The Great Corn Experiment of 2020

We have seedlings.

Corn:

And tomatoes:

And the first cowpea seedling of 2020!

I planted three varieties of cowpeas 2-3 days apart; this was the last variety I planted and the first to sprout. This is “Fast Lady Northern Southern Cowpea.” It was developed in Oregon by Carol Deppe for cooler climates, so no surprise that it was the first to come up. I planted this variety directly into the garden last year—too late, I think—and it came up and flowered but didn’t produce any pods. Hopefully, starting it in the greenhouse will give it the extra time it needs.

I went a bit nuts with the corn this year. A few seasons ago, we grew some Painted Hill corn that we got from Victory Seeds in Oregon. It did very well for us. I blanched and froze it for adding to soups and stews. The kernels are a variety of dark jewel-toned colors. The description on the Victory Seeds website says:

'Painted Hill' was bred by Dr. Alan Kapuler of Peace Seeds who stabilized a cross between Dave Christensen's genetically diverse 'Painted Mountain' grain corn and the old heirloom, 'Luther Hill' sweet corn.

Baker Creek carries Painted Mountain (although they are sold out for this season). Here is their description:

This corn is the very definition of rugged beauty! These incredibly tough plants were bred in the bitter cold mountains of Montana. They boast impressive cold hardiness, earliness, drought tolerance, and they thrive at high altitudes. Montana farmer Dave Christensen has dedicated his life’s work to naturally breeding a corn that will thrive in harsh conditions, and since the 1970s has sampled from over 70 open-pollinated varieties of corn to create Painted Mountain corn. These are old heirlooms grown by northern Native American tribes over thousands of years, as well as homesteaders from harsh northern climates. 

I bought some Painted Mountain seed this year because I am curious to see how it compares to Painted Hill (which I am growing again).

Just for fun, I bought a packet of Montana Cudu from Baker Creek (also sold out for 2020). This has been developed by another Montana corn breeder:

A beautiful spotted variety that is descended from a historic Native American variety. Ed Schultz, renowned corn breeder from Montana, has worked to adapt a blended corn as a tribute to a sacred Native American variety. Cudu corn is said to be an ancient native American variety used for sacred ritual. A sample of seeds was donated to the USDA seed bank by Oscar Will in 1958. The original donated seed may have been accidentally inbred or crossed, as the cobs were stunted and short, and kernels had begun to lose their signature blue eagle marking. Ed is a far northern grower who has worked to create beautiful and early-maturing corns like Atomic Orange and the Papa’s corn. He received a sample of seeds from the USDA and has worked for over five years to adapt it to his northern region and to create longer cobs. He reports that this variety has long, slender ears and beautiful blue-spotted kernels. To achieve this variety, he bred true Cudu corn with a small percentage of Papa’s White corn.

And some Montana Lavender Clay corn (no doubt you are sensing a pattern here). This is another Ed Schultz-developed variety (again, sold out for 2020):

One look at the unmistakable lavender kernels shows that this blended Native American variety is descended from the lavender parching corn of the Mandan tribe. In 1808, Thomas Jefferson received seeds of a lavender colored, Mandan Red Clay corn; he reported that the seeds were given to him by Lewis and Clark from their 1804 contact with the Mandan tribe in present day North Dakota. Schultz has taken the lovely lavender-clay color and rugged cold hardiness of Mandan corn while making for more slender and uniform ears and short, stout plants. A stellar feat of breeding from a solid foundation of superlative ancient genetics.

I am all for old, open-pollinated varieties. I started seed from each of these varieties and we will see how they do in the garden this year.

I’ve also got a pot with two special tomato seeds in it. Susan ordered some seeds of a variety known as “Dirty Girl” and shared them with several of us in the neighborhood. If we all grow these and save seeds, we can keep the mutual gene pool bigger. (We are so fortunate to have a resident botanist!)

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I voluntarily furloughed myself from work as of yesterday. We cleared the backlog from last month and work slowed to a trickle. I know the other transcriptionists depend on that income and I don’t. What I need now is time to work in the garden. My supervisor was fine with that decision and promised to let me know when they need me again.

I spent some time tinkering with the coverstitch machine yesterday afternoon (it was still snowing). Mine is a Janome CoverPro 1000. At the time I bought it, about three years ago, there were not a lot of domestic coverstitch machines available and not much information on their use. I got the hang of mine quickly, but I was baffled by the fact that the mechanisms were so stiff. That didn’t make any sense to me. And all of these modern machines come with admonitions not to oil. I realize the manufacturers want you to take them in for service periodically, and that especially makes sense with the electronic machines, but basic maintenance should be encouraged.

Thankfully, the wisdom of crowds came to the rescue. I joined a coverstitch group on Facebook and discovered that other CoverPro owners were opening up their machines and oiling them, with great results. That model also suffered from the problem of skipped stitches, which turned out to be a quality control issue having to do with the height of the feed dogs. I never had that problem, but the people who did and who adjusted the feed dogs were able to correct it.

In the last year or so, a bunch of new brands/models of coverstitch machines have hit the market. Some are serger-coverstitch combo machines and some are coverstitch-only machines. I think Janome missed an opportunity to take the lead in that market when they put out machines with obvious flaws.

In any case, I did open mine up and oiled it with some BlueCreeper sewing machine oil. It runs much more smoothly now. I’ll re-thread it and finish the hems on that Gap knockoff dress. And I’ve started another batch of masks.

Venturing Out

There was no help for it—we were about to run out of chicken feed and some supplies for the husband, so I made a trip to town yesterday morning.

The farm where we buy 1000-pound totes of pig feed also supplies chicken feed, but we bought chicken feed from them once and all our chickens stopped laying a few weeks later. We don’t know if the protein level in the feed wasn’t high enough or what, but we went back to buying 40-pound bags at the farm store. We can’t keep as much on hand that way, but 4-6 bags will keep us for a couple of weeks.

The farm store, I discovered, has online ordering. Not only does does their website tell me what is in stock and how much of it they have, but it’s quick and easy to use. They were sold out of the feed we usually buy (16% protein) but had a slightly richer formulation in stock (18%), so I ordered four bags of feed and two of scratch grains. The scratch grains are a treat and we don’t go through them as quickly.

Online ordering from the grocery store was a different story. My preferred grocery store is Super 1. There are two in Kalispell. One is the Evergreen store (closest to us on the east side of town) and the other is known as the “downtown” store, a name which makes me laugh. They’ve had online ordering for some months now, so on Wednesday afternoon, I went to their website to see how to access it. I was directed to an another website/app with a list of stores—none of which was either of the Super 1 stores where I shop.

Not an auspicious beginning.

It took me about five minutes of fiddling with the search function to bring up all the Super 1 stores in the Pacific Northwest and then drill down to find ours. Once I was in the correct store, I started searching for what I needed, only to discover that some of the items listed as being on sale in the weekly ad were not on sale in the app.

At that point, I decided it would be faster for me to go into the actual store and find what I need than to spend the time wrestling with the ordering app.

[Some of my Kalispell peeps have since given me tips for using that app and others suggested a different store with a better online ordering program.]

Armed with a bottle of hand sanitizer, some gloves, and a mask, I headed out at 7:30 yesterday morning in an attempt to miss any crowds. The farm store was great. I pulled up at the loading door in back and they wheeled out my order and loaded it into the car for me. Done and done.

I dropped off a batch of masks at the gym near the hospital which has been designated as the collection site.

And I went to the grocery store. It was, thankfully, mostly deserted. They are still out of rice, beans, and toilet paper (none of which I needed) but had plenty of produce and the other stuff on my list. The store has installed Plexiglas barriers between customers and cashiers. I got in and out of there relatively quickly.

The whole trip was rather surreal. Traffic at that time of the morning is usually bumper-to-bumper coming in from the east side of the valley, but not these days. There were very few cars on the road. Restaurants that would normally be doing a brisk breakfast service were closed.

I have lots of thoughts, but I’ll save those for future blog posts.

