The Circle Series

My mother-in-law, Mala Burt, had many different careers in her life—jewelry-maker, family therapist, travel agent—but she spent much of her retirement time writing. Together with her writing partner, Laura Ambler, she created the play The Santa Diaries, which has been produced and put on by community theatre groups in Indiana, Minnesota, Maine, Tennessee, and Maryland. She also wrote a romance novel trilogy set on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, where she and my father-in-law had a vacation home for 15 years. She published the first two books (Circle of Secrets, Circle of Magic) several years ago and had just finished the third one, Circle of Spirits, at the time of her death in March.

Laura Ambler has honored Mala’s request to complete the publication of the third book. It is available as an e-book on Amazon for $0.99, along with the two original books in the series. All three are to be published in hard copy, as well. If you are longing for a tropical escape, this might be the series that takes you there! (The husband and I spent a week in St. Lucia and I went there again with the girls and my in-laws in 2005. It is a magical place.)

Here are the links to the books:

Book 3: Circle of Spirits 

Book 2: Circle of Magic 

Book 1: Circle of Secrets 

If you enjoy them, please leave a review at Amazon or Goodreads. Thanks!

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A couple of lines of storms came through yesterday bringing thunder, lightning, and rain. We may get a few more showers today, but then a high pressure system is supposed to move in. That will bring sunshine and warm temps, which is nice, but I’d almost rather have more rain at this point. May and June are typically our rainiest months. If we don’t get enough moisture then, we go into fire season with a severe deficit.

I am going to venture out today to pick up my Accuquilt die. The correct size finally came in at the quilt store. I paid for it when I ordered it, so they will have it waiting for me to pick up. I’m excited to try out some design ideas with this die. I’ve also got another quilt top close to being ready to assemble.

Archaeological Church Dig

Our pastor has been keeping himself busy at the church by cleaning out cabinets and organizing what he finds. A few days ago, he sent me an e-mail saying he had found some sewing stuff in the office and did I want to come look at it? (I am the current president of the Mennonite Women/sewing group so that falls under my job description.) I popped over to the church yesterday morning to see what he had unearthed. Margaret, no doubt you will recognize some of this stuff. If you—or anyone else from church—knows more about these items, let me know. For now, they are stored in the sewing room.

There were two winder-type thingies that I thought might be for reeling binding. This one has “Mennonite Central Committee” and an address on it:

Our pastor says he remembers, as a child, tearing up sheets and winding them into balls to be used as bandages. Maybe that was this object’s purpose?

The ubiquitous button tin, although this one originally held bandages and not cookies:

And quilt block templates:

I found these most intriguing as they appeared to be made from some very heavy, very coarse-grit sandpaper. Did that come from the sawmill that used to be in this area? The sandpaper would have helped keep the template from sliding around on the fabric. Nowadays, we use mostly rotary cutters, rulers, and mats to cut quilt blocks. This is old-school quilting, for sure.

Also in the box of items were two bags, one containing packages of bias tape—and some 1/4” elastic—and one containing short lengths of ribbon. Arlene Johnson, there was a book with your name on it with some designs I suspect may have been used for appliqué. If you would like it back, let me know, although after this long, you may not be missing it, LOL.

The pastor tells me there is another box with Mennonite Women records dating back to the 1950s in it. I will get that out one of these days and sort through it.

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It’s been raining steadily since last evening and that is a welcome sound on the metal roof. I can’t work outside today, so I am going to cook down a couple of chickens for stock and attack some paperwork. My supervisor from my medical transcription job e-mailed me yesterday with an update. Apparently, one of the doctors is leaving the clinic and another one is retiring at the end of the month. The two of them made up about 40% of the work in the queue. She wanted me to know that the clinic probably wouldn’t have enough work to bring me back on board, so it appears I am retired once more. I don’t need the work, but I enjoyed it and will miss it.

