A Hint of Spring

This truly has been the mildest winter I can remember in the 26 years that we have lived in Montana. We may have had one or two nights below zero, but not many. And while the snowpack in the mountains is at or above normal, what is down here in the valleys is anything but. Hopefully we will have a rainy May and June or we may dry out and be in trouble this summer.

Yesterday was bright and sunny. I took some cardboard out to the greenhouse for storage until planting time. Some sections of the garden have an awful weed problem. Other sections—most notably, where we have put down plastic—don’t. I would like to try cardboard this year to keep the weeds down. It’s easy to come by and it degrades. I could have spent a few hours basking in the warmth of the greenhouse. I think it must have been in the 70s inside.

And this is the garden—part of it, anyway. This is a fraction of the snow that is usually out there this time of year:

The raspberry canes are to the left and the piggy pasture is to the right. I am looking forward to having pigs out there again this year.

Some of the podcasts I’ve been listening to this week have really stretched my thinking. Amy Dingmann, host of the A Farmish Kind of Life podcast, did an episode entitled Winter Is Hard: Mental Health on the Homestead. To be honest, this is not a problem I have. I like winter and I welcome it as a respite from the endless busy-ness of the spring, summer, and fall. But I recognize that winter can be difficult (the suicide rate spikes in February in Montana), and I applaud her for having the courage to speak up about her struggles. Even when someone is committed to a particular lifestyle, like homesteading, there will be challenges. I love living where we do and don’t mind the relative isolation, but I still need to take a road trip every so often or my head implodes (in contrast to the husband, who went for a stretch of about 10 years without ever leaving the county). There are no “one size fits all” solutions—we all have to figure out what works for each of us.

I also listened to a Living Free in Tennessee podcast about tiny house living. Again, not something I want to rush out and try, but it was fascinating (and educational) to hear why someone might choose that lifestyle. Nicole, the podcast host, is such a good interviewer. She could interview a stuffed animal and make it interesting.

My order from Victory Seeds arrived yesterday:

This company is in Molalla, Oregon, and they are my go-to source for seeds. Everything I get from them does well. I do have to supplement with some seeds from Baker Creek because Victory doesn’t carry everything I want to grow, but the bulk of my supply comes from Victory. This year, I added some flowers and herbs to the seed order. I want to interplant the veggies with things like borage and calendula for the pollinators. And I am going to try starting cowpeas in the greenhouse this year. I am determined to get a good crop for Cathy, who grew up in the south and misses them.

I had Elysian’s little guy over here last night. She is taking a land management class once a week and I told her he was welcome to come hang out with me. The husband left for fire training, I built a fire in the fireplace, and he chose videos to watch on YouTube. (The little boys don’t get a lot of screen time—which is great—so watching TV here is something of a treat.) By the time she got back a couple of hours later, he was asleep on the carpet and I was crashed on the couch under a quilt. For some reason, everyone falls asleep when they come to Auntie Janet’s house, including Auntie Janet.

I got one pieced section (of four) of the last border for the commission quilt made yesterday afternoon. The goal is another one this afternoon, the last two tomorrow, and then I can cross that project off the list. I am going to cut out and make a few more knit tops and I really need a new bag for this spring. AL Frances Textiles, where I get my waxed canvas, has been adding to their inventory recently. I think I am going to do an upsized version of the Metro Hipster (but without the recessed zipper top) because I really like the one I made last year.

Fussy Cutting is Not my Jam

I do this thing—and I know I do it, which doesn’t make it any less likely to happen—where I grossly underestimate how long it will take me to make something. I can read through a quilt pattern and assemble it in my head at the same time. My brain therefore estimates that the amount of time it will take to actually make the quilt is equal to the amount of time it took me to read the pattern and assemble it in my head.

I seem to be the only transcriptionist working this week, which is fine, but it meant that I did about twice as much work yesterday as I normally do. The only other task I had on the schedule was putting the next border onto the commission quilt. I thought that would take an hour. It took three.

This entire quilt design is built around a batik fabric featuring dogsleds in a line:

That’s appropriate given that this kit was purchased at a quilt store in Alaska. But parts of the pattern—including the border I was working on—indicate for the dogsled fabric to be “fussy cut,” where only a specific portion of the fabric is used. I don’t like fussy cutting, as a rule. It wastes a tremendous amount of fabric.

The pattern instructions called for 5-1/2” wide strips of the dogsled fabric to be cut so that a single line of dogsleds was centered in the strip. The dogsleds run from selvedge to selvedge across the width of the fabric. HOWEVER, the vertical distance between one motif and the next was approximately 4” or so. There was no way to cut a strip in such a way that it wasn’t chopping off part of the motif above or below it (or both). The kit included extra fabric to account for this issue. The most obvious solution would have been to cut a 5-1/2” strip out of every other motif. I needed eight 5-1/2” strips.

