shoulder if someone in front of me lost control. A reader board over the road flashed the temperature—32 degrees—with a warning for ice and snow up ahead. I watched as car after truck after SUV, all with Washington plates, passed me in the left lanes doing 70-80 miles an hour. I doubt many of those vehicles had snow tires, let alone studded ones.

I made it over the pass without incident and stopped in Moses Lake for lunch. When I got to Spokane, though, I found out that I-90 east of Moses Lake—the spot I had driven through just an hour or two earlier—was closed because of another big pileup. (No doubt another batch of overconfident Washington state drivers.) And I-90 near Ritzville was closed again yesterday morning due to a collision between three semis.

I’m not worried about my own abilities. I worry about the stupid people I have to share the road with.

Meanwhile, back at home, the husband was dealing with a wicked windstorm. I’ve got an app on my phone that notifies me when our fire department gets paged out on a call. It works anywhere I have cell service (including in foreign countries, which is a bit disconcerting). As I headed out of Spokane Wednesday morning on my way to Seattle, that app alarm kept going off. When I checked in with the husband at lunch, I discovered that we had another half a dozen trees down in the woods and the power was out. He said that the wooded area about two miles south of us looked like someone had taken a machete to it.

[I also got a text from him at one point saying Your woodpecker tree is history, by the way. The “woodpecker tree” was the skeleton of a long-dead pine that has stood on our property since we bought it. It was the tallest dead tree out there and a favorite perch of the pileated woodpecker; hence, the name. Several men have tried to cut down that tree over the years, but I steadfastly refused to allow them. It came down in the windstorm.]

I don’t want to get into a debate on climate change; that topic is too politicized and emotionally charged to have a reasonable discussion. I will say, though, that it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to note that weather patterns have shifted in the 26 years we have lived here. It used to be that we had maybe one or two of those bad windstorms a year. We’ve had three since August. And more of this:

I felt bad that I wasn’t here to help him out. I hate wind, though. This storm was so strong that it broke one of my wind chimes. The fishing line holding the pipes together snapped and I am going to have to re-string it.

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The new shop has electricity!

The electrician was here yesterday installing large overhead lights in the lean-tos and inside the shop itself. Now the husband can see to unload the trucks and trailers.

And I picked up my new bifocals yesterday. They will take some getting used to, but I already appreciate not having to take off and put on my glasses like I used to. Distance is great. Middle vision is a bit tricky; I am having trouble seeing my computer screen with them on. The optician said to give them a solid two weeks, though, before giving up, so we’ll see what happens. They will adjust the prescription if I am still having trouble.

A Turkey Trip to Seattle With Quilts

One of the side effects of having adult children is a change in how we celebrate holidays. DD#2 is currently an assistant manager at Nordstrom in Seattle, so it was a given that she was going to have to work Black Friday.

[One of my cousins also lives in Seattle and is a buyer at Nordstrom. She has been a wonderful mentor to DD#2 and has encouraged her to think about applying for a corporate job at the mother ship downtown, so this may be less of an issue in the future.]

DD#1 usually spends Thanksgiving with her boyfriend’s family, but his parents went to visit relatives in the midwest this year. I said I would come to Seattle and spend Thanksgiving there. My mother and sister also made plans to fly in from the east coast.

Driving from Kalispell to Seattle takes about nine hours in good weather. I’ve done that trip many times. During the winter, though—and with only about seven hours of daylight—I prefer to break it up into two days and stay in Spokane overnight going and coming.

On my layover in Spokane over last Tuesday, I made a visit to the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture to see the Memory and Meaning: Textiles from the Permanent Collection exhibit. I confirmed that photos (without flash) were allowed, so I took some pictures to share. This is not a huge museum and the exhibit only featured about ten quilts, but I enjoyed seeing and reading about the quilts that were on display. The first one was pieced by a young woman named Rene Snider between 1900 and 1902. Sadly, she died in childbirth the following year, but her sister-in-law, Trissa Snider Moore, finished the quilt in 1928 with the help of her own children:

People, this is at least a queen-sized quilt made up of alternating plain and pieced 3” squares, all pieced by hand. Look at the detail of these tiny hourglass units. No scrap left behind, indeed!