I guess it’s time to make long-term plans again so that the universe can screw them up for me. That has certainly been the theme for 2020 thus far. Do I sound bitter? I’m not, really—just getting weary of the constant upheaval. I’m not lacking for tasks to keep me busy around here, but I do better with some benchmarks to aim for.

Our governor, Steve Bullock, announced phased re-openings for Montana beginning this weekend. I have no plans to rush back out into public even though I’d really like to see my kids. I can wait a few more weeks—or even a month or two—for a road trip. This is such a difficult balancing act. Montana is so dependent upon tourism that for the state to stay closed for a season would be devastating, but I hope we are not invaded by people fleeing other areas.

Dismantling the Herb Garden

I decided to deal with the herb garden by burning it down. The bed in the center is an 8’ x 8’ square. I took the pavers out of it, stacked them outside the fence, and relocated a few of the plants that I wanted to keep. Nothing ever stayed where it was supposed to in that garden, so if I need anything else, I’m sure I’ll find seedlings in the other beds. I raked all of the dead plants into the center bed and piled what was left of the rotted bed edgings (logs) on top. We’ll burn it this weekend. Except for the pile of debris in the center, the whole area looks much cleaner now. 

I did have a chocolate mint plant in that garden that I’d like to find and keep, but I am still hunting for it. 

At least one egg in the incubator has an embryo inside. I am trying not to handle the eggs unnecessarily, but I did take one out and candle it yesterday at day 7 (with two weeks to go). The incubator has 25 eggs in it. We’ll see what I get. 

We are supposed to get some significant rain today and tomorrow, which is most welcome. Stuff is catching on fire here that shouldn’t be, at least not this early. An eight-acre wildfire broke out near one of the ski resorts yesterday. 

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My order of waxed canvas from Klum House arrived yesterday:

I ordered from them because the supplier I had been buying from—AL Frances Textiles on Etsy—has become so popular that they are constantly sold out. 

I was a bit surprised at what I found when I took these out of the box. Not unhappy, just surprised. This waxed canvas is quite different from the AL Frances waxed canvas. The product specs on the Klum House website indicate that this is 100% Better Cotton Initiative certified cotton canvas sourced from Scotland and the US and waxed with a blend of petroleum jelly, mineral oil, and paraffin. It is listed as being 10-12 oz—the same as the AL Frances waxed canvas—but this is a much tighter, finer weave and the fabric does not feel quite as substantial. It is, however, quite evenly saturated with the wax. That was one of my gripes with the AL Frances waxed canvas as I had gotten a couple of pieces that weren’t waxed very thoroughly. (They use Texas beeswax on theirs.)

I’ll report back after I make a bag or two with this. 

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I’m trying very hard to give myself permission to play and experiment with some quilt ideas without always having an end product in sight. I find it odd that I am having so much trouble with this considering that I was very much a process knitter, not a product knitter. Apparently, I am a product quilter, not a process one. 

However, this quilt pattern, from the book Fresh Family Traditions, by Sherri McConnell, has been driving me nuts ever since I bought the book a few years ago. 

I love the design, but I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out what, exactly, it is that I love. Is it the block? Is it the layout? Is it the fabric/color combination? And once I figure out what “it” is, can I bring that forward into a quilt of my own?

What I don’t love are the instructions. Part of my frustration with deconstructing this design centers around the fact that it’s a sort of scrappy quilt made up, as the designer notes, with fabrics from several Moda fabric lines (Sew Mama Sew and various Urban Chiks fabrics) as well as some favorite vintage fabrics from her stash. The Sew Mama Sew line is one of the few lines, I think, that had more than one production run because it was so popular. I’m not sure why book publishers even specify fabric lines in patterns given that by the time the book is published, the line may no longer be available. And yes, I am well aware that knitting patterns suffer from the same problem.

