Driving Around Western Montana

I made a quick run to Missoula yesterday—I have a whole list of people who have expressed interest in accompanying me on one of those trips, but sometimes my decision to go is made at the last minute based on what’s happening here. Also, I try to leave by 7 a.m. I didn’t think that was enough lead time to ask someone to ride shotgun. Don’t worry, though, I likely will be making a few more trips this summer and I’ll try to plan the next one in advance.

It took me a bit longer than two hours to get there as I had to stop at one of the farm stores and pick up a new chicken waterer. The one for our big chickens sprang a leak. Elysian brought over a spare and set it up for our chickens to use until I got home with the new one.

The weather was lovely for a drive, but, tourists. Ugh. So many tourists. I wouldn’t mind them so much if they would just go the speed limit.

Joann Fabrics was my first stop, but I didn’t find anything on their remnant rack. Just behind Joanns is another strip mall with a new-to-me Janome/Bernina dealer and fabric store. I am not sure how long they have been there, but I haven’t been to Missoula in a while. Perhaps it is my age, but I get very annoyed when I go into a store and no one greets me, or when I have to stand and wait for service while two or three employees mill around trying to find anything else to do besides help customers. An elderly lady came in to the store a few minutes after me. She went to the counter and said she had called about having a machine serviced. The woman behind the counter said, “Okay, go ahead and bring it in.” I looked at this petite lady and thought she might need help (which ought to have been the responsibility of the store employee!), so I asked her if I could help her bring the machine in (it was a huge, computerized Bernina). And finally, after another five minutes of me wandering around looking at stuff, someone hollered from the back of the store and asked if they could help me find anything. I said, “No, thanks,” and walked out.

On to the next stop.

Quite a while ago, on one of these trips, I stumbled upon a quilt store in a very strange location. It is in the basement of what looks like a typical office building. The first floor of this office building is a gym. The only way to get to the basement level is via elevator. (There has to be a set of stairs somewhere, to be compliant with fire code, but I haven’t been able to find them yet.) The elevator leads to a store with bolts of fabric on shelves and in piles. Off the main room are a couple of smaller rooms with shelves containing even more bolts of fabric, some of which have never been unwrapped from their plastic coverings. I think the store owner makes an attempt, at least, to keep fabrics together in their collections. Other bolts of fabric, though, are stacked here and there with no organization whatsoever. I have to make about three trips around the store to orient myself.

[My mother may remember a yarn store in Aurora, Ohio, which had a similar stocking system of bags and bags of yarns piled everywhere, including the much-beloved Brunswick Germantown…]

The likelihood of finding out-of-print fabrics in these kinds of stores is higher than normal, which makes shopping at them great fun despite the chaos. I had in the back of my head the possibility of finding some of the background fabric from this quilt block:

I lamented that I had made this block from some remnants and had no idea where the fabric came from. Alas, the store had none of this particular fabric, but I recognized a bolt of fabric from the same collection—a different print—and was able to look at the name and designer. It’s from the Soho Chic collection by Sandy Gervais. A quick Google search when I got home yielded up the name of a fabric store in Texas that still has stock, so I ordered a few yards from them. I probably won’t be able to find that green dragonfly fabric, but I likely can find something similar (and perhaps a bit more sedate, because this is awfully busy, much as I love it).

I did buy a couple of yards of Kona at that store, in a dark gray that will be great for binding.

By then, it was time for lunch, so I headed to the Good Food store. This is a huge grocery store along the lines of a Whole Foods or Wegmans, but it’s local to Missoula. I remember it in its previous, much tinier location. They moved about 10 years ago and took over an old grocery store and the hardware store next to it. I got some curried chicken salad and a drink to go and also picked up a few specialty items I can’t find here in Kalispell.

After lunch, I headed back to downtown Missoula to The Confident Stitch. This is fast becoming one of my favorite stores. It’s not large, but Kate, the owner, is a savvy businesswoman who is earning herself a solid national reputation. The customer service is on point, both in person and by mail order. The Confident Stitch carries some higher-end quilting cottons, but they really shine in their garment fabric selection. I bought enough of a soy/cotton/spandex knit in a lovely grass green to make a T-shirt.

Missoula has one other quilt store that I did not visit on this trip. I needed to leave Missoula early enough to have time to stop at the Amish store between there and home. I go to the Amish store mostly to buy fabric, as they have a respectable selection of Kona (although they, too, were out of black). Last summer, when I was there with Margaret, I bought one of those pincushion/thread catcher combos. I was hoping to buy another one to keep by my industrial Necchi, but they didn’t have any in stock. The Amish woman who was cutting the Kona for me said they would ask the lady who makes them to make a few more, so I have a legitimate reason to go back in a couple of weeks. I also bought some chocolate-covered espresso beans for the husband.

I came home, unloaded all my treasures, set up the new chicken waterer, and made a big salad for dinner. I have a lunch date with a 6 year-old today, and I think it is going to be great fun. Details tomorrow.

Getting Closer to Noon and Night

Check this out:

It’s a complete Noon and Night block, or a variation of it. I say “variation” because, as with many quilt block patterns, the same block could be called by several names, or the same name could be applied to more than one version of the block. The March 4, 2013 blog post from the PatchPieces blog has the most information I’ve been able to find on the provenance of this block. That blogger had a quilt from her aunt featuring this block. When she recreated it in EQ, she rotated the larger star points. Therefore, when I drew it in EQ, I also rotated the star points. However, when I looked in the Jinny Beyer quilt encyclopedia—as well as at the picture of this blogger’s aunt’s quilt—I noticed that the larger star points mirror-image each other, like this:

I will have to ask my friend from church if I can see what the block looks like in her quilt. I like both versions, but I think the mirror-image version is the “official” one, seeing as it is the one in the Jinny Beyer book. Finding the original Kansas City Star pattern from 1934 would put an end to the debate once and for all, but that’s like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. (The few books containing reprints of those Kansas City Star patterns don’t include this one.)

It took me two days and much experimentation to get to this point. Some of that was due to my spatial deficits, but I am also considering turning this into a publishable quilt pattern. Therefore, I went slowly and deliberately, making many notes, and asking myself, “What would be the best way to present this information?”

This is how I got to the finished quilt block after drawing it in EQ8, with notes on potential construction issues:

• EQ8 will print out templates. Templates are okay, but time-consuming to make and use. They were, without a doubt, the way the original quilt was constructed.

• EQ8 will also print out rotary cutting instructions, but only for the units in a block that lend themselves to rotary cutting. This block has four identical quadrants, and each quadrant is comprised of six units (a total of seven pieces, but one piece is used twice). Five of the six units are standard shapes—triangles, squares, and a trapezoid—but one piece is a weird shape and does not show up on the rotary cutting instructions.

