The Garden in June

We had thunderstorms and even a hailstorm last night with marble-sized hail that lasted for about five minutes. I was worried about damage in the garden, but everything seems to have come through unscathed. It’s a beautiful morning out there, albeit still a bit wet:

The beans are up:

The lettuce and broccoli look wonderful:

And the pigs are hard at work:

I can see how much they have grown in just two weeks.

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Yesterday was not the most productive of days; I weeded for a few hours in the morning until it started raining—although it was warm enough that I weeded in the rain for a while longer—and then came back to the house to work on some inside tasks. The electric co-op had a crew out here replacing the power pole across the road because it had been damaged in that March windstorm. They guys warned me that they would be shutting the power off for an hour or two at some point. I could have switched us over to the generator, but it’s loud and I didn’t want it running all day. I puttered and worked on the latest Candy Coated while I waited for the power to go out. All of the rows are done:

Now it’s just a matter of sewing the rows together—I do that in sections—and trimming the edges, and then it can be quilted.

[The organizers of the Mennonite Country Auction (what I refer to as the Ritzville sale because it is held in Ritzville, WA) announced last week that the 2020 auction will not have in-person activities due to the pandemic. An online sale is planned, instead. I am glad they are not cancelling the event altogether. Hopefully, I will have a few quilts ready by then to donate.]

This Candy Coated top used up most of the contents of the scrap bag. I am down to just a handful of strips to use as the beginning of the next scrap quilt. Of course, this was only the bright fabrics. I still have smaller scrap bags of whites and low volume fabrics. They could easily be combined into a low volume quilt, but I am not sure what I want to start next. I’ve been procrastinating by making this quilt, waiting for inspiration to strike. I’m still waiting. Even a road trip, which is usually good for getting my creative juices going, didn’t help. I am hearing the same thing from lots of other sewists. Some of it seems to be a side effect of protracted mask-making. Some of it seems to stem from uncertainty about what’s coming next.

I have the Slabtown backpack pattern. I have a couple of Noodlehead bag patterns. I’ve got a supply of knits for making some tops. I got some new-to-me used quilt block encyclopedias and I could play around with my Accuquilt dies. I’ve pinned about two dozen ideas to my Pinterest board. Nothing has set me on fire, though. I think I am just going to make a pile of options. I’ll choose something and work on it until it’s done, then go to the next item in the pile. This is rather like writer’s block. Sometimes you just have to keep sewing even when you don’t feel like it.

Outside the Bubble

We live in a bubble. It is less of a bubble than it was when we first moved here, mostly thanks to the internet, but it’s a bubble nonetheless. With the exception of his mother’s death in March, 2020 hasn’t been much different for the husband than 2019. Work didn’t slow down during the pandemic. Hardware stores stayed open. He works outside with his crew every day and doesn’t wear a mask. We had plenty of supplies stored up. If he didn’t watch the news, he might not know that anything was going on.

Although the main reason for last week’s trip was to see the girls, part of me was curious to see what life was like outside the bubble. Things are just now getting back to normal for my kids. DD#1 spent all of April and May at her future in-laws’ house, working with her clients via video. That has been hard for her as she is a pediatric occupational therapist and prefers working with her kids in person. Her fiancé’s last couple of months of dental school went sideways. DD#2 continued working, but the store was closed to shoppers and she spent the time filling internet orders.

Washington state’s two major cities are quite different. Spokane is much more like north Idaho and western Montana—conservative and a tad redneck. Seattle is very progressive. I expected to see some changes in Spokane and I did; they were very similar to the changes I saw here in Montana. About 50% of the people were wearing masks, although a few smaller stores, like the quilt stores, ask all customers to wear face coverings.

[I noticed that the stores where men shop—like Home Depot—have fewer customers wearing masks than stores where women customers predominate. Women seem to complain less about having to wear a mask than men do. I wonder how and if that is going to change now that mask-wearing is mandatory throughout Washington state.]

Seattle is a completely different story. Not only does everyone there wear masks, many people wear them outside as well as inside. DD#1 observed that it could be because of the large Asian population. Stores were also much stricter about occupancy rules. DD#1 and I went to Ikea on Friday. (Her fiancé took his board exams last weekend and DD#2 had to work Friday and Saturday.) Ikea has only been open for about a week. They had a large tent set up next to the entrance with cattle panels (for lack of a better description) to guide traffic. Only a certain number of people were allowed into the store at a time. We stood in line for about 40 minutes. Thankfully, we knew what we were looking for, because they also encourage shoppers to spend half an hour or less inside. (Has anyone ever gone to Ikea and spent less than half an hour wandering around?)

Retail, in general, is going to emerge from this pandemic looking a lot different than it did going in. I found it a bit frustrating to shop at the malls, because many of the stores—Macy’s being the notable exception—require shoppers to enter from the outside so they can control occupancy. This means having to walk around the perimeter of the mall to get into each store. Fitting rooms are closed. I won’t buy anything without trying it on, especially when I don’t have a good way to return items. JC Penney looked like a time capsule; they hadn’t yet taken down their St. Patrick’s Day displays. (I realize they have much bigger problems, but I thought that was funny.) Some stores still have winter stock. Some stores don’t have any stock. One of the Joanns I went to had two bolts of white Kona left and that was it. Despite all of this, the mall where DD#2 works was packed on Saturday, and that was the only day we hit heavy traffic in Seattle.

Nordstrom underwent a huge staffing reorganization a few weeks ago. I am not sure how she managed this—other than she is very good at what she does and she hustles like nobody’s business—but DD#2 not only kept her assistant manager position, she also got a raise. I just don’t know how much of the current retail climate is sustainable over the long-term. Neither Seattle Fabrics nor Pacific Fabrics was open to shoppers and I wonder if they are going to transition to online ordering only.

[I am not worried about DD#2 as she already has contingency plans B and C in place. Knowing her, she probably has contingency plans D, E, and F in place as well. Something about apples and trees, blah blah blah.]

Most restaurants are still closed. We ordered dinner in on Friday and Saturday evenings. The one notable exception was a place called Portage Bay, which is near DD#1’s apartment. They used to pack people in there like sardines. We were able to get a table reservation for brunch on Sunday morning, but they had removed more than half of the tables to allow for social distancing.

On my return trip, I ended up going home from Spokane via the northern route, through north Idaho and Libby, Montana. I stopped at the grocery store in Libby to grab something to eat and stretch my legs. The place was full of elderly shoppers—this was mid-afternoon—and not a single one of them was wearing a mask. I don’t mind wearing a mask to help protect other people, but I find it curious that the very people who appear to be most most at risk seem so unconcerned about their own safety.

We’ll see how all of this plays out over the next couple of months.

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This double wedding ring quilt was in the home I stayed at in Seattle:

The owner said she and her husband received it as a wedding present. It had fabric of all kinds, from polyesters to cottons. The quilting was tiny:

I didn’t buy much fabric on this trip as there simply wasn’t much fabric left to buy. My last stop in Spokane before coming home on Monday was to pick up my Janome at the quilt store, and there I found this:

It’s a yard of coated cotton produced by a company called Splash Fabric, in Seattle. It feels like a cross between the PUL fabric used for diaper covers and traditional oilcloth. I’ll probably whip up an apron out of this just to see how it handles.

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The garden survived my absence for a few days. I weeded four rows of potatoes yesterday and will finish those today. We should have raspberries soon. The beans I planted a few weeks ago are up. I even found a baby cucumber and baby zucchini, so some pollination is happening out there. I’ll get pictures of everything today.

Out Into the Big Wide World

The baby animals and I all had an exciting weekend. I went to Seattle to see the girls. Meanwhile, back here on the farm, three piglets had tunneled their way out of Alcatraz—the pig shelter—into the pasture, so the husband took all of them out and let them explore.

They became acquainted with the electric fence and have since been busy plowing up every square inch of pasture. Pigs will be pigs.

He also fenced off part of the chicken yard so the peeps could go out. They have a separate door from their part of the coop out into their fenced area of the yard. Watching them venture out is entertaining and I’m rather sorry I missed it this year. One or two brave ones will stand in the doorway looking out until eventually one of them gets pushed out. (There is a drop of about a foot out the door.) Others follow, and then they all have to figure out how to use the ramp to get back in.

I am a bit concerned about my rooster. Elysian brought the black rooster back last week and the husband says the two roosters were fighting while I was gone. Now the Buff rooster is limping. He let me pick him up yesterday but he wasn’t terribly excited about me looking at his leg. Hopefully it will get better. I don’t have a good place to separate him from the rest of the flock, and he insists on being out in the yard with the hens anyway.

While all the animals were venturing out, so was I. I went on a road trip. This close to the summer solstice, I have the advantage of about 16 hours of daylight, so my plan was to leave early Thursday morning, stop in Spokane for a few hours, then meander over to Seattle and roll in around 6-7 p.m. I gain an hour going west, too.