The cutting instructions are vague, at best, and specify only total yardage—a useless metric, in my opinion, when using this many different fabrics—and only color values of light, medium, and dark. The designer gives one critical hint in the assembly instructions when she notes that she alternated the layout of medium/dark prints with light prints. Indeed, if you look at the quilt, you can see that rows 1, 3, 5, etc. have the “darker” shades. The problem is that value is relative. A medium value color can look dark when placed next to something lighter than itself and light when placed next to something darker than itself. I would argue that there are very few actual “dark” fabrics in this design. I think they are mostly medium and light prints, and it’s their placement next to something else that determines which category they fall into. 

The one saving grace of this design is that the layout is ridiculously simple: quarter-square triangles alternating with plain squares. I’ve already got a chunk of my own version laid out so I can get a better idea of what is going on, and I’ll talk more about it in a future blog post. 

The Garden Grows

We planted potatoes on Saturday. On Sunday, the husband raked up and burned debris around the garden and we assembled two hoops for the corn. I put the Painted Mountain and some of the Montana Cudu corn out under one of the hoops. It was 27 degrees when I woke up yesterday morning and the corn appeared to be nice and toasty inside the hoop:

The heavier row cover makes a big difference. Lows are only supposed to get down to the mid-30s (at most) for the next week. The corn should be okay under the row cover for the remainder of the spring. The husband reminded me that we can always put a concrete blanket over top of the row cover if it looks like we’ll get any really low temps.

I am waiting to plant the corn under the second hoop because I want to make sure that a ground squirrel does not come through and hoover up the seedlings. (I still have seed left and could replant if that happens, but at that point, it would be a full-out war on ground squirrels.) I don’t think corn seedlings are as tasty as cabbage seedlings, though.

Several of our neighbors have also seen the fox. Theresa, who lives across the street from us, opened her back door one night and it was standing on her porch. Perhaps it has a den with kits somewhere?

I planted peas yesterday morning. The husband built a sturdy permanent trellis for them last year. I grow a shelling variety called “Alaska" and they have always produced well. The currants have started leafing out and the raspberries are not far behind. I am very pleased with the progress of the big garden this year. It helps to make up for the destruction in the herb garden, which looks like a bomb went off in there. I need to get back to cleaning that up.

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The grommets arrived:

While looking for an online supplier that had grommets in stock in the size I needed with reasonable shipping times, I ran across this kit. It had everything I needed in one box. I discussed appropriate grommet spacing and hanging options with the husband last night during our daily debriefing. I’ll set the grommets and he’ll take care of hanging the shade, and we can cross that project off the list.

I’m still working on masks. DD#2 asked me to make her some black ones to coordinate fashionably with her wardrobe. I made those and sent them with some potholders yesterday. She also asked me to make her a pouch to hold her resuable straws. The Canvas Pencil Pouch, which is a free Noodlehead/Anna Graham pattern, should work nicely. Anna has also released a couple of bag patterns recently. I have more waxed canvas on order so I can make myself a bag for this summer.

And I started something new:

Neutrals are so not my colors, but this is coming together nicely and I want to see where it goes. The pattern is ridiculously simple, made up of quarter-square triangles alternating with 5” squares.

Spuds and Thread

I am chatty this week.

The back door cold front predicted for yesterday morning did not materialize beyond a few stiff breezes. The husband and I got all the potatoes planted. I took the hoops down off the lettuce—it can fend for itself now—and will move the hoops in anticipation of getting the corn seedlings out under some heavier row cover this week. This is a gamble, yes, but the seedlings are 8” tall now and they can’t stay in the greenhouse much longer.

Deciding when to plant inside based on when seedlings can go outside is still something I have trouble doing accurately. Then again, there are so many variables. I try to aim for Memorial Day as the outside planting date and work backward. If we luck out and get a warmish spring, though, it’s nice to be able to take advantage of the extra growing time.

The husband said he found a fresh ground squirrel tunnel in the garden. I need to get the .22 out and have it ready. I’m not doing all this work to feed rodents.

We had a fox in the yard yesterday morning. I was on my way out to the chicken coop when I saw something run out from behind the woodshed in the direction of the coop. At first, I thought it might be a coyote, but it wasn’t very big. A bit later, when I headed out to the greenhouse to check on seedlings, it ran out of the woods and across the path in front of me and I could see that it was a fox. I am sure it was hoping for a free chicken meal. I’d be happy to let it stay here if it would eat some ground squirrels.

