Cleaning Leads to Finishing

The Noon and Night Quilt has been set aside, not because it has problems but because I needed to start cleaning, and cleaning led to finishing some projects that have been languishing. I put together another comforter to tie and donate to Mennonite Central Committee—it was already cut out and just needed to be assembled—but our church’s sewing group hasn’t met since March and I am not sure when or if we’ll meet in person again. I can still tie comforters here at home, but that question has been nagging at me lately. As I am the current president of that group, I should do something about it.

I made the bias binding and bound the inside edges of that Get Out of Town Duffle Bag from a few months ago. I still need to assemble the shoulder strap but the bag itself is now done.

I hate doing inside binding. I would much rather make a drop-in lining. I attached this by machine but sewed it down by hand because I think it looks nicer.

I cut out another apron as I clearly need one for every day of the week. I can’t believe how dirty I get some days. The apron needs to be put together but shouldn’t take long.

It feels good to be moving some of these projects along. In between sewing, there was some visiting with neighbors and discussions with the girls about wedding plans. My mother and I don’t want to accidentally buy the same dress for the wedding, so I enlisted DD#2’s help in finding one for me.

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Tera told me about a place in Utah that sells recycled billboard tarps. She uses them in her garden. I ordered two, 14’ x 48’, and they arrived yesterday. I’ll have the husband help me get those spread out before it snows. I needed some really heavy-duty plastic to kill weeds in a couple of problem areas and these should work nicely.

I was putting together an Amazon order yesterday—I need a good harvesting apron for picking apples and also some black batting for this Noon and Night quilt—when I ran across a company called Palouse Brand. “The Palouse” is a large agricultural area south of Spokane, and this family-run farm grows and sells lentils, garbanzo beans, and wheat berries. Their products are non-GMO and they don’t use glyphosate as a desiccant. They also partner with farms in Montana and Idaho for some of the lentil varieties they don’t grow themselves. (Lentils grow in Montana—who knew?) I was tickled to find them and put in an order for several bulk packages of lentils.

My lettuce seedlings have sprouted:

Now I just have to keep them well watered until they are big enough for me to transplant.

I think (I hope) we’re past the worst of the heat. We’ve had pop-up thundershowers the last couple of mornings and actually gotten some precipitation. (This time of year, the humidity is so low that we often have thunder and lightning, but the moisture evaporates before it hits the ground.) The forecast is for mid-80s for the next 10 days. That’s bearable. I am expecting an avalanche of tomatoes shortly. Those will get popped into the freezer and I’ll deal with them in November.

Quilts and Weddings and an Excess of Roosters

The Noon and Night blocks have all been sashed and sewn into rows. Tera stopped by Sunday afternoon and took a look at what I had done so far. She says we can custom quilt this quilt on her longarm. I am going to send her the EQ8 files and she’ll play around with some layouts.

I may take a break from that quilt today, though, to make masks. Also, I need to begin a thorough deep-clean of the house. DD#1 and her fiancé still plan to get married in October, but the event has been scaled back to just family, or what is being called a “microwedding” these days. The husband’s father and brother are planning to stay with us. I don’t think they want to sleep in the middle of a Joann Fabrics store. I have to do some cleaning and rearranging and I need to start soon.

With all of the disruptions and uncertainty, wedding planning got put on hold and we’ve spent the last couple of weeks trying to get things back on track. DD#1’s fiancé was in the middle of his last clinical dental rotation in March when everything shut down and he had to go back to Seattle. The university graduated his class despite the interruption, but then there was an issue with the students taking their board exams. They finally got that straightened out and he received his dental license last week. He has taken a position with the Coast Guard/Public Health Service. The two of them will be moving to Ketchikan, Alaska, after the wedding. I am excited about this—Ketchikan was one of the stops on the knitting cruise JC Briar and I did some years ago and I am eager to go back.

Another one of our employees gave his two weeks’ notice yesterday. I was expecting this, as he didn’t really seem to be into the work and we hired him mostly because he was a friend of our other employee, the one who left to get a desk job. So now we’re down to one reliable employee and one kid who works three days a week but is going into the service this fall.

We’ll see if this guy hangs around for the full two weeks or not. Sometimes these employees give their two weeks’ notice, leave that day, and never come back.

It is what it is. All of the builders are in the same boat.

My friend Susan gifted me with some apricots on Sunday. She doesn’t get apricots from her trees every year, but when she does, she shares generously. I made a batch of apricot chutney with them yesterday. I love Indian food and a little bit of chutney is a great addition.

And I finally bought one of these:

It’s a silicone egg mold for the Instant Pot. I confess to a love of Starbucks Sous Vide Egg Bites. They are usually my breakfast choice when I am traveling. I’m going to experiment with making them here.

I think we’re going to have to integrate the chicks with the rest of the flock soon. The baby roos all had a recent growth spurt and now look (and sound) like real roos. We have six. The pullets are also big enough now to hold their own with the other hens. We’ll have to see how it works having one big flock with eight roosters. The husband reminds me that we’ve had this situation before, but I also know that having that much testosterone in a confined space is a recipe for trouble. The roosters have a hierarchy just like the hens do; the difference is that hens very rarely go full gladiator on each other. I am steeling myself for possible bloodshed.

A Quilt Comes Together

As a result of yesterday’s post, I learned a few new things about some of my Montana friends. Two of them love drum corps and one of them grew up in an Anglican church singing “Lead Me, Lord.” (And her mother was the organist.) Music brings people together.

What else unites—not divides—us?

We’re heating back up here, with temps into the upper 80s and low 90s for the next week. I anticipate additional sewing time, especially in the afternoons. I know that’s not as hot as other parts of the country, but it’s hot for us. The tomatoes, cantaloupes, and watermelon will love it. Me, not so much.

I ran across an interesting post the other day on the Vintage Sewing Machines blog. This woman lives in the UK and writes a lot of great technical pieces on vintage sewing machine repair. She has an Adler 87 sewing machine from 1930 with proprietary needles and bobbins, neither of which can be readily sourced. Her solution was to order a batch of 3D-printed bobbins. She has been using them with great success, but because of a recent heat wave, the bobbins have swollen slightly and are jamming the machine.

A cautionary tale for anyone thinking of getting sewing machine parts 3D-printed.

I went to town Friday to run errands—most of the idiot drivers seemed to be elsewhere, thank goodness—and stopped at the quilt store north of town to fondle fabric. I walked over to the rack of Kona and noted that they still didn’t have any black, but as I turned around, I spotted a bolt hiding on the floor next to the rack. A bolt of black Kona. With a note on it saying that the store was limiting the amount each customer could purchase to a few yards.

I hustled up to the cutting table, the bolt lovingly cradled in my arms, and asked for my limit. “Ah,” said the lady at the cutting table. “I see you found the black Kona. That bolt just arrived yesterday.” (It was already half gone.)

I am using the American Made Brand black cotton on this Noon and Night quilt. It is nice to work with and it would not be a hardship if that were the only black cotton I had available. (Having to use an alternative black cotton definitely qualifies as a first-world quilting problem.) However, there is something about the way Kona feels, which is why I have an entire dresser full of it in my sewing room.

I finished the last of 42 Noon and Night blocks yesterday. While I liked the half-drop setting that my friend Kate suggested, the blocks still felt crowded to me. I could have added some sashing and still used a half-drop setting, but I am balancing quilt design with quilt pattern writing and thought that might get too complicated to explain. Just because I can lay it out with relative ease in EQ8 does not mean that I can write directions to do so in real life.

[I know of one quilt book released recently that has a lot of errors in it, and it seems to be because the designs were done in computer software without sufficient real-world testing. Computer-aided design is just that—the computer is “aiding” the design process, not replacing it.]

I took all the blocks off the design wall and put them back up in a straight setting. The difference was immediate—almost as if all 42 blocks were letting out a sigh of relief. I’ve learned to listen to what the quilt wants. This quilt wants a plain old straight setting.