There were 14 dogsled motifs on the piece of fabric included in the kit.

Sigh.

To complicate matters even further, the dogsled motif doesn’t run in a straight line across the width of the fabric. No, that would be too easy. The motif weaves back and forth a bit, which makes placing it in the center of the strip even trickier.

I managed to get eight strips cut from the fabric I had. I even managed to get the motifs mostly centered. Each border, though, had to be pieced from two of the strips placed end to end. I drove myself batty for half an hour trying to butt the edges of the strips together in such a way that there wasn’t a jarring disconnect between the motifs over the seams.

That border is done. I had a splitting headache when I was done, but now I can move on to the next border. I related all of this to the husband at dinner and I said that were I not such a perfectionist, this would have taken the one hour of time I had allotted originally.

I’m not sorry I agreed to do this—I have learned several new skills and also confirmed that I don’t like either batiks or fussy cutting—but I am ready for this quilt top to be done. It is also getting to the size where I have to wrangle it through the machine to attach each border.

I need to make something small next.

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Seed orders have been placed and should be arriving soon. I asked the husband to get me a pallet of bags of seed starting soil the next time he is at the hardware or farm store. We won’t be starting seeds for another month yet, but I’ll need to get out to the greenhouse and organize some things. Our local weatherman noted last night that Spokane and the Idaho panhandle are supposed to get hammered with a huge winter storm this weekend. Some of that—we won’t know how much until it happens—may bleed over into Kalispell. This has been an extraordinarily mild winter so far. We’re due for a few feet of snow.

Don't Be a Luddite

My desire to Fix Everything And Keep It Running In Perpetuity has run straight up against the reality that Sometimes Things Really Do Become Obsolete. As an illustration, we have several case studies:

Case study #1—I gave the husband my old Mac tower when I bought my iMac a year ago. That Mac tower is still a fine, robust machine and more than enough for what he needs. It was old enough (circa 2009) that it didn’t have built-in WiFi (I had it hooked up to the router via an Ethernet cable.) My computer guru, Greg, installed a WiFi card in it. Lately, though, the computer has been dropping the WiFi connection. I didn’t think it was the card, but the husband was annoyed because in order to reconnect to the network, he had to go through a series of keystrokes that took a few minutes. The husband will spend hours patiently hand-finishing a concrete slab to perfection, but he has no tolerance for technology that doesn’t work.

Our router is an Airport base station of the same vintage as that Mac tower. I thought it was probably time to upgrade it, but Apple no longer makes Airport base stations. Instead, they recommend the Netgear Orbi, which is a router/satellite combination that creates a WiFi “mesh” around your house.

I asked myself, “Where in Kalispell do I have the best odds for finding an Orbi in stock so I don’t have to drive to five different stores?” I went to Best Buy (or Best Try, as the husband refers to them). They had the Orbi, but only in the router/one satellite configuration. I was hoping to find the two satellite configuration. I bought it anyway, thinking it was my best chance at finding what I needed.

And then I went to Costco. Lo and behold—they had the Orbi router/two satellite configuration for $30 less than what I had paid at Best Buy. I went back to Best Buy and explained the situation. As I wasn’t in a huge hurry, I was willing to wait for them to order the bigger system if they would match Costco’s price.

“We’ll just refund your money and you can go back to Costco and buy it there,” the woman at the customer service counter told me. “That’s easier.”

I wondered how Best Buy corporate would feel about that advice, but oh well. I went back to Costco and bought it there.

The network is far more robust now, and as far as I know—because the IT department has not received any complaints—the husband’s computer is staying connected to the network. I also cancelled YouTube TV after the trial because we weren’t watching it. Instead, I signed us up for YouTube Premium. He’s very happy not to have to watch ads, and each of us has a customized YouTube feed.

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Case study #2—The husband very helpfully took apart my 24 year-old LaserJet 1200 printer a few weeks ago and oiled the squeaky bearing. Unfortunately, the bearing has started to squeak again. I think it may be worn out past fixing.

I also have a Xerox Phaser 8560 bought when I was still printing hard copies of my knitting patterns for stores. It works well, but the “crayon” ink it requires is getting harder to find and more expensive and the printer wastes a great deal of it trying to keep the print heads clean. If I leave it turned on, it will spit out a test page of paper completely covered in four colors of ink once a day. You can imagine how long the ink lasts at that rate. I’ve only been using the printer as I need it.

I did the math. For one year’s cost of ink for that printer, I literally could buy four new B&W laser printers.

