Saved From the Landfill

The new year started out well, but it has gone sideways in the past 48 hours. I apologize for the lack of specifics, but the details are not mine to share. The husband, the girls, and I are fine, but we would gladly accept any prayers, positive energy, and healing thoughts you would like to send in our family’s direction.

Needless to say, in the face of the news we received this week, I’ve had some trouble focusing. And of course, I am not allowed to deal with just one thing at a time. My beloved LaserJet 1200 printer, which has been an absolute workhorse for the past 24 years, decided this would be a good time to malfunction. Yesterday morning, it started making a horrible screeching noise and refused to pull in paper. I unplugged it and let it sit while I dealt with an overflowing queue of work that included a 25-minute stat report. (I hit a total of 103 audio minutes yesterday morning, well above the average of 65-70 minutes a day that I have been doing.)

Apparently, some part of my brain decided that because I know how to refurbish mechanical sewing machines, I must also be capable of tearing down and repairing intricate computer equipment. I found a YouTube video addressing the exact issue my printer was having, so after lunch, I got out the screwdriver and set to work.

I really should have watched the whole video before I started. I got to this point:

and hit a wall. I was so tapped out mentally that I couldn’t go any further. I was ready to admit defeat, but just then, the husband came home from work.

After taking a look at the mess on my desk and noting my obvious state of mental exhaustion, he said he would watch the video after dinner and see if he could finish the job I started. And he did. He found the motor, lubricated the motor bearing, and put that part back together. I reattached the required cables and closed up the case. He carried the printer back to my desk, and I plugged it in and held my breath.

It works!

The horrible screeching noise is no more and it prints beautifully, as always. Will we get another 24 years out of it? Maybe not, but I’ll use it until it can’t be fixed any longer.

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The only sewing I did this week was to sew some patches onto a backpack for Elysian’s little guy. His birthday is next week and she bought him this backpack in anticipation of all the hiking and camping they plan to do this summer. I was able to sew two of the patches down with the Necchi industrial. I whipstitched the other ones in place by hand.

I started reading this:

which I ordered in hard copy rather than digital format just because I thought it would be a good addition to the library. I am enjoying it so far. It is not a scholarly work, something the author notes up front. I find the explanations of spinning and weaving to be a bit simplistic—at a level for the intended audience—but the writer’s style is engaging. (If I want scholarly, I can always go back and read Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years.)

I will regain my equilibrium. After all, I have lots of experience with the universe throwing random wrenches into the works. I canceled today’s piano lesson. Perhaps a couple of hours of chain-piecing half rectangles with Vittorio will help calm my brain.

What a Pretty Machine

That Singer 9W I picked up last fall has been sitting on the floor of my office, staring at me. I had this nagging feeling that I should work on it, even though my plan was to leave it alone until I could send it off to have it restored properly. However, I’m starting to get the itch to work on some machines. Work was light yesterday morning—as I expected it to be because the clinic was closed on Monday—so when I had done my part to help clear out the queue, I logged off, picked up the machine, and headed for the kitchen table. If nothing else, I reasoned, at least I could get it cleaner for restoration than it was when I bought it.

I can take apart and reassemble a Singer 15 in my sleep simply because I have done so many of them. This machine, being an earlier model, was similar, but not identical. I had to pay attention when removing the shiny bits. So many tiny screws! The jewelry went into a bath of OxiClean, Dawn dish soap, and hot water. I had to change the water twice because it got so dirty.

I’ve cleaned the black-finish Singers with non-pumice Goop in the past. (DO NOT try that with the beige machines!—it will take the decals off.) That stuff is great for getting old grime and dried oil off machines. This one is old enough, though, that I chose to use the recommended method of wiping the finish down with sewing machine oil. I went through half a quart of SMO and lots of old rags. The finish was dry and soaked up a lot of the oil. The decals are worn, but after a few coats of oil, they came back to life.

I turned the machine over and slathered Goop on the works underneath to dissolve all that old caked-on oil. I’ve discovered that if I do that, leave the machine to sit for a while, then come back with an old toothbrush and some extra-fine steel wool, I can get the mechanicals on the underside nice and clean. I did the same for the needle bar and presser foot bar.

I still have to polish up the jewelry and the handwheel and put everything back in place, and she could probably use a few more coats of SMO, but I am pleased enough with how she looks that I have abandoned my plan to have her refinished.

Had the decals silvered, I would have gone ahead with refinishing. These decals, although worn, are still beautiful. She has some pin rash (from a piece of fabric wrapped around the top bar to hold pins, which scratches the finish), and it looks like someone tried to carve some initials into the base, but these are hard-won battle scars. I know what this machine must have looked like when it came out of the factory and I know how spectacular it could look after a refurb, but sometimes less is more.

The only piece missing is the bobbin case and a few bobbins. If I can locate one, I will pop this machine into an oak Singer treadle base and see if I can get her to sew. If not, she will still be a beautiful display piece.

And that itch has been scratched, for a few days, at least.

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We signed all the loan paperwork and will order the new hydraulic lift today, although it will be March or April before it arrives. I thought for sure the husband was going to take some time off to work on the new shop, but he is still out doing small concrete jobs when the weather cooperates. The latest big thing here in the valley is hops farms. (I’ve grown hops in my garden for 20+ years, so I know it will do well in our climate.) He has done concrete work for two of them. I look askance at these huge operations only because these tend to be boom-and-bust endeavors. When we first moved here, the big thing was mint. Lots of farmers invested in expensive distillation equipment to make mint oil to sell to toothpaste companies. In the fall, you could drive around the valley and see the huge “slugs” of leftover processed mint out in the fields. The smell permeated the air. Then Russian farmers got into the business, flooded the market with cheap oil, and the bottom fell out.