The husband says that one of the Barred Rocks caught a mouse in the coop the other night. Perhaps we need a house chicken (both of us are allergic to cats). The spring invasion of mice has already started. I have to check the traps every day.

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The positive/negative quilt blocks went into time out. I’ll revisit that project again in the future. I was in a post-project slump after finishing that Candy Coated quilt—the recipient was very appreciative—and needed a quick, instant-gratification project. Donna Jordan, of Jordan Fabrics, did a YouTube video on the Moda Love Quilt. This is a free pattern and is written to be used with 10” squares, 5” squares, or 2-1/2” squares. The larger squares, obviously, make a quilt. The charm squares make a wall hanging. The little squares make a 12” block.

I went stash diving and pulled out an old, old charm square pack of a line called Heidi, from Laura Ashley. I’ve had this forever and it seemed like a good time to use it. The background is a remnant of Kona Bone from the stash. I ended up with a very nice 32” square wall hanging:

I haven’t decided yet if I will put a border on this. That would make it big enough to be a baby quilt. And now that I know how easily this goes together, I might use one of my layer cakes to make the quilt size.

My order of quilting thread arrived from the store in Spokane:

From left to right, front to back, I got Linen, Blush, Parchment, and Pearl. Those are all neutral enough to cover my needs. I’ve tried a couple of different threads, including some polyester ones, and I keep coming back to the Signature thread. I just like the way it quilts up.

Excitement in the Neighborhood

We had an eventful day yesterday. I had gone out to the greenhouse mid-morning to turn off the propane heater and noticed that the neighbor whose property backs up onto our pig pasture at the far west end was burning a couple of big slash piles. He lost quite a few trees in that big windstorm last month. He had a small excavator out there to help manage the piles. Technically, it is still open burning season, but people are expected to check air quality and wind conditions and use common sense.

About half an hour later, our fire department got paged out for a tree on fire at that address. I grabbed my phone and started walking in that direction, calling the fire chief as I went. He had acknowledged the page and I figured he would appreciate some first-hand intel. I saw what was happening as soon as I got to the garden.

A tree was indeed on fire:

The homeowner had called it in. Within a few minutes, our neighbor Mike, who is also on the fire department, brought the wildland truck from the station around the corner, and then another responder came with another engine. They cut the tree down and the homeowner added it to the slash pile.

I think there were at least half a dozen calls for rural fire departments to respond to out-of-control grass fires yesterday. It’s still windy, and one strong breeze is all that is required for a fire to get out of hand.

I am hoping we have a rainy May and June, because a bad fire season on top of everything else that is happening is the very last thing we need.

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I am trying to do my part to support local fabric businesses. I ordered some fabric from Jordan Fabrics because I have enjoyed watching their YouTube videos. I ordered four cones of 40wt quilting thread—finally, some beige!—from Heartbeat Quilting in Spokane. I’ve been trying, since January, to order an Accuquilt die through one of the quilt stores here, but that’s been an exercise in frustration, and it isn’t really the store’s fault. I want the Drunkard’s Path die that makes the 7” block. I have the Drunkard’s Path dies that make the 3-1/2” and 4” blocks. The store didn’t have the larger die in stock but they are more than willing to order for customers, so I asked them back in January to order that one for me. By the time I got back in there, after the situation with my MIL, it was the first week of March. They had the die, but Accuquilt had sent one of the small ones that I already own. The store owner was very apologetic and said she would re-order it. I went ahead and paid for it, and the woman who was helping me verified which die I wanted from the catalog. About a week ago, I remembered that I hadn’t heard from them. When I contacted the store and talked to the owner, she said that yes, the die had come in but it was again the wrong size. She had called Accuquilt and talked to them and was trying to get them to ship the correct die.