In addition, we have a fax machine (another HP product that has to be about 20 years old) for which I can no longer get ink cartridges. (Yes, we still use our fax machine quite a bit.) I now have three large paperweights on my desk—a B&W laser printer, a color laser printer, and a fax machine—none of which is reliably functional. While I am loathe to add to the landfill problem, I can no longer justify keeping these machines around if they don’t work or the cost of ownership is prohibitive. (We must have electronics recycling somewhere in town.)

I ordered a Brother B&W all-in-one from Costco yesterday and got the shipping notification this morning. We bought a similar machine for our church a few months ago and it is working well. If I need to print in color, I can hook up a one of the color inkjet printers that the girls left here. I will be glad of the extra desk space, too, now that one machine is replacing three.

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Case study #3—The husband also replaced the timer on the 24 year-old Amana dryer. Although the timer works now, the dryer doesn’t provide heat on the regular setting. I have to dry clothes on the “delicate” setting, and as you can imagine, it takes longer. I will be shopping for a new dryer in the next couple of months.

Am I happy about the outlay of cash for new stuff? Not really. I try to make myself feel better by amortizing the cost over time, although I know that the replacement items are unlikely to last as long as their predecessors did.

I noted to the husband that the BMW dealer in Spokane is now pushing a program to help owners take care of their “vintage” —2012 and older—BMWs. And the service guy told me not to get rid of my diesel any sooner than I absolutely have to. It makes me wonder if people really would prefer less complicated vehicles. At what point have we gone past the point of diminishing returns when it comes to technology?

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I did the last section of pieced border on the commission quilt yesterday afternoon. (Thank heaven for low-tech hobbies.) I’ll put the next border on today. It’s comprised of 5-1/2” wide strips of fabric so it shouldn’t take long. And if I can stick to the schedule, I’ll get the final border made and attached on Saturday. Yay.

I”m still plugging along on the embroidered needle case project. I have almost one and a half birds (of three) done:

I really do need some kind of pouch to hold my embroidery supplies when I am traveling. I’ve got several patterns and just need to make the time to put one together.

What Makes It Broken Dishes?

I was called for jury duty this week. I am not sure if I will have to go; I need to call the night before to find out if the case has been settled. I also need to find out if it is okay for me to take knitting with me to work on while I (presumably) have to wait. I have been put in the pool before and never called in, so this will be a new experience for me if it turns out I become a juror.

I also need to give you an update on our family situation. It was never my intent to leave you all hanging, but we needed to let things ride for a couple of weeks until we had a handle on the details. My mother-in-law was diagnosed—completely unexpectedly after what we all thought was a routine operation—with cancer. It has taken several weeks to complete testing, meet with the oncologist, and make a plan for moving forward. We gratefully accept all positive thoughts and prayers as she begins her treatment.

The new year has gone sideways for several people we know. The husband reminds me that this is all part of life, but I find it terribly unfair that good people have to suffer while people out there who represent the worst of humanity somehow seem to get away with it.

Speaking of that . . . someone has been parking out in front of our house in the early morning. This started just after Christmas—I noticed one morning when I came downstairs that a car had stopped on the road near the south end of our property and was sitting there with its lights on. As soon as I went into my office and flipped the lights on, it slowly drove north past our house. The same thing has happened several other times since then. I can’t come up with a pattern other than it happens randomly and it’s always between 4:15 and 5:00 a.m. when I come downstairs. We know the person who delivers the paper out here. He drives in the other direction and says he hasn’t seen anything odd. Our house is back far enough from the road that I can’t see the make or model of the vehicle. We have alerted the neighbors about this. Thankfully, several of us are home during the day to keep an eye on what’s going on. The rate of theft in the Flathead Valley has escalated dramatically in the past couple of years, especially in the outlying areas where thieves depend on homes being vacant during the day.

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I have quilt blocks on the brain at the moment. This is not what I want to be working on—I’d like to work on pattern drafting—but when the brain is being a cranky toddler, sometimes it’s best not to argue. My current obsession is with the Broken Dishes quilt block. Please tell me if I am being pedantic about this. I get really annoyed when people call things by names that don’t apply. A Google search for “broken dishes quilt” or “broken dishes quilt block” brings up a whole bunch of images for quilts, not all of whose units (in my humble opinion) fit the definition of “broken dishes” block.

This is a line drawing of a broken dishes block:

It is made up of half-square triangles. If you imagine it made in two starkly contrasting fabrics—one dark and one light—it’s possible to see how the darker fabric rotates its position as you move from left to right and top to bottom around the block.

Depending on how you set those blocks within a quilt, you can get some really interesting effects. The Grandma’s Broken Dishes pattern by Diane Tomlinson is a great example:

I think this would be a terrific quilt for showcasing my vast supply of Kona.