The next crop was dill. (That just made me crave pickles.) Same thing happened. Now it’s hops—using some of the same distilling equipment that came from those mint and dill operations. Perhaps these entrepreneurs can make it work. We certainly have enough breweries.

The husband told me yesterday that he could work with one of his general contractor friends as a framer on one of the hops farm projects, and another GC called him about a concrete slab. He has his pick of what he wants to do at the moment.

Things That Make a Church Pianist Happy

I became a church pianist with no training other than knowing how to play the piano. It is one of those jobs where the people who don’t know how to do it are convinced that they know how easy it is to do it. You play the piano, right? Surely you must therefore be able to sight-read, play by ear, transpose instantly, modulate as needed, read shape notes, and be familiar with every hymn ever written.

Not all of these are skills commonly taught to budding piano students. You know who trains their church pianists well (and early)? The Baptists. Catherine, the previous pianist at our church and my mentor, came from a Baptist background. And I once took an all-day church pianist workshop in Kalispell hosted by one of the Baptist churches—I learned more in one day from them about being a church pianist than I had learned anywhere else.

I am rather proud of the fact that not only am I a church pianist, I am a church pianist for two different congregations in two different denominations. That takes some skill.

I had never encountered shape note musical notation until I joined the Mennonite church. I grew up singing German chorales in a Lutheran church. All our notes were round. The Mennonites, however, embraced shape note singing and elevated it to a whole new level. What is shape note singing, you ask? From Wikipedia:

Shape notes are a  musical notation designed to facilitate congregational and community singing. The notation, introduced in late 18th century England, became a popular teaching device in American singing schools. Shapes were added to the noteheads in written music to help singers find pitches within major and minor scales without the use of more complex information found in key signatures on the staff.

Shape notes of various kinds have been used for over two centuries in a variety of music traditions, mostly sacred music but also secular, originating in New England, practiced primarily in the Southern United States for many years, and now experiencing a renaissance in other locations as well.

This is what a hymn looks like when written in shape notes:

Singers read one line at a time, and the shape of the note helps them to determine the pitch. Pianists have to read four lines simultaneously—in addition to key, meter, accidentals, and rhythm—and having to do that while looking at notes that vary in shape is absolutely maddening. Mennonites have only had instrumental music in churches for a few decades, so they didn’t have to consider what the pianist was reading.

Our church has a vast library of old hymnals. In the room at the back of the sanctuary, we have a bookshelf with Life Songs 2, Church and Sunday School Hymnal, and The Mennonite Hymnal (AKA the red hymnal). In our pews we have the current (blue) Hymnal and Worship Book as well as the hymnal supplements Sing the Journey (green) and Sing the Story (purple). Each of those last three books also has a separate accompaniment book containing piano accompaniments that weren’t included in the actual books themselves. Next fall, we will be getting the new Mennonite hymnal called Voices Together (also with an accompaniment book). The red hymnal from the 1960s was the last hymnal to use shape notes, although there is also a pianist version with round notes, whose location I guard very carefully lest it wander away.

Our worship planners have decided that—in anticipation of having so many hymnals available to us—we would try using a different hymnal every week. Rather than placing them in the pews, we would put a supply of that Sunday’s hymnal on a cart at the entrance to the sanctuary and invite people to pick one up on their way in. In theory, I like this idea if only from the standpoint that if we confine ourselves to singing out of one hymnal per week, perhaps I won’t be juggling five or six different books throughout the service.

For this past Sunday’s service, we planned to use the old Life Songs 2 book. That book dates from the late 1930s. Before the comforter-tying party on Saturday, I asked Elaine to help me with a couple of the songs we were planning to sing on Sunday. Elaine is a former pastor, native Mennonite, and grew up singing out of all those old books. She knows things no one else knows. She happened to mention that she thought there was a round note version of the Life Songs 2 book. In 20 years of belonging to this church, I had never seen it.

On Sunday morning, I got to church a few minutes early and went through all the books on the cart to see if perhaps one of them was the round note unicorn. No dice. I went to the room at the back of the sanctuary, got down on the floor, and pulled the rest of the Life Songs books off the bottom shelf of the bookshelf. Lo and behold, about two-thirds of the way through the stack, I found a round note version. I felt like Charlie must have felt when he pulled the golden ticket out of the chocolate bar.

The book, being nine decades old, is not in great shape. I am kicking around the idea of having it re-bound. Before I do that, though, I think I am going to make enlarged photocopies of each page, both to have as a backup volume and for the benefit of my eyes. But really, I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to have a round note version of that songbook. Now I am only missing a round note version of the Church and Sunday School Hymnal. I’ll have to ask Elaine if she knows if one exists.

MCC's Winter Warm-Up Event

Yesterday afternoon, our church joined many other churches around the US and Canada in holding a comforter-tying event to celebrate Mennonite Central Committee’s 100th anniversary. Some churches had theirs in the morning. We scheduled ours from 3-5 with dinner afterward.