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On Tuesday afternoon, I opened to door to the porch and heard the telltale buzzing noise that let me know the hummingbirds were back. On Wednesday, I cleaned the feeders, mixed up nectar, and refilled them. On Wednesday night, we got a snowstorm that lasted through much of yesterday (and the high yesterday was 18 degrees). I don’t know how the hummingbirds survive when that happens, but I hope they will be back soon. The snowstorm also blew down the covering on my hoops over the lettuce, so I had to go out and reconstruct that yesterday. In the process, I saw some lettuce seedlings had come up. Yay! They don’t mind a bit of snow on them.

I didn’t get any sewing done yesterday because my morning trip to town pushed transcription work into the afternoon. I did my first “telemedicine” report yesterday—it wasn’t much different than a regular report, but we now have a new template in the software specifically for those reports.

The cowl from the Nancy Raglan pattern looks nice on the Gap knockoff dress.

I did that totally on the fly with no measuring. All that’s left is to mark the bottom and cuff hems and do them on the coverstitch machine. I need a few uninterrupted hours for that, though.

Done With March

At various times yesterday, we had sun, rain, snow, hail, wind, then sun again. Last night after dinner, the husband and I were sitting in the living room. I had just built a fire in the fireplace and was reading a book on my iPad. He was surfing YouTube. All of a sudden, it felt like my chair was moving around. I thought perhaps I was having some kind of dizzy spell, and then I happened to look into the kitchen and saw the pot rack swaying back and forth.

We were having an earthquake.

The epicenter was in Idaho, but the quake was strong enough (6.5 or so) to be felt as far away as Great Falls, Montana. I did say to the husband—before we knew it was in Idaho—that if the Yellowstone caldera was about to blow, that would make a lot of our other current issues irrelevant.

Just after we went to bed, our department got paged out for a structure fire. The husband left at 10:30 p.m. and didn’t get back until after 2:00 a.m. March wasn’t kind to that poor homeowner. And overnight, we had another, smaller version of the snow and windstorm that roared through here a few weeks ago.

I’m done with March. Totally and completely done. What a dumpster fire of a month that was.

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I’ve got tomatoes, corn, cowpeas, and cucumbers started in the greenhouse. Of course, the propane heater decided that this week would be a great time to malfunction, and a replacement (or parts) cannot be had anywhere in Kalispell. We had to order one. In the meantime, the husband put one of his construction heaters in the greenhouse. That is a bit of overkill, but it’s keeping it at a toasty 75 degrees inside. I expect to see seedlings popping up soon.

I’ve finished another two dozen masks. And I keep chipping away at the latest quilt project:

It’s a strange color combination but I like it. I especially like the combination of textures from the various prints. I also got the cowl for the Gap knockoff dress assembled and ready to attach.

Hopefully we didn’t lose any more trees last night. I’ll assess when the sun comes up.

Going For Gold

I told DD#1 the other day that I am in training to win the gold medal in the introvert Olympics. This situation has been an interesting experiment in finding my baseline for personal interaction with other human beings. I don’t need much. In some ways, it has very much been a relief to shed the expectations—both my own and those of other people—that I come out and participate. I’ll get tired of my own company eventually, I’m sure, but for now, I am good.

[I did figure out how to block people from sending me 20 videos a day on Messenger. I still don’t understand why some people feel the need to do that.]

My biggest enemy right now is not boredom, but analysis paralysis. I looked at my to-do list the other day and couldn’t decide what to do first. Part of the problem is that I’ll decide I want to tackle project X, but the weather doesn’t cooperate, or I don’t have all the supplies I need, or another roadblock presents itself, and then it takes me forever to let go of the idea that I can’t work on project X and have to pick something else. I very much wanted to go out yesterday afternoon and continue garden cleanup, but it was cold and windy and alternating between snow and rain.

I decided to work on my Gap dress knockoff.

I drafted this pattern a couple of months ago by laying the dress out on some pattern paper and tracing around it. The dress consists of a front, a back and two sleeves. The back of the original dress has a seam down the center. I was being lazy yesterday, so I omitted that seam and cut both the front and the back on the fold of the fabric. This is a practice version of my pattern and the fabric is some rayon knit from the clearance rack at Joanns.

The serger was still set up from my last project for a three-thread narrow stitch with wooly nylon in the loopers. I decided to switch back to a four-thread stitch, which meant putting in the second needle and threading it with some regular thread. And then I had to test.

As Zede—of the Sewing Out Loud podcast—likes to say, “There are those who test and those who wish they had.” I have made my peace with testing. It’s faster than screwing up 50 times, and taking out serger seams is a rare form of torture. I spent a good hour running scraps through the serger and fiddling with the settings:

These are not trimmings from the project. These are trimmings from all my testing. (I do have a wastebasket in that room, but I was too lazy to get up and go get it.)

I found a combination of settings that looked good, but then I realized that I should probably use clear elastic to stabilize the shoulder seams of this dress, as in the original. I went stash diving and came up with some 3/8” clear elastic.

I don’t have an “elasticator foot” for my serger, mostly because it’s $35 (for one foot!) and I haven’t yet needed it. The owner’s manual noted that there is a slot in the regular presser foot for elastic. The opening isn’t wide enough for 3/8” elastic, however, so I cut a length of elastic and trimmed it down to 1/4” wide. It fits into the foot like this:

This works, mostly. I may go ahead and shell out the $35 for the elasticator foot. The elasticator foot has a slot in the very tip of the foot that holds the elastic securely in place. The problem with using this foot to apply elastic is that the screw for adjusting the guide sticks up and causes the elastic to flop back and forth over it. It’s tricky enough to serge a slippery rayon knit without also having to worry about the what the elastic is doing. I was able to get the shoulders of the dress seamed reasonably well with the elastic in place, all while reminding myself that this is a prototype . Where better to practice serging with elastic than on a practice dress?

The dress is assembled and currently awaiting a neckline treatment. The original has binding on the neckline. I could do a very similar binding on my knockoff dress because I also have a coverstitch machine. If you thought accessories for the serger were expensive, you should check out the accessories for the coverstitch machine. I’ve already shelled out $30 for the clear foot (which should come standard, in my opinion) and $100 for the hem guide. The binding attachment for the coverstitch machine, which would allow me to make the same neckline binding as on the Gap dress, is $179.

Not this week.

I am going to take the cowl neck pattern piece from the Nancy Raglan and use it on the Gap knockoff dress. I could also do a simple foldover bias neckline, but I really like that cowl. If I end up making myself a whole wardrobe of knit garments, I might buy the binding attachment because it really does make a professional finish.

I’ll get the dress hemmed and the cowl put on and see how I like it. It hangs nicely on my dress form, which is promising. My new supply of elastic for face masks arrived yesterday, however, and I need to get back to making more of those.

Birds, Berries, and Wine

I put bathrooms back together yesterday, or as close to back together as I could get them while waiting for the new furnishings to arrive. We are going to have to replace some light fixtures throughout the house, too. Some need updating, but some also refuse to play nicely with LED bulbs. I have LED bulbs in the fluorescent overhead fixtures in my office and while I love the amount of light they put out, they must overheat the fixtures, because every so often the fixtures just shut off. I can type in the dark, but when all three fixtures go out simultaneously (they don’t always), I usually take a break and go make some tea until they cool off and come back on. We’re having similar problems with some of the other fixtures. The LED bulbs are burning out way before they should.

I made another batch of masks and cooked up some madras lentils because I really wanted some comfort food. Some people like chicken soup, others want mac and cheese. When I want comfort food, it’s usually some kind of Indian curry.

After lunch, I went out to work in the garden. I was surprised to find this little guy inside the greenhouse:

The doors were closed, so we’re not quite sure how he got in. Even when the doors are open, birds rarely find their way inside. I opened the doors and within a few minutes, he had escaped to the great outdoors again.