[I am trying very hard to provide proper attribution and links to these graphics I am borrowing, but some of them, like this one, were victims of the Great Craftsy Debacle and not all of the links work.]

Now image the block using three different fabrics—two dark and one light. The dark triangles in the middle of the square are done in one dark fabric and the dark triangles at the upper right and bottom left positions are done in another dark fabric. The owner of this site wants written requests for permission to use her photos and graphics, so I am just going to give you the link and let you go look at her Broken Dishes block as an example.

[My feeling is that if someone wants to use the photos from my blog and provides proper attribution and links to drive traffic back here, they are welcome to do so. That’s how my blog has gotten many new readers over the years. I realize that not everyone shares that philosophy, however.]

The reason that quilter’s block works with two different dark fabrics is because the two dark fabrics are of similar value. It is still possible to pick out the Broken Dishes unit within the overall design.

What annoys me, though, are the designs labelled “Broken Dishes Something Or Another” which are really just a mish-mash of half-square triangles laid out any old way. In other words, all Broken Dishes blocks are made up of half-square triangles but not all half-square triangle blocks are Broken Dishes blocks.

Believe me, I know that quilt block names can be very fluid. The same block may have several different names just because it comes from different parts of the country. Names and conventions evolve over decades of use. This one seems pretty straightforward to me, though, and I’d like to see a bit more discipline in using the correct terminology.

Feel free to weigh in with your opinion.

Delectable Borders

I cleaned and organized my sewing area before I left on my travels. That’s a habit I need to maintain. Being able to walk in and either pick up where I left off on something or start something new without getting distracted is huge.

One of my fabric purchases last week was a fat quarter bundle of some fabric I hadn’t seen before. It is the Wild Spirit collection from Daphne Brissonet for Camelot Fabrics. The Quilting Bee had made up only one fat quarter bundle for sale, but bolts of the yardage were on the shelf. Unfortunately, this line only has half a dozen fabrics in it. That’s not really enough variety for the kind of quilts I like to make. I bought the fat quarter bundle anyway and decided I would supplement from my stash when I got home (reason #351 for having a large fabric stash), so yesterday morning, I pulled a half dozen coordinating prints and started cutting. I am making another Framed quilt. So far, I have four blocks done and I love the way it looks.

And I spent a couple of hours working on that commission quilt top. The center is done, as are the first two borders. Three borders remain, two of which are pieced from Delectable Mountains blocks. I made all the half-rectangle triangles—88 of them—before I left.

Piecing this border was slow going even though I’ve made these blocks before. I have no room for error (read: no extra fabric to fix mistakes), so I set up a system. I cut one rectangle into four strips, turned them around into the proper arrangement, and took those strips to the sewing machine. I sewed one pair of strips together followed by the second pair. Then I got up, went back to the cutting table, and cut a second rectangle. I took those four strips back to the machine, sewed the first pair together, clipped the first two pairs from the chain and sewed them together to make a completed block, then sewed the second pair of the second rectangle together. Lather, rinse, repeat. It’s not very efficient because I have to keep getting up and down, but that’s not a bad thing. I needed five of each block orientation, and once all 10 blocks were done, I sewed them together in pairs to make the border.

Here is where it gets tricky. The temptation is great to sew the border to the edge of the quilt and whack off any excess length to even up the two pieces. If you do that repeatedly over several borders, though, you may very well end up with 1) wavy edges; 2) an out-of-square quilt top; or 3) both. The correct method is to measure through the center of the quilt top and use that measurement for the length of the borders. The pattern accounts for this by noting that some fudging of the pieced Delectable Mountains block border may be necessary.

The center of my quilt measured 70”. The sides where I needed to attach the border actually measured about 72” due to the stretching that tends to happen during quilt construction. The first pieced border measured 69”.

[It’s a good habit to cut solid fabric borders from the lengthwise grain of the fabric to minimize stretching. Fabric stretches more across than it does up and down. The pattern indicated to cut those borders across the width of the fabric, though, and because I didn’t have any wiggle room in the form of extra fabric, I followed the pattern instructions.]

It is possible to ease together two strips of uneven length by taking advantage of the way the feed dogs move on the sewing machine. The fabric on the bottom actually feeds a bit faster than the fabric on top. Obviously, the longer the strips, the more distance you have over which to ease in the difference, but I thought easing in 3” over about five feet was asking a bit much. I let out a few of the seams on the pieced border—a fix suggested in the pattern—to make the pieced border measure 70”. By sewing with the slightly longer quilt border on the bottom and the pieced border on top, the two fabrics went together perfectly.

The second border went on the same way.