Pat and I were a bit nervous when no one had yet shown up at 2:50 p.m., but then a flood of people came in—30 of us, total. About a third were friends and community members who had been invited by people from our church. I was thrilled that my friend Christi, two of her kids, and her mom came, and Christi brought three friends with her. Christi was with us in the deck collapse in June 2017 and was so severely injured that she spent all of that summer hospitalized in Seattle. She has fought long and hard to recover from that injury. I know it’s still a daily battle, but it was so nice to see her smiling face last night.

We set up several tables and spread the comforters out on them. As I had done much of the prep work in making the comforters, I let other people tie and took advantage of the opportunity to hold babies and take pictures.

Susan’s hands:

And one of my favorites:

This is Zach, working on a comforter next to his grandmother, Shirley. Zach and his wife came with their three kids. I let the two older girls have my camera for a bit and they took some interesting pictures, including this one of their mom:

These hard-working volunteers tied five comforters in two hours and then we all sat down to a meal of BBQ pork, salads, chips, and dessert. I think everyone had a good time. The comforters will be added to the other ones we’ve done and will travel to Portland with me in a few weeks to be delivered to MCC.

Shifting Bottlenecks

There was no transcription work in the queue at 5:30 a.m. yesterday—when I usually start working—nor was there work when I checked again at lunchtime. That happens occasionally, for a lot of different reasons. When it does, I accept the gift of a bonus day off and find other things to do. My piano student came for her lesson mid-morning. She is motivated and making good progress. I put the second Delectable Mountains border on the quilt and sewed on three of the four solid inner borders. I cut half the rectangles needed for the final two Delectable Mountains borders. And all day, the house was filled with the smell of a very large piece of pork cooking in the roaster. Our Mennonite Women group is providing the meal for the comforter-tying party. When our girls were younger, the church’s youth group hosted a fellowship meal after church one Sunday a month. Each family took a turn providing the food. I always made pulled pork. It’s easy to make in crowd-sized quantities, so I offered to make it for today’s gathering. Others are bringing salads. We’ll have ice cream for dessert (thinking of you, Margaret!).

I haven’t yet tried out the new cutter. I need a few more accessories. When I began researching which cutter to get, I found the lack of information a bit frustrating. It was hard to know what combination of trays, adapters (so I can use the dies I already own), and cutting plastic I needed. Also, the Accuquilt store on Amazon does not offer the full line of Accuquilt products. I ordered what I thought I needed—and what was available—from Amazon, but it turns out I got the largest adapter and need a larger tray to use it. The cutter only comes with the standard-size tray.

I went to the Accuquilt website yesterday intending to order the larger tray. While I was browsing, though, I got a popup screen announcing that all of the Studio dies were 50% off. That was too good a sale to pass up. Dies are not cheap. I picked out a couple of the dies on my wish list and got another popup screen announcing that I was close to free shipping and an extra $20 in rewards cash. I added one more item to get me over the top and placed my order.

At that point, I looked at my account and discovered I had $50 in rewards cash, so I went back and bought two more dies. When I used my rewards cash in combination with the sale price, the total for the second order came to $2.52.

I am excited about using the 5” square die:

I cut a lot of my larger fabric scraps into 5” squares to sew together to make comforter tops. Right now, I cut them by hand, and while I am adept at flying through scraps with my rotary cutter and ruler, being able to cut 80 five-inch squares—80 squares, ya’ll—in one pass is going to speed things up considerably. That’s almost half a comforter top right there.

[Just for comparison’s sake, I will note that the 5” die for the Go! cutter only cuts 12 squares in one pass. That’s why I never bought that die; it didn’t save me much time over cutting by hand.]

On those days when I am playing amateur systems analyst, I think long and hard about my workflow and where the bottlenecks are. The problem is that when I speed up one part of the process, the bottleneck shifts to a different location. I have visions of being surrounded by piles of 5” squares—like the poor spinster in Rumplestiltskin in a roomful of straw—attempting to sew them into comforter tops before dawn.

Vittorio is going to need another spa day soon. I’ve been working him like a rented mule on this commission quilt top. The only time he complains is when lint builds up underneath the needle plate. He starts to make a growling sound, so I stop, clean out the lint, replace the needle, add some oil, and he’s good for another long stretch.

The Studio 2 Cutter Arrived

I was in town most of yesterday. When I got home, I found a large box labelled “heavy” on the kitchen floor. I was glad the husband was home when the UPS truck showed up so he could bring it in for me. I managed to unbox the cutter and get it upstairs:

It is currently sitting on that 2’ x 4’ Costco folding table in the spare bedroom. I need to think about where I want it to live on a more permanent basis. (It does fold up for storage.) When I want to use the smaller Go! cutter, I take the steam press off the top of the dresser in DD#1’s old bedroom and put the cutter there. (That dresser holds part of my Kona collection.) That space is not big enough for the Studio cutter, however.

The husband and I each have plans for rearranging our respective tool collections—he asked me yesterday if I noticed that there was more room in the old garage—but not all of it can happen right now. Some of my plans are dependent on weather, some of them are dependent on moving out some old pieces of furniture that are no longer being used, and some of them are subject to a longer time horizon based on when our renters might move out. They are looking for a place to buy; we are happy to have them there as long as they want to stay, but when they move out, we probably won’t rent that property again. Good renters are hard to find; bad renters are a headache of epic proportions.

I didn’t have the energy to play with the new cutter last night. Thursdays are the husband’s fire training night. I typically put on my yoga pants and a comfy sweatshirt and curl up under a quilt to read. Perhaps I’ll have some time this afternoon.