Yesterday’s gardening task was more pruning. I started by giving the grapes a pretty severe haircut because I want them to produce well this year (more on that in a moment). Once they were done, I moved over to the raspberry bed. Getting the raspberries under control has been a multi-year project, because we were bad farmers and let them grow uncontrolled for too long. I went through and cut and pulled out all the dead canes, dug out the suckers that were creeping out of the bed, and thinned out this year’s bearing canes. When we put those berries in, we planted two varieties. One is thorny and one is thornless. The thornless variety bears much better and is (obviously) easier to pick, so I am also trying to dig out and get rid of the thorny variety.

It’s a process, but I am getting there. And I’ve thinned out the bed enough that it is going to provide a lot less cover for those stupid ground squirrels.

Part of the reason I want a good crop of grapes this year is this:

This is the wine that our employee and his wife made with the grapes I gave them last year. I opened the bottle and poured myself a glass yesterday afternoon. Isn’t it pretty? It tastes even better than it looks. Our variety of grapes is called Reliance. I have never seen a description of that variety that even hints that it might be a good wine grape. It is described strictly as a table grape, suitable for jams and jellies. I am no oenophile, but I know what I like, and this is really good wine. (Also, it’s organic!) I want to make sure that Matt and his wife have enough grapes this fall to make more of this.

I have heard it said that “The best fertilizer is a farmer’s footprints,” and looking at and evaluating our property is a big part of how we get things to grow here. I am noticing that my herb garden and the old vegetable garden are getting much more sun now because we lost so many trees in the woods in that last storm. The canopy has opened up considerably. Unfortunately, the chicken yard also lost some of its shade, so we may have to figure out a way to shade that for the chickens this summer. I am curious to see how the herb garden does this year with the extra sun as it already has a tendency to become an overgrown jungle by the middle of July.

Positive and Negative

I love my extroverted friends, but I can tell that some of them are starting to feel the effects of social isolation. If they can’t socialize in person, they’ll do it through other channels. I must have gotten two dozen text messages, phone calls, or videos sent to me on Thursday. While I am happy to respond to close friends who need something, that level of social interaction—whether virtual or in person—makes me feel like I am being pecked to death by ducks.

[If you are a close friend or neighbor, I want to hear from you. If you are a casual Facebook friend who feels the need to send me links to every video you watched that day, please stop. Please.]

I do miss visiting with my neighbors. We’re so used to seeing each other and touching base every day or two that having to wave at each other from across the road feels weird. Elysian called last night and asked how we were doing. After a moment’s consideration, I said, “Nothing has really changed for us,” which is true. We don’t have little kids home from school (and DD#2 went home on Thursday because she had to go back to work), the husband is still working, I’m still working, and I haven’t had to go anywhere because we have everything we need. She laughed and said we were like the farmers during the Great Depression who weren’t aware that there was a depression happening.

Believe me, I am grateful for the consistency because I know not everyone has that luxury.

Work has been steady this week, but I think it may start to drop off soon. Many of the doctors are scheduling “chemo holidays” for their patients and suspending treatment for 6-8 weeks so that immunocompromised cancer patients don’t have to expose themselves needlessly. I would be okay with several days or even a few weeks off, especially now that gardening season is ramping up.

I got all my tomatoes planted on Thursday, as well as one variety of corn and two varieties of cowpeas. I am determined to figure out how to grow cowpeas here so that Cathy can make her favorite southern dishes. I didn’t get the seeds into the ground early enough last season and I’m hoping that starting seedlings inside will fool the plants into thinking they are in Georgia. The greenhouse is still a bit chilly unless the sun is shining, so we have the propane heater running.

I put all my beans in jars in the kitchen so I can admire them. I grew a lot of beans last year (those are half-gallon jars):

I plan to make another batch of masks today, but I spent a couple of hours yesterday afternoon working on some quilt blocks. I really wanted to see how that positive/negative quilt block arrangement looked. It doesn’t bowl me over, but I think I like it enough to keep going:

This is the design based on the Pepper and Flax fabric line from Corey Yoder. (There is also some sage-y green in the line.) The two blocks are identical; they just swap print and background positions. I think what’s giving me trouble is the amount of white. I don’t generally do quilts with white in them because anything white doesn’t stay that way here for long. And I need to figure out a better production line method. Doing these one at a time is bit fiddly.

One of our employees came over after work last night to put his truck up on the lift and check out a strange noise. (Unfortunately, I did not get out there in time to get a picture.) He also brought me some bottles of homemade wine. I had given him grapes from our vines last fall and this is some of the wine he and his wife made with them. I am going to try it out with dinner tonight. Last year, they made some with currants and Italian plums that was amazing. I also got the binding made and attached to that latest Candy Coated quilt. It just needs to be sewn down, and that might be a good project for this evening.

What Day Is It?

I am usually on top of what day it is; I get into the routine of writing the new year pretty quickly in January because I have to manually time-stamp the reports I type with my transcriptionist ID and the date the report was done. My planner sits open on my desk right above my keyboard. This year, though, dates are meaningless. It has been a struggle to put them into context. I do know it’s March—almost April. I know that some things need to get done soon, like planting seeds. Many of the touchstones of my schedule, though, have disappeared. Normally, we would be getting ready for our fire department auction next weekend. For the first time in 50+ years, there will be no auction this year. Church has been canceled. Holy Week? Easter? How far will this stretch out? We here in Montana have always been in a unique position because ripples from events that happen in other parts of the world take a long time to get to us. On the one hand, that gives us more time to prepare. On the other, that time lag enables a fair bit of denial from people who think we are immune from the effects. We’re not. I am watching the wave of virus cases heading toward us. I wonder if people are going to exit quarantine at about the same time that wave hits Montana.

My days consist of working and sewing. I work in the morning and sew in the afternoon. I’ve made about 60 masks so far and every single batch has been claimed before the masks have come off the machine. Kalispell Regional Medical Center launched Project PPE this week, and while I’d be happy to be sewing masks for local use, friends and relatives who know I am making them have asked me to send them to other facilities. I don’t care where they go. I’m just trying to meet a need. Hobby Lobby sent a shipping notice this morning, so I should have more elastic in a few days. In the meantime, I may switch to fabric ties. Or I may take a break and plant seeds. I can’t put that off much longer.

Speaking of context, one image that keeps popping up in my head—and has, repeatedly, for much of my life—is that of a tapestry weaving. My brain likes things neat and orderly, so situations that are not neat and orderly make me uncomfortable. (Tapestry weaving is not necessarily a neat and orderly form of weaving.) With the perspective of 53 years in the rear-view mirror, however, I find it helpful to think of events like this as threads in a tapestry. I might look at one section of the weaving and think, “Why on earth are those threads in that spot? They don’t fit there!” When I come back to that spot later, though, after other threads have been added, I can see that even though those threads didn’t look like they fit at the time, they were necessary to make the overall design make sense.

Philosophy in the time of plague. Just another service I offer.

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DD#2 finished painting both bathrooms and now I begin the process of putting things back together. I want the downstairs bathroom to have a chicken theme, so this is the shower curtain she picked out:

I am not quite sure what I’ll do with the upstairs bathroom. The focal point of that bathroom has always been a large framed print of this piece, entitled Dancing Bears, by William H. Beard, and it will stay in there:

By some stroke of serendipity, we were able to find a wallpaper border based on the print, which was one of the reasons we’ve held off redecorating that bathroom for 20 years. DD#2 saved a piece of the wallpaper border, though, and I may frame it and hang it below the original print just for fun. I haven’t looked for any bear-themed shower curtains yet. Decorating is hardly a priority at the moment, although we do need to use the downstairs bathroom.

Roosters and Artichokes

Baby is now the only rooster in the coop. The old rooster died. Elysian asked if she could have our Black Australorp rooster and I said yes, because having that much testosterone in a small enclosed space is asking for trouble. Also, he has always been the second-in-command rooster and I think it will be nice for him to have his own harem. He has been at her place since Saturday and it sounds like he’s settling in just fine.