I’ve now got to make the top and bottom pieces and attach them. Two borders will remain after that. The next border is much simpler. It consists of 5-1/2” wide pieces of focus fabric (the sled dogs) and no piecing. The final border is another Delectable Mountains block border. Slow and steady wins the race. Hopefully, I can have this top done in another week or so. I’ve enjoyed working on it but I’d like to get it back to Jan so it can be quilted and bound.

Fabric Shopping Successes and Failures

DD#2 had Monday off. (She works as an assistant manager at a Nordstrom north of Seattle.) She picked me up and we went out to get breakfast, then took the light rail to the Nordstrom store downtown, which DD#2 refers to as Store 1 (it’s the flagship store). Our goal was to find me a mother of the bride dress. I had ordered one from Nordstrom the week before, but neither of us was crazy about it.

Amazingly, the store downtown had a minimal selection of special occasion dresses. DD#2 noted that it was the end of the fiscal year and lots of departments were thin on inventory. We decided to go back and get the car and drive over to the store in Bellevue, Washington, just across the lake from Seattle. DD#1’s office is over there, as is the BMW dealer where I got my station wagon.

The Bellevue store had quite a selection, so DD#2 pulled half a dozen dresses for me and put them in a dressing room. I have to say that shopping with her is like being on your own personal episode of “What Not to Wear.” She’s very good at what she does. She pointed out that I have such broad shoulders that I really look better with a V-neck top. I’ve always avoided V-necks because I have two prominent scars on my chest from where my Hickman catheters were placed when I had chemo. She was right, though, and in the end, I bought a dress that was very similar to the one I had ordered—from the same brand—but with a V-neck and short sleeves.

I’ve been campaigning (thus far, unsuccessfully) for a tour of the alterations department at Nordstrom. I would love to see the machines they have. While I was waiting to pick up my dress when we had finished shopping, I got to see this one, which was out on the floor:

I didn’t find a model number on the machine, but I think it’s a Juki DDL-9000B. Be still my heart.

I wanted to stop at Pacific Fabrics in Bellevue before we went back to Seattle. Pacific Fabrics had a store just a few miles from DD#1’s apartment, at Northgate Mall, but they closed it about a year ago. I’ve been to the SODO store (SOuth of DOwntown) several times. Unfortunately, when we got to the Pacific Fabrics store in Bellevue, we found they had closed that one, too, as of January 19th. I hadn’t heard they were planning to close the Bellevue store, so that was a surprise and disappointment. Now their only stores are in SODO and Bremerton.

I went back to the Airbnb to relax and DD#2 went grocery shopping. We were planning to meet DD#1 for dinner. Her office hours run late because she sees kids after school, and she wasn’t going to get home until about 7:00 p.m. DD#2 picked up a pizza and we took it over to DD#1’s apartment and put it in the oven to cook. DD#2 has a key because she babysits the cat occasionally. By the time DD#1 rolled in, dinner was ready and the cat had worked off some excess energy.

It was good to see the girls if even for just a short time. I was pleased to find such a convenient Airbnb and I’ll likely stay there again. I’ve had good Airbnb experiences in Seattle. I’m also getting better at finding my way around.

I had gotten a recall notice for the BMW back in the fall, but when I had my car at the dealer for a front end alignment in October, they said the parts were on backorder until January. The service department called a few weeks ago to tell me the parts were in. We made arrangements for them to do the work on my way back from Seattle. They needed the car for about eight hours, though. If I got the car to them by 1:00 p.m. on Tuesday, they would give me a loaner and keep my car overnight. As I was planning to stay in Spokane Tuesday night anyway, that worked out well.

I was a bit concerned about getting over Snoqualmie Pass given that it’s been closed several times this season already and snow was in the forecast again. I left early enough on Tuesday that I was over the pass while it was just flurrying. When I got to Spokane, though, I found out that WDOT had closed the pass again in both directions due to spinouts. Some idiot drivers never learn.

The dealer gave me a 2020 BMW X2 M35i to drive around while they had my car. (The guy in the service department who was helping me said, “I’ll get you the sporty loaner car.”) It had all the bells and whistles and handled nicely, but I still prefer my station wagon. I must have raced the storm from Seattle, because by the time I left the dealer, it was snowing pretty heavily. That squashed all my plans to hit the usual fabric and thrift stores in town. I went to Regal Fabrics and Gifts, which is up on South Hill not far from the hotel. Regal Fabrics is not a big store—that would be the Quilting Bee, in Spokane Valley—but the owner is wonderful and she carries a unique selection of items. I bought the pattern for this:

It’s a collage quilt, approximately 26” x 32”, designed by Laura Heine, who lives in Billings. Regal Fabrics has been having classes on this pattern recently and pics of this project have been popping up in my Facebook feed. Fabrics are layered onto a piece of background using fusible web, and then the whole thing is layered with batting and backing and quilted. This is about as close to appliqué as I probably will get as it isn’t my favorite technique.