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The third Thursday of the month is our “Sisters” lunch—it used to be referred to as the “Senior Sisters” lunch but we removed the word “senior” because I am the youngest one and I don’t yet qualify for a senior citizen discount, LOL. It is the same group that quilts on the first Thursday of each month. We had lunch at a Chinese restaurant in downtown Kalispell.

I also met with our banker. The husband and I are pretty proud of the fact that we were able to put up that new shop without taking out a loan. I hate debt. We made sure that the girls were able to graduate from college without any student loan debt, although they did their part by getting top grades in high school which earned them some hefty merit scholarships. Right now, the only loan we have is for the husband’s newer work truck, and that’s going to be paid off in a couple of months.

One of the big planned purchases for the new shop is a hydraulic lift. The husband works on all our vehicles, and even though he has a system for doing it safely in the old garage, having a lift will be a game changer. After much research and consideration, he decided on a more expensive lift with extra safety features for working on heavy equipment vehicles like his work trucks. We are at the low point in cash flow for the year—with an upcoming wedding this fall—so I suggested that we do a short-term equipment loan for the lift. The lift has to be paid for up front and will take 6-8 weeks from when the order is placed for the company in New York to build it and freight it out here.

Our banker is one of those old-fashioned guys—he calls each of his customers every couple of months just to check in and see if they need anything. He was more than willing to get the paperwork through, so the husband should be able to order the lift next week.

I also put the deposit on the venue for DD#1’s wedding, which will be in October. I’m glad to have that nailed down.

Susan let me piggyback on her Fedco order, so I have a Bob Gordon elderberry on the way and she got Seek No Further scion wood to graft an apple tree for me. I need to sit down and put together my Baker Creek and Victory Seeds order soon. For all that January feels like it is 90 days long, March really isn’t that far away.

A Quilt Center

At the end of the day Tuesday, I had this:

And at the end of the day yesterday, I had this (oh, those beautiful points!):

I promise you, it is not as wonky as it looks in the picture. Part of the is that angle of the photo and part of it is that this is adhering to a flannel sheet hanging on the wall. All parts were carefully measured during the assembly process.

Getting the center done is a milestone in this quilt top, although it is only the halfway point. I still have to add several borders (it is a queen sized quilt). The next step is to make and add a Delectable Mountain block border to the right and left sides. Those blocks are done. They were made as part of the process of making the ones in the center of the quilt, but they are not yet sewn together. Once those borders are sewn on, there will be a full border of the turquoise background fabric, a border of more Delectable Mountain blocks (yet to be made), a border of the focus fabric of the dogsleds, another border of Delectable Mountain blocks, and finally another solid border.

I expect that making the next two borders of Delectable Mountain blocks will go much faster both because I know how to make them and because they only involve two fabrics. I won’t have to be so careful about keeping everything sorted. Still, getting this done by the end of January may be a challenge. I may have to push it into the first two weeks of February. The woman for whom I am making this also sits on our denominational board. She lives in Spokane and she and her husband are riding over to Portland for a board meeting with me in a few weeks. I hope to give her the completed top by the time the board meeting rolls around. She gave me the kit back in September but the only timeline for finishing was the one I imposed on myself.

And I don’t have to quilt it. I just need to make the top.

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The BMW dealer in Spokane called yesterday to tell me the recall parts were in and they were ready to fix my car. I made arrangements to spend an extra day in Spokane on my way back from the board meeting and have them do it then. They need the car for eight hours, but they will give me a loaner to use while they have mine. I said to the husband that I thought it would be nice if they gave me an M5 or a 7-series and he laughed and said, “They will probably give you a Toyota.”

I will enjoy having some extra time to bum around Spokane, though. I’m ready for a road trip.

An Anvil and a Set of Steps

Kalispell has a store called the Tool Palace. It started out as a sort of a pawn shop but the words “pawn shop” have been crossed off their sign (literally, just crossed out) and now it is known only as the Tool Palace. The inventory comes from estate sales, storage container purchases, etc. The owners have the husband on speed dial. Our two orchard ladders came from there, along with a vast assortment of tools.

The husband informed me on Saturday morning that he was heading into town to go look at an anvil at the Tool Palace. “Look at,” is code for “I am going to buy,” so I expected him to come home with an anvil in the back of the truck. He did not. Apparently, the employee on duty did not have the authority to negotiate. I sometimes think the husband was born in an Indian bazaar because he loves nothing more than to wheel and deal. He was unhappy that he could not talk this guy into making a sale.

He went back yesterday when the owners were there and came home with an anvil:

You may wonder why he needs an anvil. You are not alone. All I can tell you is that the husband never does anything without a plan. There is a plan for this anvil. I will let you know when I find out what it is.

He spent most of the weekend building the steps up to the loft:

They are functional.

Despite an upgrade Saturday afternoon from a winter storm watch to winter storm warning, we got only 3” of snow and none of the wind that had been so direly predicted. If there were a weather pool, I would not be betting on the forecasters. I still don’t know how it’s possible to be so wrong so often.

Spokane got quite a bit of snow, as did Montana east of the mountains. The weather in Spokane is often, but not always, a good predictor of what we’re going to get a few hours later. There have been winters when they got slammed and we got nothing and vice versa. Our temperatures dropped—it was 11 degrees when I went into town yesterday—and it’s nice and brisk out there. I’ve lived in Montana long enough, apparently, that it has to drop well below zero for me to be uncomfortable being outside provided I am dressed properly.