The husband says this is the kind of stuff that drives him straight to Amazon’s website when he needs something. I get it, but I don’t think this is the store’s fault. I rather expected that Accuquilt would do a better job of supporting its dealers. In any case, the owner of the store thinks the die will come in this week and I can stop by and pick it up. I’ve already paid for it, so they can leave it curbside for me if I let them know when I’ll be there.

I also went ahead and bought a set of feet for the Juki serger that includes the elasticator foot. I anticipate making more knit tops for myself, so I might as well have it:

The other feet are the cording foot and the blind hem foot.

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My mother cleaned her kitchen and sent me this book:

I was good this year and did not plant the entire packet of zucchini seeds, although we still don’t need 12 plants. I’ll find homes for the extras.

Making a Sunshade

I sewed a batch of masks yesterday morning while watching a BBC documentary series on Henry VIII. History was not something I studied much in school, and I am enjoying learning about all sorts of stuff while I sew. I can’t just sit and watch TV without doing something else at the same time.

After lunch, I tackled the sunshade project. Being able to spread the fabric out on the floor of the new shop was great. I mentioned to the husband that it would be nice to have a sewing machine out there too, at which point he got that deer in the headlight look of terror that his wife might try to invade his new shop. In my defense, I would be happy to move my sewing stuff out to the old garage, but the place where I need to work is still occupied by stuff he hasn’t had time to move over to the new shop. Hopefully that will happen soon, because I would like to get my other industrial treadle out of the storage container and set up to use.

I took my big rotary cutter, my 24” long ruler, and an old mat with me to the new shop and squared up the piece of fabric I had cut off the roll. I turned under a 3” hem on each selvedge edge and secured it with large Wonder Clips (some of the best things ever invented, in my opinion):

Then I hauled the whole thing inside to my office to sew the hems on my Necchi industrial:

The sewing went very easily—the fabric is a plastic-y mesh and the Necchi had zero trouble with it. By far, the hardest part was wrangling 99 square feet of fabric through the machine. Once the side hems were done, I turned under a double hem at the top 3-1/2” deep—that’s where the grommets will go—and sewed that. I’ll wait to do the bottom hem until the shade is hung up and I can measure it.

I called my friend Tommy, who does auto upholstery and has the Singer 78-1 that I borrow periodically, to discuss grommets with him. He suggested I just get large grommets from Joanns and use those. My friend Scott, who sent me the Coolaroo fabric, also weighed in with a couple of helpful pics showing the grommets he used on his shade.

I’ll source the proper size grommets and get those installed, and hopefully finish this shade project in the next couple of weeks.

During our daily debriefing last night, the husband and I discussed how, even though this situation sucks for a whole lot of people, employment-wise, and we need to acknowledge that, it may also provide a lot of opportunities for new work to open up. I belong to a Facebook group that has been a huge source of inspiration to me in the past month simply because the members of that group—some of whom lost their primary source of income because of the shutdown—are constantly brainstorming about how to start side hustles, turn side hustles into more stable income streams, and be creative about eliminating debt. It’s a group of people who look for new opportunities and who get things done. I enjoy being part of it.

I also had a long talk with DD#2 yesterday afternoon. She is frustrated by some of the people she works with—one person in particular—who aren’t pitching in and pulling their weight. (That apple didn’t fall far from the tree, did it?) I told her that situations like this are when companies see who is worth keeping and who isn’t, and the person who is slacking may find herself without a job when this is all over. If DD#2 continues to show up and do more than is expected, as my kids tend to do anyway, that may also be noticed and rewarded.

In other news, Cathy is going to take some of the cowpea seedlings. I am curious to see how they do at her house versus up here. My friend Marcie has a Hubbard squash seedling for me and I’m going to give her a sage plant and some of the seedlings I started. It’s good to spread the plant genetic material around.

