All Things New

I love the first few weeks of the new year—everything is all fresh and new and exciting! My desk is clean, last year’s paperwork has been moved to the spare bedroom to be sorted for tax prep, and my new filing system is in place. I have a blank planner waiting to be filled with upcoming events, and when I am feeling particularly generous, I buy myself a new set of highlighters to go with it. (All of my planner entries are color-coded according to which part of my life they involve.)

I have to remind myself that every day, every week, every month brings with it new possibilities; there is nothing special about January 1 beyond its place on the calendar and the fact that it starts a new tax year. Otherwise, we carry on as usual. The chickens don’t know what day it is. Still, I appreciate the novelty.

Yesterday was sewing day at church. The temperatures have been hovering right around freezing, which has meant more ice than snow. I was worried no one would show up. We had a good group of 10, however, and got a lot done. Elaine and I put a comforter into the frame to tie (with the requisite amount of laughing at our awful spatial skills that makes it far more difficult than it should be):

I have a large supply of 5” squares so I am using them to play around with color combinations. As long as the combinations are not too ugly, I run with them. The goal of an MCC comforter is to keep someone warm, not be displayed in an art museum. These squares happened to land next to each other on the floor during a sorting session and they reminded me of sherbet. The backing was a serendipitous length of a gray-and-coral print purchased at Joanns for $1.13 a yard during one of their clearance sales. It matched nicely.

The other ladies worked on the quilt.

This is a quilt top that Holly bought at one of the relief sales. It was a bit wonky, though, and she had to take it apart and re-sash and reassemble it.

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I left quilting just after lunch—delicious homemade broccoli, cauliflower, and cheese soup provided by Shirley—because I had a lot of errands to run in town. One of them was a stop at the opticians. I ended up having to order myself a pair of inexpensive bifocals to wear at the computer. I am more than a bit annoyed at the eye doctor who did my exam last month. He was late to the appointment, rushed through the exam, and I don’t think he did a good assessment of what I needed or adequately explained the options. (And without knowing there were options, I didn’t know what questions to ask.) His goal was to get me out of my bifocal contacts and into progressive lenses. I love my new progressive lenses when I am out running around town. I can see to drive and see labels in stores, but they do not focus properly at the distance of my computer monitors or the music rack on the piano. I stopped in last week to talk to the optician about the problem, and he suggested a pair just to wear at the computer. They are regular lined bifocals, which are an adjustment, but at least I can see to work on the computer again (and they are nice for sewing.)

Now that I know what I need, I will be more assertive next time about making sure I get the correct glasses. I am pretty sure I could have gotten one pair that would have focused at both middle and far distance.

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My latest YouTube obsession is a BBC production called Restoration Home. This show follows people in the UK who have purchased old, run-down properties and undertaken to bring them back to their former glory. The show is a train wreck in slow motion. One of the architects interviewed astutely noted that, “Some houses just want to die.” One or two of the restorations could be considered successful—”success” being defined as the homeowners not getting a divorce and staying on budget during the project—but the rest are money pits whose work drags on for years and years and cause turmoil in relationships.

The husband has no patience for those kinds of projects. If something requires more than a nominal amount of work to make it habitable, his assessment is that it needs to be burned to the ground or bulldozed and something else built in its place. Of course, he isn’t living in a country full of centuries-old buildings. I can appreciate the need to save a medieval farmstead built in 1430. And I have learned quite a bit about English history and geography while watching these episodes. In addition to following the nuts and bolts of the restoration, historians delve into the history of the property, who built it, who owned it, and its place on the historical timeline.

Revenge of the Rectangles

Happy 2020! Following that old adage “Begin as you mean to go on,” let’s start the year with a blog post, some sewing, and the new shop.

I worked on the commission quilt yesterday. Halfway through slicing up a group of pieces into smaller ones so I could sew the smaller pieces back into a big piece—a process that confounds the husband—I looked at what I was doing and started laughing, but in order to tell you why I was laughing, I have to tell you a story.

Long ago, when I was about 4-1/2, my parents took me to a psychologist to have me evaluated. I was a very, shall we say, precocious 4-1/2 year-old, and they were trying to decide if they should send me to kindergarten a year early. I remember one part of that visit very clearly. I was seated at a small table and the psychologist (a man) had given me two blocks and asked me to make a rectangle from them. I moved those blocks around and around and for the life of me, I could not figure out how to make a rectangle out of them. I also remember becoming terribly frustrated and sensing that I was failing miserably at what was expected of me.