• HOWEVER, the piece that doesn’t show up on the rotary cutting instructions is basically a triangle with one of the side points cut off. Furthermore, it starts out the same size as one of the other triangles in the block, so, theoretically, it could be included in rotary cutting instructions with an additional step added for cutting off that side point to make the required shape.

• What size quilt block yields rotary cutting instructions that make the most sense? In EQ8, it’s possible to resize a quilt block with a click of a button. I experimented with 8”, 9”, 10”, 12”, 14”, and 15” block sizes. The rotary cutting instructions for some of those block sizes got really wonky; no one wants to be cutting 6-3/16” HSTs. (I was discussing this with the husband and he said he gets plans like that from architects all the time, with foundation measurements like 25’ 8-15/16”, which I suspect is a side effect of using CAD software and not common sense and a tape measure.)

• EQ8 gives the option for rounding or not rounding. I always prefer to make my units and blocks a bit bigger and trim them down. However, I’ve got to be careful that rounding doesn’t propagate errors throughout the entire block, because 1/8” can mean the difference between nice, sharp points and points that get chopped off, or cause the framing carpenter to say bad words about the concrete contractor.

• Through much trial and error, I discovered that the units have to go together in a specific order. At one point in the process, I did wonder if this was one of those blocks that would be best constructed with foundation piecing. I hate foundation piecing. (That technique relies on good spatial perception skills, so hate is not too strong a word.) If foundation piecing had been the only (or best) way to make this block, it never would have made it off my cutting table.

• I made each quadrant separately—and oversized—and trimmed them down before sewing them together as a four-patch. This is Mary Poppins piecing (“Enough is as good as it gets”), although it’s pretty darn good for flying by the seat of my pants. It occurred to me, while sewing, that the quilters of the 1930s and 1940s who made quilts using this pattern likely weren’t seeking perfection. They used templates and cut the units out of whatever scraps of fabric they had without regard to grainlines, and if their points didn’t line up exactly—well, that quilt was still going to keep someone warm.

I’ve got plenty of Kona scraps, so the plan is to make three more blocks and sew them together into a wallhanging. Making three more blocks should give me plenty of opportunity to make sure my math and cutting/sewing instructions for the block are accurate (and decide which version to use), and then it’s on to designing an actual quilt. I like the idea of scrappy bright fabrics on a black background, although the all-Kona solids is a nice look, too.

Just for giggles, I drew the (much simpler) Noon and Light quilt block in EQ8:

You can see that the trapezoid/triangle unit takes up one entire half of the quadrant, and the points of the star are identical. This would be a snap to rotary cut and piece, but where is the fun in that?

In related sewing news, the black American Made Brand cotton I ordered arrived and has been washed and pressed. I picked up the large set of stays and pattern for the full size Poppins bag at the quilt store in town. Klum House finally got the color of green waxed canvas I wanted in stock, so I ordered that for the Slabtown backpack pattern. When I am not hauling produce in from the garden, I’ll have plenty to keep me busy.

Some Days I Like Twitter

Twitter is a useful dumpster fire. I sometimes cringe at things that bleed into my feed from people I follow, but in terms of providing immediate access to current trends, Twitter does the best job of all my social media accounts, so I put up with the detritus.

Every so often, though, Twitter showers me with Good Things. The first is a young woman whose Twitter handle is @hollymathnerd. I have been following her for quite a while—long before she got to the follower count she has currently—and she’s one of my favorite people. A recent college grad with a degree in math, she is more mature than a lot of 50-somethings I know. She writes eloquently—this article on Medium.com discusses how not to be fooled by statistics—and I hope she finds a job soon that is worthy of her many talents.

I also follow a couple of Cleveland Browns-related accounts (speaking of dumpster fires), and last week, Nathan Zagura, who is the sideline reporter for the Cleveland Browns Radio Network, tweeted about some new shirts he had received. I looked further at his tweet and discovered that they had come from a company in Vermilion, Ohio—not too far from where I grew up—called Szabo Apparel. They have a Twitter account, so I followed them and also messaged the owners to let them know I would be shopping there.

My new Browns T-shirt arrived on Saturday:

But I was delighted to find a second shirt in the package, too!

These are nice quality shirts and I will be sporting them all summer. If you are looking for Browns swag, please consider supporting this veteran-owned business. They also have some really nice Cleveland merchandise that isn’t sports related. You can tell them I sent you.

[I have no idea what is going to happen with the NFL this fall, but I will carry on as I have for more than four decades as a long-suffering Cleveland Browns fan. Woof woof.]

The first batch of peas have been shelled and blanched, and I’ve got another zucchini on the counter waiting to get made into bread. I am saving my sewing for this afternoon. It’s either going to be messing around with that Noon and Night quilt block or tracing View C (the black and white striped top) of this pattern:

I’m still looking for a few tried-and-true patterns to make up the base of my fall wardrobe. I’ve got some nice lengths of French terry that I think will work well for this.

Stuff That is Still Inside My Head

I’ve been playing with Electric Quilt 8 (EQ8) here and there as I have time. I’ve figured out the drawing tools; I am so used to Illustrator that whenever I go to another drawing program, I expect it to behave the same way and get frustrated when it doesn’t. I have been able to figure out how to draw blocks and color them, though, and this morning I even discovered how to print the templates for a block I drew. Margaret may remember this one:

One of the ladies in our church had an antique quilt made by a family member. I can’t remember for sure if it was just the top and it needed to be quilted or if it was a quilt that needed to be repaired, but our quilting ladies worked on it and it was on display in our fellowship hall for a few weeks. None of us had ever seen the block, though, and it took some sleuthing to discover the block’s origin. According to The Quilter’s Album of Patchwork Patterns by Jinny Beyer, this is called Noon and Night, and it is attributed to Laura Wheeler, Kansas City Star, 1934. I’ve wanted to recreate a quilt from this block and decided it was time to get it out of my head.

I can see why this isn’t a popular block. There are six components to each quadrant of the block, and they don’t lend themselves well to rotary cutting shortcuts and/or chain piecing. EQ8 will print out a sheet with each unit, including the seam allowances, which is very helpful. I am going to play with this a bit and see if I can come up with an efficient way to put it together. I may also get a quote from Accuquilt on making this into a custom die.