I am now cutting narrow sashing strips and adding them between the blocks. I did two of the seven rows last night before stopping:

I haven’t yet decided if there will be cornerstones on the sashing between the rows or if the sashing will be plain black. I might have to wait and ask the quilt what it wants. And I have to start thinking about how I want this quilted. My friend Tera is coming by this afternoon. I am sure she would let me borrow her longarm to quilt this, but in that case, I’d probably do an allover design. The other option is to sub it out to a professional longarmer and have them do something custom. I am willing to pay extra for custom quilting, but the issue is the additional time that would take. I’ll have to think about that some more (and see what the quilt wants).

What a journey this quilt design has been.

We Cannot Keep From Singing

This is a post for the musicians and singers out there.

Our church went back to in-person gatherings in the middle of June, but it’s a hybrid format. About 8-12 of us are present physically in the church house. Those who want to join us via Zoom can still do so. We have two computers set up at the front of the church. One is hooked up to the projector and projects the Zoom portion of the service onto the screen at the front. That way, we can see the people at home who are participating. My laptop computer is set up by the piano and gives a view out into the congregation for the people at home.

We’ve had to do some creative tech rigging. The piano isn’t picked up well on just the computer input, so I went to my “box of cables” (we all have one) and pulled out a very old microphone. It came with an educational software package that my kids used almost 20 years ago. The microphone is so old that I had to get a USB adapter for it to hook it up to my laptop. It sits inside the piano. As old as it is, it seems to work well at picking up the sound.

Because singing has been identified as a “superspreader event” for coronavirus, Mennonite Church USA issued a recommendation that churches curtail singing for the foreseeable future. They might as well have asked us to stop breathing. We compromised by having one congregational song at the end of the service, but everyone sings with masks on. I play my usual 10 minutes of prelude before the service, and our pastor has added two more times of music in the order of worship—one where I play a hymn and one where we play a video from YouTube. 

I’ve had to laugh, though, because it’s nearly impossible to keep Mennonites from singing. I can hear people singing and humming along while I am playing prelude. Last week, one of our members sang a hymn on Zoom and everyone around me was humming along quietly, in parts—always in parts. We make up parts if there aren’t any parts.

The day we take off our masks and break into song together again will be a fine day, indeed.

Hymn #580 in the Mennonite Hymnal and Worship Book is “How Can I Keep From Singing?” It’s one of our congregation’s favorites. I’ve got several lovely piano arrangements of it. And my favorite vocal arrangement of this hymn was done by a female group called SheDaisy. This was on their Christmas album, but as an “Easter egg.” The song was not listed anywhere on the CD. The only way to hear it was to allow the final track to play, and then a few moments later, this song started:

Gorgeous.

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DD#1 played the trumpet in high school band, so I got to indulge myself as a “band mother” for a few years. I chaperoned a lot of band trips, one of which was the District Band Festival at Hellgate High School in Missoula. As part of band festival, the kids are asked to sight read a musical arrangement. That year’s selection was an arrangement called “1861” by Jonathan Newman. It is based on a 19th-century Anglican hymn called “Lead Me, Lord.” I was so intrigued by that piece—and that hymn, which I had never heard before—that I came home from band festival and started looking for it. I have a fairly extensive collection of hymnals from many different denominations, but this hymn wasn’t listed in any of them. Finally, I went to the internet. The website Hymnary.org has a search function that brings up every instance of a hymn in just about every hymnal ever published. I typed in “Lead Me, Lord,” and guess what popped up?

“Lead Me, Lord” is hymn #538 in the Mennonite Hymnal and Worship Book.

It had been there the whole time but I didn’t think to look for it in our hymnal.

Somehow, this came up in a discussion between my friend Robert and me. We have been friends since I was 14 and he was 16 because we both played trombone in high school band. For the past decade or so, he has been a low brass instructor for the Akron Bluecoats drum and bugle corps. His big thing is pitch and intonation and listening to yourself and the musicians around you to create the best sound possible. (I know this because I sat next to him in band for two years in high school.)

Robert took this hymn and arranged it as a warm-up piece for the Bluecoats low brass hornline. Because they couldn’t tour this year, the corps had an online telethon a few weeks ago, and Robert sent me this link (it should start at 30:40 in the video):

It’s hard to play this well together in person. The fact that these kids did this virtually is mind-blowing.

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And because I think this is funny, I will leave you with a story about my kids. From the time they were little, we always sang together in the car. We started with a collection of CDs called My Little Yellow Bus, then moved on to Disney soundtracks. (I could probably still sing you every song from “The Little Mermaid”.) If I got tired of kids songs, I made them listen to SheDaisy, Sarah McLachlan, Indigo Girls, Sugarland, the Wailin’ Jennys, or the Dixie Chicks. My mother and sister joined in when they were with us. We once drove down the east coast, from Maryland to North Carolina and back up to Ohio, banging out Miley Cyrus’s “See You Again.” The girls learned how to harmonize. They also learned a few other things on the way.

DD#2 was born in 1997. The Dixie Chicks CD “Fly” came out in 1999, with such memorable tracks as “Goodbye Earl,” about two women who murder the abusive husband of one of the women, hide his body, and go on to live happy lives, and “Sin Wagon,” which includes part of the old hymn “I’ll Fly Away” in it. We were driving somewhere one time with my mother and sister in the car when DD#2—who was probably only about 4 or 5 at the time—said to my sister, “Aunt Beth, what’s a sin wagon?”

Who lets a little kid listen to music like that? LOL. DD#2 has a playlist now with both those songs on it and I just laugh when we’re in the car and she puts it on. Apparently, both girls turned out okay despite their mother’s questionable choice of music.

The Magic of Gardening

Garden cleanup continues, as does harvesting. I brought in five tomatoes and one potato that I accidentally dug up while weeding. The plant was a volunteer that was hiding. It yielded up a respectably-sized Classic Russet, though, my favorite all-purpose potato.

Potatoes are amazing. You put a gnarly-looking piece of sprouting vegetable in the ground, and a few months later, you get lots of potatoes!

There will be beans:

Not as many as I had hoped, but more than I had three months ago.

My friend Marcie brought me some beautiful carrots:

I made carrot salad with them. Yum yum.

Tomatoes fresh off the vine always trigger a specific memory for me: When I had leukemia, I underwent three rounds of chemotherapy at the Cleveland Clinic. In between my second and third rounds, I came home to Montana for the month of September. I had been told by my doctors not to eat fresh vegetables or fruits while I was being treated (just one of many stunningly awful pieces of nutritional advice I received). When we pulled into the driveway, I got out of the car, walked into the backyard, picked a ripe tomato off the vine, and ate it. I’ve done that with the first tomato of the season just about every year since then.

[“Patient is noncompliant” is written all over my medical records, in case you were wondering.]

I cut out some of the spent raspberry canes in order to give the other plants some breathing room and more sun. The pigs got what was left of the broccoli and hoovered it right up. I am allowing the lettuce go to seed and I started another tray of seedlings in the greenhouse to transplant into the garden in a few weeks.

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This book arrived in the mail the other day:

It’s an index to all the Laura Wheeler-designed quilt blocks, compiled by Rose Lea Alboum. It’s important to note that this is just an index, not the actual patterns—which I knew before I ordered the book—but combined with the CD of Kansas City Star patterns I got a few weeks ago, it is a useful resource. I flipped through it the other night and earmarked several more obscure blocks that I’d like to mess around with.

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I am trying not to overload the blog with critical social commentary, but I do have a few more things to say. A friend of mine shared this on Facebook yesterday, attributed to another FB user named John Ferguson:

“Pay the people who are working an extra $400
Watch the unemployment go back to 3%.”

While I disagree with the idea that government should be acting as a nanny state and handing out money in exchange for votes, this does remind me of the basic truth that you tax what you want to discourage and subsidize what you want to encourage. So if you want to discourage job creation and entrepreneurship, you tax and regulate the living daylights out of small businesses. And if you want to encourage people to avoid working, you subsidize their expenses and make it possible for them to do so. This turns that on its head. I wonder what would happen?

