The Seasons March On

Happy Easter! Our congregation will be celebrating together via Zoom this morning. The pastor and I did a trial run on Friday to ensure that having the piano prelude streamed from my living room would work. I can safely say this will be a first, as are many things this year.

I am cautiously optimistic that yesterday’s snow and windstorm will be the last of this season, although this is Montana and I know better than to pin my hopes on the weather. (We had snow on June 10 one year. I had to cover all of my tomato seedlings with coffee cans.) Events like yesterday’s storm bring everything to a standstill, and even though it’s only temporary, it is frustrating. I spent the day with a grumpy bear who could not get any of his outside projects done.

We ended up leaving the seedlings in the greenhouse. The husband got up in the wee hours yesterday and today to go out and make sure everything was okay. I took the row cover off the hoops Friday afternoon so the fabric wouldn’t be destroyed by the wind. He laid an old concrete blanket over the lettuce seedlings yesterday to protect them from the projected 15-degree overnight temperature. Those old concrete blankets get a lot of use in the garden. They’re invaluable for keeping the tomatoes going through the end of September.

Fortunately, this windstorm was not strong enough to take down any more trees, nor did we lose power. I made a batch of masks in the morning and then worked on the latest Candy Coated quilt all afternoon. I hadn’t planned to finish this one so soon, but it was all basted together and waiting. I did an overall loop pattern on the last Candy Coated, but this version is slightly bigger (ending up at 72” x 80” because I made the individual rows longer). I didn’t feel like wrestling it through the machine to quilt an overall design. I decided straight lines with the walking foot would be easier and faster.

Blue painter’s tape is a good thing to have in the sewing room. I used it to make a diagonal line from corner to corner:

I quilted alongside that line, tore off the tape, then used the guide bar on my machine to follow the first line and quilt additional lines 2” apart. Finding a suitable thread color took a bit of doing—for some reason, I still do not have a cone of beige 40wt thread. I pulled out lengths of white, pale yellow, and brown and laid them on top of the quilt. The white was too bright. The brown was too dark. The pale yellow ended up working perfectly.

This is the backing:

It is a Juliana Horner print from several years ago. Juliana is the daughter of fabric designer Anna Maria Horner and a talented artist in her own right. She designed a line of fabric for Joanns that was delightfully quirky and I bought up everything I could get my hands on. I’ve got chunks of various prints in the stash. This was one five yards long. I used a bit more than four yards and have enough left for an apron. I may gift this Candy Coated quilt to someone, so I was willing to use up some of my more special (to me) fabric. Also, this print looked cheerful and spring-like.

[I know a lot of sewists refuse to buy fabric at Joanns because they believe it to be of inferior quality than that of quilt store cottons. I am all for supporting local fabric stores and I am greeted by name whenever I walk into either of the two quilt stores in Kalispell. During my recent stash dives to find fabric for masks, however, I pulled out some prints from fabric companies that only sell through independent quilt stores and was dismayed to discover that they were of lesser quality (thinner) and only 40” wide instead of 42”-44”. I don’t think that “chain stores carry inferior fabric” is a strong correlation to make. This Juliana Horner print is a quality fabric with a beautiful hand. I never had much use for yarn snobs (Lion Brand Lion Wool was a wonderful yarn and only available at Joanns and Michaels) and I have little use for fabric snobs, either.]

The bobbin thread is a mint green 50wt Aurifil that blends in nicely with the Juliana Horner print. I got all of the diagonal lines quilted in one direction yesterday. The husband wants to plant potatoes this afternoon, so I may not get to work on this again today, but it’s only going to require a few more hours’ worth of work to quilt lines in the other direction. And making this quilt put a significant dent in the scrap bag.

The weather is supposed to improve this week. The corn seedlings are going to outgrow their pots soon, so I’m planning to build more hoops and get them and perhaps the cowpeas out into the garden. Oh, and we had another earthquake yesterday. This one was only 3.3—I didn’t feel it—but the epicenter was only 30-ish miles away. I was very surprised to see the notification pop up on my phone.