***********************************************

The baby robins left the nest yesterday. I was a nervous wreck. One must have flown earlier in the day, because by the time I noticed that they were out hopping along the porch rafters, only three were left. I saw another one leave, and the last two must have flown after I went to bed. I had a talk with Lila about leaving them alone, and I also had a short discussion with a garter snake on the ground near the porch just in case it had ideas about dinner. (I have no idea if garter snakes eat baby birds, but I wasn’t taking any chances, and this was not a small snake.) The fawn was cavorting around the front yard and the four baby turkeys and their mamas are still hanging out near the chicken coop.

I also seem to have acquired a pet raven or a crow—I know there is a difference, but I can’t get close enough to this one to tell which it is. I’ve been putting old/rotten eggs out in the woods rather than in the compost bin. The crows like them. Apparently, this particular bird has decided that I need to do that on a regular basis, because it shows up every day in a tree near the house and harangues me for a few minutes.

I said to the husband that all I need is a giant toad to appear in the driveway and my life will be complete.

***********************************************

I spent some time organizing my sewing stuff yesterday, putting parts into labeled bins by machine model. The husband is going to see about getting me that industrial shelving this week and then I can get all the machines and the bins off the floor. I also got the 31-15 treadle operational. My college friend, Scott, who lives in Columbus, Ohio, also acquired a 31-15 in a treadle this week (I may have enabled that purchase slightly). We’ve been chatting back and forth about our machines and comparing notes.

And I gave the BMW a spa day. I’ll take it through the car wash this week, but I went over the inside with a shop vac and hoovered up all the bits of chicken feed and pig feed. Sometimes I feel bad about using my BMW as a truck. Until Dodge makes one that gets 40 mpg, though, I’ll keep driving my station wagon.

Black Concrete and Zucchini Bread

Yesterday was one of those days when everything went sideways, starting with the 20% chance of rain that turned into a 100% chance of rain and took with it my plan to cut the grass. A conference call scheduled for late morning happened an hour later than it was supposed to. I had to spend an inordinate amount of time chasing down e-mails, including the one for payroll. One of the general contractors sent us a payment, but it was for another sub’s invoice, not ours, so I had to get that fixed. The whole day ended up being a wash, productivity-wise, and I was pretty cranky by the time dinner rolled around.

The husband, at least, had a good day. He and one of our employees poured our neighbor’s porch. I got some shots at the beginning and the end.

Here we are, waiting for the festivities to begin. The husband is talking with the mixer driver.

This is the husband and our employee, Matt, getting ready for the concrete to drop.

Matt’s wife is a hobby winemaker. She took some of our grapes last year and made the most amazing wine from them, and they aren’t even wine grapes—they’re a table grape variety.

The concrete is definitely black!

Mike, our neighbor, helped out, and even I got pressed into service at one point to hold some foam in place.

By midafternoon, the job was all done and looking great! It really ties the house together nicely. Mike’s porch faces east and doesn’t get a lot of direct sun during the day, because of the mountains, so the concrete won’t get too hot.

When the sun finally came out in the afternoon, I tried out my new weed whacker. I noticed our renter using a little DeWalt battery-powered one a few weeks ago. She said she had borrowed it from her father-in-law. I mentioned it to the husband during one of our porch sessions. We have a weed whacker—it’s gas powered, temperamental, and too heavy and unbalanced for me to use efficiently. The husband thought I should get the Milwaukee battery-powered string trimmer because he has a whole bunch of Milwaukee tools and extra batteries, but when I compared the two at Home Depot, the Milwaukee one was longer and about 10 pounds heavier. I bought the DeWalt. I like it very much. It’s nice to have something sized for me. Even Elysian complains about being frustrated by tools that are designed for men to use, and she was a Navy diver and electrician so she’s no lightweight.

[I think tool companies are missing a huge demographic by not making more tools that are sized for women. Maybe DeWalt has a clue and will take advantage of that underserved market.]

I am going to try to get the grass cut this morning before it heats up here. I need to check the pea patch again today, and more of this might happen:

I brought in two zucchinis the other day and made a batch of six loaves of zucchini bread. Two got eaten fresh and the other four went into the freezer. I usually make and freeze about three dozen loaves every summer. I am not the world’s best baker—when DD#2 was still living at home, I would subcontract the zucchini bread production to her—but I’ve used this recipe for years and it’s hard to mess it up.

A Finished Mini Poppins

I am tickled with how cute it is!

I think I’d like to make the full-size Poppins Bag at some point, so I may go ahead and sign up for the class in September. And I still have another set of stays for this size bag. Now that I am familiar with the construction, a second one of these wouldn’t take too long.

The inside:

I really wish I had more of that outside fabric. It is very cool, but I think it was a remnant and who knows when I bought it?

Overall, this was a fun project. I loved all the clever little details and new techniques. I was able to make it entirely with supplies from my stash, which is always a bonus. (And probably says something about the size of my stash.)

What to start next?

******************************************************

I’ve been catching up on my podcast listening while sewing. I was very much missing the Peak Prosperity podcast, by Chris Martenson, because he took some time off from the podcast to do a series of YouTube videos on the coronavirus. His interview with Peter Sandman entitled, “How Your Ability to Process Risk Can Save Your Life,” provided some good insight. Chris also interviewed Neil Howe, one of the co-authors of The Fourth Turning, who always has a fascinating perspective on what’s happening around us.

I’ve got an episode on working with linen queued up on the Love to Sew podcast and one on tracing RTW garments from the Sewing Out Loud podcast. One of my new favorite homesteading podcasts is We Drink and We Farm Things, “the farm comedy podcast where we drink adult beverages, farm, and give zero clucks about not having the perfect farm life.” The hosts are highly entertaining, but one of them sounds exactly like one of the hosts of the Love to Sew podcast and that’s a bit disconcerting.

I also ran across a wonderful series of videos on YouTube from The Gourmet Quilter (“…because quilting is delicious!”). Susan-Claire Mayfield lives in New Zealand and offers a series of patterns she calls Tasty Treats. One of her Tasty Treats for 2020 has been 20 pincushions in 20 days—the patterns are available for purchase on her site and each has a short accompanying YouTube video. I’ve been enjoying the videos very much and may purchase the patterns as I realized yesterday that I do not have enough pincushions. (I was looking for one to take out to the porch with me while I sewed the bottom onto the Mini Poppins bag.) I should use up that 25-pound bag of crushed walnut shells I bought a few years ago.

Halfway to a Mini Poppins

This is one of the rainiest summers in recent memory—and I am not complaining, because I would rather have rain than forest fires. The weather still could turn hot and windy in late July and into August, but I’ll take a bit of rain every week if we can get it until then. Periodic rain showers also give me a bit of bonus sewing time.