I know it’s more complicated than that—believe me, I know how complicated it is—but there is another truth I am reminded of, which is that you don’t simplify a system by adding more layers of complexity. (Health care, anyone?)

I talked to another general contractor last night who is trying to get a foundation put in. People have started calling our home number, which tells me that they are desperate, because most contractors the husband works with know to call his cell phone number directly. I don’t mind fielding these calls—I am happy to run interference for him—but the fact that we’re getting more of them and that I am hearing the same story about not enough help tells me that I am not far off in my assessment. I tell anyone who calls that the husband is not accepting any more jobs for 2020, because he’s not.

And in today’s edition of “We Hate Tourists,” I went to town Wednesday to run some errands. If I had been a cop, I could have issued about a dozen citations to people for stupid and reckless driving, and three-quarters of the tickets would have been given to people with out-of-state plates. If you want to drive like an idiot, please stay home and do it. I have never seen it as bad as it has been this summer.

Stop Here or Keep Going?

I’ve reached a point on the Noon and Night quilt where I have to make a decision. I’ll give you a sneak peek at another block:

I keep “seeing” this quilt in my head with a border. Several borders, actually. I have completed enough blocks that if I stopped now and added a couple of borders, I would end up with a good-sized throw. On the other hand, I have enough pieces already cut to make another dozen blocks, which would give me a twin- or full-sized quilt. I am not sure if I should keep going and make the extra blocks or if I should stop where I am and add some borders. I think this quilt needs to marinate for a couple of days while I decide.

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I’m always happy when fall gets here, for lots of reasons, but this year I am especially looking forward to it. This has been a difficult summer for the husband, and he doesn’t get stressed out easily. The lack of people willing to work for a paycheck has been a constant strain. He agrees to take on work based on the crew he thinks he is going to have, and then people quit. Or their vehicles break down. Or they have personal crises. Our Craigslist ads for help go unanswered. I’ve never seen him this exhausted. He knows he is, and he is working on fixing it, but it’s not like he can just stop and do something else. He’s got to get the current commitments through the pipeline. We’ve been talking to other builders and everyone is in the same boat.

I just love it when people say, “Well, employers ought to pay more and then people would want to work!” Okay, let’s have a little math lesson. The numbers are simplified here for illustration. Let’s say that someone is collecting $3000 a month from the government in unemployment benefits (funded by employers, remember), factoring in the current $600 a week extra payment. (By the way, the husband and I could live on $3000 a month; we could not live extravagantly, but we could manage.) Is that person going to get off the couch and actually WORK for $3000 a month when they can get it for free? Heck, no. So what is the incentive level that is going to motivate them to get a job? Will they work if the employer pays them $4000 a month? Some might. Some might not be inclined to work unless they can get $5000 a month. Is that employee adding enough value to the business to justify that level of pay? Employers aren’t giving out participation trophies. And keep in mind that that is actually costing the employer more than $5000 a month when things like payroll taxes, unemployment, worker’s comp, and other benefits are factored in. The employer has to pay far more—and far more than likely makes sense economically for that employer—to motivate someone receiving unemployment benefits to go out and get a job. The employer may, in fact, decide that it no longer makes sense to stay in business.

You know what motivates people to work? Hunger. Not knowing where the next dime is coming from. And I should probably point out that business owners don’t get to collect unemployment benefits. We fund our own unemployment. It’s called savings.

Call me a selfish libertarian. I no longer care. I am watching my husband work himself into the ground and I am not interested in hearing about what employers “ought to do” from people who have never owned a business and had employees.

Get off my lawn.

It’s supposed to be cool again today before another warmup, and I need to keep working on the garden. You know—growing my own food and taking responsibility for my life and all that.

Grinder Success

I use a lot of ground meat when I cook. We get five kinds of ground pork from our processor—chorizo, Italian, hot Italian, maple, and plain—and after the bacon, it’s the next stuff to get used up. We have quite a few chops left in the freezer, though, and one of the reasons I bought this grinder was to see if I could grind them up and use them that way.

I took out a couple of packages of chops on Sunday evening and put them in the fridge to defrost. The husband has been asking for meat loaf for dinner. I usually make mine with half ground pork and half ground beef, but I didn’t have any pork.

The meat has to be chilled—”crunchy,” as the instructions say—to grind properly. The chops in the fridge had defrosted just enough and seemed to grind easily:

But holy cow! That grinder is LOUD. The instructions say that it will take 5-10 hours of operation for the motor and gears to break in and get quieter. I only used it for about 20 minutes and it sounded like a wood chipper, even on low.

I ground enough pork for meat loaf and made that for dinner. I would change two things next time: I would use one of the smaller grinding plates and I might cut off some of the fat. I used what was on the chops, which did not seem excessive to me. (And the fat is tasty.) For meat loaf, though, it would be better to have it a bit leaner. Also, I need to play around with the seasonings. I’ll often use hot Italian ground pork in meat loaf for a little extra kick. This time, I used regular Italian seasoning when I mixed up the pork and beef. I prefer the extra kick.

I consider this experiment to be a success, enough that I am wishing I had bought this grinder earlier. I’ll pick up casings next time I am at the grocery store and try making some sausage links.

Speaking of seasonings, the little grocery store down in Bigfork has their own house brand of herbs and spices:

They started this a couple of years ago and the list of offerings keeps expanding. I like that they come in these large containers because I use a LOT of seasonings when I cook. I also like that they don’t contain any additives. (McCormick taco seasoning has something in it that makes me ill.) I don’t get to that grocery store very often, but when I do, I try to pick up a few of these containers. I bought cinnamon Sunday night when I went to get frozen pizzas because I’ve used almost all of what I had making zucchini bread.

I plan to make another batch of zucchini bread today and then I’m going to sew. My Martelli rotating cutting mat arrived yesterday and I want to try it out. I need to stay close to home today anyway. A dry cold front with wind is supposed to come through this afternoon. Fire season isn’t over just because we had a little bit of rain.

Why Am I Craving Pizza?

We had some lovely cooler weather this weekend. I mowed the front yard Saturday while the husband was out on a job with one of our employees, and the the two of us finished working on the yard yesterday afternoon. We’ve had enough rain lately that things were starting to get a bit overgrown. I did some garden cleanup, too, and assessed how things are going.

[Our primary residence sits on five acres and the rental house behind us on two acres, so when I say I cut the front yard, I am talking a goodly amount of square footage. I don’t have a riding mower. One of these days I’ll remember to put the FitBit on my arm and track how far I’m walking when I mow.]

We will have watermelons before too long:

A volunteer calendula popped up through a crack in the black plastic:

I had a whole row of calendula in that spot last year. It’s a nice pop of color out by the tomatoes, which are starting to provide their own color:

That’s an Oregon Star paste tomato. There will be more. Some of those tomato plants are 4’ tall.

Maybe it was all the physical activity, but I was craving pizza the whole weekend. Pizza is the one thing I miss most, having given up eating wheat, although there are some good cauliflower-crust and gluten-free crust pizzas out there. (They are not cheap, however.) And I did not feel like cooking. The Crown Vic police cruiser—DD#2’s old car, which we keep on hand as a backup—needed to be driven, so after we finished yesterday, I took a ride down to the small grocery store south of us and picked up some frozen pizzas. Interestingly, that store had Wheat Montana whole wheat flour, but no unbleached white flour.

I had an Amy’s spinach and tomato pizza for dinner. That itch has been scratched.

I missed seeing my friend, Tera, though, thanks to this goofy 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. sleep schedule I’m currently on. She and her husband stopped by after I had gone to bed and my husband didn’t come wake me up. He did give them a tour of the new shop and their dog got to play with Lila. I hope Tera and I can get together soon.

Needless to say, all that outside work didn’t leave much time for sewing. I picked a wagonload of zucchini and cucumbers yesterday and those will have to be dealt with today. I also unboxed my new meat grinder:

It’s an STX TurboForce II. This model came highly recommended by someone I trust, and I want to try it out this week. I’ll keep you posted.