Meanwhile, I have a rooster who follows me around like a puppy dog until I give him a handful of scratch grains. He does step up, though, when he is needed. One of the Barred Rock hens has gone broody. She had a fit when I went into the coop yesterday. (I was five feet away from her nesting box, but she wasn’t having it.) Two other hens came over to investigate, which made her really cranky, and the next thing I knew, Baby was over there hustling them away. It’s a regular soap opera in there.

I am going to see if this Barred Rock hen will accept a few extra eggs tucked underneath her.

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Last year, we planted a bunch of Jerusalem artichokes—AKA sunchokes—in the old vegetable garden here by the house. They were a donation from our neighbor. I didn’t get them dug up last fall, but everything I read said they would overwinter just fine, and if we didn’t dig them up in the spring, they would just keep spreading. I went out and dug down into the bed yesterday afternoon to see if I could find some. I thought I might bring them in and roast them.

There aren’t any.

I suspect they were eaten by the voles that have plagued that garden for years. Voles are nasty little creatures that tunnel underground and eat the roots of all the plants. The plants often seem okay, especially after a long winter, until you touch them and realize that there is nothing left but stalks. No doubt the voles thought they had hit the lottery when they found all those tubers.

I might have to find a different spot and try again.

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DD#2 finished the downstairs bathroom and had enough paint left over that she has moved on to the upstairs bathroom. If this keeps up, we might also get the spare bedroom painted.

I’m still working every day—and we have plenty of reports in the queue—so I am a bit envious of the people who are getting all sorts of miscellaneous projects done. I did clean the refrigerator last week and was proud of myself for crossing that off the list.

The husband got the lift operational and tried it out last weekend. It’s impressive.

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You know what I’d like? I’d like to see people responding to this crisis with a lot more grace and humility. I’d like to see more grace (and gratitude) for the people whose lives have been thrown into chaos by this event and who are scrambling to make it up as they go. (And I am talking real chaos, not “I can’t get my Starbucks latte every morning now” chaos.) I’d especially like to see a lot more humility. This is not the time to act superior and show off how much you think you know. If you’re not a medical doctor, I’m not terribly interested in your opinion. The situation might be different in your part of the country or the world. Perhaps you might also consider that things are different elsewhere from what you’re experiencing. It’s entirely possible that you don’t have all the answers. We’d all be a lot better off if we minded our own neighborhoods for a while, or even learned to do that long-term.

(Cranky libertarian this morning needs more coffee and fewer people telling her what to do.)

Amy, over at the Farmish Kind of Life, did a great podcast yesterday: Ten Lessons You Can Learn in Times of Crisis. And it’s not focused just on homesteaders, so don’t be afraid to give it a listen. (The second one on the list, interestingly, is “learning what you don’t know.”)

And just because we need a bit of levity and I like to laugh at myself periodically, I’m going to share this clip from the movie The Three Amigos (thank you, Elysian!):

Trees, Dirt, and Bathrooms

The husband’s brother is currently staying with their dad, who has been in and out of the hospital over the past couple of weeks. BIL texted me over the weekend and asked for a couple of masks for them to use. I have another batch done, so I packed some up and will send them off this morning. A friend of ours who is a retired nurse is working with the local hospital to determine what kind and how many masks they may need. When she finds out, I’ll probably start working on those. I don’t want to make more until I know what they want. It’s great that there are so many patterns available so they can be customized to each facility.

The weather was gorgeous this weekend and I wanted to be outside helping the husband cut up fallen trees. We have been together long enough—and cut up enough trees together—that we can do that job without much verbal communication. That’s going to be an ongoing project just because of the number of trees we lost. We worked in the front yard on Saturday and in the pig pasture yesterday. One of the trees in the pasture fell across the fence onto our neighbor’s property. We got it cleaned up, but the fence will need to be repaired soon so we can put pigs out there this summer.

It’s good to be active, but I feel a bit like the Tin Man at the end of the day.

He also helped me pull the black plastic (thank you, Clifford!) off one part of the garden, where we’ll be planting potatoes:

and move it to another part of the garden:

I am not sure yet what’s going to go in this spot, but the weeds were awful here last year and need to be beaten back. That is my lavender hedge at the left. I pruned it last fall, before the snow, and I think that was a big help. The plants aren’t as misshapen as they usually are in the spring, and they’ve already started greening up at the bases. The section to the right of the plastic is where the potatoes were last year. The plants were mulched with straw, which kept the weeds down in that area. After digging the potatoes last fall, we spread the straw around. It decomposed nicely over the winter and that section looks good. My goal is to stop tilling altogether. All that does is make the weed problem worse.

[Our relationship has always had too many generals and not enough soldiers. We’ve mostly gotten around that by having a strict division of labor and staying out of each other’s departments. When we do have to work together—tree-cutting being the notable exception—he has a tendency to start barking orders, at which point I usually just stop and look at him. We were spreading out the second piece of plastic and he said to me, “I spend all day giving orders and you spend all day not taking orders.” Keen observation, that.]

We got the water line set up to the greenhouse. I’ve got to get at least the tomatoes and squash planted this week. I’ve been putting off working in there because the weather has been so nice. I’ve also got to get ahead of the strawberry bed this year. I worked on it some last year, but it needs more attention.

While we were outside, DD#2 was working on a project of her own—repainting the bathroom off the laundry room. She is just as incapable of being idle as her parents. We set her up with some paint and a decorating budget and let her go.

We painted the bathroom that turquoise blue about 15 years ago. It has been in desperate need of an upgrade for a while, but to say that I dislike decorating is putting it mildly. She is painting it in a Sherwin-Williams color called “Bagel,” which is also the color we used in the laundry room and upstairs hallway. She ordered a new shower curtain and some towels and they should be here this week. I loved having little kids, but adult children are very special.

Needs Must When the Devil Drives

I am a mass of conflicted thoughts and feelings these days. This situation is unprecedented and requires more than the usual amount of mental effort to maintain rational thinking. Social media is a double-edge sword—for those of us in rural areas, it has often been the best way to stay on top of what’s happening, but I wade through it cautiously now, buffeted on one side by people yelling “Stop overreacting, the flu is worse!” and by people on the other side yelling “Everyone needs to stay home!”

[I have first-hand experience with exactly how bad the flu can be, having spent a week in the ICU on a ventilator two years ago because of post-flu pneumonia. And I was a healthy 52-year-old with no risk factors, which is a sobering reminder that pathogens don’t always discriminate between young and healthy and old and infirm. Discussions of hospital ventilator capacity are a bit more than academic once you have been in that situation.]

I have a much better appreciation now for how people must feel in times of war. It is an ongoing struggle to maintain an even keel while adapting to constantly-changing circumstances. I seek the middle ground.

And this is what happened yesterday:

The morning started with a Twitter notification from my sister that the Deaconess Hospital system was soliciting homemade masks for their staff. I knew that call had gone out, but I was waiting for verification from my friend, Cathy, that there was a need. I didn’t want to be part of a wave of sewists making cozies for koalas that were never going to be used.

I did, however, get out the plastic bin full of elastic to assess how much 1/4” elastic I had. It was not an insignificant amount:

A few hours later, I got a text from Cathy. Her daughter works at a hospital in New York City and they are desperate for masks. She said they’ve been using ones made from woven cotton on one side and T-shirt knit on the other. I printed out the pattern from the Deaconess website, set DD#2 up with a pair of scissors and the pile of elastic, and got out the husband’s old Carhartt T-shirts. We keep them around for shop rags, but a couple of them were intact enough to be organ donors. I got sixteen 6” x 9” pieces out of the first shirt and cut up an equal number of cotton pieces to go with them.

I ran up a prototype mask on the big Janome machine. In the midst of stitching, I got another text from Cathy asking if she could stop over. By the time she got here, I had the first mask completed. She tried it on and pronounced it serviceable (she would know). We chatted for a bit about the state of things. I know we are all supposed to be practicing social distancing, but oh, my, it was so good to see her in person for a few minutes.