Irene, the store owner, gave me a wealth of tips for working on this pattern. I’d like to get to it this year, but it’s currently behind some other projects in the queue.

I stopped at the grocery store on my way back and picked up some food to microwave at the hotel—their pub was closed for dinner—then tucked myself in for a nice, quiet evening. As long as I have my iPad and some handwork, I’m perfectly happy by myself.

The snow had let up some by Monday morning, so I waited until rush hour was over and then headed out to The Quilting Bee where I picked up some Tim Holtz fabric from the Memoranda line to add to the collection. A text from the BMW dealer at 10:30 let me know the car was done, so I headed back to Spokane and an hour later, I was on the road back to Montana. The roads weren’t great, but I drove appropriately for the conditions and was home mid-afternoon.

I missed our sewing meeting at church yesterday because I was trying to crawl out from under the pile on my desk. It’s amazing how much stuff needs attention when one has only been gone for a week. Now I need to prioritize my sewing to-do list. And the second half of my Accuquilt order came while I was away:

I’m going to cut some fabric this weekend.

Back From My Travels

I am home after being gone since last Thursday. I went on one of my “barnstorming the Pacific Northwest” trips. Our conference of churches—which consists of congregations in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Alaska—has an annual meeting on the last weekend in June, hosted by one of the congregations, as well as a one-day meeting in February. The meeting in February traditionally has been held in or near Portland. This year, we met at Portland Mennonite Church.

I left after work last Thursday morning and drove as far as Spokane to spend the night. On Friday morning, I picked up Jan and Gary, who were also attending the meeting. Jan is on the board with me and is the person for whom I am making the commission quilt top. Her husband is self-employed but has also served as interim pastor for congregations within our conference. The drive from Spokane to Portland takes about six hours and it was nice to have the company. We got to Portland mid-afternoon and met up with Jeryl, our pastor, who had taken the train from Kalispell the night before.

Our gathering on Saturday consisted of approximately 50 people; each congregation is encouraged to send their pastor and one lay leader or other representative. I was there in my official capacity as a board member but also as a representative from our church. The topic was “Intercultural Competency,” and the presenters were two women from MCC Central States.

[FYI, this note came in to all the churches who made comforters for MCC a few weeks ago: Thank you to the hundreds of volunteers who came together in January for MCC’s Great Winter Warm-up! Due to snow, some events were delayed by a week, but the totals are in and we collected more than 9500 comforters, that’s 3,000 more than our goal! From start to finish, each comforter is created with love and MCC always hears from comforter recipients that they can feel the love from the hands that created their new comforter.] 

I went into this workshop not knowing quite what to expect. Our conference has a number of Hispanic congregations and we have, at times, struggled with understanding how best to relate to them. We get randomized seating assignments at these events, and I found myself at a table with four men: a man a bit older than me who is also on the board, the young African-American pastor of one of the Oregon churches, a pastor from one of the Hispanic churches, and another young man, also from one of the Hispanic churches. (We make translation services available for those who are more comfortable listening in Spanish than English.)

I thought the presenters did a great job of navigating a difficult topic. They started by having us evaluate our own personal cultures—the backgrounds and identities that influence each of us most strongly—then moved us on to discussions of group dynamics. The topic is certainly too complex to tackle in a one-day session, but they gave us a lot to think about.

Something happened toward the end of the meeting that I’m still processing. Each table group was given a case study and 30 minutes to talk about it. At the end of that 30 minutes, a representative from each group was supposed to present to the larger gathering. Whenever I am part of a table group that is asked to present something, invariably, every single time—including this one—I get asked to be the group representative. It has happened for years. I used to be willing to be the spokesperson, because if you put a microphone in front of me, I WILL talk, but as I get older, I am more inclined to encourage someone else to take that role. (Also, I was sewing down a comforter binding during this meeting and I wanted to get the last 9” of it done before the meeting ended.) Our young African-American pastor finally agreed to be our representative.

After the last table had presented its findings, a woman stood up and said she was dismayed to see that all of the table representatives had been men. (At this, all of the men at my table looked at me somewhat reproachfully.) I overheard her later telling someone that when it came time to choose a spokesperson from her table, everyone immediately assumed one of the men would fill that role.

I am not trying to minimize or discount her experience in any way. I have no doubt that she experienced this exactly the way she described it, but it made me think about the different ways in which each of us moves through the world. I don’t sense any difference in treatment in the church because of my gender—especially now that most of the older generation of men is gone—but she is younger than me and clearly she does. And I am not sure what to think.