The Little Things

Sometimes it is the little things that make our lives so much easier. I have a hard time keeping track of my fabric cutting rulers on my cutting table. If I lay them down on the table, they are in the way. If I set them on the shelf next to the table, then I forget where I put them.

I bought a Riley Blake Ruler Pal Mini yesterday at the quilt store. What a difference:

Now my rulers are out of the way when I am not using them, but within arm’s reach when I need one. Even my big 9-1/2” x 24” ruler fits in the holder nicely.

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One of our chicks has a lame foot. (See it sticking out on the left side of the picture?)

It’s hard to tell because her crooked foot hasn’t slowed her down any. She wouldn’t stand still long enough for me to get a good picture. I am not too worried about her getting picked on because her mother was a Light Brahma. She is big enough to hold her own against the other chicks. And she is very sweet. She is the first one to come running into the coop when she sees me, because she wants to be at the head of the line for scratch grains.

While it is fun to incubate eggs and hatch out chicks, I’ve really had to watch that I don’t get too attached to this group. We don’t want our livestock to become pets. (I do bend that rule a teeny-tiny bit for my roosters.)

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Something has been chewing on my State Fair apple:

I need to ask Susan what it might be. I got up there yesterday and cut out the damaged branch and threw it into the burn barrel. Hopefully that is the end of the problem. I haven’t had to spray my trees yet, but I might just have been lucky.

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One of the habits I have tried to maintain over the past several months is to spend some time every day processing the changes this year has brought. Sometimes I do that over discussions with the husband. Sometimes I do it while I am sewing or working in the garden. The point of that exercise is to confront the reality I see and not hide in the reality I wish I saw. For example, I knew that there might come a day when my frequent road trips got curtailed, although I assumed that would be because of a spike in fuel prices and not because of a pandemic. I knew there might come a day when we had supply chain disruptions, although I am a bit baffled at the shortages. Bleach and Lysol wipes?—okay, that sort of makes sense. Black Kona?—I did not see that one coming.

I was telling the husband last night that all of a sudden, Wheat Montana flour has disappeared from store shelves. I bought some two weeks ago so I would have it on hand for making zucchini bread, but I’m almost out (and my recipe uses both unbleached and whole wheat). I am particular about using Wheat Montana flour because they do not use glyphosate on their crops. Hopefully this is just a seasonal shortage and not something more dire, but it’s odd to have seen it two weeks ago and now not be able to find it anywhere. (I checked several stores.) And I haven’t run into this problem in the past.

Amy Dingmann, who hosts the Farmish Kind of Life podcast, posed an interesting question on social media yesterday. She asked, “What if 2020 is just the trailer for 2021?” She then went on to point out that people in 1929 had no idea that they were at the start of a depression that lasted for years. What if things don’t get “back to normal” in 2021? Or for the next five years? Or never? I have two choices: stick my fingers in my ears and say, “La la la la la,” or pay attention and adjust accordingly. Humans have an amazing capacity for denial. I won’t allow myself to fall into that trap.

Happy Saturday! As some of my friends say—“Get out there and move that needle!” although that makes me laugh because the needle I want to move is the one on my sewing machine.

The First Friday in August

I made a lot of headway on the Noon and Night pattern yesterday morning, incorporating Joanna’s comments, re-drawing some of the graphics, adding a few more, and including some photos. I am really pleased with the progress so far. Now I just need to finish the quilt.

I ordered myself a Martelli rotating cutting mat.

I have a Fiskars one, but it’s a bad design—the base and the top tend to slip apart when I am cutting. I think this one will help speed up the trimming process on the Noon and Night blocks. It is supposed to arrive on Monday.

I need to rearrange some of my sewing areas. I have stuff in all four bedrooms. I’d like it more centralized, but we have to keep beds in all the rooms for the once or twice a year when we have houseguests. The setup is great from an exercise standpoint, because I am constantly going back and forth from the sewing machine in our bedroom to the cutting table in DD#2’s bedroom. However, the most convenient place to plug in the iron puts the ironing board right in the doorway of our bedroom.

When the husband has some time to attack the honey-do list, I’ll have him help me move furniture around to make the space more efficient.

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One of our employees—the guy who has worked for us for many years—gave two weeks’ notice. He wants to get an inside desk job. This puts the husband in a bind not only because he’s down a person, but because this guy knew enough that the husband could leave him in charge of one job while he went and worked at another job. We put an ad on Craigslist, but everyone here is in the same boat trying to find workers.

A lot of people are trying to get houses built right now. We funnel all foundation inquiries to the husband’s cell phone, but occasionally someone will get our home number. I talked to one guy the other day who is trying to get a foundation poured for a shop. He said some contractors aren’t even answering their phones, so he was very happy to get a live person on the line, but then I had to tell him that I am not in charge of scheduling. The husband said that there are quite a few homeowners who are trying to pour their own jobs. You can imagine how that works out. And one of the concrete companies had to fire a mixer driver because he was driving down the highway last week, not paying attention to the mixer, and discharged a load of concrete that damaged several dozen vehicles.

Add to that the real estate market….the husband reminds me that when we moved here, in September of 1993, there were people moving out because they thought it was getting too crowded. If only it were still like that. I checked Zillow the other day—I know it’s not necessarily a good measure of reality, but it’s a useful data point nonetheless—and it noted that our primary residence had appreciated $15,000 in the last 30 days. It’s just nuts. My concern with all of these out-of-staters moving here is that they will try to turn Montana into the places they left. The first person who moves into the neighborhood from California and complains about my roosters is going to get an earful, and not just from the roosters.

Everyone I talk to is praying for a hard winter. Truly, I think that is the only thing that will keep Kalispell from turning into another Jackson Hole or Aspen. And even if the climate keeps the population down in the winter, we’re still going to have to contend with tourists during the summer.

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My liberty-minded blog readers might be interested in a new podcast called Unloose the Goose. (Try not to let the grammar irritate you.) It’s a group of some really deep thinkers including Nicole Sauce of Living Free In Tennessee (probably my favorite podcast ever), Jack Spirko of The Survival Podcast, Curtis Stone (The Urban Farmer), and half a dozen other contributors. They also livecast the podcast recording on YouTube; sometimes I find it easier to watch the YouTube video because it’s hard to tell who is speaking when I am just listening.

That front came through and brought cooler and windier weather, and we even got a nice soaking rain overnight. I’ll get out in the garden this weekend and start doing some cleanup work. The corn stalks can come out and I might be able to move a few more loads of compost from the pile into the garden. I’ll also start another tray of lettuce in the greenhouse.

More Breadcrumbs on the Trail

I had an eyebrow wax scheduled yesterday morning but got to town a bit early, so I popped into a nearby thrift store to check the craft section. They had a large bookshelf full of books. I’m trying not to add to my book collection, but I went and looked anyway. You never know.

My eyes lighted on the spine of this book:

“Hmmm,” I thought. “That’s the book mentioned on the patchpieces.com blog as having a Noon and Night quilt in it.” I pulled it off the shelf and looked at the table of contents. Sure enough, it was listed there as Original Star Quilt on page 72. I flipped to page 72 and found a pattern for the Noon and Night block and a quilt designed by Liz Porter and Marianne Fons based upon a vintage quilt that had been lent to them by its owner.

I wasn’t expecting to see a pattern; for some reason, the patchpieces.com blog made it sound like the block had been mentioned in passing with no other additional information. I paid for the book ($2.50) and went on my way.

When I got home, I read the entire pattern. Part of me is annoyed that the universe waited until I had worked out all of the math and cutting by myself before dropping this book into my lap, but part of me was quite pleased to see that my numbers and method are similar—although not identical—to that of the legendary Fons and Porter. (I like my method better, but that’s just me.) Interestingly, they have their pattern’s skill level listed as “challenging.” I haven’t assigned a skill level for my pattern yet beyond noting that it is “not for beginning piecers,” but “challenging” is not far off base.