I went back to making masks. DD#2, having finished cutting up elastic, turned them inside out for me. I took a short break to eat dinner and visit with the husband before finishing up the mask pleating/topstitching on the Necchi industrial. (The pleats are thick enough that the Janome was balking a bit. The Necchi goes right through them.) These are some of the ones I am sending to Cathy’s daughter today:

I have enough elastic for about 50 more. (And that, people, is why I have the equivalent of a small Joann Fabrics store in my house.) Cathy stopped at Joanns on the way home to pick up elastic—she sews, too—but they were out. That didn’t surprise me. I thought they would sell out quickly. She found a few packages at Hobby Lobby. I ordered more from the Hobby Lobby website. I’ll keep making these because it sounds like we might run short locally, too.

We also got a call from DD#1. She and her fiancé were on their way to his parents’ house. I am relieved about that. Right after the 9/11 attacks, my MIL made the comment that she felt very much like a mother hen who wanted to gather all her chicks under her wing to make sure that everyone was safe. I know exactly what she meant. We have DD#2 with us and I know that DD#1 will be well taken care of by her future in-laws.

Would I like this situation to be different? Yes. I’d like all of 2020 to be different, actually, but we play the hand we are dealt. After dinner, the husband responded to a medical call down the road for a very sick, very small child with what sounded like the flu. The husband is an EMT. He is going to respond to dangerous situations, be they structure fires, car wrecks, or medical calls. I accept that risk; I’ve accepted it for 25 years and that isn’t going to change now. Just before he got back, our neighbor—who is a flight medic on the helicopter service and works in the ER at the hospital—texted me to tell me that we now have two confirmed cases of COVID-19 here in Flathead County.

I look forward to the day when we are on the other side of this and people are writing stories about it for future generations. In the meantime, we do what we can. And what we have to.

Hooped Up

Adjusting to this new normal looks very different in some ways and very similar in others. I still get up and go to work every morning. Call it coincidence or divine providence or whatever you want, but how odd that I got my job back just before this happened. While everyone is scrambling to figure out how to telecommute, I continue doing what I’ve done for 10 years. (Pro tip: Get up, shower, and get dressed just like you’re going out. Working in your PJs won’t help you to feel like a professional.)

I have been wondering how cancer care may change in the face of this epidemic. I transcribe for an oncology clinic in the mid-south. This article popped up this morning in one of my medical transcriptionist e-mails:

Current Best Practices to Facilitate the Management of COVID-19 at Cancer Care Institutions

This was put together by experts at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance (SCCA) (part of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network [NCCN]), the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and the University of Washington. Your useless factoid for today: I had bone marrow harvested 25 years ago at Fred Hutchinson and kept in storage at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance until my oncologist said I didn’t need it anymore (it was an insurance policy in case the leukemia relapsed), at which point I donated my cells to science.

I also see that some medical institutions are asking people to make masks to combat shortages. I need to check with my physician friend, Cathy, but if that is something I can do, I will.

In the meantime, garden preps continue. DD#2 finished beans, tidied up the greenhouse, and got trays and pots ready. I’ve been collecting cardboard all winter, and that’s getting spread out where I plan to put the squash. And I got the hoop put up over the perpetual lettuce bed:

The husband provided me with a supply of rebar scraps. The PVC piping was already out in the storage shed. It took about half an hour to pound the rebar into the ground (thankfully thawing out), put the pipe over it, then spread out the spun-bonded poly. It isn’t wide enough to go over the whole setup, so we had to spread out two lengths that I attached together at the top with clothespins. I did briefly consider bringing the whole works inside and seaming the two pieces together on the machine, but I think this will hold just fine. This isn’t meant to be permanent. It is meant to give the lettuce a head start.

[After dinner, the husband and I went out so I could show him my handiwork. We have this joke—started by my mother-in-law many years ago—that when the bull does some hard and difficult job, the cow’s response is to moo in admiration. I can’t even remember where that came from anymore but we use it a lot. At our house, either gender is allowed to moo in admiration at something the other one does.]

Today’s task will be to get some aged manure mixed in with the potting soil and start planting seeds.

I also went down to the root cellar yesterday afternoon to check on the status of the potatoes. They have a built-in timer and tend to start sprouting about now. We need to wait for the rest of that snow to melt—and move some of the black plastic to other parts of the garden—but it’s going to be time to plant those soon. When the raspberry canes start leafing out, I’ll have to go through and prune them.

I worked a bit more on the Candy Coated quilt last night. One side of the quilt is done and I’ve started moving up the other side. The only downside to that Candy Coated pattern is the number of seams. I have to change my needle more frequently than I do with other patterns, but quilting loops is very soothing and this is going quickly.

Unexpected Blessings

DD#2 has been here since last Thursday. She had been planning to come home for a visit anyway, but given that our lives lately seem to involve nonstop contingency planning, she arrived ready for the possibility that she would have to stay longer than a few days. Her original plan was to drive home today, but last evening, she got an e-mail from her boss letting her know that Nordstrom was closing its stores for two weeks.

You have never seen a more relieved mother (and father) in your life.

We are happy to have her here with us as long as she needs to be. DD#1 is still in Seattle with her fiancé. She is working from home starting tomorrow. They know that they can come here, too, if necessary, but for now they seem to be coping well where they are.

DD#2 has been helping with last-minute preps, and now that we have sufficient supplies for us and the chickens, she is helping out with homesteading tasks. This afternoon, we went out to the (very toasty) greenhouse and finished shelling the last of the dry beans. We need to clean off the benches so we can get the seed trays set up.

She is the most stylish homesteader I know (the Montucky hat is a nice touch):

We aren’t going to run out of beans. I have plenty to use as seed for this season’s crop as well as to can up for future eating. The pods are so dry now that just touching them makes them pop open. It didn’t take long to finish cleaning up what was left. We’ll get the trays set up and the seeds planted some time this week.

I finally got to begin pruning my fruit trees, too. I have to keep reminding myself to be ruthless. Apparently, I pruned just enough last year to encourage the trees to put out even more branches. Duh. This year, I am cutting way back. The goal is fewer apples and pears, but larger fruit. While I was pruning, DD#2 helped by raking up branches and debris. We were serenaded by the sound of chainsaws to the left and right because all of our neighbors are still busy cleaning up from the storm.

I am waiting for the last little bit of snow to melt in the garden and then I am going to put up a hoop over the perpetual lettuce bed in hopes of goosing the lettuce into growing a bit faster. The weather is supposed to be nice this week and cold and rainy next week. I’d rather get the outside tasks done while the sun is shining.

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While we do have a lot of food put by—plenty of beans, for sure—I wanted to stock up on the perishables that I get weekly. We shopped yesterday and got a couple of cases of beer and a case of apples for the husband. I bought dog food last week. Lila will not starve. The chickens have a two-week supply of feed. And I stocked up on whiskey:

I go through about a bottle a month making my daily whiskey sour. Dry Fly is a distillery in Spokane, but this particular batch is whiskey finished in Cold Smoke beer barrels from Kettlehouse Brewing in Missoula. It’s available locally. I love all the Dry Fly whiskeys, but this one is a special favorite.

We should not have to go to town for supplies for at least a couple of weeks.

I may not do any sewing this week while the weather is nice, but we’ll see. I have all the supplies to put together another couple of quilts. Even in quarantine, I won’t be lacking for things to keep me busy.

Calming Loops

Yesterday was beautifully bright and sunny. The high only reached 18 degrees, but that didn’t keep everyone from getting out and assessing the damage from the storm. Of course, the local bottom feeders wasted no time trying to turn this situation to their advantage. The fact that they do it under the guise of “helping” makes their behavior even more egregious.

The husband spent much of the day building slash piles. I’ll be out there later this week—after it warms up and the snow melts—raking up the debris in the yard and pruning my fruit trees. In an attempt to right the ship, I got out the quilt I basted together last week and started working on it. I thought I might try a new quilting pattern, like the leaf pattern we learned in the Angela Walters class I took last February. I was only a few inches into the pattern when I realized that I needed something easy and familiar. Machine quilting is supposed to be a calming activity, and practicing a new quilting motif was anything but.