I got halfway through the Mini Poppins bag yesterday:

As patterns go, this one could benefit from some tech editing. I have yet to find in the pattern where the seam allowances are specified. (WHY is that information so often left out?) I am not a big fan of the pattern/YouTube video combination. I understand that some people like having the visual explanation, but I am of the opinion that the pattern should be comprehensive enough to stand on its own. Videos should not be required for successful completion. Also, we have a whole lexicon of standard sewing terminology, so why not use it in the pattern?

Noodlehead patterns are the gold standard for bag patterns. Maybe I am just spoiled, having made so many of them.

Design-wise, this bag features some construction techniques that have been fun to try. I’ve never made rolled handles before. I am all for adding techniques to my repertoire that might be used on other projects.

It’s still raining this morning, so we’ll see how far I get on this today. I was hoping to get out and work in the garden, but I think it might be too soggy out there. The peas are coming on fast and furious, though. I’ll probably need to make a pass through the pea patch. And I’ve got a couple of zucchinis that are just about big enough to start zucchini bread production.

***********************************************************

I am going to talk about animals as food now, so if you’re squeamish, you might want to skip this part and come back for the next post.

Elysian went camping for a couple of days, so I took care of her animals for her. She has two horses, a Shetland pony, two goats, many chickens, several turkeys, and a batch of meat birds. The horses—a gelding and his mother—are sweethearts. They know that I come with a pocketful of carrots for them and will follow me around like a couple of overgrown puppies. The goats are master escape artists and like to climb on everything.

Most people who raise chickens do so for the eggs. We often see ads in the local pennysaver paper for people trying to get rid of older chickens that have stopped laying because they don’t want to butcher them. We eat our chickens, although layers tend to be skinny under all those feathers. When I cook old layers down into stock for chicken soup, I might only get a couple of cups of meat off of them, and I’m ruthless when I go over the carcasses. (There is nothing like raising your own food to make you very conscious of wasting anything.)

Old layers are also tough—which is why I usually cook them down into stock—although Nicole Sauce at the Living Free in Tennessee podcast has a theory that I’d like to test. She thinks that part of why layers are so tough is because most people freeze them when they are in rigor mortis. She says that if you butcher the birds and leave them in the refrigerator for 24 hours until they have gone through and come out of rigor mortis and then freeze them, they aren’t tough. The problem is that we often butcher several dozen chickens at once, and I just don’t have space in our fridge for that many birds. We probably ought to get an old fridge and stick it in the garage.

Our pastor and his wife like to cut up the chickens, put the pieces in jars, and pressure cook them. He says that when they open the jars, the meat comes out nice and tender and falls off the bones.

Some people raise chickens specifically for meat, sometimes called “broilers.” The Cornish Cross is the most well-known meat breed. These birds have been bred to grow to maturity in about 8 weeks and provide the chicken meat that is sold commercially. I tend to think of them as Frankenchickens, although I understand their popularity. Elysian has about a dozen meat birds. They are smaller than regular chickens, with short, fat legs. They can get so big that they cannot walk. You also have to be careful how you feed them because they don’t have an “off” switch when it comes to eating. We leave regular food out for our chickens 24/7 and let them determine how much to eat. If you do that with Cornish Crosses, they literally will eat themselves to death. When you do feed them, it’s like being in the middle of a piranha tank. They push and fight and try to inhale as much feed as possible.

Taking care of Elysian’s meat birds was my first introduction to that breed and it has been interesting to see how they differ from regular chickens. I doubt we’d ever do meat chickens, though, just because they require special handling and have to be kept separate from the other chickens.

July in Montana

I popped over to Elysian’s yesterday morning to check on the egg supply in the market fridge. The view from the corner down our road was just stunning, so I snapped a pic:

Our house and property are on the right. Straight ahead, up in those mountains, is the Jewel Basin hiking area.

These are the days that make snowstorms and subzero temperatures worth it. Unfortunately, a lot of people come here and think it is like this all year round. Some of them have very rude awakenings come January. (This view is still beautiful in January, just in a different way.)

**************************************************

The husband spent the weekend practicing with the backhoe, which is all tuned up and purring nicely:

He dug up a bunch of stumps from the trees that came down in March, then filed the holes with dirt. The stumps got added to burn piles to burn in the fall. I spent a fair bit of time just standing out there watching him. I find it fascinating. He said he would teach me how to operate the backhoe, but I don’t know that this is a skill I need to add to my arsenal right now. Maybe.

That area where he’s working is much more open and sunny now with the evergreens gone. It might be a good spot to put more fruit trees.

**************************************************

We have a second batch of four baby robins in the nest in the corner porch rafter. I can’t tell if this is the same couple that had the first batch or if they sub-let the nest to another couple. That corner rafter is prime real estate for sure.

The mama turkeys are still here with their babies, and we have a mama deer with a tiny little fawn. Lots of babies this year.

**************************************************

Sewing items of note:

• I got the second edition copy of the Block Genius book. This edition adds the math/measurements for 4-1/2” blocks (yikes! tiny!) as well as 5x5, 7x7, and 8x8 grid quilt blocks, many of which were designed by the author. I see lots of opportunity for fun and experimentation.

• Yesterday was my day to run errands in town. I stopped at the Salvation Army thrift store, which usually has a good sewing section. The only thing I bought, though, was a bag made of some nylon material with the Similac baby formula logo on the inside—not something I would carry as is, but the size, style, and design is exactly what I am looking for in a cross-body bag. I have this wild idea that I will recreate it in a different material.

• I noticed that Joanns is now carrying Dritz hardware in bulk—they have large bags of D-rings, gate hooks, even 10-packs of fabric marking pens. (I go through those pens at a ridiculous rate, probably because they dry out so fast here.) I have had mixed success with Dritz hardware, but sometimes it’s the only product readily available.

I have the pieces cut out for a Mini Poppins bag:

A few weeks ago, I was at one of the quilt stores in Kalispell buying some fabric, and a finished Mini Poppins bag was sitting on the counter. I asked about it and the salesperson went over and took what I assumed was the pattern off a display. When I got it home, though, I realized that I had purchased the metal stays for the pattern but not the pattern itself. (Perhaps the “stays-only” package should have a different label on it than the one that is on the pattern; they are identical except for the small type at the bottom that indicates no pattern is included.) The quilt store didn’t have any more copies of the pattern for sale and it’s not available as a digital download. I saw the pattern at the quilt store in Spokane, so I bought it there. Now I have two sets of stays and one pattern. I am going to make the larger Mini Poppins bag first.