The quilt in the book is done in 30s prints on a muslin background in a straight setting. I kicked around the idea of a muslin background but went with something else. And while a straight setting is easy, I still think that block needs some breathing room.

So. I am up to 16 blocks now. I am going to need somewhere in the neighborhood of 50-60 blocks for a twin size quilt depending on sashing and/or borders.

Joanna whipped up the first test block from my instructions:

Don’t you love the fussy cutting on that great Cotton + Steel fabric? This is the kind of block that looks great in both vintage and modern fabrics. Joanna also gave me lots of great feedback on the instructions. I am no novice when it comes to pattern writing, but quilting instructions are a bit different than knitting instructions. At least we know that my method for making this block is reproducible by someone other than me.

A cold front is supposed to move through today. Hopefully, it brings with it some rain, but if nothing else, the temperatures are supposed to moderate a bit. Tomorrow and Saturday will be cooler. I plan to spend a fair bit of time out in the garden this weekend, so today will be devoted to working on the pattern and making more blocks.

Tomato Tenacity

I ran errands Monday and took WS to his Kids College class on French cooking. As we got out of the car, I noticed this in the berm in front of my bumper:

WS walked by and said, “Look, that’s a tomato plant,” and I said, “Yes, it surely is. Why on earth would it be growing there?” That led to a few minutes of speculation about the possibility of the community college having been built on the site of a former tomato farm.

His cooking teacher must be an elementary school teacher, because she has about 10 kids in that class and she’s got it running like a small factory. For anybody else, it would be like herding cats.

I had Ali’s little guy here yesterday afternoon. He’s five. We joke about these kids being little Amish boys because they don’t get much screen time. Ali doesn’t have a TV at her house, so coming over here for an afternoon of YouTube videos is a treat. I made a batch of zucchini bread while we watched the following: a bulldozer that sank in a rice paddy being pulled out by two other dozers and an excavator; several trick motorbike competitions; the demolition derby from the 2013 Los Angeles County Fair; and a series of heavy equipment failure videos. I learn a lot from watching these selections, such as why women live longer than men.

[The heavy equipment failure videos just make me laugh. When the little guy was about nine months old, I had him for the afternoon. I had to go do something for a few minutes, so I left him with the husband, and when I came back, the two of them were sitting in the husband’s recliner watching heavy equipment failure videos. This is a longstanding tradition.]

I so enjoy having these kids around. They put up with me, but they are fascinated by the husband. They always want to know where he is and what he’s doing. And they love to sit in his recliner.

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I am up to a dozen Noon and Night blocks. I won’t show you the blocks, but I will show you this:

I got out the collection of 30s/40s reproduction fabrics for my first version of this quilt. (There may be more than one version; we’ll have to see how I feel when I get the first one done.) I love how it looks so far.

I am thinking of using some of my reproduction vintage Simplicity fabric for my Poppins bag:

Perhaps the red one? I also have some fabric with sewing machines on it that would work, too. We’ll see.

Verbose

I am old enough to have done my first knitting patterns and my books in traditional print publishing. The transition from print to digital was awful. Making the PDFs was the easy part. It was all the stuff associated with delivering those PDFs that was a huge headache—setting up a website with shopping cart software (much of which had to be customized with hand coding back then), credit card processing, etc. I often think that the indie knitting designers who came after me, when most of the kinks had been worked out of digital publishing, had a much easier time starting their businesses.

(Get off my lawn.)

I love digital publishing, though, if only for the fact that that I am not limited to a certain number of pages. And that’s a good thing, because the pattern for this Noon and Night quilt is turning into a small novel.

[To be honest, that is probably why I started Twists and Turns, because I couldn’t just write a knitting pattern. I had to write about the history and the technical aspects and the design philosophy behind the pattern, too, and for that, I needed a newsletter.]

The pattern will be as long as it needs to be for me to communicate the process effectively. Another benefit of digital is that you only have to print the pages you need.

As the pattern stands, I have illustrations but no photos. I think there is a tendency by some pattern writers—not all, but some—to use photos as a crutch for poor instructions. Photos also use up a lot of ink. I do have a lightbox and a really nice camera, though, so I could incorporate some photos if needed.

Does anyone have opinions on photos versus illustrations? Or about overly-chatty pattern writing?

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I went out yesterday afternoon to get one last crop of lettuce. Cutting some of it back did not help and it bolted anyway, so I will let it go to seed now. If the weather cools off some, I plan to start another tray of lettuce in the greenhouse to transplant toward the end of August. I’ve done that in the past, and with a hoop over it, we may be able to keep it going until Thanksgiving. The temps have to go down a bit, though, because even with all the vents and doors open, the greenhouse is an oven in the middle of the day and any lettuce seedlings I start now will just bake to death.

I happened to look at the corn while I was out there and thought that I should probably check an ear to see how it was coming along. I really thought it needed another week. Nope. In fact, I am probably about three or four days late getting to it.

This is always what happens with corn—one of us happens to look at it, realizes it is ready, and then it’s a mad scramble to get it picked, shucked, blanched, and frozen. Corn doesn’t wait. So that’s what I did yesterday afternoon and now the winter supply of corn is in the freezer for use in soups and stews.

You may remember that this was the year of experimentation with the old Native American corn varieties. I planted four of them: Montana Cudu, Montana Lavender Clay, Painted Mountain, and Painted Hill. We’ve done Painted Mountain in the past. Painted Hill is a cross of Painted Mountain and Luther Hill.

I am tickled with them. I took the picture after I blanched them, because the kernels swelled and the colors really deepened:

These will stay in the rotation for next year. The Montana Cudu—the blue one on the left—produced much better than I expected. I thought it was going to be a diva. The Lavender Clay has an interesting flavor. It’s sweet, but an earthy sweet. I had a hard time not eating all of that one. I think it would be really good dried and ground into flour. The Painted Mountain/Painted Hill (they are very similar) did well, too. We’ve grown Painted Mountain before.

Part of the fun of heirloom varieties is the fact that they produce some really odd-looking fruits and vegetables. These ears were not as big as commercially-grown corn, nor as consistent in length, but they taste good and that’s what matters. I need to make a note to myself about the length of the growing season, though. Those seedlings were 10” tall when I planted them in the garden in May, and if I do that again, I need to start watching for ears around the middle of July.

Peas are done. Corn is done. Raspberries are just about done. Lettuce is done. Zucchini and cucumbers continue to produce. Tomatoes will be ripening soon—I found a ripe one the other day but I ate it before I remembered to take a picture. The beans that did come up are doing well.

My plans to sew yesterday were upended by the corn, but that happens. I have eight Noon and Night blocks done so far and I love the way it is coming together. With all the cutting done, it only takes me about 30 minutes to make one block.

The Noon and Night Goose Chase

We live in an age of information at our fingertips—quite literally—so you would think that something as simple as a quilt block would not be able to evade capture. You would be wrong.

Last week, I ordered a CD from Amazon that is supposed to contain “all 1,001” quilt block patterns that appeared in the Kansas City Star from 1928 to 1961. The CD came yesterday and it does have 1,001 quilt block patterns on it. (I think it will be a useful resource.) However, Noon and Night is not among them, despite the note in Jinny Beyer’s Quilter’s Album of Patchwork Patterns that Noon and Night is a Laura Wheeler block design that appeared in the Kansas City Star in 1934.

Where is the discrepancy? I went back to the Beyer book and looked at her information about source material, specifically the Kansas City Star patterns. Beyer notes that “In all, there were 1068 patterns given in the newspaper, more than three quarters of which were pieced designs.” Aha! I don’t know who came up with the 1,001 number, but apparently, 67 patterns are still at large, Noon and Night among them.

I have scoured Pinterest, eBay, Etsy, and done various Google image searches, to no avail. This morning—because I couldn’t sleep at 3 a.m. due to the heat—I opened my iPad and did a quick Google search on “Laura Wheeler quilt block,” then clicked on the images link. As I was scrolling down, I spotted something:

Do you see it? Look at the middle of the picture. That’s the Noon and Night block. This link originally went to an eBay sale but now goes nowhere. I did a screenshot of the image to save it. Unfortunately, the resolution is so low that the only words I can make out are “Laura Wheeler Designs” and “Quilt in Light and Dark Scraps.”