[Thank you to those of you who messaged me to see if I was okay. I don’t like to announce ahead of time that I will not be home, for obvious security reasons. If I don’t blog for a few days—especially over a weekend—then it’s a good bet I am off visiting the girls. If I don’t blog for more than a week, then it might be time for concern.]

Before I left, I made a list of all the places I needed to visit in Spokane and checked their operating hours. I was glad I did that, because otherwise, I might have been running in circles. Some places open at 9, some at 10, and some not until 11. I got to Spokane around 9 a.m. My first stop was the quilting store where I get Signature 40wt thread; I picked up another couple of spools and visited with the owner about what to expect in Seattle as she had just come back from there.

Hobby Lobby was open, too, so I stopped there. By then, it was 10 a.m. and I headed to the other quilt store to drop off my Janome for its annual servicing. I had checked with the store ahead of time to make sure that they could accommodate my machine if I dropped it off Thursday and picked it up on Monday.

One of my favorite stores in Spokane, Sew E-Z Too, is closing. The owner is 74 and lives about an hour out of Spokane and drives in six days a week. Apparently she wants to retire. Who can blame her? I stopped in to see what they had, but the line at the cutting table was 20 deep and I didn’t want to wait.

The last place I stopped before leaving Spokane was to deliver the quilt top I made on commission in January for my friend Jan, who also serves on our denominational board. Her husband is our district pastor. I was happy to see them and even happier to hand off that project.

I was back on the road to Seattle around 1 p.m. There isn’t much between Spokane and Seattle except potato fields and the small cities of Moses Lake and Ellensburg. Moses Lake has a Joann Fabrics that happens to be right next to a gas station, so I took the opportunity to stop in, fuel up the car, and wander around Joanns for half an hour. Without exception, all the Joann stores I visited on this trip were almost completely sold out of quilting cotton, no doubt a result of all the mask-making combined with a disruption in the supply chains. I didn’t find much on the remnant racks, either.

I also stopped in Thorp, just past Ellensburg and before Snoqualmie Pass, at a huge fruit stand/antique store. I like to wander around the antique store and see what goodies I can find. I saw a few quilts and aprons, but nothing that needed to come home with me.

By 6:00 p.m., I was on I-90 heading into downtown Seattle to pick up I-5 north. DD#1 lives a few miles north of downtown near the University of Washington, and DD#2 is about five miles north of her. I noted to the husband that this was the first time I’ve ever driven into Seattle and not had to sit in traffic. And it was rush hour! Apparently, most people are still working from home.

The AirBnB where I stayed in February, which was just a few blocks from DD#2’s house, wasn’t available on this trip. I found another one in the same neighborhood, a small suite in the basement of a home. The owners were a lovely couple about my age and the accommodations were great. This location also had off-street parking, which is a plus. I will probably stay there again. I made myself some dinner, called the husband to check in, let the girls know I was in town, and turned in for the evening.

In tomorrow’s post, I’ll talk about the differences I saw between pandemic life in Montana and Seattle, and also show you some of the goodies I picked up.

Taking A Break From Weeding

I did not weed yesterday. We are having a string of cool, rainy days and being cold and wet in the garden is not my idea of a fun time. The husband laughed and called me Goldilocks, which is his nickname for me when I am being particular.

Instead, I mixed up and canned a batch of Grandma Milly’s BBQ sauce:

When the husband and I got married, my MIL gave me a recipe box with family recipes, including this one. A note at the bottom says, “G’ma Milly said the boys would eat old gym socks with this sauce on them.” (“The boys” were the husband and his younger brother, Ted.) I use ketchup without high fructose corn syrup as the base, and if I quadruple the recipe, I get 14 pints. It has plenty of vinegar in it, so a 25-minute trip through the water bath canner produces a shelf-stable batch. We ran out several weeks ago and this has been on the to-do list since then. It’s got a bit of a kick to it, which I like, although sometimes I’ll add some currant jam if I am cooking a pork roast or meatballs with it.

I also moved more of my sewing machine stuff out to the garage. This is my collection of accessories:

I hate it when accessories get separated from machines. Many thrift stores—Value Village and Goodwill come to mind—sell the accessories separately. That makes no sense to me as the machine is worth a lot more if it has all the parts with it. I’ve been in the habit of picking these things up when I see them. I try to stick with accessories for machine I have, but I’ve got a few parts for Kenmores and Berninas. Those will probably go on eBay.

The trick now is to go through and figure out if I can put together complete sets of accessories. To say this is frustrating is an understatement. The husband says that this is why there are dedicated parts guys at most repair shops, because finding replacement parts for machines is a full-time job. I noted that they probably all drink, too.

Here’s a prime example: I have two boxes of extra top-hat cams for Singer sewing machines. The part number on each box is 21976. Each box contains 12 cams. The cams are numbered. The collection of cams is different in each box. I went to eBay to see if I could determine which cams were supposed to be in that box when it was sold originally, as I have a bag of loose cams that I could pull replacements from if I have them. People are selling boxes of cams on eBay with various numbers in them, and after 15 minutes of research, I still don’t know what number cams came in those boxes originally.

Arrrgggghhh.

Here is another example—one that I hesitate to share because it makes me angry that I did this—but which is illustrative of how hard it is to find correct parts. You may remember that I bought that Singer 9W machine last fall and even lucked out and found the bag of presser feet that went with it. However, the machine was missing a bobbin case. I researched and researched and researched some more, and it appeared that a bobbin case from a Wheeler and Wilson D9 machine would fit the Singer 9W. I was using as the basis for my research this page of information from Needlebar.org.

The Singer 9W evolved from the Wheeler and Wilson D9 after Singer acquired the W&W company in late 1905. As these things go, parts and model numbers changed along the way. The problem is that they didn’t change all at once on the same day but rather evolved as the factory ran out of existing parts. The woman who runs the Necchi group on Facebook has a theory that on Friday afternoons, when everyone was tired and just wanted to go home, workers grabbed whatever parts were available and put them on the machines, which is why sometimes you get a machine that looks like some kind of outlier.

There seem to be two extant models of 9W, the 9W7 and the 9W1. In trying to determine which machine I had, I started with this bit of information:

The 9W1 and 9W7 differ from each other in their bobbin cases, bobbins, and slide plates. The 9W7 takes a solid, bagel shaped bobbin, similar to the W&W 9. In fact, it is reported that the later W&W 9 bobbin will work in the 9W7, but not the 9W1.

And this:

The differences in serial numbers for the slide plates and bobbin cases are as follows:

Slide plates:
W&W9 - 202143 (other respondents reported also 202206)
9W1 - 208737 or 204177
9W7 – 208799

Bobbin Cases:

208811 - Singer 9W7 (has latch)
202145 - Singer 9W1, W&W D9 (has latch)
202192 - W&W 9, old style (no latch) (other respondents reported also 202054 and 202063)

The serial number for the slide plate on my machine is 208799. I didn’t have a bobbin case so had no way of checking the serial number on that part. Further down that page on the Needlebar.org site is another clue regarding the machine serial numbers:

Machines with a serial number of 3,160,000 and above are presumed to be 9W1s, with the featherweight type bobbin. Machines with lower serial numbers are presumed to be 9W7s with the solid or later W&W 9 type bobbin.

My machine’s serial number is 3,144,297. All available evidence is pointing to my machine being a 9W7.

I found a W&W bobbin case with two solid, bagel-shaped bobbins on eBay and bought them. The bobbin case had the number 202054 on it, which matched the bobbin case information given on the Needlebar.org site. I fitted the bobbin case into the shuttle on my machine. It fit into the shuttle, but it took more jiggering to get it in there than I was expecting. I turned the handwheel slowly to make sure that everything moved smoothly, but apparently, I didn’t turn the handwheel carefully enough. The bobbin case dislodged and this happened:

I wanted to cry when I saw this. I don’t like to break parts, and I especially don’t like to break parts that are no longer made. (The husband tried to console me and said this happens to everyone eventually.)

I have concluded that—despite the evidence—this was NOT the correct bobbin case for this machine. After looking at some of the additional part numbers on the hook, I believe my 9W takes the bobbin case which holds the flat bobbins that are similar to the Featherweight bobbins. That would make it a 9W1, not a 9W7, for whatever that’s worth. Of course, the only way to test that hypothesis is to find the other style of bobbin case. I set up eBay alerts to let me know if one shows up there, and I’ve asked on a few vintage machine groups. If I can’t find the correct bobbin case, I’ve resigned myself to using this machine for decoration, not sewing.

Vintage machine repair is an art, not a science, for sure.