Cleaning and Mending

I started on the living room as soon as the husband left for work yesterday morning. All the slipcovers, window valances, insulated curtains, and dog bed covers went into the wash. Furniture got moved, floors vacuumed and mopped, baseboards and window trim wiped down, everything on the mantel washed, and when I was done, I put it all back together in reverse. The insulated curtains and tension rods went into storage until next fall.

I also mended the slipcovers on the sofa and loveseat. I don’t want to replace the covers because they weren’t cheap and still have years of use left in them, but there is elastic at the back that has stretched out and made the covers droopy. (It was not very high-quality elastic to begin with.) I decided that while they were off the furniture, I’d just go ahead and fix the elastic. Replacing the entire length of elastic would have involved more surgery than I was willing to undertake, but I was able to cut the old elastic off and splice new, heavy-duty elastic (from the stash, of course) in its place. I attached the new elastic with three parallel lines of stretch zig-zag to make sure it would hold, and I’m very happy with the result. The slipcovers fit nicely again with no droopy spots. Yay.

The window valances are looking a bit faded. I bought those about 10 years ago, but I doubt I’d be able to find anything else of similar quality now. Making new ones will go on the list of things to do next winter.

I spent most of the day cleaning, so I haven’t yet worked on the porch shade. I need to bang out another batch of masks this morning and then I’ll work on the shade. I’m also planning to deliver the Candy Coated quilt to its new owner.

Eggs are in the incubator:

I will check them in a week to see which ones are viable.

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I am going to make some comments on the current state of things, so feel free to skip this part if you want.

I heard it said a few days ago that “Nuance is a dead language.” That pretty well sums up the mood in this country. It’s virtually impossible for people to see things other than in black and white. It requires extra effort to consider points of view that don’t fit neatly into our preferred narratives. I am not sure when we stopped being willing to put forth that effort, but we did, and we’re all the poorer for it.

Social media is a two-edged sword. Podcast host Amy Dingmann, of A Farmish Kind of Life, has had some really good commentary about social media lately. She noted that she got to the point where she had to remove social media from her phone, only checking it a couple of times a day on her office computer. The atmosphere had become too toxic. Unfortunately, for those of us running small businesses, disconnecting from social media isn’t always practical, and when she discovered that removing those apps from her phone meant people who needed to reach her sometimes couldn’t, she reinstalled them, but with tighter filters.

I ran across this piece this morning, and it’s worth reading: The Social Media Shame Machine is in Overdrive Right Now. I don’t agree with everything the author says—the libertarian in me rebels against the notion that we need some kind of authority figure to tell us what to do in order to relieve our anxiety—but she makes some great points about the misuse of social media.

One of the biggest takeaways from this whole situation, I think, is that many things can be true at the same time. I am looking at this from the perspective of someone who lives in a huge state with fewer than a million people, but who also has two kids in a major metropolitan area that has been hit hard by this virus. We just reached 400 confirmed cases in Montana with fewer than 10 deaths. Our local hospital had to furlough 600 workers this week. Can we conclude, then, that the coronavirus was a non-event? It wasn’t a non-event in Seattle, where my kids live. Or in New York City. Perhaps the fact that Montana was at the end of the curve and had time to prepare made the difference. Perhaps it’s because our population is more spread out. Perhaps we haven’t yet seen the worst of it. But it can be true that it hasn’t been as bad here but was still bad in other places.

I’ve entertained more than a few conspiracy theories in the past month. I am not quite ready to dismiss all of them as lunacy. It can be true that this virus came from the wild instead of being a bioweapon gone wrong (deliberately or accidentally). It can also be true that some government entities (see Michigan) are using this situation as an opportunity for control and overreach and that we need to be vigilant against that. (Why is it necessary to ban the sale of seeds at Wal-Mart at precisely the time they are needed to prevent food shortages down the line?) It can be true that we have a solid scientific grounding that should guide our response to this situation, and also true that this virus exhibits characteristics that are requiring us to build the plane as we fly it.