This answers one question for me, at least. I wanted to know how the pattern was presented initially. Did the star points rotate or were they mirror-imaged? This appears to show the mirror-imaged version.

I’ve got an eBay search saved so that if anyone puts Kansas City Star quilt patterns up for sale, I get an alert. Maybe one of these days I’ll get my hands on an original print of this pattern. And maybe pigs will fly.

I did a lot of cutting yesterday for my version of this quilt. I may take a break today and do some prep work for the large Poppins bag. I looked at the class information again, but the store is offering it from 10-5 on a Sunday and a Monday in mid-September and that won’t work because of church. I don’t need the class to make the bag; I just thought it would be fun.

I can’t do much in the garden right now except run the sprinkler and pick raspberries. This heat is supposed to break by Tuesday, when the high is forecast to be 81. Still hot, in my opinion, but better than 97.

Blog Housekeeping

Teri, one of my blog readers, alerted me to the fact that the comment box was not displaying on my blog posts. I hadn’t changed any settings. I opened a trouble ticket with Squarespace and received this reply:

Due to an authentication issue in these browsers, we've temporarily disabled logged in commenting in Safari and Chrome. To comment, you can use guest or anonymous commenting in these browsers.

I have changed the settings to allow anonymous commenting, but comments are still on moderated status. (Also, nice of Squarespace to alert their users ahead of time about the change.)

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I’m going to have to start another project so I have something else to talk about here. The Noon and Night quilt needs to go under wraps now. I am confident in my block cutting and assembly instructions, but at some point, I may ask if anyone is willing to make a few test blocks for me to make sure my method is reproducible. My job now is to make blocks until I can’t stand it anymore, then play around with some setting options.

I’ve always been good at finding niches—Aran and cabled knitting design being a prime example—and any quilt designs I publish will continue in that vein. I want Noon and Night to be the kind of quilt pattern that would appeal to my quilt-making sensibilities: something slightly challenging to piece, scrappy but not disorganized, with opportunities for the quilter to put a personal spin on the quilt. If I can throw a bit of history and detective work into the mix—inspired by Margaret—I’ll do that, too. I am not Judy Niemeyer and have no aspirations to be. (Her quilts are stunning, though.) I am going to find my lane and stay there.

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I took WS to Kids College yesterday morning because I had errands to run in town. He’s taking Japanese Language and Culture this week and it has been fun to listen to him talk about what they’ve learned in class. I am always amazed at what sponges little kids are. I find it distressing that so much of that love of learning gets beaten out of kids in the current educational system. Our girls were fortunate enough to attend a rural school where many of the teachers were community members that they saw at church, at the grocery store, etc., and who were committed to the idea of the whole village helping to raise the kids. Unfortunately, the bureaucratic nonsense implemented over the past couple of decades has resulted in an educational system that I no longer recognize. Worse, it is one that I think no longer benefits children.

I’m curious to see how this pandemic changes the educational system in this country. Homeschooling has always been a popular option in our area, and it might become even more popular now. Not everyone has the skills or the temperament to homeschool their children, though, which is why I also see an opportunity for “microschools” to become an option. A return to an older form of schooling might well be appropriate now.

A picture of the first blooming echinacea, just to brighten up your day:

There were more bees on the lavender hedge this morning, which is gratifying, but still not as many as usual.

The Ladybug Aphid Farm

I went through the peas one last time Tuesday morning, then pulled out the plants and made some repairs to the trellis for next year. I gave the pea vines to the chickens. When I checked on them an hour or so later, there was nothing left but a bunch of stems. Sometimes the chicken yard very much resembles a piranha tank.

I have this faint hope that I’ll be able to keep the lettuce from bolting during this heat wave by cutting it back, so that all went to the pigs. We’ve moved on from lettuce salads to cucumber salads—I made instant pickles (cucumbers in vinegar) the other night for the husband because the cucumber vines are taking over the world. Likewise the watermelon and cantaloupe vines, which have little golf ball-sized fruits on them.

Weeding continues. I had a terrible problem last year with a weed that looks like clover with yellow flowers. I believe it is some kind of woodsorrel. It has tenacious roots and lots of foliage that chokes out other plants. I managed to beat that one back this year with lots of cardboard and weed barrier, but of course, other weeds took its place. I have a bumper crop of chamomile, which would be a bonus were I not allergic to it. A sip of chamomile tea will make my sinuses swell almost instantly. Chamomile is a pretty plant, though, so mostly I leave it alone unless it’s in my way.

The thistles and nettles are neverending. I find them easiest to pull up when they are just about to flower. There is a large patch over by the grapes that I intended to eradicate yesterday morning, but after a couple of minutes, I started noticing lots of these little guys:

And when I say lots, I mean like dozens and dozens and dozens. Two of them were even having a romantic interlude. I looked around and they were on everything in that patch of weeds. Then I saw the aphids, and it dawned on me that I had stumbled into the ladybug aphid farm—although perhaps “lunch counter” would be a better term. I don’t know if ladybugs farm aphids like ants do.

I stopped pulling weeds. I want ladybugs in my garden. The last thing I am going to do is make it inhospitable for them. Chemical management of weeds and insects is forbidden (by me), so I have come to accept a baseline level of chaotic biodiversity. Sometimes that includes weeds. My garden will never grace the pages of a magazine. I do try to keep the noxious weeds under control, but I am not as picky about mullein, plantain, or lamb’s quarters, all of which have practical uses. (Yes, nettles have practical uses, too, but they hurt.)

My garden produces food—for us as well as the ladybugs, apparently. And the garter snakes, whose favorite place to hang out is underneath the leaves of the zucchini plant. I have to announce myself before reaching in.

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Work on the Noon and Night pattern layout continues here and there, as does sewing up more test blocks. I can make this block in my sleep at this point. It may be time to start an actual quilt.

I’ve had to impose some design restrictions, informal ones, because there is such a thing as too many choices. A few years ago, I joined the “Bag of the Month Club,” but I let my membership lapse. It really should have been called the “Purse of the Month Club,” because it was mostly fancy purse designs. When I commented in the Facebook group that I had been hoping for a wider variety of bags—wallets, backpacks, totes, duffels, etc.—I was told that we shouldn’t put restrictions on the designers regarding the style of bags because that would squelch their creativity. I respectfully disagree. Sometimes the most creative solutions come out of situations where the choices are limited, intentionally or otherwise.

But hey, what do I know?

I want to make a few more test blocks this afternoon before I commit to anything. Sewing is about the only thing I have energy for when it’s 90+ degrees in the afternoon. (We don’t have air conditioning.) The chickens hate this weather, too—they are cranky and snappish and pecking at each other. The pigs are happy as long as they have shade and cool dirt, although I go out to the pasture once or twice during the day and spray them with the hose. This is supposed to last until the middle of next week. Ugh.

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One of my jobs as bookkeeper for the construction company is to act as a collections agency. I don’t have to do that often, thankfully. The husband’s reputation is solid enough that he can be particular about the jobs he takes and the general contractors he works for. We have what we call the “A List” of contractors, which are the GC’s who are solvent and pay their invoices on time. Every so often, though, the husband will take a small job with a new contractor. We’ve got one at the moment who is causing me no end of headaches. He asked for the invoices to be e-mailed to him, but then claims he never got them. As soon as I hear, “I can’t find your invoice,” I know that’s code for “I don’t have enough money to pay you, so I am going to stall as long as I can.” This guy did that with the first invoice we sent him. The husband refused to do any further work until we got paid. Miraculously, the contractor “found” the invoice in his spam folder almost immediately. Huh.