Amazing.

Several other quilts were hung in a group:

That appliquéd flower quilt (second from right) invited closer inspection. It was another tour de force of handwork:

Those stitches are TINY. On the order of Margaret-quilted-them tiny. And there are a lot of them.

I haven’t tried making a crazy quilt, although they are becoming more popular these days. The quilt store in Spokane has offered some classes on making them. This one was pieced and embroidered by Eudora Parker Mead, who worked as a dressmaker in Spokane to support herself and her daughter while her husband was off prospecting.

That embroidery. Oh, my goodness.

The highlight of the exhibit was the Bengali quilt. This quilt is so old and fragile that it was not hung, but instead laid out horizontally on a high platform. I had a hard time getting a good picture:

Quilt historians have dated this quilt to the 17th century. It likely is one of the oldest surviving quilts in the United States. Apparently, it came over with a family who settled in Massachusetts and was passed down through the descendants, finally ending up in the possession of a man who came to Spokane and started the company that eventually became Avista Power. As with many family heirlooms, its story became embellished through the years, so historians had to sift through what was legend and what was truth. Family history held that it had been embroidered by a couple of Queen Elizabeth’s attendants, but the timing was wrong. (I am paraphrasing all of this and I think I have it correct.) It appears to have been made in Bengal‚ which has a long history of producing and exporting fine textiles to European markets in the 16th and 17th centuries.

It is one thing to see artifacts of metal and stone dating back several hundred years—they do not deteriorate quickly—and quite another to stand in the presence of a textile piece that age, especially one of this scope and detail. Whose were the hands that created this piece? What were their lives like? I forgot to ask, but I don’t think this quilt is going to be part of a traveling display, unfortunately.

The museum also had a number of embroidered pieces on display. I know I’ve dismissed embroidery as being a bit of “frippery,” but it really did have a practical application. Back when textiles were time-consuming to produce, they were considered valuable household items. Being able to label your household’s textiles with an embroidered name and date ensured you could keep track of them. (Fabric markers hadn’t been invented yet.) And if you’re going to go to all that work, why not make it pretty, too?

Off to the side, in one of the smaller display alcoves, I found the delightful story of Pearl Allen:

Widowed in her twenties after only three years of marriage, she filled lonely hours tatting and sewing. She remarried in 1922, but money was tight. Pearl often used cloth from chicken feed and flour sacks to make tablecloths and other objects. She made many of her own clothes and sewed for her children.

Her work took a creative turn when she developed a method of “writing” with thread. Using her old treadle sewing machine, she decorated potholders and other items with favorite poems and sayings, recipes, and historical information, often giving them as gifts.

This is a a tea towel embroidered with a recipe for cocktail sauce:

I find machine quilting difficult enough with a modern sewing machine. I can’t imagine doing this with a treadle.

Speaking of sewing machines….

I really am trying not to add to the collection. You probably all think I doth protest too much, but it’s true. After I left the museum, I hit up a couple of thrift stores in the area. I’m looking for vintage apron patterns now, not sewing machines. At the Union Gospel Mission thrift store, however—which almost always has a couple of vintage sewing machines for sale—I found this:

No, it’s not a vintage machine, but it is valuable (to me) nonetheless. This is a Janome Jem. A few years ago, these machines were elevated to the same status as Featherweights. Everyone wanted one. Janome, oddly enough, makes even their lower-end machines with beefy metal guts. Despite being small and having a plastic case, this machine weighs about 12 pounds. Quilters wanted the Jem models as portable machines to take to quilting classes (and indeed, this one had a quarter-inch foot on it). These machines retail for between $150- $200. This one was $16.00, so I scooped it up. I’ve been looking for a machine that I could take back and forth to Seattle with me, because it seems that DD#2 always has clothing in need of mending or alterations.