This same designer, Aunties Two, has a pattern for the full-size Poppins bag, one that is large enough to carry a sewing machine. The quilt store here is having a class on making it, but I didn’t find out about the class until Sunday and the first of two classes was held yesterday. The store is offering the class again in September. Perhaps I’ll do it then, although one of the women who works at the other quilt store in town made the large Poppins bag and told me that it’s a lot to wrangle through a domestic machine. If I were going to make it, I think I’d want to use the Necchi industrial.

I think it’s going to be a stay inside and sew day today as we’ve already had one big thunderstorm move through here. The pager went off just before 4 a.m. for a wildfire on the mountain up above our house. We got dressed and went out to see what was happening. There was a small fire visible, but it’s out of our fire district, on state forest land, and inaccessible by any of our trucks. The rain may have put it out, but those fires have been known to smolder and flare up weeks later when it’s hot, dry, and windy. The Department of Natural Resources will have to get up there today and see what’s going on with it.

Baby Roos Learn to Crow

I said to the husband earlier this week that it is just about time for the baby roosters to start practicing their crowing skills. They have to learn how to crow by listening to the big roosters. Sure enough, on Friday evening, I heard what sounded like a rusty gate coming from the direction of the chicken yard. And then I heard another, slightly different rusty gate sound. Oh, joy. This will continue for a while yet. The baby roos get very excited about their ability to make noise and want to practice All.The.Time.

At least now we will be able to determine exactly how many roosters we have out there.

The Buff rooster is getting better, slowly. He doesn’t always hang out behind the trash cans now; sometimes I go in there and he is wandering around inside the coop. I hope he has learned something.

Managing roosters is so stressful. So much testosterone.

*********************************************

The husband helped me move my other industrial treadle into the garage so I could play with it:

This is a Singer 31-15. I bought it in Spokane about 2-1/2 years ago. It doesn’t need a lot of cleaning; I oiled it and it runs very smoothly. The bobbin case is missing but easily replaced. My Necchi BV is almost identical to this machine in design—enough that some parts are interchangeable and I used the Singer 31-15 manual to re-time my Necchi after I cleaned it. This machine has the big, heavy handwheel on it. I may take it off and see if it fits on the Necchi. I’d love to have the heavier handwheel on that machine. Although I haven’t measured the pulley sizes between the two handwheels, they look similar, so I wouldn’t be changing gear ratios, just getting a heavier, easier to grab handwheel. This machine came with a 3/8” treadle belt on it. I have 5/8” belting (in the box to the left) and that is what is on the Necchi, but this machine seems to do okay with the original belt.

We’ll see. I prefer my Necchi because it’s a Necchi but also because it has reverse and the Singer 31-15 doesn’t. A lot of people use their 31-15s for free motion quilting. That might be fun to try.

*********************************************

Yesterday’s early-morning rain shower gave way to sunny skies, so we top-dressed the rest of the corn with compost. As expected, that job went much more quickly with the husband doing half of the shoveling. That was the last big garden job until crops start coming in. I am down to spot weeding daily. DD#2 always used to say that the garden looked its best in July and she’s right. After I mowed the grass in the garden the other day, I wanted to lie down out there and take a nap. All the greenery is very inviting. I am watching for a good deal on a metal park bench that I can put out in the garden. I think it would be nice to be able to sit out there and enjoy my hard work.

I picked some comfrey leaves and have a batch of comfrey salve infusing in the slow cooker (per Nicole Sauce’s recipe). I also picked a bunch of oregano and put it into the dehydrator. I’ll do more today as it doesn’t take very long, but it does make me crave pizza.

And I reorganized some sewing stuff yesterday evening and found Yet Another Bag of Scraps—not a big bag, but big enough. Hopefully this is the end of them. I half-heartedly sewed another couple dozen strips together for the next Candy Coated.

This is the Flying Dutchman block I made last week:

This block frustrates me only from the standpoint that I adore the fabric combination—it gives the block so much movement—but those fabrics aren’t available anymore. The background is a dark eggplant with that beads-on-a-string pattern and the triangles are a dragonfly print. I am pretty sure the eggplant fabric came from the quilt store north of town, but I looked there on Thursday and didn’t see any. The dragonfly fabric was a Joanns remnant.

This is one of the hazards of using up scraps to make blocks. Sometimes you hit on something really cool and can’t recreate it. The block itself is fun to make, though. Maybe I’ll use this on the front of a tote bag.

No Black Kona

I have an idea for a quilt. I need a plain black cotton fabric for the background. I noticed a few months ago that my supply of black Kona was running low—I used a lot of it for binding—but I did not think to get more. And now there is no black Kona to be had anywhere, not at any of the quilt stores in town, not at Joanns or Hobby Lobby, and not online. Even the 108” wideback Kona is sold out. I should have driven down to the Amish store in St. Ignatius on Thursday because they probably still have stock.

In the interest of putting my money where my mouth is, though, I am going to try some American Made Brand cotton. This is 100% cotton fabric made from fibers grown in the US, spun in the US, and woven into fabric in the US. I’ve known of this brand, but honestly, finding a retailer has been something of a hassle. I wish “Made in America” products were more prominently displayed in stores. We have a Made in Montana program/sticker here that makes it easy to find and buy locally-made items.

I had to order the amount of fabric I needed, so I can’t start this project yet. We’ll see how it turns out.

I am having fun with EQ8, although some things about the program frustrate me to no end. Why can I only have one project open at a time? Why do I have to name the project at the beginning in order to start it? Why are both blocks and quilts considered “projects?” I ordered the “Lessons for Beginners” book and hopefully that will help me navigate some of these issues, because the people who engineered this software clearly think differently about workflow than I do.

**********************************************

I spent much of yesterday morning in the garden. I cut the grass around the perimeter, weeded the last of the potatoes and dumped the grass clippings on them for mulch, then weeded other spots needing attention. As I acquire more cardboard boxes, I am putting cardboard down on the spots where I’d like to plant next year.

I have lots of gooseberries and a respectable amount of blueberries this year, but I didn’t heed Cathy’s advice to prune my currants. They are not producing quite as much as they have in the past. Lesson learned.

I found the first pod full of peas.

I opened it and ate the peas. Oh, my. Looking at the number of pods about to fill out, I suspect I’ll be shelling peas every afternoon for the next couple of weeks. I shell them, blanch them, and freeze them and they go into soups over the winter. I should make some pea salad, too. Yum. The variety is Alaska and I grow it every year.