Not Made in China

When DD#2 was home for a visit a couple of weeks ago, she helpfully took charge of the downstairs bathroom renovation. Our house is 24 years old. At the time the husband built it, we were under some fairly tight budgetary constraints. Those were also pre-Internet ordering days, so I was limited to what I could buy from local hardware stores, which were not known for having a vast selection. Although my house will never be one to grace the pages of a decorating magazine, some things do need updating. That has been a mixed success.

If nothing else comes out of this coranavirus situation, I sincerely hope that we will stop outsourcing all of our manufacturing. I would be willing to pay more and/or forego purchasing items just so I don’t have to shell out money for trash. Case in point:

I bought a new towel bar and toilet paper holder for the downstairs bathroom. The husband helpfully installed them for me the other evening.* This is driving me absolutely bonkers. The quality control supervisor must have been taking a nap when this came out of the factory. And yes, it was made in China.

[How hard is it to measure something this simple?!?!?!??!]

I need to point out here that I live in a farmhouse-style house with oak trim. I am aware that that is not the current trend in home decorating, but I am not going to shell out tens of thousands of dollars to make it look like something out of an IKEA showroom. I love my farmhouse-style house with oak trim. I do not really want metal accessories in my bathroom. I inhabit that narrow demographic—characterized by women who want to drive stick-shift diesel station wagons—where my choices are severely limited. There are thousands of metal toilet paper holders out there and one or two wood ones. DD#2—who works in retail and is a notorious power shopper—scoured every supplier’s website she could think of and couldn’t come up with anything else.

[* I am not opposed to home improvement projects, but this is how these things typically go: I ordered a new towel bar. The husband is working 18 hours a day. I hate to bother him with simple projects and there was no reason I couldn’t install this myself, considering that I was just putting the new one in the same place the old one had been. I took the towel bar out of the package and did a quick dry fit, only to discover that the old towel bar was 22” long and the new one was 24” long. After two decades, I cannot remember whether the original one was 22” long when we purchased it or if the husband cut it down when he installed it. (Based on the location of the brackets, I think it was the latter.) Could I have cut the new one down? Sure, after I hiked out to the new shop and spent half an hour trying to figure out where the husband keeps his collection of saws. I gave up and just asked him to handle it. He did the whole installation in a couple of minutes. This is no different than him handing me a hoodie and asking me to replace the zipper. He’s smart enough to figure that out himself, given enough time, but it’s far more efficient for him to ask me to do it than to waste time going up that learning curve. Our division of labor, sexist and outdated as it may seem to some people, works for us.]

The husband said he could move the bracket on the left side up so that the roller is level, but then the fact that the brackets are not level with each other is going to drive me nuts. Arrrgggh.

I have given myself a stern talking-to this week. I like fabric, and let’s be totally honest— I like to collect fabric. Part of the reason my fabric collection is so vast is because most of it is produced overseas and produced relatively cheaply. Ma Ingalls no doubt would be horrified at the utterly wasteful concept of “fussy cutting” fabric to use small portions of yardage. I am not entirely sure how to change this—it is not always as simple as finding an American supplier for something—but it is something that I need to address. And I hope it’s a larger lesson to come out of this whole mess. I think I need to leave that toilet paper holder as it is so it serves as a good reminder.

Sewing Math is Fun

My mother has been utilizing her quarantine time to deep clean her house, and she sent me a box of stuff that included these two gems:

The prices are interesting. The pattern on the left cost $0.45. The one on the right cost $4.75. Patterns are typically priced in the $15-$25 range nowadays, although everyone usually just waits until they go on sale for $1.99 each (or $5.99 each for Vogue patterns) at Joanns. I’ve almost completely stopped buying Big 4 patterns and am sewing as much as I can from indie pattern designers. I got tired of the lousy instructions and illustrations in the Big 4 patterns. Indie patterns also usually include a file that can be printed on large-format paper at the blueprint store. I use that as a master and trace my working pattern from it.

I love the 5 out of 4 Nancy Raglan pattern, and yesterday morning, I cut out pieces for the Knot Your Average Shirt pattern. Knot-style tops are very flattering on me, which of course means that they have gone completely out of fashion. They are almost as hard to find as 100% cotton high-rise jeans. I am testing the Knot Your Average Shirt pattern out of a remnant from the stash. Not only do the pattern pieces require some mental gymnastics for the construction, they also need to be coverstitched before assembly. I am letting the instructions marinate a bit inside my head before I try sewing it together.