Life is risky (ask me how I know). The anxiety brought on by uncertainty is uncomfortable—sometimes unbearably so. Feeling our way through this as a society is much like walking across a field full of landmines, but I think it’s important that we don’t make the problem worse by insisting that there was one correct response to this situation and it either was or wasn’t implemented, depending on our worldview. Perhaps this would be a good time to resurrect and become fluent in that dead language.

Come back for the fluffy chick photos in a few weeks.

Light

I make it to about the middle of April every year and have to take the insulated curtains down off the windows. By that point, I cannot stand living in a cave any longer and my desire for sunlight overrides any savings we might get on our heating bill. Of course, taking down the curtains means I can see exactly how badly the living room needs to be cleaned, so that’s what I’ll be doing today.

I took the insulated curtain off the window in the laundry room, too. That room is considerably brighter now because we lost so many trees in the woods.

And while I am taking curtains off some windows, I am getting ready to make a sunshade for the porch. Some places don’t have enough light and some places have too much:

My college friend, Scott, who lives in Ohio, generously gifted me the Coolaroo mesh fabric left over from a shade he made for a pergola at his house. We have a glider rocker on the porch where the husband and I like to sit and debrief when he gets home from work. Unfortunately, by that time of day, the sun is low enough in the sky that it beats down on that section of the porch. I priced out sunshades—Wayfair has one, but it’s $600.

Unrolled, the fabric Scott sent me is 12’ wide from selvedge to selvedge. I need a piece 11-1/2’ wide and about 8’ long. My thought is to hem the sides to make the piece the proper width, then turn under a 3” hem at the top and install grommets every couple of inches. The husband can put hooks on the porch framing from which to hang the shade. I’ll hem the bottom to an appropriate length. It won’t be as fancy as the Wayfair shade—I don’t plan to install any hardware so it can be raised or lowered—but it will work for what we need.

I am going to take the fabric out to the new shop, which has plenty of room for me to lay it out for cutting. And I am pretty sure I can run up the hems on the Necchi industrial. Scott sewed his sunshade on a vintage Singer 15-91.

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I am not feeling overly anxious these days, although I know many people are. However, the unexpected shortage of chicks led me to worry about getting piglets. The one saving grace is that it is a lot harder to go from 0 to 60 on pig production than it is for egg production, so fewer people are going to try pigs for the first time this year. However, the supplier we used to use tended to over-promise and under-deliver and finally stopped selling pigs altogether. We didn’t do pigs last year for that reason, and I knew we needed to find a replacement supplier. We’re sort of competing with the 4-H kids, who in recent years have switched from the old standby Chester Whites to the heritage breeds like Durocs and Berkshires, which are what we get. The kids have to have their pigs finished out by the fair in August and we don’t send ours for processing until October, so we can wait a few weeks for later litters.

Cathy gave me the name of a woman she knows who raises pigs. I called yesterday and was able to reserve six piglets for delivery at the beginning of June. She is getting bred sows from a Hutterite colony east of the mountains. These will either be York/Duroc crosses or Landrace/Duroc crosses, either of which is fine with us. We’ll keep a couple for ourselves and sell the others.

We missed having pigs last year. It will be good to have them on pasture again.

When we first started raising chickens and pigs, I followed the Chicken Thistle Farm CoopCast. (The back episodes are chock full of great information and still worth a listen even though they go back several years.) It was produced by a young couple in western New York. Farming was not their primary source of income, though, and it took so much time that they got a bit burnt out. Their listening audience was devastated when they stopped podcasting. A few months ago, Andy—the husband half of the duo—started dropping hints that something new was coming, and last week, he posted a couple of videos on their YouTube channel.

This one in particular was interesting, because he talks about economies of scale and how it’s easier to scale up than scale down, at least where animals are concerned.

The husband concurs, and says that the difference between raising four pigs and six pigs is negligible. We won’t breed our own pigs, though. We don’t have adequate winter shelter for them, for one thing, and the task of doing the artificial insemination would fall to yours truly. I could do it, but I’m not excited about the idea. I do much better with plants than animals, honestly. (The first batch of eggs is in the incubator.)