Weeding, Weeding, Weeding

I spent most of Saturday out in the garden. The straw, black plastic, and cardboard are doing a great job of keeping excess vegetation down this year, but I still have to weed. Most of the weeding I have to do right now is in the rows of potatoes. I put straw between the rows a few weeks ago, but I had to wait until the potato plants emerged and were big enough for me to see them before putting straw around them. While I was waiting for that to happen, the weeds in the rows also grew. I pulled the weeds between the potato plants, then mulched the plants with more straw.

[“Weeds” includes all the chamomile, dill, and cilantro that have seeded themselves everywhere. I’m going to leave some of them to grow and use, but we don’t need half an acre of dill, trust me. I’ve also got parsnips popping up in odd places, like the middle of the raspberry patch. I planted parsnips once. I haven’t had to plant them since.]

Weeding is like cleaning. It’s basically just rolling the same rock up the same hill over and over, but for a few minutes after it’s done, everything looks really nice.

I am happy with how things are coming along. The peas have put on blossoms. All of the potatoes are up. The lettuce and broccoli look wonderful and we are eating salads from our lettuce every night. There will be currants, blueberries, grapes, and raspberries, and the elderberry bush I put in a few weeks ago has grown by leaps and bounds. The corn is making steady progress. As soon as we get some hot weather for more than a day or two, I expect the tomatoes, zucchini, cukes, and melons to take off. Hopefully, with all this rain, the beans will sprout soon. I have given up on the cowpeas, though. They are just sitting there. Maybe they are doing better at Cathy’s house down in the valley.

I saw half a dozen ladybugs and one garter snake in the garden. We had a lively discussion after church last week about bees—the consensus seems to be that there aren’t as many bees this year. I’ve seen quite a few of the big bumbles on the dandelions. I’ll see what happens when the lavenders bloom. If they aren’t covered with bees as they normally are, that will be cause for concern.

Right now, the garden is healthy and that makes me happy. And the exhaustion at the end of the day is good exhaustion from working hard.

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I’ve moved most of my sewing machine stuff out to the old garage. In the process, I located a few things I had misplaced (which means I had filed them so well I couldn’t find them again). Many of my older sewing machines, like Vittorio, don’t have measurement markings on their needle plates. That’s not an issue if I am piecing quilt blocks because I’m using a quarter-inch foot, but sometimes I need a 3/8” or half-inch marking. I had purchased some adhesive marking stickers from Sew-Classic and promptly lost track of them. They resurfaced yesterday. Now Vittorio has measurement markings on his needle plate:

The old garage will be a nice place to work on hot summer afternoons as it’s cool in there. The first job on the list is to organize and inventory what I’ve got. Some items could get listed on eBay, but I have to decide what to keep, first.

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We had given Elysian our Black Australorp rooster about two months ago, but he’s older and wasn’t taking care of her hens, so she brought him back here yesterday. I said to the husband that I think he was homesick at her house. As soon as he got back to our place, he began crowing nonstop, and when I went out to the coop after dinner, he had gathered a bunch of hens around him. Hopefully the two roosters will co-exist peacefully.

The biggest rooster chick—his mother was a Brahma hen—likes to stand on top of the waterer and survey his kingdom. He won’t let anyone else up there. If he doesn’t develop an attitude problem, I think he has the potential to be a fine rooster.

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I am uninspired by sewing projects at the moment, so I’ve been working on another Candy Coated quilt. My pile of leftover strips never seems to get any smaller. I’ve come up with a slightly different system for this CC in the interest of efficiency. I have quite a few long, width-of-fabric strips. I sew those in pairs, then slice them into batches of progressively shorter strips. I needed one row of 10-1/2” strips sewn together, so I did those first, then the 10” strips, then the 8-1/2” strips. Now I am at the point where I need three rows of 8” strips, and one of those is already done.

A Knot Top and a Concrete Pour

I sewed the front of the knot top to the back yesterday and tried it on. It fits well, but for purposes of the blog, you get to see my dress form modeling it:

Overall, I am happy with it. The fit across the bust—where I always have issues—is good, so at least I have that part of the sizing dialed in. Reviews of this pattern, however, all mentioned that the fit across the midriff is too tight. I agree. I have a well-defined hourglass shape and I prefer tops that don’t fit like potato sacks, but I think this is overly fitted, especially in a rayon spandex fabric. I want the fabric to skim, not cling. This clings.

[I cannot get away from spandex, no matter how hard I try. It’s in my bra, so it’s not like I can avoid it completely. It bothers me most in jeans. I’ve learned to tolerate it elsewhere.]

For the next iteration—one that I will actually finish and wear—I am going to trace the same size off the dress pieces of the pattern and make a tunic length top. Other sewists who have made both the top and the dress from this pattern note that the dress is less fitted below the bust.

I wasn’t crazy about the back neckline finish on this top, either. The instructions have you cut a narrow length of fabric, fold it in half to make an even narrower binding strip, then attach it to the neckline edge. After grading the seams, that binding is folded to the inside and stitched in place. The instructions say to sew it with a twin needle on the sewing machine, but I have a coverstitch machine, so I did it on the coverstitch. It looks fine but it’s bulky. I think the neck edge would be better with some kind of facing, similar to what is on the front. I need to think about that a bit. One person coverstitched fold-over elastic on hers (the dress was black rayon jersey so it was easy to find matching FOE), which I thought was a nice finish.

The only other change I will make will be to match the looper thread in my serger to the fabric so it doesn’t show.

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The husband has been working in the neighborhood this week. A couple about our age has been buying small pieces of land, putting up nice starter houses, then selling them after a year and moving on. Their son does the same thing. (The father and son build the houses.) The husband does all their foundations. They had a wall pour yesterday, so I went over to take some pictures.

[I took a seminar on optimizing Google My Business a few weeks ago. The GMB listing is important for companies that work locally—not so much for something like Big Sky Knitting Designs—and I want to make sure the husband’s website pops up near the top of the search engine listings. One of the suggestions was to add pictures regularly to the listing. His website is getting more visits, so this seems to be working.]

The boom truck and the concrete truck work together on these pours, especially where access to the jobsite is tight:

Having the long boom makes the job a lot easier:

The husband controls the nozzle and directs the concrete into the forms:

It’s a messy job.

One of the employees wears a pack with a long vibrating wand attached to it. He runs the wand through the concrete to make sure there are no air bubbles. Another employee comes behind and smooths off the top of the wall.

At least the weather was nice. They can—and do—pour walls even when it’s raining, which is less than fun.

I think the husband plans to let the piglets out into the pasture some time this weekend. That should make for some good photo ops.

The Burda 6911 Project

Warning: This is a picture-heavy sewing post.

On Wednesday afternoon, I traced the pieces for the top (View A/B) of Burda 6911. This is a knot-front top pattern. Here are the front pieces cut. The traced pattern master—I use Pellon’s E-Z Pattern for my tracing paper—is still lying on the fabric:

I look at this and wonder how such an oddly-shaped piece of fabric could possibly morph into something wearable, but I have faith. I have read every review and watched every YouTube video pertaining to this pattern. Several people have made this top and been happy with the result. I should mention that this is my first time using a Burda pattern.

I cut using my small rotary cutter and the French curve, which give much better results than using shears.

One of the interesting things about this project is that it really can’t be assembled entirely on a serger. That might be possible with some modifications (or with a 5-thread serger with a chain stitch?), but not as the pattern stands. However, if you have a relatively modern sewing machine—we’re talking something that has decent stretch stitch capabilities—you could construct this top without a serger. (My mother sewed first-generation knits on her Elna TSP circa 1970-something.) I couldn’t make this on Vittorio, my beloved 1948 Necchi, because he just doesn’t handle modern fabrics well, but my Janome 6600P does a great job.

After cutting, I serged each edge front edge to finish the self-facing and the bottom section that becomes part of the seam:

I didn’t change the thread that is currently in my knit serger because this is intended to be a muslin. I probably should have played around with the differential feed a bit to even out that ruffling, but no biggie.

For the front seam, I went to the Janome 6600P, put in a 80/12 ballpoint needle, and selected stitch #6, which is a very narrow (VERY narrow) stretch zig-zag suitable for knits:

The instructions indicate to sew the seam to just below the future location of the knot, then tie off the ends:

Making sure you transfer ALL of the markings from the pattern pieces to the fabric is key with this pattern.

Press the seam open:

This top has self-facings at the neck. They need to be folded back and basted in place.

I tried washable basting tape but it did not hold well during the knot-tying process, so I put in simple lines of long basting stitches with the machine (not shown here).

The upper side edges are finished in the same way as the front edges:

One side edge is then folded down and seamed to itself, vertically, to create sort of a bust dart.

I say “sort of” because it’s a dart that goes from the side edge almost to the middle of the top, leaving only a section about 1-1/2” long unseamed. The unseamed section forms a hole through which the other half of the top is pulled to create a knot.