The huge infusion of scraps from mask-making has given me the opportunity to finish Yet Another Candy Coated quilt top. (I think this must be #5 or #6.) Unlike the low-volume one I just finished binding, this one features bright colors. I had about half of it done when I ran out of scraps a few months ago. I’ve been working on it in the evenings when I don’t have the mental energy for anything else.

There are a variety of scrap management systems out there. Mine looks like this:

1. Maximize the initial cutting to get as much out of the fabric as possible.

2. Cut leftovers into 5” squares (I love my Studio cutter with the 5” square die!)

3. Cut anything narrower than 5” into 2-1/2” strips. Those can also be subcut into 2-1/2” squares.

4. Add remaining strips to scrap bag for Candy Coated quilts.

That’s the system that seems to work for me based on how I’m using up scraps. Your mileage may vary.

I did make one change to the Candy Coated quilt pattern. The finished quilt in the pattern measures 88” long. It is constructed using rows of varying heights from 3-1/2” to 10-1/2”. I took out one of the 8” rows to make the final top measure 80” instead of 88”. I did that because a quilt top that measures 60” x 80” (or 64” x 80”) only requires four yards for a backing. Four yards cut in half across the width and sewn together along the long edges yields a backing that measures about 72” x 88”. The backing needs to be slightly bigger than the top, so a 72” x 88” backing works great for a 60” by 80” quilt. It’s too short for a quilt that is 88” long. For that, I would have to use five yards of fabric. You wouldn’t think that extra yard would make that much of a difference, but because I try to buy clearance fabric for the backings of the quilts I donate, it really does. By the time a bolt of fabric—which starts out with 10 yards—gets to the clearance rack, finding one that still has five yards on it is next to impossible.

I’ve got four tops now that need to be quilted. I might be doing some this weekend. We’re supposed to get another storm, although the wind is forecast to be strongest beginning Saturday morning. That means we’ll get to watch trees falling over during daylight hours. I am going to move the seed trays out of the greenhouse today. The seedlings are going wait out the storm in the back of my station wagon inside the old garage. With the way 2020 has been going, I don’t want to take a chance that a tree falls on the greenhouse and destroys my seedlings or that the heater goes out and the seedlings freeze to death (or both).

I’ve decided to re-create the herb garden in the back of the big garden by the strawberry bed. Our garden is basically one very large rectangle with another, smaller rectangle tacked on at the west end. We put the strawberries in that small rectangle, but they didn’t fill in the area like I had hoped they would. (Plants do what they want.) Most of the plants are concentrated at the far west end of the bed. I am leaving those there, digging up the stragglers and giving them to friends, and putting the herbs in the rest of that area. I dragged over a piece of plastic yesterday to cover that spot and kill the quackgrass and one very stubborn Oregon Grape bush. If I don’t do it now, I’ll be fighting those weeds forever.

I Hate Rodents

Forget that “all creatures great and small” nonsense—rodents are the bane of my gardening existence. I hate them. If it isn’t mice trying to eat up my pantry stores or ground squirrels munching on tiny seedlings, it will be voles snacking their way through a bed of Jerusalem artichokes or destroying my echinaceas. Really, there are days when I think that nuclear weapons are a reasonable option in this war.

The weather has improved considerably, although we’re supposed to get another snow/windstorm this weekend, sigh. I headed out to the herb garden yesterday to do some cleanup but stopped short when I saw this mess in the yard outside the garden fence:

Those are vole tunnels. And they go right into the herb garden, where there is even more carnage. The echinaceas and hyssop are almost totally gone. Two currant bush starts Cathy gave me are missing. There are no columbines (I had quite a few). Even the hops vine, which has been there for 20+ years and has a root system some of the pine trees would envy, had significant damage. Apparently, the lavender and sage are not as tasty, because they survived with only minor gnawing. I think the bee balms are okay.

It’s a mess.

I was grumpy about this all day. The herb garden needed some work this year, but at this point, it would be faster to tear it all back and start over. I had planned to move many of the plants over to the big garden anyway. When the husband got home, he came over to assess the damage with me. After a few minutes, he said, “We could just extend the chicken yard into that spot and give the chickens more room to run around.”