I thought I might be out in the garden most of today, too, but we were blasted out of a sound sleep at 1 a.m. by crashing booms of thunder followed by 20 minutes of heavy rain. I grabbed my iPad and looked at the weather radar and there was only one small blob of precipitation—right over our house. It’s raining again now. I’ll have to see how soggy it is out there later this morning. I am glad I got the grass cut.

Our neighbor, Mike, is putting a new porch on his house. The husband was there yesterday helping him get it ready for a concrete pour in the next week or so. Mike’s property backs up to ours along one edge of the pig pasture. Sometimes, he will stand on the fence line and talk to the pigs. We really do have well-socialized pigs because they get visits (and leftovers) from lots of people in the neighborhood. We’ve got a path through the woods from our property to Mike’s so I ducked through there a couple of times yesterday to see how the porch framing was progressing:

Mike is a flight medic with the helicopter service and also on the fire department with the husband. Lila adores Mike and no doubt would prefer to live with him, but he visits her regularly with puppy treats and tummy rubs.

The husband asked Mike if he was still planning on black concrete for the porch; the husband doesn’t do a lot of decorative concrete, but apparently, they are going to add the color at the batch plant. I’ll try to get pictures when it happens because I’ve never seen a colored concrete pour. It will coordinate nicely with the rest of the house:

Mike consulted with his own Architectural Review Committee and black concrete was the suggestion. I concur. I think it will actually be more of a charcoal color, but we’re calling it black.

With one exception, we have a group of truly excellent people in our little neighborhood. Everyone helps out when needed and enough of us are home during the day that we can keep an eye on things. Anything out of the ordinary would be noticed immediately. We have kids running around. People drop in to visit. We share food from our gardens. This is a wonderful little community.

Quilt Blocks, EQ8, and Baby Turkeys

When I got to the Broken Dishes block in the Block Genius book, I pulled out the huge stack of HSTs still—yes, still—left over from that blue-and-white quilt I made for the Ritzville sale last year. The finished quilt had 1096 HSTs in it and I think I must have had that many left over, too.

I made as many Broken Dishes blocks as I could with the leftovers, then arranged the blocks into another wallhanging:

I think both wallhangings could benefit from borders to make them look a bit more finished. I’ll put these in a pile and see if we can get them quilted and donated to Mennonite Disaster Service. When MDS works on someone’s home, they give a quilted wallhanging as a gift when the project is done.

It feels good to have made a dent in the orphan blocks bin.

The blocks in the Block Genius book are in alphabetical order. Thus far, I’ve made the following blocks:

• Big Dipper

• Broken Dishes

• Buckeye Beauty

• Carmen’s Block

• Caroline’s Choice

• Cracker Block (ugh—I tried to make that block in the evening when I was tired and I kept mis-cutting the units.

• Crosses and Losses—I didn’t actually make this block because I had one left over from the C&L Ritzville quilt from several years ago, so I took it out of the orphan block box and added it to the pile of finished blocks.

• Double Pinwheel

• Double X Block

• Flock of Geese

• Flying Dutchman

I am learning what I like and what I don’t like. Blocks with triangle units are hard for me as they mess with my limited spatial perception abilities (that Double X block was a nightmare). I knew going into this that I much prefer making block units en masse and trimming them to size—as with eight-at-a-time HSTs—rather than cutting tiny units and sewing them together a la Bonnie Hunter. However, I am using scraps and charm squares for these sample blocks and also trying to follow the math in the book, which means abandoning the usual shortcuts and doing some things the old-fashioned way.

Right now, I am stalled at that Flying Dutchman block because I like it very much and would like to design a quilt around it. Flying Dutchman is a variation of Dutchman’s Puzzle. (This American Quilter’s Society article has a good explanation with pictures.) I’ve been thinking that it would be nice to have some quilt design software, like Electric Quilt 8. When I checked the EQ website yesterday, I discovered that EQ8 was 25% off through July 5, so I bought it.

I hate going up software learning curves. I especially hate going up software learning curves when the software is obviously PC-based but has been compiled to run on a Mac. That said, I learned the basics of this program in just a few hours and have been playing around with some ideas. We’ll see what happens.

**********************************************************

We have two mama turkeys hanging out on our property. They have four babies between them and I always see them together:

Lila flushed them out of the tall grass at the edge of the woods the other day, so she and I had to have a discussion about defenseless baby forest animals and how we don’t eat them. The mama turkeys seem to think that our property is a relatively safe place to raise their babies and I want to keep it that way. (The free scratch grains may also have something to do with that.)

The Buff rooster is still limping. He roosts on one of the low bars at night and then hides behind the trash cans during the day. The leg doesn’t appear broken and he does put weight on it, but I am surprised that it doesn’t seem to be improving much. I am trying to be patient. One of the hard lessons of farming is that sometimes, the only thing to do is wait and see. As long as he’s not getting picked on and he is still eating and drinking, I am going to assume that this will heal with time. Some of the chicken websites say that sprains can take several weeks to heal. I am also going to trust that he knows that hiding and resting is what he needs right now.

We’ve had lame chickens in the past, but a lame rooster will not do well if we have more aggressive roosters in the coop.

Rainy Days and Quilt Blocks

The pager went off shortly after 4 a.m. yesterday morning for a structure fire in our district. The husband got dressed and went for the engine; I got dressed and headed out to get food for the firefighters. It occurred to me, about a mile down the road, that the grocery store might be closed because of the pandemic. The store where we have an account is normally open 24 hours but they had adjusted that at one point. I pulled off the road and called and discovered that yes, they are back to being open around the clock.

The adjustments we’ve all had to make pop up in the oddest places sometimes. I took for granted that the store would be open. If it had been closed, I would have had to come up with an alternate plan. We have a convenience store/gas station in our district and I’ve gotten sandwiches from them, but they don’t open until 6 a.m. and we have to wait for them to make the sandwiches. As it was, I went to the grocery store, cleaned out their deli case of all the pre-made sandwiches, and grabbed some apples and bananas.

The house was already fully engulfed by the time the call came in to dispatch, so it ended up being mostly a defensive response. I stayed for about an hour, then came home to feed animals. It’s heartbreaking to see someone’s home burn, but I never tire of watching our firefighters work together in such a coordinated and caring way. The husband is the tallest one on scene and he wears a black helmet as Deputy Chief of Fire Operations, so it’s not hard to follow what he’s doing.

****************************************************

We have been sitting under a stationary low that has done nothing but rotate and dump rain on western Montana for the last couple of days. I am not complaining. This year has been enough of a meat grinder without adding forest fires to the mix, and every drop of moisture we get helps.

I couldn’t work outside, so I played with fabric. I think the universe is leaving me a trail of breadcrumbs. Where it might lead is an interesting question.