I undid all the stitching and started over with loops:

I like loops (obviously). I’ve done them enough that the muscle memory is right there and I don’t have to think about what I am doing. I divided the quilt in half vertically, started at the bottom of one side, and worked my way back and forth from the side to the middle of the quilt and toward the top. I made it about two-thirds of the way to the top on that side before closing up shop for the night.

The top thread is Signature cotton 40wt and the bottom thread is Aurifil cotton 50wt. That’s my favorite thread combo, although I also like Aurifil 40wt thread for the top.

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Our church’s leadership team met after the service yesterday and decided to cancel worship services for the next two Sundays. I think that is the appropriate response given the current situation. (It helps that the head of our leadership team is a medical professional.) The schools—which were going to be on spring break next week anyway—are also shut down for two weeks.

When this is all over, no doubt there will be people who will say, “See, everyone overreacted and nothing happened!” without realizing that it is precisely because everyone overreacted that nothing happened. (Read that again, slowly.) The husband and I have been ridiculed and laughed at for the past 20 years because we’ve structured our lifestyle to be prepared for exactly this kind of situation. And while I have no doubt that we’re going to feel an impact, that impact will be far less than what other people may feel.

These are interesting times, that’s for sure.

March, Like a Lion

The wind started blowing around 10 a.m. Friday morning and picked up steadily throughout the day. I went into town to get a few last-minute items but made sure I was home by 3 p.m. when the High Wind Warning went into effect. I noticed that Friday’s warning was specific as to location, and that location included us. Our road runs north to south along the base of the mountains, and when we get these wind warnings, it is usually because a pressure gradient sets up over the Continental Divide and the winds come roaring down the backside of the mountains from east to west.

We’ve lived here for almost 27 years. We used to get maybe one or two of these windstorms a year. They would take out a couple of trees. Friday night’s storm was the fifth one since August and definitely the strongest one. We have lost so many trees that our neighborhood is starting to look like a meadow instead of a forest.

We lost power shortly after the local news ended at 5:30 p.m. The husband went out and fired up the generator, then went out to a call for some downed trees. I wasn’t crazy about going upstairs to sleep, so when he got back from the call, I stayed in the living room until 10:00 p.m. when we turned in for the night.

The builder of this house—who sleeps next to me every night—assured me that we were safe in bed. Just as I started to drift off, though, I heard things coming down outside. I got up and went to look out the bathroom window to make sure nothing had hit the chicken coop. We did not put any windows in the second floor gable end of our house, so I was limited to what I could see from the bathroom. The chicken coop looked intact. Just as I walked back into the bedroom, though, there came a crashing noise from the front yard. I put on my robe, went downstairs and stuffed my feet into my muck boots, and headed outside to see what had happened:

There is a concrete slab behind the old garage, between that garage and the house. Two 1000-gallon propane tanks sit on the slab, as well as a porta-potty. My kids hate that porta-potty. They were mortified when the husband bought it. It’s been there since they were in elementary school, although a year or two after we got it, the husband moved it to the concrete slab and built a nice wooden fence around the whole slab to hide it and the tanks.

The porta-potty is no more. The top of a very tall larch near the road had blown down and taken out the porta-potty, destroyed part of the fence, and shifted one of the propane tanks about 6”. The husband checked to make sure the fittings on the tanks were okay, got a bar and moved the one back into place, and pulled what debris he could out of the way. Keep in mind that the wind was still howling and we didn’t know what else was going to come down.

We came inside and I went back to bed. He went to sleep—briefly—in his recliner before the fire department got paged out for more downed trees. They were out most of the rest of the night.

It was almost 8:00 a.m. before we could assess all the damage, although he had walked the property with a flashlight to see what needed immediate attention. Interestingly, we did not have power but our rental house next door did, because of the location where the line had come down.

This is a view from our front yard looking into the woods on the south side of our property:

That woodpile is wood the husband cut up from the last batch of trees that fell.

We had trees down on the north side of our property:

And one that had fallen onto the corner of the new shop:

That tree was removed with the aid of the forklift.

I went out yesterday afternoon to survey the damage in the woods on the south side of the property. I estimate we lost 8-10 more trees out there, and all large ones, in addition to the ones that fell in earlier storms and haven’t yet been cut up:

Most came up by the roots:

But some sheared off about 20 feet up:

Elysian lost three large pines in her front yard and another several in the backyard. The front yard of her neighbor across the road took the worst of the damage—they had 30-40 pines in their yard and I would estimate that maybe a dozen thin ones are still standing.

The good news?

• Nothing fell on the house, the greenhouse, the chicken coop, or the old garage, and the one tree that clipped the new shop did very minor damage.

• We were able to keep the generator running and had power and heat.

• We have enough firewood to last us a few decades, although not all of this burns well.

• No one got hurt.

• It’s open burning until the end of March, and that will speed up cleaning up the debris.

I am sad to lose so many trees. I like living in the woods. One of the other trees that came down in the front yard damaged a couple of my pear trees. Hopefully they will recover. The rest of the fruit trees were not damaged. The one bright spot yesterday was having the two little boys here in the afternoon so their mothers could get some work done. The two of them spread their collections of Matchbox cars out on the carpet and we watched construction videos on YouTube. The electric company had the power restored by late afternoon.

At some point, I’ll have to get some larch seedlings (the Forest Service used to sell them and may still do that) and repopulate our woods with trees.

The weather is supposed to be warm and sunny again by the middle of the week. Mother Nature is a fickle creature.

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Our big fire department auction that is always held the first weekend of April has been canceled because of the coronavirus epidemic. I know what a difficult decision that was to make—this would have been the 54th (!) consecutive auction—but public safety is paramount. I only wish that churches would be more proactive about canceling services and activities, especially because churches like ours are weighted heavily toward the elderly end of the population. We’ll see who comes to church this morning. I know some people are planning not to. The other church I play for very reluctantly canceled the rest of their mid-week Lenten services and has asked people to sit apart from each other in the pews.

So . . . we continue to put one foot in front of the other and keep moving. The husband picked up six bags of potting soil for me last week. I’m going to mix in some aged manure and get seeds started this week. We’ve got some hens that are acting broody, so we’re letting them sit on eggs. Even as some activities come to a standstill, others are going full steam ahead.

Quilts, Not Clothes

One of my neighbors read my blog Tuesday morning and stopped by on her way to work to give me a whole bolt of fabric that she picked up at the thrift store. She thought I could use it for quilt backings. It’s a lovely Debbie Mumm print and it will make great backings for at least 2-3 quilts! Thank you, Rebecca!

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I’m struggling with what to write these days. I started blogging as a way to keep my MIL and my mother updated about what was happening with us and the girls. Along the way, the blog took on a life of its own and now I have readers all over the planet. I hadn’t realized until this week, though, how much of my blog post planning is driven by me saying to myself, “Oh, the husband’s mother will want to see pictures of the new hydraulic lift,” or “She’ll want to know what we’re planting in the garden this year.” It has always been easiest for me to write when I have an audience in mind, whether that’s my family or a group of knitters or sewists. Missing one of my main audience members is going to take some getting used to.

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Back when I was designing knitwear, I had to be disciplined and work on the projects I needed for the newsletter and books, even if I didn’t feel like it. Part of my resistance to monetizing my sewing (and I need to revisit that whole idea again) is because I like giving into my sewing whims. I was going to make some knit tops, but here I am working on quilts, because I’ve had a stack of fabric sitting on the cutting table:

This started as a fat quarter bundle of Pepper and Flax by Corey Yoder. I added extra prints from my stash. It’s an odd color combo of gray, yellow, and green, but somehow it works. (Most of the fabric in that pile is stash fabric; I don’t want to cut into all of the Pepper and Flax fat quarters until I’ve made a couple of blocks and confirmed that this idea works.) A quilt idea has been percolating in the back of my mind for a couple of weeks now, ever since I saw the Half and Half Quilt from Missouri Star Quilt Company. That quilt design is comprised of one block, but the block is done as a positive and a negative and the two alternate. If you watch the video, you’ll see that Jenny Doan makes the blocks using half-square triangles. That is fast and effective, but it results in a lot of extra seams, especially through the center of the block. I want to make the block using flying geese units and squares, instead. I’m going to use a combination of the print fabrics and Kona White. I have some Kona White remnants, but white is tricky enough to match that  I want it all to come from the same cut of fabric. I picked up a couple of yards of Kona White at Joanns.