This is where things get hairy. This is one half of the front with the bust dart sewn:

You can’t really see the hole, but it’s at the right end of that seamline. At this point, you are supposed to grasp the shoulder edge of the other half of the top and pull it through that hole from back to front to form the knot.

I am so spatially challenged that some days it’s a wonder I can get my clothes on properly in the morning, so you can imagine what bad words were being said during this process. And of course, I was so focused on getting it correct that I didn’t take any pictures.

Once the right half of the top has been pulled through this hole, the other bust dart is sewn to keep the knot in place. The completed front looks like this:

Yay me! Apologies for the goofy lighting. I was too happy it was correct to make any adjustments.

I had to set this project aside at this point to go to town and run errands, and when I came home, I had to rescue a piglet that had gotten itself wedged into a corner—the piglet is fine—and cut the grass in the front yard before it rains again this weekend. (Pollen issues, thankfully, have subsided.) The next steps on this project will be to serge the front to the back at the shoulders, set in the sleeves, and serge the side seams. Then I will try it on and evaluate the fit. I am pretty sure I will need a longer top to fit my freakishly long torso, which is the reason I am sewing my own tops to begin with. The pattern also includes separate pieces for a dress. It might be easiest to trace the dress pieces and cut them off at tunic length rather than try to lengthen the top pattern pieces. We’ll see.

More pictures to follow when I get a chance to get back to this, but for the moment, I need to deal with vegetation.

Too Many Mamas

This was the scene in the nesting box with all the eggs yesterday morning:

The Black Australorp looks very put-upon.

I sat with the chicks for a bit yesterday. I stand by my initial assessment of five roosters and 12 hens. One of the roosters is a purebred Buff Orpington and we’ll probably sell him. It would be too confusing to have two purebred Buff roosters. The largest rooster chick is from a Brahma mother, which makes sense because Brahmas are sizeable chickens. (They aren’t the most prolific egg layers but I do like the breed and I’d be inclined to keep that rooster.) The chicks seem to have worked out some kind of pecking order and I am seeing a lot less arguing.

A few years ago, Elysian started a tradition of sneaking things into my garden. The first year, it was some sunflowers. Last year, it was a mystery tomato plant. This year, she gave me a packet of seeds and told me to plant them and see what came up. With all of the rain, they sprouted quickly.

I suspect they are some kind of radish, but we’ll find out! It’s fun to trade plants and seeds back and forth.

We had a couple of cartons of weeks-old eggs, so I broke open the eggs and mixed them up to give to the piglets. When the pigs are older, they’ll get whole eggs, but right now, they are still on baby food. After a few minutes of coaxing—so many new things!—they figured out the eggs were tasty and hoovered them up.

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Even though it finally stopped raining yesterday, it was too wet to work outside, so I finished quilting the construction equipment quilt. I’ll trim it this morning and add the binding. I’m still on the fence about what project to start next.

I bought a small rolling cart for my embroidery supplies. I decided that was the best solution for organizing the bits and bobs that were getting lost on the end table next to my chair in the living room. It holds my bins of thread, pincushions, needles, books, and current projects. The plan is to keep it in my office and roll it into the living room when I want to sit and work on something.

I continue to pare down my social media interactions. I left a sewing group on Facebook the other day—and ended my financial support of its content creators—because they put up a post I found highly objectionable. They exhorted all “white sewists” to go around the internet looking for particular kinds of comments by people and then to respond to those comments. Examples of the kind of comments to look for and responses to make were given. I understand that they saw that as a way to provide allyship to people of color, but I refuse to participate in any kind of policing of other people’s speech, objectionable or not. If it happens in my presence, I will speak up, but that’s different than actively searching for it. Also, it was a sewing group. I belong to sewing groups for sewing information. I have other outlets for activist work.

I am seeing more and more of this “thought policing” and I don’t like it. Totalitarianism can arise from lots of places, and not all of it comes from the right. (Read that again, slowly.) That was part of why I closed my Ravelry account last summer. However noble the goals may be, I think that some people are going to be surprised what is at the bottom of this slippery slope we seem to be accelerating down.

Rain Instead of Snow

My kids will be happy to know that most of my sewing machines have been moved out of the house to the old garage. And I bought myself a decent set of screwdrivers—including some nice long-handled ones for getting into tight spots—along with a few wrenches and pliers. I’ll be ready to start tinkering with some machines soon. I also ordered some plastic bins and labels so I can sort parts by machine model.

[I have a Chapman hollow-ground screwdriver set but I also need regular screwdrivers.]

The piglets appear to be doing just fine; the shelter is dry but not fully enclosed or heated, so the husband put up a heat lamp for them Sunday night and gave them a blanket to sleep on. We have had nonstop rain for almost three days now and it is pretty soggy outside. Parts of Montana, near Bozeman, had several inches of snow. Yes, snow in Montana in June—it’s a thing.

We get a couple of days of warming temperatures before more rain this weekend. I need to get the grass cut again before then. And weed.

The husband installed the replacement seat on the backhoe:

He continues to work on it here and there, replacing parts as needed and tuning it up.

The chicks are getting bigger every day. I can tell which chicks came from Brahma mothers as their feet now have feathers on them. I might go sit in the coop with them today and pick each one up and take a good look at it. I was listening to the Farmish Kind of Life podcast yesterday and Amy noted that when she decides which rooster(s) to keep, she watches to see which rooster the hens prefer. I had no idea the hens had an opinion, although when we had multiple roosters, I noticed that each of the roosters had its own little harem.

A couple of weeks ago, one of the Black Australorp hens started sitting on eggs again. I think this is the same hen that keeps trying to go broody but can’t quite get it together. She amassed a pile of about 15 eggs. The interesting thing is that this pile of eggs always has a hen sitting on top of it, but it’s never the same hen. I’ve seen the Black Australorp, a Buff Orpington (or two), a White Orp, and even a Brahma on that pile of eggs, although the Black Australorp is there most often. I am leaving the eggs for another week to see if anything hatches. I don’t know who is going to actually take responsibility for a chick if one does hatch, but we left the brooder box in the coop in case I end up being the mama. Does tag-team broodiness work as a hatching strategy? Stay tuned.

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I made a quilt out of the construction equipment fabric. It came in a layer cake of forty-two 10” squares, so I sewed them together into a grid of six squares by seven squares. Some of the fabrics in the layer cake were large-scale prints and there was no sense cutting them down into unrecognizable pieces. It’s not a fancy or complicated quilt. I have half of it quilted (with loops, of course). I’ll get the other half quilted today and attach the binding. I used Warm and Natural batting and it’s is an absolute pleasure to quilt.

We had Elysian’s little guy here last night (he’s 6) while she was at a meeting. We have established a rule that if Janet falls asleep on the couch—those kids YouTube videos are horribly soporific—he is not to take the keys to the car and drive to California. I didn’t fall asleep last night, though, because I got him hooked on Ultraman videos. Ultraman is a Japanese science fiction series from the 1960s and it figured prominently in my childhood. I have the entire series on DVD. We watched the first episode and I promised him that the next time he comes over, we can watch more. I think I should also introduce him to the original Lost in Space.

The husband can’t watch Ultraman without laughing at the low-budget special effects.

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I discovered—in my quest to make some knot-front tops for myself—that there are two methods for creating the knot. The 5 out of 4 Patterns Knot Your Average Shirt version makes the knot with two horizontal bodice pieces twisted into a knot. A thorough examination of the knot tops in my closet, however, revealed that the ones I really like to wear are comprised of two vertical pieces twisted into a knot and seamed. Those also seem to be a bit less complicated to sew. I’ve played around with the 5 out of 4 pattern, although I haven’t made a complete top yet. I picked up this Burda pattern, which is the vertically-seamed version, and I am going to mess around with it using some knit remnants from Joanns.

DD#2 texted me yesterday to say that, not unexpectedly, Nordstrom has reorganized some of their stores in response to what has happened with this pandemic and she has a new position. She’s been working the whole time, even though the stores were closed, as the managers were kept on to fill internet orders. The stores plan to open to shoppers next week. She is now going to be an assistant manager in the kids department. The husband asked me what she knew about selling kids clothes and I laughed. This is the child who has been putting together her own wardrobe since she was 3. My mother used to take her to The Children’s Place in Missoula and let her pick out what she wanted. I told him that if a little girl comes into Nordstrom with her grandmother and her grandmother tells her to buy what she wants, DD#2 will know exactly what to do.

Retail is going through a tough time right now, but obviously Nordstrom recognizes that she is good at what she does. They like to invest in their managers by cross-training them in lots of different areas. The fact that they are moving her to another department is a positive sign.