These are the two books I picked up in Seattle:

The one on the right is a book of block designs, with templates, which puts it squarely in the pre-rotary cutter era. The other was published right at the start of the rotary cutter craze and features mostly quilt designs made up of a single block. I don’t need books full of quilt designs as much as I need reference books with building blocks (no pun intended). I have resisted buying quilt books because I don’t want to end up with as many quilt books as I have knitting books, but these were a good purchase.

I also bought this book:

The book is great, but that title wasn’t doing it any favors. As it turns out—and I did not know this when I bought it—Fox Chapel Publishing has re-issued it as a revised and expanded second edition with a marginally better title.

I will now have to hunt down the second edition. This is a book for quilt block geeks, for sure. The author has broken each block down into grid size and subunits, with the math already done for making the block in several different sizes. She suggests going through and making each block to create a quilt block library. I thought I might try that and see how far I got. I started with the first two blocks, Big Dipper and Broken Dishes:

I have a whole plastic bin of orphan blocks and orphan block units that are either left over from other projects or were experiments I abandoned. I opened that bin and lo and behold, there was a stack of already-made hourglass units—the units that make up the Big Dipper block—left over from the neutrals quilt. I made one block, then laid out the rest of the units to see how many other blocks I could make. I had a total of nine finished blocks, which made the perfect size wallhanging:

It’s not fancy, but it used up the blocks and that’s a plus.

I moved on to the Broken Dishes block in the afternoon—noting again that this is an actual block with HSTs in a specific arrangement, not just a mishmash of HSTs—but you’ll have to come back tomorrow to see what I did with that one. This blog post is long enough.

****************************************************

I am not going to win any points with Katherine for doing this, but she is one of my favorite people and I love this video. Our Pacific Northwest Mennonite Conference put this together last week and sent it to all the member churches to watch on Sunday. Katherine Jameson Pitts is our Executive Conference Minister. She also sews and quilts and I want you to notice the sewing machines on her office shelves, one of which is a black Singer 301.

And if you stop the video at the 3:03 mark, you will see the inside of our church. I think the picture was taken in 2014 when we hosted the annual gathering. You have not heard anything like the sound of several hundred Mennonites singing together in that space, which has wicked acoustics. I am probably up at the piano, but I see Margaret and a few others in that photo.

A Linty Mess

I finished sewing down the binding on the neutrals quilt and did something I haven’t done before: I immediately threw the quilt in the machine and washed it. I do love the way cotton batting crinkles up when it’s washed, but I don’t wash my quilts right after finishing them because they aren’t dirty and I think it’s unnecessary. This quilt, though, was covered with lint from that awful batting and I was hoping that a trip through the washer and dryer would remove most of what was left.

The quilt felt wonderful after coming out of the dryer, but most of the lint was still on it. The worst of the lint was in the border, where I had quilted loops and the lint had gotten trapped in the stitches. I had to pull the bits of lint out—what a tedious job—and then roll a lint roller over that area to clean it up. Thank goodness I had picked up a nice lint roller and four refills at Ikea last week. I went through five layers of adhesive on the first lint roller on this quilt alone.

It’s done.

Hopefully the rest of the batting will stay trapped inside where it is supposed to be.

Fairfield Organic Cotton Batting—don’t use it. I see it’s on clearance now at Joanns. Ugh. I am sticking with Warm and Natural from now on.

I still don’t know what I want to work on next. I unearthed a Laura Heine collage quilt pattern (the Featherweight) the other day and thought I might start that, but I’m just not sure. Maybe this lack of enthusiasm for sewing is a nudge to go work on sewing machines. I stopped after church yesterday and picked up my friend Ginger’s serger and brought it home for some TLC. A few years ago, she happened to mention that she was looking for a serger. Not long after, I found a White Speedylock for $40 at Goodwill. Her office is right next to the Goodwill store, so I told her about it and she popped over on her lunch hour and picked it up. She says she loves that machine and uses it often, but it stopped working recently and she didn’t know how to fix it.

I cleaned and oiled it, rethreaded it, and got it serging again. It’s a good, solid, no-nonsense machine and I am glad she’s getting a lot of use out of it. The threading is a bit tricky, though; the upper looper kept wanting to unthread and I think that was what was causing her headaches. I’ll sit down with her and show her how to thread it in case it happens again.

******************************************************

The husband spent the weekend putting trim and siding on the new shop. I’ll wait until it’s done to show you a picture. I think it’s going to look really nice. (And that is why it is important to have an Architectural Review Committee for these projects.)

The herb garden again looks like a jungle this year, despite the extensive rodent damage from last winter and me giving plants away to anyone who wanted to stop by and pick them up:

We haven’t yet extended the chicken yard, and at this point, that’s going to have to be a late fall project. If we let chickens in there now, we might never see them again. (I suspect there are more than a few snakes living in there, too.) Really, I think the plants take my clearing attempts as a challenge. The salvias are nowhere near the place they were planted originally. One of them is growing right in the middle of the lavenders.

An item on my to-do list for Thursday, after it stops raining, is to get in there and cut some oregano, lemon balm, and comfrey. I want to try making a batch of comfrey salve and I’d like to dry some oregano and lemon balm to use this winter.

My friend Anna stopped over last night with scraps for the chickens and asked if she could have some mint. I’ve got a big patch of spearmint out in the big garden and I told her she was welcome to whatever she needed. Anna used to have a catering business, but when the pandemic started, she saw an opportunity to transition her business from catering—which is exhausting—to making and selling to-go and take-and-bake plant-based meals using as many local ingredients as possible. Vegan cooking is her passion and the demand here is quite strong, surprisingly.

I tend to eat more vegetarian than the husband; he typically has four eggs for breakfast, salami and cheese for lunch, and likes to have some red meat meal for dinner every night (and a salad). It’s the only reliable way for him to get the caloric intake he needs. (And yes, he has perfect bloodwork and a blood pressure of 90/60.) I like chicken, fish, and pork more than beef, and I might only have animal protein 3-4 times a week. If we lived in a place where seafood was readily available and affordable, we’d eat more of it. I doubt I could go full vegan, however. As much as I love vegetables, after three or four days on a totally plant-based diet, I am just dragging. I do get to try a lot of Anna’s recipes, though, and that’s great fun.

I get nervous when people proclaim that everyone needs to follow a certain kind of diet. I think human bodies are too varied in their nutritional needs and preferences for a one-size-fits-all approach. And as with many things, moderation is key.