On the way home from Spokane yesterday, I made a quick stop at the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store in Coeur d’Alene, another place known for having a lot of vintage machines for sale (although I was looking for vintage patterns, remember?). In the furniture section, I spotted a Singer case on the floor, likely with a vintage machine in it, and knelt down to take a peek inside. A man behind me said, loudly, “I’m buying that machine!” I stopped what I was doing and stood up. “You can look at it if you want,” he said, a bit less forcefully. “No worries,” I responded, and headed off to see what else there was. I found a table with half a dozen machines in cases—including some good vintage models—but nothing I wanted to take home. When I turned around, though, I spotted this hiding on the floor underneath another table:

There are some machines I will not leave in thrift stores whether I need them or not, and that includes any of the Singer 400 or 500 models. This is a Singer 401. I love these slant-shank machines. (I wondered briefly if the man buying the other Singer had seen this one, but I didn’t stop to ask him.) It needs a thorough cleaning and a foot pedal, but I expect it works just fine.

I’ve got more to share, but this post is long enough. Look for more in the next couple of days.

December Already

I’m back after a week of traveling—I will post a comprehensive review of my activities in tomorrow’s blog post, but I will note that literally 15 minutes after I walked in, the phone rang. It was my supervisor’s supervisor from my old transcription job. One of the transcriptionists who stayed on the account after I was let go has just given notice, and before they started looking for a replacement for her, this woman wanted to know if I was interested. I said that yes, I definitely was interested. It will only be part-time, but it keeps me in the industry and gives me some spending money. I don’t really want to go back to work full-time anyway, and this way, they don’t have to train someone because I know the system. I start the 23rd of December.

That was a lovely surprise. I do need to get my feet back under me this week, though. I have a lot to do between now and then. To keep you entertained until tomorrow’s blog post, here is a picture of some (but not all) of my pre-holiday fabric shopping:

I’ll be back soon.

Serged and Sewn

The apron I was hoping to assemble entirely on the serger didn’t work out that way, because I forgot that there is a not insignificant amount of topstitching to be done. Oh, well. It’s good exercise to get up and move between the serger and the sewing machine, especially as they are in different rooms.

This is not a reversible apron, so the back needs to look nice. And I do have to say, that serged edge is really pretty:

I like my sergers. The more I use them, the more uses I find for them. I am going to try gathering on the serger when I do another apron from the Lori Holt One Yard Apron pattern. The Seasoned Homemaker has an excellent tutorial. At some point, I may spring for the gathering foot for my serger, which will allow me to gather and attach to a second piece of fabric in one fell swoop.

Ali came over with the boys last night—Elysian wasn’t feeling well, but she sent her little guy over with a birthday present for me (my birthday was yesterday):

It’s a meat grinder and a bean slicer! Elysian has been processing turkeys and grinding the meat, and I mentioned that a meat grinder was the one appliance I didn’t own (amazingly enough). The bean slicer is pretty cool, too! We will have to make sure we try it out next season.

I keep a basket of toys here for the kids to play with when they come over. It holds a whole collection of Matchbox cars and a set of blocks that my father made when I was pregnant with DD#1. The boys know they are welcome to go and get the basket and strew things all over the living room floor. My father also made a set of wooden trucks and equipment. Ali and I sat and visited while the boys played on the floor. I said to her that I thought my father would be very happy to see those trucks and blocks still being used. The boys love them.

Ali has the same serger that I do but hasn’t used it much. Her little guy was wearing a great little fleece raglan top that he had had on for three days straight. She wants to make him a few more like it and I said I’d help her get started. It’ll save some time if she doesn’t have to re-invent all the wheels that I did. Elysian has been sewing, too. Between the three of us, we ought to be able to keep these little boys outfitted with lots of warm clothing.

The husband replaced the lock mechanisms on the BMW for me this weekend, too, so I don’t have to worry about them failing and me getting locked out of my car completely or not being able to lock the car at all. That was a lovely birthday present.