Picking Up Piggies

With everything that has been happening this spring, I have been very worried about being able to get piglets. We took last year off because our previous supplier flaked out on us. He had a tendency to overpromise—and require deposits for all the piglets he promised—and then scramble at the last minute to find enough stock. He would promise us piglets on at the beginning of June, then call me a few days before they were supposed to be delivered and ask if we could take some in August, instead. We don’t have the infrastructure for late pigs. Ours have to be out of here before the water line freezes. We got tired of dealing with his nonsense.

Cathy knew someone here in the valley who had pigs and gave me her number. I called Carol and we talked about what we were looking for. She has some of her own breeding stock but also buys bred sows from the Hutterite colonies on the east side of the mountains. Her early piglets are reserved for the 4-H kids as they have to have their animals finished by the fair in August. She said she would reserve six piglets for us for the beginning of June.

When I called her last week, she said the piglets would be ready to pick up this weekend, so yesterday morning, the husband and I headed to her farm to get them. She lives north of the airport in a surprisingly undeveloped part of the county. Her barn has quite the setup. The pregnant sows are in one area and the weaned piglets in another. If I remember correctly, she told me she had gotten eight bred sows from the Hutterites. With an average of 10-12 piglets per sow, she had quite the little pig nursery.

The husband stayed out by the truck and I went into the barn with her to get the piglets. One of her boys got into the enclosure with the piglets and picked each one up. Pigs get very upset when their feet are not on the ground and they squeal loudly, which of course upsets the other piglets. She took each piglet from her son, handed it to me, and I walked it out to the truck and put it in the large dog crate we had brought to transport them home. When we had all six loaded up and had paid her, we headed for home:

We went down back roads as much as possible just to avoid stressing the piglets.

Back home, the husband and I moved the dog crate into the pig shelter, then opened it up. A couple of the piglets were reluctant to come out, but eventually we got everyone sorted.

They were very curious about their new home and immediately started rooting around. We will keep them inside the shelter for a few days before letting them out into the pasture. The grass in the pasture is taller than they are.

I forgot to ask what cross these were—Carol had told us they would be either Duroc/Landrace or Duroc/York crosses, but a friend of ours who stopped over in the afternoon and is familiar with pigs said he thought they were Duroc/York crosses. We have done Duroc/Berkshire crosses the last couple of years.

I feel much better now that we have our stock for this year.

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We have had some good soaking rains over the past 36 hours. I am glad I got my beans planted when I did. We have Zoom church this morning. After lunch, I’m either going to sew or move some sewing machines out to the garage. I’d like to start tinkering with them again now that I have a good place to work.

One of the congregations in our denominational conference is a Congolese congregation in Portland. They have a sewing program that employs refugee women. When I was at our meeting in Portland at the beginning of February, I talked to the head of the program about donating some of my machines to their group. And then this virus stuff started. I’d still like to pursue that.

DD#1 and her fiancé are heading back to their apartment in Seattle today after staying with his parents for the last two months. She will be going to work at her office two days a week and working from home the rest of the time. Her fiancé has been through the wringer attempting to graduate from dental school and get licensed. His graduation ceremony was supposed to be yesterday. Had this pandemic not happened, we all would have been in Seattle to celebrate. The class has graduated—we can call him Doctor now—but they are still sorting out issues with the licensing exams.

How to Drive People Away

Story time…

When we were getting ready to move to Montana, the husband and his dad came out here to look around and find a place for us to rent. When he came back—we were living in Pennsylvania at the time—he brought with him a copy of the local activities guide put out by the newspaper. “Look,” he said, pointing to an article, “Kalispell has a spinning and weaving guild.” At the time, I belonged to a very active guild in our area and I think he wanted to help smooth the transition for me by finding me a group I could join in the Flathead.

And as it turns out, the spinning and weaving guild was how I met Susan. I went to one of the meetings, on a Wednesday afternoon in the local Lutheran church basement, and a woman came up to me with a young girl in tow. I had DD#1 with me, who would have been about 1-1/2 at the time. Susan introduced herself, we got to chatting, and we discovered the the property the husband and I had just purchased was right down the road from where she lived.

And that is how Susan became my first and best Montana friend and my children’s other mother. Our daughters did not escape our activities:

We had a great guild here. It met every week—the first Wednesday was for spinners, the second for weavers, the third was the guild meeting, and the fourth was for fun. I participated in all the activities. I also became involved with the state organization known as MAWS (Montana Association of Weavers and Spinners). I took over producing the quarterly newsletter. I was a member of the board. I taught at the MAWS gatherings every other year. I was involved because I loved it and it was fun.

MAWS had an award called the Living Treasure Award. It was given at each MAWS state gathering. To be considered, a member had to be nominated by their guild with a form that indicated why that person met the criteria for being considered, which included service to the guild, teaching and sharing of information, and depth of knowledge. The nominations were evaluated by a committee. We nominated one of the members of our guild and I had the honor of introducing her at the meeting where the award was given. (It was in Missoula that year.) Some years, only one person was nominated. Some years, several people were nominated and it was not uncommon for each of them to be named a Living Treasure.

Unbeknownst to me until the last minute, our guild decided to nominate me for the award the year that the meeting was held here. By that point, I was teaching nationally as well as within the state. I would have been the youngest person to receive the award, although no age limit was specified in the nomination criteria. Three people were nominated that year. Two of them were awarded the Living Treasure award. I was not. I sat through the awards ceremony—our guild was the hosting guild that year—with a smile pasted on my face, but inside, I was crushed.

The explanation we were given later was that, “She’s young—she’ll be eligible for the award another time.” Perhaps that may have been true, but I didn’t stick around to find out as that was the end of my involvement with MAWS.

I think this is one area where organizations can really fall short. While I don’t require an award or big ceremony when I help out—a simple acknowledgement and thank-you will suffice—it’s critical that organizations avoid treating their supporters with disdain, taking them for granted, or behaving as though they are expendable. Being singled out NOT to receive that award felt like a slap in the face to me (and still stings a bit even years later). Organizations that operate in that manner may find their supporters quietly picking up their marbles and taking them somewhere else.

This post is not aimed at any of the groups I am volunteering with currently. I simply wanted to share this story as a cautionary tale about treating people with kindness and appreciation.

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On my way out of town yesterday, I stopped at Joann Fabrics and was delighted to find that their knit fabrics were on sale. And it was a big sale, like 60% off. I took advantage of the opportunity to stock up on fabric for making myself some more tops:

I bought three yards of the black with yellow flowers in case I decide to make myself a dress. I adore yellow but look like a corpse wearing it. I think I can get away with this print, though, as it’s mostly black.

It’s supposed to rain for at least the next couple of days. I will forego weeding in favor of sewing.

Should I Make a Backpack?

Klum House launched a new sewing pattern this week, the Slabtown Rolltop Backpack, and I am thinking this may be my next big project.

The kits include a lot of great color combos, including this green one (love love love). Not all of the the kit colors are available as yardage. This may be one of those instances where buying the complete kit makes more sense than trying to source everything separately.

Klum House has had a series of blog posts recently with a behind-the-scenes peek into the development of the pattern. I love those kinds of posts because I love to see and read about other makers’ design processes. They also had to contend with supply disruptions this spring, which pushed back the launch of the pattern.

I’ve wanted to make a backpack for a while now, but hadn’t found a pattern I liked. This one comes pretty close. I am not crazy about the rolltop style, but perhaps I will be if I make one and start using it. I listened to the Sewing with Threads podcast yesterday and the guest was designer Becky Fulgoni. She talked about how she is experimenting with backpack patterns and has made every pattern she can get her hands on. It sounded like her goal was to come up with one pattern that incorporates all the features she likes from other patterns.

And I still need to make some T-shirts. I watched a Mimi G YouTube video about making a T-shirt from an existing pattern and I might try some of her techniques.

[One of the best podcast interviews I ever listened to was with Mimi G on the Craft Industry Alliance podcast. The story of how she built her business is fascinating. She has several YouTube channels in addition to the Mimi G Style channel and all of them are excellent.]

My sewing this week has consisted of sewing together strips from the scrap bag, which is what I do when I can’t focus on anything else. These will probably end up in another Candy Coated Quilt (I’m up to the sixth or seventh one now). It occurred to me yesterday that the Ritzville Mennonite Relief Sale scheduled for October might be yet another casualty of this coronavirus pandemic. The sale could, theoretically, be done online, but either way, I would like to be able to donate some quilts.

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I maintain my stance that social media is one of the biggest ills of modern life. I think it takes a fair bit of skill to give it a place in one’s life without allowing it to take over or skew one’s perspective. (I worry about some of my Facebook friends who seem so obsessed with social media that it appears to be affecting their mental health.) I am on social media to get information that I wouldn’t get anywhere else. Still, it is useful to unplug every so often. And I have to do that even though I work really hard to curate my feeds so they don’t become echo chambers. A good example of that is a woman I follow on Twitter. I started following her because she’s a knitter, something we have in common. She’s also an African-American woman with differing political views who lives in a major metropolitan area on the other side of the country. We don’t have any of that in common. I appreciate having her in my Twitter feed, though, because she speaks with brutal honesty about what she is seeing where she lives. Sometimes it’s hard to hear what she has to say. But she’s a knitter and a human being. Common ground.