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I finished quilting the most recent Candy Coated quilt yesterday morning and attached the binding. Now I just have to sew the binding down, which is a good evening activity when I want to sit for a bit. I’m not sure what sewing project is up next, but I always have masks to work on.

Egg Mama

My girls arranged a FaceTime chat Sunday afternoon. Normally, we just call or text each other. The last time we did video chats was when DD#1 was in Spain during her study abroad semester. It was so good to see them. DD#2 is still working; Nordstrom laid off the hourly staff but kept the managers on to fill web orders. DD#1 is at her fiancé’s parents’ house and is working from there. I miss my girls. We don’t usually go longer than a couple of months between visits.

I unpacked the incubator and set it up on the desk in the kitchen:

I had asked around for recommendations and eventually went with the IncuView from Incubator Warehouse. Huge shout out to them—they shipped the incubator via Priority Mail even though I had specified regular shipping.

The incubator has to “stabilize” for 12-24 hours to establish suitable humidity and temperature levels. The instructions noted that the ambient temperature of the house should be between 70 and 85 degrees. We generally keep our house at 67 during the day and 63 at night. I reprogrammed the thermostat to keep it at 70 during the day and no colder than 67 at night. I can adjust the temperature of the incubator up a bit, too.

It’s hot in here.

This past weekend’s windstorm was mostly an annoyance. I didn’t want the row cover getting whipped around by the wind, so I dropped it from the PVC pipe. The husband laid an old concrete blanket over the lettuce bed. I commented on the wisdom of the gardener (me) who had the foresight to make the lettuce bed exactly the same size as the concrete blanket.

“Everybody gets lucky sometimes,” he said. (I had no idea how big that concrete blanket was—this was a complete fluke.)

The lettuce seedlings were nice and toasty under their blanket.

I took the blanket off yesterday afternoon—it got up to 50 degrees—and put the row cover back up.

The corn is going to have to go out soon. I’ll put another hoop up with slightly heavier row covering on it for them. If necessary, we can always lay a bigger concrete blanket over the hoops themselves.

The Fast Lady Northern cowpeas had an almost 100% germination rate and look really good:

The Baker Creek cowpeas (nonspecific as to variety) came in a close second, with about a 95% germination rate. They haven’t grown as quickly, however. The Baker Creek Purple Hull Pinkeye BVR—which obviously doesn’t care for the Montana climate despite being inside a greenhouse—had an abysmal 50% germination rate. I am not even sure I’ll put those plants out in the garden.

The broccoli, cantaloupe, watermelon, and zucchini are all up, as well. The tomatoes seem to be taking their sweet old time. The plants look healthy; they just aren’t as far along as I think they ought to be. Oh well, they can’t go out for another several weeks anyway, so they have time.

I’ve quilted 3/4 of the latest Candy Coated quilt. I’m going to try to get the rest of it done this morning because I’ll probably be outside the rest of the week. This afternoon’s collection of eggs goes into the incubator. Wish me luck.

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I continue to lecture myself on abandoning certain practices after this is done. The last two times I have gone into town to get chicken feed, I’ve had to remind myself that I cannot stop at Joann Fabrics. Both our Joanns and Hobby Lobby are closed completely thanks to lobbying by some do-gooders who didn’t even want Joanns opened for curbside pickup. (You may debate amongst yourselves about what constitutes “essential services,” but I know several people who were relying on curbside pickup of fabric to make masks and isolation gowns for local facilities. Beware of unintended consequences.)

In any case, this has been an exercise in discipline. I’d like to think we were fairly disciplined to begin with, but we have moved from the theoretical into the applicable in some areas. I try to pretend that it is 1995 in Kalispell again. If it can’t be found locally, I cannot automatically default to ordering online. And some things cannot be had, even online, because they are out of stock. Part of me welcomes this paring down of the supply chain, although I don’t want it to affect people negatively who might be relying on medications and other necessities. I am convinced that we can do without some of the frippery, however.

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.