After the meeting, the board decamped to the restaurant next to the hotel and had a short board meeting, which we concluded the following day after the early service at Portland Mennonite. I missed seeing Katherine, our Executive Conference Minister, because she was home sick with the flu. I like to talk quilting and vintage sewing machines with her.

By 3 p.m., I was on my way up to Seattle. Thankfully, it being Sunday afternoon, traffic was light. I had made reservations to stay at a wonderful Airbnb just a few doors down from the house where DD#2 lives with three other Gonzaga grads. She met me there and we went out and got some dinner.

I’ll post about the rest of my travels tomorrow, but for now, I leave you with a pic of my remnant rack haul:

There will be more treasures to show you tomorrow.

Toy Boxes for Quilters

The shipping notification for my Accuquilt order indicated the box would arrive Wednesday afternoon, but FedEx was being extra efficient and delivered the box Tuesday afternoon.

What’s inside?

I ordered some storage boxes for my Go! cutter dies. I have lots of 6” x 6” dies:

As well as some 6” x 12” dies:

And some 10” x 10” dies:

I could have gone the cheap route and put them in standing file folder racks (Accuquilt also sells similar racks), but I prefer to have them in labeled boxes where they won’t get dusty.

I ordered a starter pack of polycarbonate sheets; these go on top of the fabric layered onto the die before the die is rolled through the cutter.

This is the die for cutting 5” squares of fabric. It is large and heavy:

I had to order the large tray to go with it:

I ordered a smaller die adapter for use with my existing dies:

The storage boxes are great:

I have several of the really large dies (12” x 24”) and I may need to get racks for those. They can warp if not stored properly.

The second half of my order has not yet shipped. That order contains a few more Studio-specific dies, but I have plenty of ways to cut fabric with my current set of Go! dies and adapters. I ran the 2-1/2” die through the Studio cutter last night to make more leader and ender squares.

I’m happy that I decided to upgrade to the bigger cutter. I’ve always said that I don’t mind cutting fabric as much as some quilters do, but this will make me even more efficient.

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The Framed quilt is done, or at least sewn together:

I may add a border. Forty-two squares make a quilt approximately 54” x 63”, and while that is a fine size for a lap quilt, something about this seems a bit unfinished.

I’m okay with the way this turned out. I’m glad I left that periwinkle blue in the mix. I probably could have toned down the amount of acid green, but that’s one of my favorite colors. This will get added to the pile of “things to be quilted and donated.” Some day when I feel like doing some free motion quilting, I’ll pull it out, baste it with batting and a backing, and practice my loops and swirls. For sheer speed of construction, though, it’s hard to beat this pattern. I felt like it didn’t take long at all, and sizing it up would be a breeze—just add more 10” squares. This is a nice way to use up remnants.

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The husband is still in the process of moving stuff from the old shop to the new shop and getting things set up the way he wants them. The air compressor has been moved over, which means I am no longer at risk of sudden cardiac arrest when it exhausts without warning as I am getting into my car. He also found a muffler for it, which cuts down on the noise considerably. As soon as the shelving in the back of the existing garage has been emptied, I am going to start moving some sewing machines over there.

The new shop really is quite the place. I am sure that for the husband, it feels like moving from a 750 square foot apartment into a mansion. Even with the lift in there, he will still have plenty of room to move around and work on projects and vehicles.

Do You Need a Rogue Fabric?

I was a productive sewist yesterday and got 44 of the required 88 half-rectangle triangles for the commission quilt sewn and pressed. (“Half-rectangle triangles” does not roll off the tongue nearly as easily as “half-square triangles.”) They went much faster than the first set I did for the center of the quilt because these are all one color combination. As soon as I make the remaining 44, I can slice all of them up to make the Delectable Mountains blocks that comprise the final two borders. I still have some work to do, but the end is in sight.

As a reward to myself for my industry, I sliced up one of the fabric combos I pulled yesterday morning (the floral one). I wanted something relatively quick and easy. Layer cakes—10” squares—are my favorite place to start for easy quilt blocks. Charm squares—5” blocks—are easy, too, but I am rather tired of them given how many comforter tops I’ve made recently.

“Layer cakes” was a term coined by Moda, one of the fabric manufacturers, to market their pre-cut fabrics. (A roll of forty-two 2-1/2” strips is called a “jelly roll.”) A layer cake usually contains forty-two 10” squares of an entire fabric line. The fabric line might be made up of a dozen different prints, so some of the fabrics are repeated within the layer cake. I like to make my own layer cakes. I took that stack of fabrics I pulled and began slicing the fabrics into 10” squares. A couple of the prints were fat quarters (18” x 21”) which only yielded two 10” squares. The larger remnants provided more squares. The idea is to come up with a good variety using the fabrics available.