[I have long suspected that the husband spends a lot of his time trying to stay three steps ahead of me, which is highly annoying but also very admirable considering that my brain is on overdrive most of the time. I alternate between being delighted with his ideas and irritated that I didn’t come up with them myself.]

It’s an elegant solution. The chicken yard is only about three feet from the west end of the herb garden fence and it wouldn’t take much to connect the two spaces. Expanding it would triple the size of the chicken yard. And it would eliminate the vole problem.

I’m going to dig out the plants that are left and move them over to the big garden. We’ll have to take down a couple of beds in the old veggie garden and figure out how to get rid of the huge, annoying comfrey plant that is trying to take over the world—that one is not getting moved over to the big garden—but this should be a relatively straightforward process.

I do need to spend some time out in the big garden today figuring out where I want to put the various plants. On the one hand, it’s been nice to have all my herbs and flowers in one spot close to the house. On the other, I really want more polyculture out in the big garden. Having herbs interspersed here and there is one way to make that happen, as long as I mark them well so they don’t get plowed under.

If any of my Kalispell peeps want lavender plants, let me know this week.

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I ordered an incubator yesterday. Thanks to all of the people who panicked and have decided to become instant homesteaders (good luck with that, by the way), there are no chicks to be found in Kalispell. Stores are still getting shipments, but they can’t say when and they won’t reserve any. Getting a batch of chicks would mean going to one of the farm stores and camping out until the delivery truck arrives and I am not going to do that.

I got a nice plastic incubator with an automatic egg turner and temperature and humidity alarms. It will hold three dozen eggs. This is something we have needed to do for a while and we might as well start now. Baby—the husband refers to him as “Todd,” after the guy we got him from because he doesn’t think Baby is a suitable name for a rooster—seems to be doing a good job with the hens. I do wish a few of them would go broody and hatch out their own chicks. The one I thought was going broody last week was just having a bad day, apparently.

While I was out working in the garden yesterday, I took a break to go play the chickens’ favorite game with them, Mining for Earthworms. I dug up a few that were as thick around as my pinkie finger. The chicken that manages to snag a big worm then runs around being chased by the other hens until she has a chance to stop and gulp it down. It’s pretty entertaining and the chickens like the addition to their diet.

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Mask sewing continues. I have a system set up. My Janome is positioned so that I can see the TV in our bedroom and I’ve been watching the excellent YouTube quilting tutorials put out by Jordan Fabrics, in Grants Pass, Oregon. When this is all over and I can take a road trip again, it would be fun to drive through central Oregon and stop in Sisters, at the big quilt store there, and go to Jordan Fabrics. (Tera?) The first road trip I plan to take, though, is to see my kids.

Growth

Cathy lives down in the valley. Her garden runs about two weeks ahead of mine, so when she posts pictures on Facebook—say, of her rhubarb or currants—I know to start watching for mine. It’s about time for my rhubarb to pop up. I went looking yesterday:

I have three rhubarb plants. This is a tiny one that Elysian gave me last year:

And this is one of the larger, established ones:

Signs of life! While I was checking the rhubarb, I also found a clump of garden sorrel:

At one time, there was a whole row of this, but over the years, most of it succumbed to the husband’s overly enthusiastic weeding, lawnmowing, and/or roto-tilling. (I have learned that if there is a plant I don’t want destroyed, I need to mark it with some kind of eye-catching flagging.) Honestly, though, I don’t need much more than one plant. The leaves have a lemony taste and are good in salads in small amounts.

The chives are up, too, but I didn’t get a picture.

I started seeds yesterday for broccoli, zucchini, watermelons, and cantaloupe. All of the other seeds have germinated. I am optimistic about the cowpea crop and curious to see which variety does the best. The husband says we have plenty of PVC pipe, rebar, and row cover, so I should be set for hoops if I need them.

He got the brooder box set up in the chicken coop last night. I’ll start checking with the farm store today to see if I can get some chicks.

I really can’t do much more in the big garden. If the weather is as nice as it’s predicted to be, I’ll probably work on the herb garden this week.

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One of my Facebook friends noted that she’s been cutting up so much fabric for masks that she’ll be able to make a COVID-19 commemorative scrap quilt when this is all over. Here, too, the scrap bags overfloweth (again).