I’m cutting the squares needed to make the flying geese using Eleanor Burns’ method and her specialty ruler. I used this method to make a quilt composed entirely of flying geese units a few years ago and it worked out very well. I find it easier to cut and sew larger pieces of fabric and then cut them down to size, rather than sewing smaller pieces of fabric into bigger units. And this method makes four flying geese units at once, so I feel very efficient using it, even though I have long suspected that the various methods take the same amount of time.

This may end up being this year’s Ritzville quilt. I thought I might take a year off—and I’m getting down to the wire for making something before the summer rush starts—but if it works out, I could donate it to the sale. It might have to be machine quilted, though. And it will be smaller than a king size.

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The special hydraulic fluid for the lift arrived yesterday. I am curious to see this machine in action. It looks fairly unassuming right now (and I am not sure he’s done assembling it yet):

I’ll get a picture with a vehicle on it at some point.

Basting a Quilt

We are supposed to get a winter storm this weekend, although I don’t think it’s going to be snow as much as plummeting temperatures and wind. In preparation for being stuck inside on Saturday (so much for my plan to prune fruit trees), I got a top ready for machine quilting:

Our bedroom is big enough that if I move Vittorio’s cabinet out of the way, I can lay out a full-sized quilt for basting. I had to stand on the bed to take this picture. This is a Candy Coated scrap quilt, my go-to pattern for using up excess fabric. The backing came from Joanns during one of their big clearance sales.

Some people like to tape down the backing to stretch it out and avoid wrinkles, but I’ve found that our carpeting is “sticky” enough that I don’t need it. Once I got all the layers situated, I crawled over the quilt and put in basting pins every 4” or so, then rolled the whole thing up like a burrito for safekeeping until this weekend. I think this will be a good quilt on which to practice some new quilting designs. It’s so busy that no one will be able to see if I screw up.

I’ve got a couple more quilt tops to prep, but I need some more backing fabric. I’ll stop at Joanns this week and hit up the clearance rack.

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I sewed the handles on the Kit Supply Tote and it has been put into service. I think I’m going to work on some knit tops next. I’ve gotten hooked on The Last Stitch YouTube channel—Johanna Lundstrom lives in Sweden and is the author of the book Master the Coverstitch Machine. I have learned so much about working with knits from her book and her videos. It’s time to put theory into practice.

The husband got most of the lift assembled on Sunday—I’ll get pictures soon—but had to order some hydraulic fluid for it.

And I am still wondering where all the other transcriptionists went . . . when I logged in yesterday morning, we had over 700 minutes in the queue, with reports from the beginning of last week waiting to be done. I did 100 minutes again yesterday. We’ll see if they brought in reinforcements overnight. The husband noted that work-at-home jobs ought to be in high demand now because of the coronavirus situation, but we were all told that medical transcription was a dying industry and I think there are a lot fewer of us out there now.

I Made a Thing

Some people procrastinate by crafting instead of cleaning. I’ve been procrastinating by cleaning* instead of crafting. The reason for that is complicated and can be blamed on the time of year, sadness, a lack of focus, the influx of my MIL’s sewing supplies, and an avalanche of scraps needing to be dealt with, but the upshot was that I have been moving a lot of things around and not actually making anything. That needed to change, so yesterday morning, I pulled out the Kit Supply Tote pattern from Aneela Hoey. She just released this a few weeks ago. It looked like a quick, easy make. I went stash shopping and came up with this combination:

The exterior is an old Cotton + Steel print; I was waffling between that and some Robert Kaufman Essex Linen, but in the end, I decided I wanted a print, not a solid. The black and white print is from Joann Fabrics. Honestly, I ought to buy a bolt of that in every color they sell because it’s such a useful print. I think that was my last remnant of it. I wanted the pink polka dot for a pop of color on the inside slip pockets. I also thought I was being clever because I had that pink 12” zipper in my supply, but it is not a separating zipper. Arrgggh.

[Zippers are my nemesis. Finding the correct zipper for a project is like hunting unicorns. If it’s the right length, it’s the wrong color. If it’s the right color, it doesn’t separate. If it separates, it’s plastic, not metal, or vice-versa. I have three—count ‘em, three—plastic bins full of zippers because I am so tired of projects coming to a screaming halt because I have to stop and order a specialty zipper. I really appreciate the designers who either carry the zippers for their projects in their online stores or, at the very least, give supplier information in the body of the pattern.]

This is a quick make for a bag, although I found myself scratching my head a couple of times. Hoey uses the abbreviations RSO and WSO for “right side out” and “wrong side out.” I am far more used to the abbreviations RST and WST for “right sides together” and “wrong sides together,” so when I saw RSO and WSO, I had to stop and think hard about what I was doing. I’m not sure if that’s a British convention with which I am unfamiliar or if it’s something unique to her pattern writing.

And that spawned a lively discussion over dinner. The husband wanted to know why fabric had a “right” and a “wrong” side instead of a “front” side and a “back” side. We spent 15 minutes going back and forth and I couldn’t come up with a better reason than “It’s always been called that,” which is a lousy explanation but the only one I have. I did sometimes use “public” and “private” side when discussing knitting.

Back to the bag . . . I loved the fact that Hoey included specific, smaller cutting measurements for the interfacing and fusible fleece that accounted for keeping them out of the seams to reduce bulk. The majority of designers specify to cut the interfacing/fleece the same size as the fabric and it’s up to the sewist to remember to remove the excess before fusing. Do I remember? No.

The whole project came together fairly quickly:

However, as I was doing the topstitching on my industrial Necchi, which is in my office with the overhead LED lighting, I discovered that the 12” separating zipper I ended up using was actually navy blue, not black, but then I realized that the dark accent on the exterior fabric was also navy blue, not black. (Note to self: You need better lighting upstairs.) The inside print should have been navy blue as well, not black and white, but finished is better than perfect:

I cut a piece of heavy template plastic to size and inserted it into the base for some extra reinforcement before hand-sewing the opening closed.

I still need to sew on the handles. I think this is a very useful tote design, though, and will be great for hauling around my embroidery projects. I made the small size; the larger size uses a 14” zipper and Hoey notes that with longer webbing handles, the larger size makes a nice over-the-shoulder bag.

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About that cleaning thing . . . I went to the east coast and visited houses that looked like models out of a magazine—not festooned with dirt, dog hair, and straw—and felt like a failure of a housekeeper when I came home. Yesterday morning, as he was getting ready to leave to go work on a job, the husband asked me to wash his fluorescent yellow hoodie (one of two that he rotates) while he was gone. He took the gloves out of the pocket and turned it upside down to zip it up before putting it in the washer, and a whole bunch of dirt, concrete, and rocks rained down onto the laundry room floor. I am not a bad housekeeper. I just have three times the amount of dirt to contend with as people who have office jobs and don’t raise livestock.

It is what it is and I am not complaining; I simply need to be a bit kinder to myself about the state of my house. I refuse to expend the amount of time and energy it would require to make it look like something out of a magazine and that is okay, although it does need a good spring cleaning every year.

Cancelling March

My sister-in-law announced that she was cancelling March and I wholeheartedly endorse that idea. I am beginning to think we should cancel all of 2020, except that we have a wedding this year and we certainly don’t want to cancel that. The husband’s father, who lives in Colorado, ended up in the hospital this week and while it seems to have been a relatively mild event, that was not news we were anticipating.