I sent a second invoice for the second installment and eventually received a check in the mail—made out to our construction company but for the wrong amount because it was for an invoice from another contractor. I called and spoke to the woman in the office and she said she would mail the correct check, but it’s been two weeks and nothing. The husband texted the GC and told him no more work would be done until the outstanding invoice was paid. The GC texted him back and told him he couldn’t find the invoice. I forwarded a copy of the e-mail containing the invoice—which I had sent to both the office e-mail and the contractor’s e-mail—and within an hour I got an e-mail back from the woman in the office. “Ooops,” she said, “this was in the spam folder.” Uh-huh, okay. Whatever.

The husband always tells me not to attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity. We’ve been doing this long enough that I can tell when a contractor is trying to dodge payment, although the fact that the person doing the bookkeeping is sending checks for the wrong invoices to the wrong contractors does indicate some level of incompetence. I doubt this guy is going to be in business much longer.

Getting Closer to an Actual Quilt

I’ve been using page layout and design software since the days of Pagemaker. We used Pagemaker in college to lay out the newspaper and literary magazine (the husband was the editor of both) and Twists and Turns actually started out in Pagemaker and transitioned to InDesign. Having been out of the design business for about 10 years while I was working as a medical transcriptionist, I was dismayed to discover that Adobe’s business model has changed. You no longer are able to purchase the Adobe suite of apps on disc and keep them for years. Now you have to “rent” them from Adobe.

[I have lots of thoughts about this. I am sure you can guess what they are.]

When I decided to close my Ravelry account and move everything back to my website, I went ahead and “subscribed” to InDesign so I could update my pattern files. I pay $20 a month for that privilege. I didn’t need Illustrator or Photoshop because all of those files were embedded in my patterns. Unfortunately, now that I have decided to publish a quilt pattern, I need Illustrator.

[Yes, I know there are open source packages out there, but they have never worked as well for me as the gold standard software programs. I am annoyed enough that EQ8 doesn’t behave like Illustrator.]

The husband has my old Mac tower. It still has the last Adobe suite I paid for in 2008 on it. As it is going to be in the mid-90s here this week, I thought that working in the cool basement in the afternoons, drawing all the schematics I needed in the old version of Illustrator, would be a good plan, so I headed down there yesterday after lunch.

Illustrator worked, sort of. Some features don’t show up, other features work intermittently, and that computer—for all that it served me so well for over a decade—just isn’t as zippy as my current one. I resigned myself to going back to my computer and “renting” Illustrator in addition to InDesign.

The universe must have heard me grumbling, because when I came back upstairs and checked my e-mail, there was a special offer from Adobe. If I subscribed now, I could get all the apps for $10 a month more than I am currently paying just for InDesign. That was too attractive an offer to pass up.

I’m glad I did it. Illustrator works beautifully on my office computer and I was able to draw all of my schematics in just an hour or so. I’ll have Photoshop for when I need it, and Acrobat always comes in handy.

I enjoy writing patterns. I like the writing, I like the math, I like doing layout. Pattern production is almost as much fun as making the quilts.

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I finally came to a decision about the Noon and Night quilt. Although I love the bright Kona scrappy versions on the black background, my gut feeling was that I needed to make the prototype with prints. I can make a solid-color Kona version later.

I can tell that that was the right decision, because I stopped feeling so ambivalent once I committed to that plan. You’ll have to wait to see what I chose. I was helped along in my decision-making by these two quilts. The first is “Aunt Hazel’s Quilt,” from the patchpieces blog:

The second is from the Bellwether Dry Goods website.

I cannot find the source for this photo—the Pinterest link leads to a listing of quilts on the website without photos—but I was able to grab the photo from Pinterest.

And there was this photo, also on Pinterest, with no source:

Of note, the first quilt is entirely scrappy and the star points are mirrored. The second quilt is “controlled scrappy,” with what appears to be 2-3 fabrics per block. Some of the blocks have mirrored star points but some of them rotate. (?!?) The individual block in the last photo is comprised of just two fabrics. Those star points mirror, but are positive/negatives of each other.

This is such a capricious block. Every time I think I have it figured out, another variation pops up. I ordered some source material from eBay that I hope will help me determine how this block was presented originally. That is supposed to arrive soon.

I’ve had an epiphany about quilt blocks and quilt design through this process. I used to think that there was a finite number of pieced quilt block designs out there and that there was nothing new to discover or create. Nope. Church music is a close analogy. As a church pianist, I get very frustrated trying to find fresh pieces to play. Every arranger—and I mean EVERY ARRANGER—does arrangements of about 20 of the most popular hymns. You can’t swing a cat without hitting an arrangement of “Amazing Grace,” but finding an arrangement of some lesser-known hymn is next to impossible. (Some of that is due to copyright restrictions, but not all of it.) Quilt design is similar. Want a log cabin pattern? There are thousands. King’s Crown? Good luck with that one.

I’d rather muck around in the dusty old attic of forgotten and challenging quilt blocks than try to put a new spin on something that’s been done to death. Wish me luck.

Nose to the Grindstone

The husband told me when he got home Friday that he poured 120 yards of concrete last week. That may not mean much unless you’ve watched a concrete pour and seen the work that goes into it, but I can assure you that it’s not an insignificant amount. This time of year, the crews like to pour early in the day to avoid the heat, which meant that he was getting up at 4 a.m. with me some mornings. The problem is that our animals like to stay up partying. It doesn’t get dark until 10 p.m. here, and the chickens and pigs don’t want to come in until then. He was operating on an average of five hours of sleep a night. The poor guy was so sleep deprived that he literally could not carry on a conversation with me and fell into bed around 8 p.m. Friday night.

We have four employees. None of them works a full 40 hours a week. The guy who has been with us the longest has two kids and a wife with a job outside the home. He sometimes has to drop off or pick up kids from daycare. Another guy is single, but he was having vehicle problems and then his truck broke down completely. The one guy who works the most hours per week (an average of 35) is dependable and works hard, but tends to move more slowly than the husband would like. (That is true of just about everyone.) And the young kid who works for us also has a job at a pizza place—making half of what he makes working for us—so he only works for us a couple of days a week.

I find this behavior baffling. We pay far, far above minimum wage, and although the work is strenuous, my 54-year-old husband is out there doing it. He’s the first one on the job and the last one to leave. We’re not stingy. We’d be more than happy to pay overtime—especially this time of year, when we are so busy—but putting in the minimum amount of work required seems to be the trend these days. We hear this from everyone we know who has employees. And now that the government has increased the unemployment benefit, there is an actual disincentive to work.

This whole unemployment benefit thing chaps my hide. It is always framed as money generously bestowed by the state and federal governments onto people who have been forced out of work. Nowhere is it ever explained that it’s funded by a tax on employers. We pay several thousands of dollars every year into the Montana unemployment fund and a smaller amount to the federal government. I have no problem doing that so that our regular employees have something to draw on during the winter when their hours get cut. Workers who have left our employ voluntarily, though, are not supposed to be eligible for unemployment benefits, but I can just about guarantee that every guy who has ever left us when we still had plenty of work available will try to file for them.

Here’s the kicker, though: Every time benefits are paid out to someone, they get charged back to the employer’s account. If we exceed the payout amount in a given year, our rate goes up and we have to pay more into the fund the next year. We had one guy who told the husband that he was going back to Michigan to work for his uncle. However, he made the mistake of telling another one of our employees that he was actually going to file for unemployment and then spend the next couple of months hunting. Word got back to us. Hell, no, he was not going to vacation on our dime. I fought that one with the state and he was denied anything.

Like a lot of other people, I wonder how the federal government is going to pay for all this free stuff it is handing out to people, but then I remember that they will come back to the productive people, the employers, the people who actually show up and work, and they will expect us to pick up the slack.

Atlas Shrugged isn’t fiction in our little corner of the world.

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I was out in the garden by 6 a.m. yesterday, trying to get ahead of the heat. I started the sprinkler, did some weeding, and was going through the pea patch when the husband came out to join me. I am going to make one last pass through the peas this week and then I think we’re done. We have enough in the freezer for this winter.

We brought in a few raspberries:

There will be many, many more in the next week or two. These get laid out on cookie sheets and frozen, then bagged up.