[I told this story to the husband and he—no doubt trying to be charitable—pointed out that 4-1/2 year olds fail at a lot of things. I responded that it was my suspicion that he, at 4-1/2, not only could put blocks together correctly to make a rectangle, but could also build intricate towers with them. I probably talked a lot more than he did at that age, though, something that hasn’t changed much.]

In order to make these Delectable Mountain quilt blocks, I have to start with rectangles of two different fabrics, cutting them on the diagonal like so:

Then I have to combine half a rectangle of one fabric with half a rectangle of the other fabric. That was when I started to have flashbacks to 4-1/2 year-old me. Do they go together like this?

Or like this?

Or—holding my breath—like this?

(Because my brain is better at these tasks than it used to be.)

Thank goodness batik fabrics don’t really have a right side or a wrong side, because then I would have been in trouble. This is the hardest part of the quilt and it is the center section. Once I get through this, I should have smooth sailing with the borders. Pray for me.

I made a couple of sets of these rectangle combinations and decided that was enough for one day. I am disciplined enough to stop before I begin making stupid mistakes. I made a few more Candy Coated strips, sewed the Scrapper’s Delight blocks into bigger sections, and finished making the remaining half of 96 charm square units—one print, one Kona—for a comforter top. I still have to sew the units together. I’m going to do that today, as well as make two more comforter envelopes to tie at the party in a few weeks. And we have sewing day at church tomorrow.

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The husband has spent the last couple of days framing the loft in the new shop:

The loft will be above the bathroom and is where the bolt bins and other assorted small supplies will live. He informs me that getting the air lines put in may happen soon, and that means he can move that ^&%$* air compressor over from the old garage. I’m hoping that by the time spring gets here and the weather improves, enough space will have been cleared in the old garage that I can put some industrial shelving out there and organize my sewing machines.

I bought Elysian’s little guy a model trebuchet kit for Christmas. He and I had brainstormed the possibility of building a “punkin’ chucker” to deal with the excess pumpkins from our gardens last fall and I thought it would be prudent to start with a scale model. He also thinks that we should have a zip line here in the neighborhood, although when we proposed the idea to the husband—the top of the new shop being the highest point—it was not met with a lot of enthusiasm. Oh, well.

Scrap Management Sewing

The heavy sewing production of the past couple of months resulted in a lot of leftover fabric. I try to deal with those leftovers while the fabric is still on the cutting table by slicing parts for future projects. For instance, much of the extra apron fabric morphed into potholders. What wasn’t big enough for potholders was cut into 5” squares for comforter tops. And the “strings” that were left after that went into the scrap bag.

The scrap bags are overflowing, though, and driving me batty, so I decided to spend a few hours dealing with them yesterday. I dumped them all onto the floor and sat and sorted them by length. The strings that were full widths of fabric were set aside in their own pile. Those are the ones I want to use last because their length makes them the most versatile. Using the shorter pieces, I finished the last four squares for the Scrapper’s Delight 2.0 quilt for our bed. We already have Scrapper’s Delight 1.0 on our bed, but it is only 72” x 72” and I wanted a larger version. The original required thirty-six 12” squares; version 2.0 required sixty-four 12” squares. I’ve been working on them as the scraps pile up. Now I can put the whole thing together and figure out how I want to quilt it. Tera helped me do the first one on her longarm. I may ask her if we can do the second one that way, too.

I still had a supply of short strings, though, so Vittorio and I started Yet Another Candy Coated Quilt.

Both the Scrapper'‘s Delight and Candy Coated are from Sunday Morning Quilts by Amanda Jean Nyberg and Cheryl Arkison. I love that book. I think this is the fourth Candy Coated that I’ve made, simply because it’s such a great pattern for using up scraps. It’s made up of rows of varying heights, anywhere from 3” to 10-1/2”.

I started with the shortest pieces, seaming them together on their long sides to make a strip about 24” long. That strip was trimmed to the appropriate width and then the sections sewn together to make a row approximately 72” long. Out of those short scraps, I was able to get a 3” row, a 4-1/2” row, and part of another 4-1/2” row. At that point, I switched gears and pulled out the longer strips that were approximately 20” long. After sewing those together and trimming them, I was able to cut them into sections for a 10-1/2” row and and an 8” row:

This is good mindless sewing. You just sew strips together without regard for what fabrics are next to each other. It’s scrappy, yes, but somehow it all comes out in the wash looking fine.