This was me last February when the high was like -15 for a whole week:

That is my grandmother’s wool coat and it’s very warm. And my hair is thick enough that I never wear a hat.

Finding Joy in the Snow

The husband went out to do a preemptive round of plowing yesterday afternoon:

A few minutes after I took this picture, however, he came in to tell me he was going to town to get a replacement hose. One of the hydraulic lines had broken and was spewing hydraulic fluid everywhere. Thankfully, the hose broke during business hours on the day before a big storm.

He came home with a replacement and a spare, because two is one and one is none.

Our plow truck is the 1999 Dodge 3/4-ton pickup that I used to drive. It has served us well. I drove it for eight years, the girls drove it in high school (both my kids know how to drive a stick shift), and now it is living out the rest of its useful life as the neighborhood plow truck.

The winter storm watch that had been posted for this afternoon has been upgraded to a winter storm warning. Now they are predicting 7-9 inches for the valley and 1-2 feet for the mountains (that’s us). We’ll see. The warning runs from noon today until tomorrow morning.

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The Delectable Mountain blocks are coming along:

There are nine sets of rectangles that have to be sliced up and re-sewn into these blocks, and each set has a right and a left side. I did the first three sets yesterday and stopped. It is a tricky enough process that I need to stay alert and pay attention to what I am doing. After two sets, I could tell I was starting to go into auto-pilot mode and that is when stupid mistakes happen.

It occurred to me that if I were to do this block again—and I might, because it’s kind of fun—I would consider cutting the rectangles on the Accuquilt cutter. Each rectangle has to be cut into four 2-1/4” strips. (There is a quarter-inch of slop on either end of the rectangle.) I could lay the rectangles on the appropriate die and run them through the cutter. At the very least, I could cut one layer of three separate rectangles simultaneously. Even doing it that way would speed up the process. I’m not going to try that with this quilt because I have no room for experimentation or error, but it’s on the list of things to try with the new cutter.

A few weeks ago, while cleaning the fabric room, I ran across a box of 2-1/2” squares that I had cut (with the Accuquilt cutter!) a few years ago. When I was a freshman in high school, I took two semesters of art. Our art teacher’s name was Ms. Furey. She was tall and elegant and wore her dark hair in a bun on top of her head. I never saw her in slacks, only dresses and skirts. She knew how to coax creativity from even the most reluctant students. One of our projects that year was the legendary 88 Squares. It began with a penciled 11 x 8 grid of two-inch squares. Our assignment was to fill each square with a different design and then paint the squares with alternating complementary colors. We were allowed to mix those complementary colors with either white or black to get tints and shades.

I chose orange and blue, still one of my favorite color combinations. When I started quilting, that 88 Squares project popped back into my head and I wondered if I could do something similar in fabric. I cut a whole bunch of orange and turquoise scraps, put them in this box, and apparently forgot about them. I’m using them as leaders and enders for the Delectable Mountains quilt. I’ve accumulated quite a stack. Last night, I put some of them on the design wall to see what I think:

The jury is still out. I wish I had my original 88 Squares drawing to look at for comparison; some memories have faded after 40 years. I’m not sure this will become a whole quilt, but I might very well make a wall hanging out of it. We’ll see.

Ms. Furey retired from teaching, but she still lives in the town where I grew up. I actually ran into her there a few years ago. She was working at an antique store that was in the location of our old library (behind Papo’s Pizza, for you Avon natives). I thanked her for being my art teacher and let her know that a lot of what I learned about design from her is still with me all these years later.

I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes about snow:

If you choose not to find joy in the snow,
you will have less joy in your life but the same amount of snow.

A Little Help From My Friends

It is lovely to have friends who will help pull you out of a slump even when they don’t realize that is what they are doing. I was pretty wrung out by the time yesterday rolled around. Thankfully, work went smoothly and I got that out of the way. My friend Rebecca came for her piano lesson mid-morning, but just as she was pulling into the driveway, my phone rang. It was Cathy, calling to catch up. I promised to call her back as soon as Rebecca and I were done. Rebecca made great progress with her practicing last week (and that despite having a sick little one). I still feel like I don’t know what I am doing, but we’re using a couple of adult piano lesson books and I am following the lesson plans laid out in them.

I called Cathy back after lunch. We had a great conversation and caught up on cows, kids, and her job at a clinic in Kalispell (she’s a physician there). She’s got an insane work schedule at the moment but hoping to cut back to just three or four days a week. Yesterday was one of her rare days off. I was so glad she called.

The husband and I had some Amazon reward points to spend. After checking with him to see if he needed or wanted anything (he didn’t), I spent them on one of these:

I have the smaller Accuquilt Go! cutter, but I use it frequently enough that I’ve been kicking around the idea of upgrading, either to the electric version or the Studio 2 version. I finally decided on the Studio 2. The electric one would have been nice, but this model allows me to use all the dies I currently have (with an adapter) as well as the dies made specifically for this cutter. (Accuquilt says this cutter will accommodate all 600 of the dies available.) This will allow me to churn through fabric much faster. And it was on sale.

And then the mail came, with a giant box from DD#1’s future mother-in-law who is an accomplished baker. It was full of cookies, each package individually wrapped. The husband and I had great fun unwrapping each package to see what kind of cookies were inside. I am a lousy baker, so I appreciate it when people shower us (but mostly the husband, whose metabolism can handle the extra calories, LOL) with homemade baked goods.