Montana has largely been untouched by the coronavirus panic, although both my girls are in Seattle and their dispatches from what have become the front lines of this situation have been unsettling. DD#2 tells me that several stores have run out of basic supplies like beans, chicken stock, and—of course—toilet paper. The mall where she works as an assistant manager at Nordstrom is deserted and some employees have been furloughed. I have discovered, strangely enough, that my kids were listening to my sermons when they were growing up, because apparently DD#1 told her co-workers that I always used to say, “‘Panic will kill you when nothing else wants to.” (I lifted that line from the book Rhapsody, by Elizabeth Haydon.) And the husband always says that it’s the stuff you don’t see coming that ultimately gets you.

No kidding.

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The lift arrived Thurday morning and the husband unloaded it (that forklift was the best money we have ever spent on a piece of equipment, hands down):

At first, I didn’t think it was very impressive, but then I realized that there are several boxes tucked in underneath the plastic that are holding other components:

The lift is now in the new shop waiting for the husband to find time to put it together. It’s too bad he didn’t have it two weeks ago when I was in Maryland, because he had to replace the front brakes on the BMW while I was gone.

I did several long days at work this week as I think I was the only transcriptionist for part of that time. I can see how many jobs are in the queue and how quickly they get done and the count wasn’t going down as fast as it does when several of us are working. I don’t mind the extra work (or money), but I don’t like sitting for long periods of time. I want to be up and moving around, especially now that the weather is getting nice again.

Today, though, is supposed to be rainy and cold. I was disciplined and dealt with the tax stuff this week and started my spring cleaning, so I am going to treat myself with a day of sewing. I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to work on; it will be something from my priority list or maybe several somethings, depending on how productive I am.

Legacies

While I was in Maryland last week, I spent several hours collecting and packing up family keepsakes to send back here to Montana. My father-in-law, who is actually the husband’s stepfather, will move to assisted living eventually and won’t have room for everything.

I already have the quilts made by the husband’s grandmother; his mother sent them to me many years ago. One of the Very Important Items, though—important enough that my MIL had left written directions as to its whereabouts and disposition—was the bunad, or traditional Norwegian dress, that belonged to the husband’s grandmother. Here is Grandma Milly in 1983 wearing it:

The bunad has always been earmarked to go to DD#1. That seems especially appropriate now because DD#1’s fiancé’s family is of Norwegian descent and his sister is actually in Norway now studying for her master’s degree. One of the husband’s uncles helpfully provided the information that this bunad was made (sewn and embroidered) by Milly's cousin in Norway.

One closet in my MIL’s office was filled with sewing and craft supplies. That all got sent here. I now have enough thread and buttons to last me at least 30 years. I also found a huge box full of these:

For the last dozen years or so, my MIL had been knitting “Guidepost sweaters”—simple sweaters to send to children around the world. This was a program started by Guidepost Magazine in 1996. It has since been taken over and administered by World Vision and is now called Knits for Kids. I knew she had been making these sweaters because we had had several discussions about how much she disliked sewing them together (even though there is only one seam underneath each sleeve). I found a dozen finished sweaters and another three or four that need to be sewn; I’ll complete everything and send them on.

And this made me laugh:

When we got married, I received a recipe card box with all of the husband’s family’s recipes in it. The recipe for Mrs. Tidings Curried Chicken Broccoli was three cards long, stapled together, and included the entire history of the evolution of that dish into something that no longer resembles the original. Apparently some family members disliked broccoli, so the broccoli morphed into French-style green beans, the American cheese was changed to cheddar, the bread crumbs became crushed Ritz crackers, etc. The whole thing became something of a family joke. I ran across this—which is the original, unadulterated recipe—in my MIL’s office. I am going to put it with the copy I have.

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I pushed through and got all the tax stuff for the construction company sorted and organized yesterday. (I really want it out of my fabric room.) I keep all the financials in Quickbooks but there are hard copies of invoices and material lists in case we ever need to refer back to a particular job. Now all that’s left is for me to go through and organize our personal records for itemized deductions. The job does seem a bit simpler this year now that we no longer have dependents and those associated expenses.

And the dentist said my tooth still has enough integrity that I can avoid getting a crown for a while. That was welcome news.

The big excitement is that the hydraulic lift is being delivered today! I plan to take lots of pictures. Stay tuned.

And We Go On

My mother-in-law passed away Monday night. She was an amazing woman. One of her superpowers was her ability to manage a crisis. She would step in, do what needed to be done, and deal with the fallout later. I hear her voice in my head telling me that we need to keep moving, and so we shall.

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We have reached that time of the year that I refer to—even in times of relative calm, which this certainly has not been—as the point at which all hell breaks loose. Besides March being the month of building seawalls on Flathead Lake, it is also the time when general contractors begin jockeying to get on the husband’s pouring schedule. This has been an exceptionally mild winter, so building season is ramping up even earlier than usual. And he needs more help, so I re-posted the Craigslist ad yesterday.

I picked up a chick schedule from the farm store the other day. We need to get our flock under control. I said to the husband that I am kicking around the idea of skipping chicks this year and seeing how many babies our hens will raise on their own. The new rooster seems to be doing a good job of getting on the hens. We had hens go broody (repeatedly) last year, but I think that the old rooster wasn’t doing his part.

I am still thinking on this. Having the hens raise chicks is infinitely easier than getting babies and keeping them in the brooder for two months. And at some point, we need to order piglets.

I called our accountant before I left and asked him to file extensions for us this year. I don’t like to do that as I pride myself on being organized enough that we file our returns on or before the due date, but I needed the breathing room. The only other time we’ve done that was two years ago when I was sick. I am about halfway through getting everything compiled and ready to take in to him. My workspace for that project is in my fabric room, so I’m motivated to get it done and out of the way.

I have a dentist appointment today and at some point in the near future, I’m going to need to get a crown on one of my molars. The dentist has been watching that tooth for years. It has a crack in it and is basically being held together by the filling. I’ve noticed some sensitivity in that area lately, which she said would be the trigger for doing the crown. Yay.

This weekend is the Free the Seeds event at the community college. This is the fifth year and it continues to grow. My friend Susan is doing a workshop this year on “Getting Started with Fruit Trees.”

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One of my tasks for this week is to prioritize my sewing projects. I’ve got clothing, quilting, and miscellaneous sewing projects stacked up.

Clothing:

• A couple of basic T-shirts using the Rhapso-T pattern from SewHere.com.

• A few more tops using the Nancy Raglan pattern from 5 Out of 4 Patterns; the first ones I made are getting a lot of use.

• At least a prototype of the pattern I copied from that Gap knit dress.

Quilting:

• I think I have three tops that need to be basted and machine quilted. That number might be higher. I’ll have to check.

• A few sessions with the Studio cutter to get pieces for future MCC comforters cut out and ready to go.

• Finish up the scrap quilts I have in progress and add them to the “to be quilted” pile.

Miscellaneous:

• I need a bag for spring and summer. I see that AL Frances Textiles has been adding new colors of waxed canvas to their Etsy shop. I’ll either make the new Hillside Tote from Noodlehead or an upsized Metro Hipster from Betz White.

• Aneela Hoey has two new patterns out that I want to make, because I need some totes and organizers to hold my embroidery projects. I’ve got the patterns for both the Flip Pocket Folio and the Kit Supply Tote.

• Those embroidery projects . . . the days are getting longer and I will have less time to sit in the evening and work on them.

• A prayer shawl or two; our supply at church is running low.

• The blanket strip project I signed up for that has a deadline coming up—that is currently at the top of my work pile as I need to get it finished and sent off this week.

• My Maryland apron. I got the appliqué put together Monday afternoon. Now it needs to be stitched and the apron assembled.

I have no shortage of jobs to keep me busy. And the house needs a good, thorough spring cleaning.

Just for fun (because I have nothing else at the moment), here is a picture of our original Buff Orpington rooster from several years ago. Baby, the current Buff Orpington rooster, looks very similar:

Such personalities.