I may not get an entire Candy Coated 4.0 out of the current scrap supply, but that’s okay. These completed rows are easier to store than a bag of messy scraps. I also have smaller scrap bags of light-colored scraps—what are known as “low volume” fabrics—and a bag of white and cream scraps. I have this desire to make a quilt from the white and cream scraps, which is incredibly impractical but keeps nagging at my creative subconscious.

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Transcription work has been light to nonexistent this week. That was not unexpected. I did all my errand-running yesterday—and got to chat with Tera for a few minutes at Costco—because we are supposed to get a winter storm this afternoon and it could be a messy one. Current forecasts are for 6-12”—two feet over the passes, which means we may get more than a foot at our elevation—and 40 mph winds. (Oh yay.) The bigger worry is the possibility of freezing rain. All of the people who think that four-wheel drive makes them invincible are going to get a physics lesson on what happens when the coefficient of friction goes to zero.

My mother-in-law sent some 13-bean soup mix, so I boiled down the ham bone from our Christmas ham and made a pot of soup. That will just simmer all day and be our dinner tonight. Hopefully the husband will not have to spend New Year’s Eve cutting up downed trees and dealing with car accidents.

All Those Elephants, One Bite at a Time

I started working on the commission quilt top yesterday. I said to the husband that cutting into fabric that belongs to someone else—and that probably cannot be replaced—is way more nerve-wracking than cutting into my own fabric. I am moving at a slow and deliberate pace. I made sure that I knew what was happening with the pattern before I started, because the pattern includes instructions for more than one size. I did two rounds of pressing and cutting and that was it for yesterday. (When I said “slow and deliberate pace,” I wasn’t kidding.)

The commission quilt features a block known as “Delectable Mountains,” one I haven’t made before. Bonnie Hunter’s Scrappy Mountain Majesties quilt uses this block:

The fabrics I am using are batiks—something of a departure for me. They aren’t my favorite fabrics but it’s good to branch out once in a while.

I’ve also got two of the MCC comforters assembled for the comforter-tying party in a few weeks. I still have five to go but I need to retrieve more batting from the sewing room at church. We are trying a different technique for these comforters. Normally, we would layer a backing, batting, and a top—either a single piece of fabric or a pieced top—into a quilt frame and tie it on the frame. I would then bring the comforter home, trim the edges, attach binding, and sew the binding down. (I love to sew down binding so that’s why I volunteered for that part of the job.) We only have one quilt frame available for tying, however, and we’re hoping to do several comforters at one time at the party. Shirley’s sister had sent her a set of instructions for making the comforters “envelope style,” which is how they do it in their sewing circle. We ordered a bolt of 60” wide cotton flannel in a plaid pattern and a bolt of 58” wide poly/cotton broadcloth for the backing. (The total cost was about $150 for enough fabric and batting to make seven 60” x 80” comforters.) Last month at sewing, Elaine and I measured and cut fronts and backs for seven comforters.

To make the comforters, I lay the batting out on the floor of the bedroom, put the plaid flannel down on top of it, then put the broadcloth on top of the flannel. The broadcloth is actually a bit narrower than the flannel, which is a bonus for sewing because I can see and follow one of the straight lines in the flannel to make each seam. An 8” opening on one end is left unseamed for turning. Sewing the seams takes about 15 minutes. I’m doing them on the Janome with the even-feed foot engaged.

Once all the seams are done, I trim off the edges to make everything even, then trim the corners and turn the whole thing inside out. At that point, all I have to do is topstitch around the edge, which secures the batting and closes the opening. The comforter is now stable enough that a couple of people can sit around a table and knot it every 4” or so. (I chose a plaid pattern with a 4” repeat to make that part easy.) And it doesn’t require any binding when it’s done because the edges are already finished.

I’ve been trying to figure out if this way saves time. I think it does. Each comforter takes me about an hour to assemble. When we tie them in the frame at sewing, it takes 2-3 hours by the time we get the frame set up and the whole thing tied, and then it takes another couple of hours for me to sew down the binding. It would take less time if I sewed down the binding on the machine, but I am not as fond of the way that looks. Using a single piece of fabric rather than a pieced top definitely saves time.

[At the end of the day, it’s not always about saving time, though. I am very much a process person and I do some of these tasks the slow, old-fashioned way because it’s a form of relaxation for me.]