After a good night’s sleep in which Rusty did not bark or whine once (he has been waking us up several times a night recently), I woke up feeling much refreshed and ready to tackle today. It’s snowing heavily and has been since last night. We are under more watches and advisories through Monday, but given the recent track record for forecasts, I’m not going to speculate on how much snow we will get until it’s all over. I filled the woodbox yesterday. We’ll be all snug and battened down for the next couple of days.

This Was a Long Week

I am still deep in the throes of wedding stuff, but I think once we get past this initial set of decisions and arrangements, most of my work will be done. The kids know what they want. We are just doing our best to make it happen for them.

[Please do not ask me for details. If you have not been given details yet, it’s not because of some big conspiracy to keep you in the dark. You don’t yet know because we don’t yet know. Some things are still up in the air. It’s that simple. And it’s not my wedding, so I plan to be careful about how much I share here on the blog.]

It’s also been a week of finding some equilibrium with the doctors. I did have one day where I said to the husband that I am having second thoughts about working again. I am not unhappy about the change in the schedule. Transcribing fits into the early morning hours nicely. Rather, I am still struggling with the severe decline in the quality of reporting that comes with allowing people not trained in reporting to have access to a patient’s electronic medical record. And I am not the only one. I was doing a batch of reports yesterday for one doctor who made his feelings very clear. The numbered list of diagnoses for one patient had been transcribed all in lower case, which makes me believe it was done by someone other than a trained transcriptionist. He requested—with some associated editorial comments—that everything be capitalized and punctuated properly, so I had to go back and fix all of it. (Not work that I get paid for doing, by the way, as my compensation is calculated on the basis of audio minutes.) His anger was completely justified. A patient’s medical record is critical to the success of treatment, so why would you want it to look like it was written by a fourth-grader? The official transcription style guide that I was trained to use is more than an inch thick, but it’s basically useless now.

I could give you my sermon about how the government completely screwed up health care (and education, and a thousand other things), but I have come to accept that most people can’t think past “More legislation must be the answer!” to realize that government interference caused the problems in the first place. Some days it’s not worth the effort to point out that layering more complexity onto an already complex system never made that system simpler and more efficient. (The physician author of this article expresses a similar sentiment, with an associated graph that ought to make you choke on your coffee.)

I do hear reports every now and then of doctors who are bucking the requirements and hiring their own transcriptionists or switching to concierge-style medicine where they don’t have to be told how to practice by a bunch of lawmakers and insurance companies. Truly, I hope that trend continues. There may well come a time, though, where I cannot bear the mediocrity in the current system any longer.

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I haven’t done much sewing this week. I did slice up some half-square rectangles for the commission quilt yesterday to test out the process of making the Delectable Mountain blocks. They came out beautifully.

I also stopped at the quilting store and bought a new die for my Accuquilt cutter:

This is the die for the Cleopatra’s fan quilt block. It has a very art deco vibe. A few years ago I bought a collection of fabric—also in the art deco style—and a set of plastic templates for making the block. I hadn’t yet started on the quilt because the thought of having to trace and cut all those template pieces by hand was too daunting. And then a few months ago, Accuquilt came out with this die. This should make cutting the fabric for the quilt go MUCH faster. (Sewing them together will be another story. This is not a block for the faint of heart.)

I also ordered the die for the larger Drunkard’s Path block (the store didn’t have it in stock). The one I have makes a 4” block, so I ordered the one that makes the 7” block.

I’ve got to take some time this weekend and sit down and figure out a production schedule. Most of the “loose ends” projects have been dealt with and it’s time to start working on new items. I suspect zipper pouches will be next on the list.

My Word for 2020

The members of one of the Facebook/MeWe groups I belong to have been sharing their “word” for 2020—ideas like “grow,” “connection,” “focus,” and other positive, motivational concepts. I have never been able to find a word of the year for myself. Heck, I can’t even find a work to describe last year and it’s over.

This year, though, I have decided that my word is going to be “juggle.” That one popped into my head after a day where I started out with a few hours of transcription work, moved on to paperwork and billing for the construction company, did some sewing, and throughout all of this, was on and off the phone with various people attempting to nail down a venue for DD#1’s wedding reception.

The choice of the word “juggle” is not meant to be bad or good, just descriptive. I have a lot of balls in the air right now. My planner is starting to resemble a coloring book.

I’ve done five comforters for the party on the 18th and I am going to stop there. I need to make more headway on the commission quilt this week. My ironing board was in desperate need of a new cover, so I picked up two yards of gray cotton twill in town on Monday. Twill is almost always 58” wide, but that’s exactly how long my ironing board is, so I need a slightly longer length. (The cover that this one is replacing was made from some twill from my stash that I pieced together—that works, but it’s not ideal.) Two yards gives me enough fabric for two covers of sufficient length. I am covering my vintage Mary Proctor ironing board—a rectangle—and even though covers are still available for it, they are expensive. I prefer the ones I make myself.

I took the nylon cord out of the old cover, sewed a couple of leftover lengths of red bias binding together, and edged the gray twill with the red bias binding with the nylon cord tucked inside. It took less than 30 minutes and I am ready to press yards of fabric:

I switched to gray twill from beige twill and I am not sure how I feel about it. Oh well. It’s done, and the next cover will be gray, as well, so I’d better learn to live with it.

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What do these items have in common with each other?

And this?