Quilt designers have come up with all sorts of unique ways to slice and dice layer cake squares into fun quilt blocks. I’ve done Double Sliced Layer Cake blocks in the past, but for this quilt, I am using Framed, a quilt tutorial by Ann Ferguson for the Moda Bake Shop (see what they did there?).

The first step, after cutting, is to pair up the 10” blocks randomly. Here is where things got interesting. That navy blue floral focus fabric had a tiny bit of periwinkle blue in it. I had pulled a matching periwinkle blue floral out of the stash and cut it. When I put it with the other fabrics, though, I felt like it was fighting with them. I took it out and cut more 10” blocks out of some of the other prints to make up the difference. I paired up all the blocks and went to bed.

My subconscious was hard at it while I was asleep. I woke up and my first thought was about that periwinkle blue fabric. I decided it needed to be put back in with the other fabrics. Mary Fons, in her book Make + Love Quilts, talks about the need for “rogue fabrics” in a design. She maintains that many quilt designs benefit from a fabric that is just a tad off-kilter. I don’t like matchy-matchy quilts, so this concept resonates with me. I suspect that periwinkle blue may be the rogue fabric I need for this quilt.

The blocks are made by stacking two 10” squares on top of each other and cutting strips off each side, leaving a square in the middle:

The fabrics are separated and the center squares swapped out to give a positive and negative of that fabric combination:

I’ll sew up a few squares and put them up on the design wall and see what I think about that periwinkle blue. It might work or it might be an unmitigated disaster. I’ll let you know.

Fabric Therapy

If ever you are feeling helpless and don’t know what to do for someone who is going through a difficult time, please don’t hesitate just to reach out and let them know that you are thinking about them. The texts and e-mails that have come to us since yesterday’s blog post have been most appreciated. And when I got home from running errands in town, a card was waiting for me in the day’s mail. Someone who had bought my knitting books sent me a handwritten note to thank me for writing them. Joyce in New York, I don’t know if you read the blog or not, but I want you to know how much that card brightened my day.

And I was treated to a stream of live pics from my girls, who had planned a day out together in Seattle to shop for wedding dresses. DD#2 provided the associated running commentary. (We’ve already been informed that she must approve any wardrobe selections that the husband and I make for the wedding.) I enjoyed being able to see the choices. That was the next best thing to being there in person.

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The husband noted that what would help me most right now is a road trip—he knows me so well—but I can’t take off yet. I was awake at 4:30 this morning because my body doesn’t differentiate between weekdays and weekends. (Neither does Rusty.) I went into my fabric room and began rummaging through the stash. Every so often, I like to go through the exercise of pulling fabrics for a quilt. I think of them as my “maybe” quilts. The fabric combos go into a separate bin. Sometimes they end up as quilts and sometimes I repurpose the fabrics for other projects. It’s the challenge that matters.

I ended up with two very different sets of fabric. The first one is modern and geometric:

That print on the bottom was the inspiration piece. Choosing fabrics that coordinated with it was especially challenging because the gray is more of what I would call “greige,” with definite brown undertones. And I didn’t want florals. I am happy with this combination. The prints are a good mix of colors, textures, and scale.

I did go with florals for the second combination.

Again, the inspiration piece is on the bottom. Those two lighter fabrics in the middle look gray, but they are actually nice lavender florals that pick up the same color in the print.

We’ll see if these become quilts. They might be the first fabrics run through the new cutter, and once they’re cut, it’s silly not to sew them up.

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Speaking of the cutter, I got a shipment notification from Accuquilt. The items I ordered should arrive here in the middle of next week. I haven’t yet had an opportunity to play with the new cutter because I need what is in those orders. I am going to have to move the cutter, though, because it’s high time I started sorting tax paperwork.

I also want to make myself another waxed canvas cross-body bag—the Metro Hipster is nice, but I need something just a tad bigger and easier to get in and out of. Unfortunately, AL Frances, the Etsy store where I have been buying my waxed canvas, has fallen way behind on stocking new inventory. They became very popular very quickly (their product is excellent!), and I wondered if something like this would happen. I wouldn’t be surprised if much of their time now is spent filling wholesale orders for custom bagmakers. Their Etsy store lists barely a third of the waxed canvas stock they had when I started buying from them.

Robert Kaufman (the company that brings you Kona) offers Waxer Canvas, which is similar, but in a much more limited range of colors. I also hesitate to buy waxed canvas that was produced outside the US (especially in China), because who knows what kinds of toxins might be in the wax? I don’t think I’m being paranoid about that.

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.