I need to call the pig supplier today and make arrangements to pick up piglets tomorrow. I have three rows of beans left to plant and will knock those out this morning. After that, the to-do list will consist only of weeding and moving compost. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Black Gold

This is a time of year when I get wound up and unable to focus, because I see everything that needs to be done and worry that I won’t have enough time—or energy—to tackle it all. The energy thing has been a big frustration to me lately. Much of it is hormone related and not worth going into here. I also know that even when I’m not firing on all cylinders, I am probably getting more done than a lot of people. Still, I know what I am capable of doing and it irritates me when I fall short.

[It is also tough to be married to someone who could kick most 20-year-olds to the curb. I am far more competitive than I realized, apparently.]

I’ve been planting beans. I am planting a lot of beans. I may regret, in the fall, just how many beans I planted, but we’ll see how it goes. Thus far, I have put in one row of Calypso beans (black and white), one row of Steuben Yellow Eye bean, three rows of Jacob’s Cattle beans, and three rows of pinto beans. These are 40’ rows, for those keeping score.

Still left to do are three rows of Vermont Cranberry, three rows of Kerbarika beans, three rows of mayacoba beans and the packet of Calima beans. The Calima are for eating as green beans. The rest are for dry beans. I have a lot of white beans in storage and won’t do any of those. I also have a packet of Swiss chard and a packet of collards. I likely will plant the collards as I like to blanch them and freeze them for soup. It is going to rain on Saturday so I want to have all of this in before then.

I think I have to give up on the dream of growing cowpeas in Montana unless something miraculous happens. They aren’t doing anything. They are farther along than they were at this time last year, so I won’t write them off just yet, but I am bracing myself for potential crop failure.

The grapes are leafing out. The apple trees don’t have a lot of blossoms on them, but they produced heavily last year so I wouldn’t be surprised if they took a year off. If that happens, I will receive it as a blessing.

After planting beans (I’m pacing myself), I moved some compost. The husband moved the pile of aged chicken manure over next to the greenhouse. Then he cleaned out the compost bins and piled the contents on top of the chicken manure:

This is a lovely pile of black gold. I shoveled it into the wheelbarrow and moved it over to the rows of corn:

We’ll keep spreading it around the garden until it’s gone.

I did not see my snake friends yesterday despite looking for them.

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I’ve cut way back on my social media usage this week. I’ve been seeing the absolute worst of humanity on Facebook and Twitter and I am tired of it. Bonnie Hunter, a well-known quilt designer who is incredibly generous with her time and talents—she hosted the Unity quiltalong (for free) during the quarantine—shared a blog post yesterday that made my blood boil. She was taken to task for not participating in the #blackouttuesday movement.

[TL;DR She didn’t participate because she didn’t have reliable internet access where she was, was not on social media except briefly in the morning to put up a blog post and thus was unaware that anything was happening (I didn’t find out until about 2 p.m.), and Tuesday was her deceased daughter’s birthday, so she spent the day in remembrance and mourning. As a result, she got some very nasty comments on her Instagram-linked blog post.]

I am sick unto death of all this virtue signaling, public shaming, and policing of other people’s morality. Some days I think we’re living in puritan New England. I saw plenty of this nonsense during the coronavirus crisis, and now it has shifted into overdrive. Go ahead, announce that you are a better human being because you did X and that person didn’t, or you didn’t do Y and that person did, you’re educated and those morons over there aren’t, you believe in science—go ahead and post whatever meme or comment you think will demonstrate that you’re a better human being than people who think or behave differently from you. I won’t argue with you, but I’m probably going to tune you out.

[By the way, there are serious questions being raised about that recent Lancet study debunking the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine. You can read about it here (please note that I am linking to an MSM outlet, not some conspiracy theory website). So go ahead and “believe in science” with the understanding that it isn’t infallible—or, more accurately, that human beings engaging in scientific research muddies the objective waters somewhat.]

I raised my kids with the admonition to watch what people do instead of listening to what they say. Actions will always speak louder than words. I could tell you anything I want to on this blog, but it’s what I do when I walk out of the house and into the world that really matters. Those actions—not the sanctimonious crap I might post on Facebook or Twitter—are how I am going to be judged. And that is how it should be.

Friends (and Enemies) in the Garden

I want my garden to be a healthy ecosystem, and that means that I do not intervene with any kind of pest control measures unless it is an absolute necessity. Thus far, the only pest control measures I have had to institute are the ones that involve my .22 (more on that in a moment). I have never had issues with potato beetles, tomato hornworms, squash vine borers, or worms in my broccoli. That is not to say that I don’t see the occasional pest, just that the pest pressure is very mild. By far, weeds are my biggest issue.

I also think that if I make the garden hospitable to animals, it will attract the very ones I need to help me keep pests under control. I am particularly fond of snakes and it is always a happy day for me when I see the first one of the season. Yesterday, I saw two. The first one—obviously a garter snake by its telltale yellow striping—was underneath a piece of landscape fabric I pulled up in anticipation of moving it to a different part of the garden. I apologized to the snake for disturbing it and put the fabric back.

A few minutes later, I went over to check on the cantaloupes and heard a slithering noise. I looked down and sure enough, this little guy was sunning himself on the black plastic:

He let me take his picture and we had a short conversation before he ducked under the plastic and went in the opposite direction.

I don’t think this one is a garter snake. I think this one is a North American Racer—same family (Colubridae) but different species than the common garter snake, Thamnophis sirtalis. These, apparently, can get to be as long as 65 inches!

It seems early in the season to be seeing snakes, and they’ve all been larger than normal. I wonder if the mild winter and warmer spring means that they were out and active sooner and have had a chance to bulk up? Regardless, I am delighted that some have chosen to hang out in the garden. Now that I know they are there, I’ll just keep an eye out where I am walking.

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I worked very hard to eliminate cover for the ground squirrels in the hopes that they wouldn’t run rampant through the seedlings. The tunnels are still there, but I haven’t seen—or heard—any yet this season. Also, I think we have more foxes, coyotes, and wolves in the neighborhood than we’ve had in recent years, although our neighbor has picked off half a dozen in his yard. Maybe word got out that the crazy gardening lady shoots trespassers.

At least one squirrel is still hanging around, though. I had to dig up the old lettuce bed because it was taken over by weeds. There were some arugula seedlings scattered here and there, so as I dug up that bed, I carefully removed them and planted them in the new lettuce bed. I love arugula in my salads. Apparently, so does the ground squirrel. All of the lettuce seedlings remain unmolested, but yesterday morning, I discovered that the arugula seedlings had been chewed down to stems.

Arrggghh. I started a tray of arugula in the greenhouse, and I am going to keep a careful eye out for the ground squirrel.

The potatoes are all mulched, either with straw, landscape fabric, or a combination of the two (I had to get creative in a couple of places). I need to plant beans today. They have to get in soon to have enough time to ripen. The corn and rhubarb need a top dressing of compost/chicken manure. Everything else looks phenomenal.

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I did sew a bit yesterday; the brown twill I ordered from Joanns arrived last week, so I finished the other half of the custom apron order. I’m not sure what’s up next in the queue. I still need to make some knit tops and I have to finish a birthday present for later this month. If the weather is nice, though, most of my time will be spent out in the garden.

Cue the Next Storm

I had one eye on the weather when I got up yesterday morning. I knew a large line of thunderstorms had moved through Spokane overnight and was headed in our direction. The husband and I were sitting on the porch around 8 a.m. drinking coffee. I was watching it get darker and darker to the southwest of us, although the clouds appeared to be moving mostly to the north. All of a sudden, the wind came up and it started pouring. I ran inside to close some windows and the husband went out to make sure things were secure in the yard. As I came back down the stairs, I saw that a tree had come down in the front yard, and when I looked out the screen door in the kitchen, I could see large branches down in the back yard.

I also saw a little kid standing on the porch talking to the husband. Elysian’s son had started over to our house with a bag of egg cartons and got caught in the downpour. He was going to try to run back home across the road. I heard the husband say to him, “You’re not going anywhere; come in the house.” I got him a towel—he was drenched—and then the power went out.

Thankfully, we caught just the edge of the storm that went up through the valley. The damage in Kalispell was considerable. Our power came back on mid-afternoon, but some parts of the area are still out.

The top of this tree sheared off about 20 feet up. It missed the mailbox by about 3” when it landed:

(You would never know I cut the grass a few days ago, “grass” being a loose description of what grows in our yard.)