Not the Same as Being There

This past weekend was supposed to have been our annual Pacific Northwest Mennonite Conference meeting. The location of the gathering changes every year depending on which church is hosting. We last hosted in 2014. This year, Seattle Mennonite was supposed to host, but because of the pandemic, we canceled the gathering and arranged to have a two-hour business meeting/delegate session via Zoom, instead. Kudos to our dedicated tech team, who set up a webinar-based format for the meeting complete with voting, Spanish translation, and an informal breakout session so we could “visit” with each other. (Singing, visiting, and eating are key elements of any Mennonite get-together.) They did an awesome job.

We also had an hour-long Zoom meeting with the old and new board members in place of our traditional board luncheon. Our pastor has been moderator for the past two years and his term is up. My four-year board term also ended. I was asked to serve another term but requested a break for a year or two. As the husband notes, however, I can’t ever seem to get away from these things completely. The new board was trying to find a time for its fall meeting. As you can imagine, trying to coordinate a dozen schedules can be difficult, at best. The board’s recording secretary couldn’t make any of the suggested dates, so I offered to fill in for her. We’d all love the opportunity to meet in person again, but the plan is for that board meeting to happen via Zoom.

I got most of the binding sewn down on that neutrals quilt during the meetings. When asked for some parting wisdom at the board luncheon, I said that someone was going to have to take over knitting or sewing during the board get-togethers. Our treasurer liked to say that “things are right with the world” if Janet was working on something. I did finish a lot of projects at board meetings over the past four years.

**********************************************************

Yesterday morning, before the meetings started, I went out and cut a big bucket of lettuce, washed it, and filled three gallon zipper bags. Elysian said I could put it in the market fridge up at the corner where she sells eggs and we would see if anyone wanted to buy it. The lettuce is growing faster than we can eat it. I can keep it from bolting, for a few weeks, at least, if I cut it back and let it grow again.

I weeded the other two rows of corn yesterday afternoon and that really helped to stretch out my back. It feels almost back to normal now. And look!—I have little ears of corn!

The Dirty Girl tomato that grew from seed Susan gave me is the biggest of all my tomato plants (I need to prune them this week).

I’ll save seeds in the fall and add it to the rotation again next year. It is my only potato-leaf type tomato. All the other varieties have serrated leaves.

We will have the first cucumber (Muncher) of the season soon:

My sense is that a lot of the crops are ahead of schedule this year. The corn is obviously early, although all four varieties I’m growing are old Native American varieties bred for this climate. We don’t usually have cukes until mid-July or later, depending on temperatures. I’ve already got tomatoes setting fruit, and we’ll have the usual bumper crop of zucchini. I really think that starting seeds in the greenhouse and allowing the seedlings to develop strong root systems gives them a running start when they finally get into the ground. Perhaps this year, crops will ripen on a more staggered schedule rather than all at once, which is just overwhelming.

All of these successes are making up for the fact that I cannot get cowpeas to grow in Montana.

**********************************************************

I made a honey-do list for the husband yesterday. I try to handle most things myself, not because he doesn’t want to do them, but because—at this time of year, especially—he’s usually working. I asked him to help me get my other industrial treadle base out of the storage container and moved over to the old garage so I could set a machine up in there. We need a shade hung in our bedroom. That’s one of those jobs that would take him five minutes and would take me two hours (an hour of which would be spent looking for the right tools), so it’s better just to have him do it and do it correctly. I also asked him to move half a dozen wheelbarrow loads of compost from the pile by the garden into the rows of corn. That’s another job I could do—and have done—but he can move three loads in the time it takes me to move one, so I am going to play the helpless female card there for the sake of efficiency.

We have an 80% chance of rain in the forecast for the next four days. I am staring down the gift of some extended sewing time and I have no idea what to work on. Stay tuned to see what I decide to do.

Strains and Sprains

The Buff rooster has been taking it easy for the past few days, spending most of his time either sitting on one of the low roosting bars or hiding behind the trash cans in the coop. (We keep the chicken feed in them.) I am hoping that a few more days of rest will allow that leg to heal completely. I hope he knows enough not to pick any fights with the other rooster.

I’ve been watching for an opportunity, too, to clean out the nesting box with the pile of eggs in it. The eggs have been in there long enough—and nothing has yet hatched, despite the merry-go-round of broody hens—that I was worried a rotten egg would explode and cause a haz-mat situation. I got all the eggs out of the box yesterday and disposed of them. Those hens will have to amass another pile of eggs and try again. (Really, how hard could it be?)

I woke up the other morning with my lower back spasming so badly that I could hardly get out of bed. I’ve been weeding a lot this week, but that usually helps with my flexibility. The husband has a tendency to be a bed hog, and occasionally he will push me into a corner and I’ll wake up twisted into knots like a pretzel. I think that happened the other night.

[He said to me, “Why didn’t you push me back over to my side of the bed?” as if moving 200 pounds of unconscious husband is easy, LOL.]

I was sure that stretching those muscles out would help, but I was in agony no matter which way I moved. I tried everything—arnica, BioFreeze, Aspercreme, liberal amounts of ibuprofen, heat wraps—nothing helped. Finally, in desperation, I laid down on the heating pad for about 20 minutes with it on the highest setting. That relaxed my back muscles enough that I was able to do some stretching exercises. Clearly, I need to do more core strengthening and not rely on gardening work for that.

I used the heating pad and stretched again a few more times again yesterday whenever I felt like those muscles were tightening up. I was able to get the front yard mowed in the morning (I like to cut the grass but I may have to give in and get a riding lawnmower) and then finished the Candy Coated quilt top:

I picked up six yards of fabric on clearance at Hobby Lobby last week in Seattle and that will make a good backing for this top.

It was hot yesterday, which made lying on the heating pad even more fun, but it also reminded me how July and August are my least favorite months of the year after March. Heat absolutely saps me of energy and motivation. I am good to about 75 degrees and then I’m done. Fortunately, it is supposed to be a bit cooler today, then much cooler with rain through about midweek. I know the garden needs to the warm temperatures to do well, but I suspect I’m going to be spending a lot of time in the basement or out in the garage for the next couple of months. Any gardening work is going to have to happen in the early morning.

I see at least one snake a day when I go out to the garden, although they are always garter snakes. That big racer snake is keeping a low profile. I’ve also seen lots of ladybugs when I am weeding. The raspberries are covered with bees. The lavender won’t bloom for another couple of weeks yet. We aren’t getting a lot of strawberries this year. I really need to re-do that bed anyway as it’s getting overgrown.

Every year is different.

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.

*****************************************************

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.

********************************************************

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.

********************************************************

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.

********************************************************

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.

********************************************************

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.

********************************************************

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.