Pruning is a paradox. You would think that cutting plants way back would diminish their ability to produce fruit. Not so. I cut those raspberries back to within an inch of their lives this spring and now they are getting revenge. Same thing with the grapes. The apples decided to take a year off. Only the Red Wealthy and the Golden Delicious have fruit on them, and not much. That’s fine with me.

The blueberries are starting to ripen:

So sweet.

The turkey mamas seem to have lost one of their poults. They show up every afternoon for scratch grains and have had only three babies with them lately. The husband says that sometimes he sees them roosting on the rafters of the chicken yard when he goes out to close up the coop.

The baby Brahma roo got brave enough to eat out of my hand yesterday. We’re making progress. I don’t want to spoil the roos too much, but they need some socialization with humans. I now have three confirmed roos, all of whom were trying to impress me with their crowing skills when I was in the coop.

On the Subject of Cow Farts

That got your attention, didn’t it? More on this topic below the fold.

I ran my errands early enough yesterday that I missed most of the traffic in Kalispell. Friday afternoons in town are a nightmare. This was my haul:

I got the Slabtown pattern printed, picked up more foam, and grabbed this Simplicity pattern for $1.99 at Joanns along with some thread that was on sale. I have this image in my head that won’t go away of a jacket like this made from a white broken twill-type fabric. Where that image came from and why it persists is a mystery. I would never make myself a jacket out of white fabric. I live in Montana, not Manhattan. But I can see the fabric very clearly.

The hens cooperated by providing enough eggs for another batch of zucchini bread. Elysian grew cabbage this year. She borrowed my cabbage shredder the other day and brought over a bag of cabbage for us, so I planned a stir fry for dinner last night. While I was in the kitchen baking and doing prep work, I listened to the most recent We Drink and We Farm Things podcast. The more I listen to these two women, the more impressed I am.

This episode was entitled” It’s Being Yodeled at You.” The topic of discussion was a new Burger King commercial that has the farming social media community in an uproar. I follow a few farming accounts on Instagram and Twitter, but apparently not the ones that were upset about this commercial. Also, we don’t watch network TV and we have ad-free YouTube accounts, so the chances of me seeing it in the wild are slim to none. I had to go look it up and watch it.

[Warning: The commercial is pretty cringe-worthy, but watching it is helpful to understanding the discussion.]

This is what I love about the hosts of this podcast, Bev and Sam: They took apart this topic and looked at it critically and dispassionately. They drilled down and read the research behind it. They don’t take anything at face value, which is a refreshing attitude in this climate of constant and instant outrage. They raised the following points:

• Using kids in propaganda is generally a bad move.

• Farmers do not like being made scapegoats (no pun intended).

• The problem is actually not cow farts, but cow belches, and Bev and Sam noted that they also got this wrong in a previous podcast on this subject.

• The research behind using lemongrass in cow diets to reduce methane emissions appears solid and deserving of more attention (emphasis mine), but to use it to support a marketing campaign seems premature.

This commercial looks to me like an epic fail by BK’s marketing team. I agree that they could have made the point that this is an area of research with some promise, but without the hyperbole and the horrible country music theme. It’s condescending.

I know a lot of people who evangelize about plant-based diets. I am all for eating healthier and eating more vegetables—have you seen the size of my garden?—but the husband cannot get 5000 calories a day from plants, although he does love his salads. I am not a big red meat fan, but even I have noticed that if I go solely plant-based for a few days, I really start to drag. Human beings are complex organisms. I am convinced that everyone has differing nutritional needs. I like it when we all have the freedom to choose what works best for us as individuals.

Plans B, C, and D

On Wednesday night’s newscast, the meteorologist said that Kalispell should watch for thunderstorms between noon and 3 p.m. on Thursday. Right on schedule, at 7 a.m. Thursday morning (that’s sarcasm), we got a thunderstorm with about 10 minutes of rain. We got nothing else for the rest of the day, and it was much hotter than forecast.

I should get paid so much to be so wrong so often.

I was going to make another batch of zucchini bread, but I had sold all our eggs to WS the night before. He buys them from me at wholesale and sells them from a fridge up at the corner. This kid is going to go far. He is a very savvy businessman and he’s only 6. I said to the husband that I probably could have gone up to the corner to get a dozen from the fridge, but he would have charged me full retail, LOL.

I went into the coop to check inventory, but the hens don’t finish laying until late afternoon. All of the nesting boxes were occupied, and the hens let me know in no uncertain terms that I wasn’t welcome in there. I should have enough eggs today to make more zucchini bread, though.

Elysian said that a woman stopped on Wednesday and bought all the eggs in the fridge. People who do not live on farms have a far different view of food production than we do. This lady wanted to know if she could reserve six dozen eggs every week for her family. (She is not the first person to ask.) Elysian is very clear with people that eggs are on a first come, first served basis. What’s in the fridge is what is available. We have no control over what the hens do. They might decide it’s too hot and stop laying. They might molt and stop laying. They might get mad at the farmer for bothering them and stop laying. Our chickens lay about two dozen eggs every day, pretty reliably, but I also know from experience that they tend to stop laying in August and we have a dry spell before the pullets start laying. Our chicks were later than usual this year, so our dry spell might last longer.

I listened to an interview with Joel Salatin a while back, and he said that when this pandemic/meat shortage started, he had people calling him up asking how much they had to pay him to get put on his “premium subscriber” list (he doesn’t have one) to get guaranteed purchases of meat. One of the bottlenecks we have here is a shortage of meat processors. We only have two left here in the valley, and the husband and I actually use someone two hours away in Eureka, Montana. I called our processor on Tuesday and got the last available processing date in November for the pigs. One of our neighbors processed his own cow a few weeks ago because the processors are booked solid. I might be able to do one pig, but I have no desire to process six.

[Thank your federal government for making the regulations so onerous that starting up a meat processing business is an uphill battle and one that no one wants to fight anymore. We have room here for three or four more processors but we won’t get them.]

The upshot was that I could not make zucchini bread. I thought I would start working on the Slabtown Backpack. Normally, I will cut bag pieces by measurement with the rotary cutter because they are almost always rectangles. This bag has some large, oddly-shaped pieces, though, that are best cut out with pattern pieces. I could have printed the pattern pieces on my printer, taped the sheets together, then cut the patterns out, but I have no patience for that. I will take the large-format file to the blueprint shop today and have them print it for me.

There went that project. I thought I might quilt some pieces for the large Poppins bag, but then I realized that I did not have enough of the foam interfacing I needed. I’ll have to stop at the quilt store and get more today.

There went that project. I finally gave up and made two more Noon and Night blocks, one warm:

And one cool:

Do I have a plan for all of these experimental blocks? No, I do not. They are pretty to look at, though.

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We have started Baby Rooster Comportment lessons here. If I end up selling a couple of these extra roos, I want them to be well trained. Every afternoon, I throw scratch grains out into the chicken yard and most of the chickens go out there to eat. The Buff rooster (who has recovered completely from his leg injury) comes back into the coop and waits for me to get a handful of scratch grains to feed him. The baby chickens stand inside their cage and watch as he eats out of my hand and then calls a few hens over to share. Yesterday, I fed the Buff rooster and then went into the chicks’ cage and crouched down with a handful of scratch grains. Some of the baby roosters came over to investigate but haven’t yet figured out what to do.

There are two roos that I am SURE are roos; the jury is still out on the others. Some of the chicks have developed combs and wattles, but that’s not a reliable characteristic because the hens of certain breeds also have them, albeit smaller than the males. I am watching to see who is crowing and who displays more dominating behavior. This guy, whose mother was a Light Brahma, has acted like a rooster since day one and clearly sits at the top of the baby chicken pecking order:

He likes to stand on top of the waterer and practice crowing. If he doesn’t turn into a jerk, I think he has the potential to be a very nice rooster. There is a baby Buff Orpington rooster, too. He’s not quite as dominating as this one, but he also has potential. We want roosters to know that their job is to protect the hens against threats, but not to see the farmer as one of those threats.