The top of another tree sheared off and fell behind the woodshed. And then there was this one:

It started to blow over but got hung up in another tree. Had it fallen, it would have landed in the middle of the old herb garden and possibly clipped the edge of the chicken yard.

The husband brought the forklift over and carefully lifted the tree up, moved it over, and dropped it in the woods where it wouldn’t do any damage.

More work to be added to the list of things to do. I should note that there used to be a large pile of chicken manure just to the left of where the forklift is sitting, but the husband used the backhoe to move all of it over to the garden for me on Saturday.

The husband fired up the generator so we could have power until the lines were fixed. He went out to work out in the new shop. I had trouble focusing on anything; even though we had power, the internet was out, so I couldn’t access the tutorial for the one project I really needed to work on. I basted a quilt together and then decided that it would be a good day for scrap management.

When I attended that online Accuquilt seminar a few weeks ago, I received a 20% discount coupon at the local quilt store. I picked up this strip die, which has turned out to be surprisingly useful:

I already have a die that cuts multiple 2-1/2” wide stripes. This die, however, cuts three strips in widths of 2”, 1-1/2”, and 1”. Sometimes I end up with a strip of fabric that is wider than 2-1/2” but narrower than 5”. I can’t cut that piece into 5” squares, and I may want strips narrower than 2-1/2” for some of my scrap quilts. This die is the perfect solution. I went through and cut all my large scraps, then emptied the scrap bag and went through that, too, cleaning up strips that had ragged edges. Now my strips are neat and tidy and ready for sewing:

I’ll have to start another scrap quilt soon.

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I am not unaware of what is happening around the country. My mother’s metal stamping plant is just to the east of downtown Cleveland, and there was rioting and damage in Cleveland Saturday night. DD#2 and her housemates—all Gonzaga grads—had gone to Spokane for the weekend and were headed back to Seattle. They had to detour to get back to their house because I-5 was closed in and out of downtown Seattle. (They live about half an hour north of downtown.) DD#2 was supposed to work yesterday, but because of the damage done to Nordstrom’s downtown Seattle store, the stores in the outlying suburbs were all closed.

I don’t feel the need to add my voice or opinion to the cacophony—indeed, I think that social media is, in many ways, contributing to the problem, not helping it. However, that doesn’t mean that I am not concerned about what is happening. I like to think of myself as fairly resilient when it comes to upheaval, but 2020 continues to stun me with the series of sucker punches it has delivered.

Itchy and Sneezy

These allergies are starting to wear on me a bit. I’ve concluded that the itchy skin is due to pollen overload. I’ve been wiping pollen off of every horizontal surface in the house. And when I finished cutting the grass the other day, I had to give in and take a Benadryl and go to sleep. Also, a bug bit me under my right ear and I have a large welt there.

[I realize that begs the question of why I am cutting the grass if the pollen is such a problem, and that is because I am here all day and it needs to be done and I do not think it is right to ask the man who has been schlepping forms and pouring mud for 14 hours to come home and do it. Hopefully, pollen season will be over soon. I am a big girl and I can take one for the team. In the meantime, I pop a Claritin in the morning and use Benadryl cream (and children’s Benadryl) as needed.]

My patience has worn a bit thin(ner) this week as a result. I am annoyed with the US Postal Service because I put a Priority Mail envelope in the mail to someone in California on May 19, and as of today, she still has not received it. Do you know why she has not received it? Because it is traveling from Montana to California via Memphis, Tennessee and Oxford, Mississippi. By the time she receives it, it will be a two-WEEK delivery, not a two-day delivery. And no, this isn’t due to the virus. This kind of stuff happens all the time, pandemic or no pandemic.

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We got a letter from BMW in the mail this week. Remember when that part failed in the transfer case of my station wagon a year ago? And how it would have cost $3000 for a new transfer case (not including labor), except that my genius mechanic of a husband figured out exactly which part had failed so it “only” cost us $600 and several evenings of his time to replace it?

It’s now part of a recall. Apparently, enough people complained about the problem over the past seven years that BMW was forced to act. (I would like to think that my tersely-worded e-mail to them expressing my displeasure at my car failing so spectacularly at 70,000 miles had something to do with it.)

The letter indicated only that the recall process has been initiated. There is not yet a fix for the part for those lucky people whose cars haven’t already self-destructed, although it sounds like BMW plans to replace the transfer case. For those whose cars have already been repaired, BMW says they will reimburse the owners. I told the husband that I think they owe us a new transfer case. He says he fixed the problem and the car doesn’t need a new transfer case, but it’s a matter of principle. They owe us a new transfer case and the cost of his labor to replace it.

I’m not holding my breath.

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I decided to go ahead and bind that neutral diamonds quilt even though I haven’t yet added more quilting to the center. I was getting tired of picking cotton lint off everything. Before I sewed on the binding, I laid the quilt out on our bedroom floor and went over it with a lint roller. It got some of the lint, but I will have to go over the quilting in the borders and pick lint out of the stitching:

I am so disappointed in this quilt. I think it could have been so much better with a different batting. Even my free motion quilting looks awful. Yes, it’s almost done and yes, it will keep someone warm, but the finished product isn’t up to my standards. I won’t use that batting again. Fortunately, I only had the one package.

I am about to start a fun project with this:

What will it be?

All of the tomatoes, cantaloupe, watermelons, and zucchini are planted. Only the beans are left to do, and then it’s just a matter of keeping after the weeds. I cut some of the lettuce from the crop growing in the tray and that will be the base of our salad tonight. I might start another tray in the greenhouse just so we have a steady supply. The peeps spend most of their time running around and around inside their section of the coop; I am getting a better idea of who the baby roosters are because there is a lot of posturing and mock fighting going on. Those chicks got a lecture yesterday about their behavior. (The husband has started referring to it as “Janet’s Finishing School for Baby Roosters.”) The robins who nested in the corner porch rafter have four noisy babies. And the piglets arrive next weekend.

Greening Up

My friend Susan—my kids’ other mother—has a master’s degree in botany. I’ve always said that if Susan can’t grow something, it can’t be grown in Montana. She has an orchard full of apple trees and generously shares the apples from her Duchess of Oldenburg tree with me every year so I can make apple pie filling. She has also been doing a lot of grafting and experimenting with cuttings taken from old trees here in our little community. A few months ago, she offered to graft me a cutting from her Duchess tree so I would have my own. She also grafted me a cutting from a Westfield Seek No Further that she ordered for me from Fedco, and yesterday she sent me a picture:

This is very exciting! She said the Duchess and the Northern Lights grafts are testing her patience and taking a bit longer, but no doubt they will green up, too.

Apple trees are a rabbit hole I don’t want to fall into as it is easy to become obsessed. The reason I wanted a Seek No Further was because it is featured in a series of books—the Wilderness series—by one of my favorite authors, Sara Donati. It’s an old, old, New England variety and I just think it would be cool to have one in my own orchard.

Our apple trees are doing very well, but the other fruit trees are struggling. Two of our pear trees were crushed under a tree that fell during that March windstorm. They are still alive, amazingly, although looking a bit battered. We have two peach and two cherry trees in another area that haven’t produced anything since we put them in. I was planning to take them out this year, but the cherry trees woke up suddenly and are covered with blossoms. If they produce this year, I guess they will get to stay.

I put in an elderberry bush this year, too, and it’s doing really well.

My tiny chocolate mint plant survived the Great Vole Infestation of the herb garden last winter. I’ll move it to a spot over by the big garden where it can sprawl. There is already a spearmint plant over there that I plan to harvest this year and dry for tea.

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I talked to the girls this week and it sounds like things are starting to open back up in Washington state. I am planning a trip to see them some time next month. The husband noted the other day that this is the first time in several years that I have been home for our anniversary (or to plant the garden). Last year, I was in London, and the year before that, I had gone to meet DD#1’s future in-laws. I have a bad habit of traveling on our anniversary because it falls on a long holiday weekend.

Getting away from a farm(ette) is tricky. The peeps are big enough now that I only have to check on them once during the day, and even that isn’t absolutely necessary as they have plenty of food and water. But piglets are supposed to show up next week—I have to call and verify today—and I’ll need to be here to make sure they are settling in.

The husband is happy that he didn’t have to do the planting this year. He has a tendency to dig holes and stick plants in them without a lot of consideration of what goes where. I don’t blame him for wanting to get the job done, but there was one year that I found bean plants growing among the cucumbers and had no idea if they were green beans for eating or dry beans for shelling. I tend to be a bit more meticulous in my garden organization. And it’s amazing how quickly the weeds will grow in a week if I am not here to stay on top of things.

Planting Day

Memorial Day weekend has always been the traditional planting weekend here in Montana, although the cooler-weather crops like lettuce, broccoli, and peas have been in for a few weeks already. I headed out to the garden early yesterday morning to get the tomatoes planted.