I finished the binding on the latest Candy Coated quilt last night:

That pale turquoise houndstooth is the backing. I had a heck of a time finding a binding color that worked with that print. I the end, I went with some navy Kona. This will get added to the pile to donate to the relief sale in Ritzville next fall.

I also put together another MDS comforter for tying whenever our sewing group is able to meet at church again. We had cut out parts for seven comforters back in January—for the big comforter-tying party, which seems like a lifetime ago—and only finished five of them. The other two have been in my sewing room waiting for me to assemble them. I’ll do the second one today.

And I think I have figured out what is going on with those positive/negative quilt blocks, but that will have to wait for another blog post.

Quilt Blocks and Calves

I went totally into the weeds with the positive/negative quilt project. The whole thing started with a fat quarter bundle of ten prints from the Pepper and Flax line by Corey Yoder, bought at the quilt store in Spokane. Ten fat quarters—eight, really, because two of them didn’t provide enough contrast with the white background—were not enough for a decent-sized quilt. The store in Spokane probably still has bolts of of that line, but given the current state of things, it’s not likely I can get more from them. I went stash diving and pulled up some coordinating prints and started churning out blocks.

I’ve long maintained that I don’t like quilts made solely out of one fabric line, because they tend to be too matchy-matchy. I like the occasional rogue fabric tossed in to liven things up. It’s possible I may have gone overboard with the rogue fabrics on this one, though. The finished blocks went up on my design wall and I liked what I was seeing. However, at some point, the blocks started arguing with each other. In particular, there were two different yellows that didn’t want to play nicely together. One is a cool lemon yellow and the other is a brighter, warmer yellow. Even when separated by quite a distance, they continued to yell at each other. And once that brawl started, it upset the overall balance of the entire quilt.

At the moment, the whole project is in time out. I have the blocks separated into two piles. One pile is made up of only Pepper and Flax prints. I was able to find two more prints in that fabric line from an online store, and if I am careful, I might be able to get enough blocks for at least a lap-sized quilt. It looks so matchy-matchy to me, though. The other pile has the blocks made from stash fabric. I have enough of those to make a second quilt, but even though the color combination is similar to the Pepper and Flax line, it seems rather flat to me.

At this point, I’m leaning toward making as many blocks out of the Pepper and Flax fabric as I can and filling in—judiciously—with a few blocks from the stash block pile. That pile includes one print that really helped jazz things up quite a bit. Once I get one quilt done, I’ll look at the blocks I have left over and decide what to do with those. I may have to jettison those lemon yellow blocks and make them into a wall hanging instead of a quilt.

The husband observed that if this were 1880, I’d be sewing every scrap of fabric I could get my hands on into a quilt without regard to what color it was. Point taken.

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It snowed all weekend; I think we got more snow in the first four days of April than we had in all of February and March combined. I’ve lived in Montana for 27 years—long enough to know better—but I am still baffled as to why we have winter in the spring instead of the winter. I have to content myself with going out to the greenhouse and talking to the seedlings. A second variety of cowpeas has come up, as did the cucumbers and most of the tomatoes. I mixed aged manure into the potting soil when I planted seeds, and the corn looks like I planted it in nuclear waste. Some of the plants are 3” tall already. I may have to put the corn out a bit earlier than planned and put hoops over it.

I was thinking about skipping chicks this year, but the husband still wants to get a dozen or so. The problem is getting them from the farm store. We are hearing about shortages because so many people have decided to take up homesteading. And we never know when the farm store will get in a shipment of chicks. In a normal year, I’d just stop in every couple of days to see what they have. I don’t want to go out until I have to, though, so I am going to have to call them every day and hope my timing is good. I can’t be as picky about breed this year, either. I may have to take whatever egg-laying breed is available.

The alternative strategy is to wait a few months until all the people who got chicks thinking they wanted to be homesteaders change their minds and want to get rid of them.

The weather is supposed to warm up this week—”warm” being 50 degrees instead of 18 degrees. I still have to start melon and zucchini seeds and I have a bag of sprouting potatoes that need to be planted.

Cathy’s Dexter cows have started dropping their calves. The first one to show up was this adorable little bull calf (picture taken before it snowed):

His mama is such a pretty red color. It will be interesting to see if his color changes as he gets older.

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.