Both are pieces of clothing belonging to people in my family. DD#2 sent me her jeans with a plea to fix them as they are her favorites. I am going to come up with some kind of fix, although I told her it was not going to be invisible.

The other pants belong to the husband (shocking, I know.) Every time he got up out of his recliner the other night, his flashlight fell on the floor. He finally looked at his pants and realized that the flashlight had worn a hole in the pocket.

It is obvious that these two share DNA.

I’m trying to get the husband to alert me when his clothing is at the 50% failure point because it is much easier to repair than when it is at the 100% failure point. (One pair of pants is missing that flashlight pocket entirely.) I am not a miracle worker, and I’ve come to accept the fact that I just need to buy him four or five new pairs of work pants twice a year.

Speaking of repairs, this came in the mail yesterday:

I am hoping to have a functional dryer again soon.

A Loft

The loft framing is done:

That vertical steel beam (one of two) will support the eventual overhead crane.

The floor of the loft is set and stained:

The husband said he chose that color so it wouldn’t show dirt.

Stuff is gradually moving from the old garage to the new shop. When I got home from church on Sunday, I discovered that the big metal welding table that was against the wall was gone, which makes getting in and out of my car much easier.

I expect that the bolt bins will be moved soon, as they are going to live upstairs in the loft. The loft will get some railings—I asked—but probably not until everything that will be stored there has been put in place.

Yes, this is a pretty swanky shop, all things considered, but the husband made do for over two decades with a shop that was barely adequate. I love seeing the way he has designed everything so efficiently. He will have beefy electrical service, air hoses where he needs them, and plenty of good lighting. Eventually, there will be a lift and a crane for working on vehicles and heavy equipment. And as we all know by now, anything worth doing is worth doing in excess.

Plus, I get to turn the old garage into a sewing machine repair workshop and I’m not going to complain about that.

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My friend Anna and I drove up to Whitefish Sunday afternoon to pick up some chickens. The father of a friend of hers died unexpectedly last week. The family is overwhelmed and didn’t know what to do with the chickens, so she asked if we could take them. There were two Rhode Island Reds and a Barred Rock, all of which were chicks last spring. I brought them home and the husband introduced them to the rest of the chickens. They have blended right in, literally. I couldn’t find them now if I tried.

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The host of a podcast I follow (A Farmish Kind of Life) posed an interesting question on social media yesterday. She wondered if an episode on how to deal with the less-busy months of the year on a homestead would be of interest to anyone. She pointed out that for a lot of homesteaders, the spring-summer-fall months are so busy that there is no time for the brain to go places it shouldn’t. Without that level of activity in the winter, some people are more prone to mental health issues.

It’s a valid point. So much of homesteading is a “feast or famine” proposition—either you’re so busy you meet yourself coming and going or you can’t do anything beyond peruse seed catalogs and imagine what the garden will look like without all of that snow.

I’ve been lucky enough not to suffer from that particular malady. I enjoy the winter months as a respite from the frenzied activity. During the summer months, I might see the husband for 15 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes in the evening. I rather enjoy having him around when he can’t pour concrete. But we are unique in that arrangement. Many of my friends struggle with the gloominess of January and February, and February in Montana typically sees a spike in suicides, unfortunately.

So I hope she goes ahead and does an episode focusing on that topic. I think we could all benefit from ideas on how to make ourselves more mentally resilient.

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Our dryer—which runs on propane—has been having issues. A few weeks ago, the timer stopped working. The dryer will dry clothes with heat intermittently. The rest of the time, it’s cold air only. We bought that dryer 24 years ago when we built the house, which makes it old enough that Amana is no longer manufacturing parts for it. If the county hadn’t outlawed dumpster diving at the garbage sites, the husband would go there to look for a replacement timer. He found one on eBay and we are waiting for it to arrive.

It would be lovely if we could get another 24 years of use out of that dryer, but I’d settle for four or five.

Not Blown Away This Time

I spent yesterday waiting for a “high wind” event that never materialized. I heard that it was gusty in town, but all we had were a couple of stiff breezes. The reason may have been the wind direction. The winds yesterday were out of the southwest. When we get bad windstorms, it’s almost always due to a back door cold front from Canada accompanied by winds coming off the mountains from the east.

But I am grateful that our trees are still standing.

I finished making the half-rectangle blocks for the center of the commission quilt.

That was a milestone, and I reached it without having to rip out any seams. The next step is to slice the rectangles into 2-1/2” strips, turn them around, and sew them back together to make the “mountain” portion of the Delectable Mountains block. The pattern suggests doing one color combination at a time to minimize the possibility of mistakes. I shall follow that advice.

I am still planning for an end-of-January finish for this quilt top because it is residing on the table where I do my tax prep and paper sorting and all of that has to be completed by the first week of February. The construction company is set up as a partnership between the two of us and the partnership tax return is due March 15. I want to make sure the accountant has all the information in plenty of time. The only year we ever had to file an extension was the year I had the flu and spent a week in the ICU. I’d like to keep it that way.

I replaced a zipper in a knit hoodie that belongs to my friend, Anna. I have a zipper repair kit and first tried to repair the zipper, but that didn’t work. Replacing the zipper didn’t take terribly long. Zippers are the one thing my Janome machine doesn’t do well, so I popped a ball point needle into Vittorio and he handled the job perfectly.