We had put several pieces of plastic down in that area last fall, but they’ve been driving me batty ever since the snow melted. My desire to have smooth, unwrinkled fabric apparently extends to the large pieces of plastic in the garden, too. I took up several of the pieces, trimmed them, turned them around, and fitted them back together in a smooth patchwork layout. I also did away with a small raspberry patch; it’s a thorny variety that was spreading aggressively into parts of the garden where I didn’t want it. I went through and cut off all the canes at their bases, then extended the black plastic over that area. We won’t plant there until next year, but hopefully having the black plastic over that spot will kill off the plants. If not, we can always take the backhoe out there and dig them up.

Getting the black plastic straightened out took up the first few hours, but I am very pleased with the results:

The raspberry patch used to be located in the top center of the picture (that’s our neighbor’s property and horse trailer). Getting rid of it opened up quite a bit of extra space.

I put in 46 tomato plants—15 each of Oregon Star paste tomato, Cherokee Purple, and Indian Stripe, as well as the one Dirty Girl grown from seed that my friend Susan gave me. She had given me two seeds but only one germinated. Dirty Girl is an open-pollinated variety of Early Girl, one of the most popular tomatoes in this area. Susan ordered the Dirty Girl seeds from a producer in California and shared them with several of us in the neighborhood. Even though I’ve only got the one plant, it is large and vigorous and I am looking forward to tasting the fruit it produces.

I also put in seven zucchini plants. I’ve been trying to find homes for the rest of them and still have three left if anyone is interested. I have half a dozen of each variety of tomato left, too. I only plant heirloom/open-pollinated varieties in my garden. The zucchini is a variety called “Grey” that I grow every year.

Mother Nature blessed my efforts with a gentle overnight rain. Next to go in will be the cucumbers, watermelons, and cantaloupes. I decided to have the husband go ahead and rototill the one section where the beans will be planted, just because it has all that lovely rotted straw from last year on it.

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While I was out in the garden, the husband was moving more of his stuff from the old garage to the new shop, and now I have a space to work on sewing machines!

I thanked him for leaving me that gallon jug of wood glue, LOL. The lighting here is much better than over the kitchen table, and I can leave my repair projects set up. As soon as the shelving arrives, I plan to move all the machines out here so I have them in one location.

And the peeps got moved out of the brooder box and into their own section of the coop:

We know it’s time to move them when they start trying to escape the brooder box. It was getting crowded in there, too. They have plenty of room to run around now. The rooster came into the coop from the chicken yard as soon as we moved them. He stood there with his head cocked to one side and watched them for a couple of minutes. I am not sure his brain is big enough to grasp the idea that he fathered all of these babies, but he knew something was different.

Happy Anniversary to Us

Our 30th wedding anniversary is Tuesday. I asked the husband, “Where did the time go?” and he said, “We were busy with projects.” I suppose that is true. This anniversary seems even a bit more momentous than the 25th anniversary, for some reason. Perhaps it is because of everything else that has happened this year.

We bought ourselves a present. The husband wants you all to know that this is not what he intended as an anniversary present, but the timing was right and I thought it would make an entertaining blog post. Pearls are the traditional 30th wedding anniversary present. We did not buy pearls.

Our daily porch debriefing sessions often include long-term planning and wish lists. The husband will mention that he’d like to buy or build something, and then one day, that thing appears. (I can always tell when he’s going to start building something when the can of orange spray paint—for marking lines—comes out.) As long as I am comfortable with the financial end of the project, I just go along for the ride.

The husband recently did a commercial job for a client he’s had for many years. We were eating dinner one night last week when he pulled out his cell phone and showed me a picture. “They have this for sale,” he said. “Let me know what you think.” The price was right and he thought it was a good deal, even though the item in question needed some work. I printed the check for him and on Friday morning, this arrived at our house:

We bought a backhoe! Cosmetically, it looks like it has been rode hard and put away wet, but the machine itself is sound. It’s about 3o years old—how appropriate.

The husband pressure washed the mud and rocks off it yesterday and started working on it. New tires are in order, for sure, along with a few other things. The resident seamstress thought she might have another project:

However, I had a hunch and checked the internet this morning. We can get a replacement seat for $139, which is probably less than it would cost me to make one.

Two little boys in the neighborhood are very excited about the backhoe. Both of them came over to see it yesterday. (I am convinced there is a gene on the Y chromosome for this fascination with heavy equipment.) I am excited about the backhoe too, but only because it means I won’t have to haul chicken manure to the garden in a wheelbarrow.

And just for giggles, we’re also the proud owners of a roller:

The client threw this in because it doesn’t run and he wanted it gone. I asked the husband if we were going into the road-building business. He said he’ll get it operational again and then maybe we’ll sell it. Or maybe we’ll build roads. (There is a libertarian joke in there for those of you paying attention.)

Lastly, the seller also has a bunch of industrial shelving that came out of K-Mart when it closed last year. The husband is getting some of that for me to store my sewing machines on in the old garage.

All in all, I think this is an excellent anniversary present and far more useful than a pearl necklace.

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In between watching two little boys check out the backhoe, I worked on the garden all day yesterday. I put cardboard down around all my berry bushes, which I hope will be far better at controlling weeds than me getting in there and pulling them. I took down the hoops that were over the corn. I transplanted more lettuce. The section for the tomatoes is all ready for planting.

Today—which is supposed to be even warmer and sunnier—I plan to mulch the potatoes, put chicken manure around the corn, and get the rows ready for planting beans. By next weekend, the highs are forecast to be well into the 80s.

I am pleased with how the garden looks so far this year. It’s a lot of hard work, but I enjoy it.

Fun With Chickens

The husband reminds me periodically that chickens have brains the size of peas. Some days, I think that is a generous assessment.

The chicken coop has 14 nesting boxes. Fourteen very large, comfortable, and filled-with-pine-shavings nesting boxes. Chickens do not all lay eggs at the same time, so 14 nesting boxes should be more than adequate, which is why this happens:

Every so often, one of the nesting boxes will be designated as special, and all the chickens will want to lay their eggs in that box. I have no idea what criteria determines which box is special, and it changes from day to day and week to week. If more than one chicken wants to use the special box at the same time, though, arguing and jockeying for space ensues. Believe me, these chickens did not look so amiable 30 seconds before I took this picture.

This Buff Orpington has not left this box for over a week now. Will she hatch out some chicks? Let’s hope. She likes to sit with her butt facing out, though. I find that odd:

I haven’t been able to see how many eggs she has under her, because she gets annoyed if I get too close.

The husband watches a YouTube channel where the host just finished building a chicken coop. This guy’s wife sews, and she made cute little curtains for all of the nesting boxes. (They only have half a dozen hens.) I will not be doing that.

The baby velociraptors are getting their big chicken feathers.

They have just about doubled in size in two weeks and won’t be able to stay in the brooder box much longer. We’ll move them to the fenced-off area in the coop where they can see the big chickens but the big chickens can’t get to them.

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The black bear is still wandering around. One of our friends down the road saw it passing through her yard last night. I hope this bear does not end up having to be euthanized, but that’s usually what happens to bears that become habituated to being around people. We haven’t seen it in our yard (yet). Lila would let us know if it were anywhere close with the special bear version of her “Danger, Will Robinson!” bark.

I went out to check on the garden yesterday afternoon. I have a lot of work to do out there this week thanks to all this rain. It is supposed to dry out and warm up into the 70s by the middle of the week, though, and I should be able to plant everything that is left in the greenhouse.

I have two sides of the border left to quilt on the neutral diamonds quilt and then I can trim and bind it. I am still leaning toward adding more quilting to the center, especially after quilting loops in the border. The denser quilting pattern really does help to stabilize that batting. I also have to bind the inside seams of the Get Out of Town Bag and make the carrying strap. And I stopped at the church yesterday on my way to town and picked up my knitting bag with the prayer shawl.

I’ve developed a bumpy, itchy rash on my arms. It’s only on my arms and it has been there for about a week. The husband thought maybe it was poison ivy, but I haven’t been working outside with my arms uncovered. I use only unscented, dye-free laundry detergent. I haven’t changed soaps. I had a terrible problem with allergies this spring, which was odd because I haven’t had spring allergies since I stopped eating wheat. The itchy, watery eyes and sneezing went away a few weeks ago, but then this rash broke out. It’s either a different manifestation of seasonal allergies or some kind of food intolerance. I don’t feel particularly stressed out, so I doubt it’s that, and even if I were stressed, I would expect the patch of shingles on my back to flare up. So far, calamine lotion is providing some relief. I thought about taking Benadryl last night before bed, but apparently I have developed an aversion to being sedated since my week in the ICU. (Imagine that.) Even a small dose of Benadryl is going to knock me out and I don’t want that. I’ll look at what I am eating and see if I can figure out if there is a trigger.