I’ll run this analysis past the other ladies at sewing this week. We probably will continue to put tops into the frame each month for tying as we have some women who prefer to tie rather than quilt, but this is the way to go, I think, when we want to make a lot of comforters quickly.

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I started working on the embroidered needle case pattern that I bought a few weeks ago. I attached the felt birdies with a glue stick and now I am whipstitching them to secure them to the piece of red wool.

Once that’s done, I can embellish them to make them look like fancy birdies. The woman who designed this pattern is giving a class on making it at the quilt store at the end of January. I kicked around the idea of taking the class, but it’s four full-day sessions and I just don’t think I can spare that much time.

I’ve also got the embroidered felt quilt block kit that Tera gave me, but that one is complicated enough that I want to perfect some of my embroidering skills before I start working on it.

Goats and Horses in Cahoots

We did some farm sitting for Elysian last week. She went to California to visit family for Christmas and asked us to take care of her animals. She has about 25 chickens, two goats, two horses, and a Shetland pony. Her system is very streamlined and efficient. Each of the feed containers is labeled with a cutout of the front of the feed bag stapled to the wall of the barn above it. All of the doors open and close with pulley and rope systems. The stock tanks all have heaters, and I only had to fill the chicken waterer every other day. And the hayloft has openings in the floor for the flakes of hay to drop through.

Elysian had attached two small stock tanks to the walls of the barn underneath the openings in the hayloft. Theoretically, the hay was supposed to fall down into the stock tanks. The first day, however, I discovered that the horses didn’t like that arrangement. They had pulled the stock tanks out of the ratchet straps holding them to the walls and arranged the tanks in the middle of the barn floor. This plan was endorsed by the goats. When I arrived, one goat was standing on top of one of the stock tanks—which was on its side—and the other goat was inside the stock tank rocking it back and forth.

I didn’t want the goats to hang themselves on the ratchet straps, which were still attached to the wall, so I removed them. I put the stock tanks back in place. That lasted exactly one day before they were again moved so the goats could play on them:

After that, I didn’t bother putting them back.

I don’t have a lot of experience with horses, but Brighton and Dixie (she’s Brighton’s mother) are fairly calm. Still, I thought it would be prudent to take carrots with me when I went to do chores. Brighton caught on right away. Every time I showed up, he would impatiently nose around the pockets of my barn coat to see if I had treats. Elysian says he is like a big puppy. I suspect he wonders why Carrot Lady didn’t bring him anything this morning.

I skipped yoga last week because I got plenty of flexibility exercise climbing up and down the ladder into the hayloft.

Many years ago, when we lived in Pennsylvania, I farm sat for a friend of mine who had a large flock of sheep. Her farm was just off the route I took to work every day, so I would stop in the morning and let the sheep out of the barn and feed them, and then stop on my way home to feed them again and put them back in the barn. She had a Lincoln ram named Tiger. Tiger was a sweetheart most of the year—he would come running up to the fence when he saw someone and put his nose up to be petted—but during mating season, he tended to be a bit aggressive. I carried the shepherd’s crook with me so I could bop him on the head if necessary. Tiger lived to a ripe old age (for sheep) and sired many beautiful lambs. He died of old age and now his pelt is on the floor of our bedroom.

We would have sheep here but the husband says that would be equivalent to putting up a neon sign saying, “DINER.”

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We’ve already had an eventful Saturday morning; a few minutes after I got up at 5:00 a.m., the pager went off for a structure fire. Nothing will get a firefighter out of bed faster than to hear those two words from dispatch. The husband was half-dressed by the time I got back upstairs to make sure he had heard the tones go off. He left to get the engine. I waited a few more minutes, then called the convenience store just off the highway to see if they could make up 15 sandwiches for us. Fortunately, it was not a large fire and they had it knocked down by the time I had picked up the sandwiches and delivered them to the scene.

We don’t respond to many structure fires. Our responses these days are mainly medical calls and things like motor vehicle accidents (and there are plenty of those, unfortunately).

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I finished the website for the construction company this week. It can be found here if you’d like to take a look. And if you know anyone who is planning to build in the Flathead Valley and needs a concrete contractor, please let them know. The schedule for 2020 is already starting to fill up.

The husband got the plywood up on the inside of the shop. It’s nice and toasty in there with just the floor heater. He also has the supports for the loft framed in.

I am curious to see how he arranges everything in the new shop. The old shop is very organized, but stuff is crammed into every available nook and cranny.

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.