I sewed the remaining pairs of red print and blue Kona squares together for Yet Another Comforter Top:

Assembling the top will be an hour’s worth of sewing some evening. The colors in this quilt are closer in value than I anticipated—especially the darker red squares—but beyond rearranging some of the units, I am leaving it as is. These comforter tops have made a nice dent in the 5” square supply. Some of those fabrics are several years old and I am tired of looking at them. They need to move on.

I made the fourth envelope comforter top to be tied at our comforter-tying party on January 18. Four tops may be plenty. I have fabric for three more, but those can always be done later in the year. Or I might go ahead and get them assembled while I have the Janome set up to do them.

I trimmed the comforter top we tied on Thursday and pulled out some Kona for making binding. If I had had binding made up, I would have attached it and worked on sewing it down while watching the Patriots lose (is anyone upset about that?). Instead, I worked on the embroidered needle case kit:

I’m enjoying the embroidery, but I find myself getting analysis paralysis when choosing colors. I have a large supply of embroidery threads thanks to my mother’s bequest and the ones I have found at thrift stores. Sometimes I think that is not a good thing as it gives me too many options. I really appreciate that the instructions in this kit refer to Sue Spargo’s book Creative Stitching and specify which stitches (with page numbers!) should be worked where. That saves me from having to pick thread colors and stitch patterns. I like to design, yes, but sometimes I prefer to have a pattern tell me what to do and how to do it.

[I went off script at the very beginning by picking different colors for my birds than the ones the designer of the pattern chose, so some of this is my own fault.]

I need to finish this needle case so I have some place to keep my hand quilting needle(s). I tried half a dozen needles of various lengths and thicknesses on Thursday before I found one I really liked. (You would be surprised at how much of a difference it makes. I am also picky about my thimbles.) Hopefully, my collection of vintage needles contains some that are similar.

I am a Piano Teacher

This is new for 2020. I’ve never taught piano before, mostly because I don’t have any training as a piano teacher. I knew better than to try to teach my own children. DD#1 took lessons from other people and DD#2 wasn’t interested.

I started taking piano lessons when I was 8 years old. My first teacher was a lady who lived down the street from us. I took lessons from her for about a year, and then my parents enrolled me at the Koch School of Music in Cleveland, where I took lessons until I was a junior in high school. Interestingly enough, I never played in church. Our church had an organ, for one thing. (The two instruments are not interchangeable, by the way—pianists aren’t automatically organists.) We also had a young man about a year older than me who was unbelievably talented. He studied at Oberlin and Peabody and is currently on the staff of an orchestra in a major US city. On the rare occasions we needed a pianist, he was the obvious choice.

I did play piano in jazz band in high school when I wasn’t playing trombone. And although I played the trombone all the way through college, I stopped playing piano for almost 15 years. The Lutheran church I first attended when we moved to Kalispell had a very talented pianist. (That’s a different Lutheran church than the one I play for now.) It wasn’t until I joined the Mennonite church—and bought my own piano—that I started playing regularly again. If I could clone myself, I could be a church pianist at half a dozen churches here. It seems to me that fewer kids take piano lessons nowadays and church pianists (and organists) are a dying breed. I am hoping that someone shows up that I can train to take my place, because I don’t want to do this forever.

The husband commented a few weeks ago—as I was heading out the door to the Lutheran church—that if someone had told him when he was 20 that he was going to be married to a church pianist, he wouldn’t have believed them. Well hey, at 20, I didn’t think I was going to be a church pianist, so there you go.

Anyway . . . our friend Rebecca, who lives around the corner, asked me last spring if I would consider giving her lessons. We had hoped to start back in the fall, but couldn’t make it work. She came for her first lesson yesterday. I am grateful to be starting out with an adult, and one who knows some of the basics of reading music (she sang in choir in college). I think I would have a much harder time teaching a child starting at square one. She also understands that much of the work is going to be her responsibility; I can teach her good practice habits and a fair bit of music theory, but she’s going to have to do the hard work of building muscle memory.

We’ll see how this works out. With all the littles in the neighborhood, I may end up doing more teaching in the next couple of years than I anticipated.

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It’s time to start looking at seed catalogs. My partner-in-crime, Susan, is getting ready to put in a Fedco order and asked me if I wanted to add anything. I need to replace some fruit trees in our orchard and I want some old heirloom varieties. Black Oxford is at the top of the list:

Isn’t that a pretty apple? Susan wonders if it will ripen here, but it is a Maine variety so I am being optimistic. Susan’s son-in-law is from Montana, and his father is also interested in apple trees. He comes to visit every spring so he and Susan can graft some. Susan said that he planted a Black Oxford at his cabin in Kellogg, Idaho. I think that if it can survive there, it can survive here, too. I’ll have to ask him how it’s doing.

I also want a Seek-No-Further for the simple reason that it is mentioned in my favorite series of books by Sara Donati (Into the Wilderness is the first book in that series). Fedco doesn’t have Seek-No-Further trees, but they are selling the scion wood, so Susan said she would graft me one. She’s also going to graft me a Duchess of Oldenburg, which is the tree in her orchard that provides me with my annual supply of pie apples. Have I mentioned how much I appreciate having a friend with a degree in botany who has these specialized skills?

The Cosmic Crisp apple that was released at the beginning of December with much fanfare is available at our grocery store. Cosmic Crisp is a variety that was developed in Washington state from a cross between a Honeycrisp and an Enterprise. I haven’t bought any yet because they are pretty pricey. I’m also one of the few people on the planet who doesn’t think Honeycrisps live up to the hype, although they do keep well.

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.