Which Waxed Canvas?

I did not mean to sound so grumpy in yesterday’s blog post—and on my birthday, to boot—but I am not going to be one of those people who posts only rainbows and unicorns. Life is what it is, and I am definitely grateful for another trip around the sun. I just find it wearying to share this planet with other people sometimes.

I sewed all day yesterday, on a project with some waxed canvas. This is the waxed canvas I bought from Klum House, in Portland. My previous waxed canvas projects have been with the material from AL Frances Textiles, on Etsy. The AL Frances waxed canvas is incredibly easy to work with; the Klum House waxed canvas, not so much. Klum House uses a vegan wax blend on their canvas which is comprised of petroleum jelly, mineral oil, and paraffin. The saturation is good, and the weave of the canvas is tighter, but I found myself fighting the Klum House canvas every step of the way. When I crease the AL Frances canvas, it stays creased, which makes sewing it a breeze. The Klum House canvas would not stay creased, no matter how hard I went over it with my Hera marker (a plastic blade used to mark and shape fabric without pins). And my Necchi industrial didn’t seem to like sewing it.

I prevailed, however, and the project is almost done. It looks good and I am happy with it. I need one item to finish it, which I’ll pick up in town. I can’t show you a picture, though, because it’s a gift for someone. I’m glad I did a simpler project with the Klum House canvas before embarking on that Slabtown Backpack, because now I know what I am dealing with. I don’t dislike the Klum House canvas; it simply requires different handling.

I was laughing at myself yesterday morning, because I spent a couple of days cleaning and organizing my sewing area, and within 15 minutes of starting that waxed canvas project, it looked like a bomb had gone off again. I engage in a lot of creative destruction when I am working, apparently.

[“Creative destruction” is such a wonderful oxymoron.]

I pieced the backing for the Noon and Night quilt, too. I like to use 108” wide fabrics so I don’t have to piece backs, but I wanted a specific backing for this one and it only came in 44” wide yardage. As I was pressing it, though, I noticed a tear in the fabric:

So I turned it over and ironed a small piece of black interfacing over the hole to keep it from getting any bigger.

When it’s quilted, the flaw won’t be noticeable.

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

The husband is still working, although not as many hours because there just isn’t enough daylight. The early snows caught a lot of people off guard and scrambling to get projects done. He poured some sidewalks yesterday at a duplex whose foundation he did in the summer of 2019.

I expect we’ll be picking up the pork orders some time next week. I’ll be glad to have that all done and wrapped up. We’ve already had people asking us about reserving some for next year. I am hoping we can use the same supplier for piglets.

I’m also going to order seeds a lot earlier this year. I saved a lot from last season—especially tomatoes—but I don’t want to get caught without other ones that I need.

Happy Birthday to Me

Today is my 55th birthday. My birthday falls so close to Thanksgiving that usually I am celebrating with family—my mother and the girls and I spent it in Seattle last year—or I take myself on a long weekend trip. Neither of those things will be happening this year and I am kind of bummed. I am reluctant even to travel to Missoula because the weather has been so lousy. I was getting ready to head into town yesterday morning to run errands and had one ear on the scanner. We had gotten some snow and already, fire departments were responding to a couple of motor vehicle accidents. I narrowly missed being hit in town—as I approached an intersection at Main Street, where I had the green light, someone coming down Main Street ran the red light right in front of me. Had I been in the intersection, he would have hit the front end or side of my car. He never slowed down.

Sigh.

I wore my new top all day yesterday. So comfortable. The next time Joanns has a sale on knits, I’ll pick up a few more lengths.

One of my errands yesterday was to track down the totes for my Kratky lettuce system. Home Depot was out of the ones I needed, so I ordered a box of five-gallon totes from Amazon. They seemed like they were taking forever to arrive, so I checked the order status. Imagine my surprise (/sarcasm) when the US Postal Service tracking number indicated the the mail carrier had tried—unsuccessfully—to deliver them last Monday. I doubt she even made an effort. I never received a slip or anything that notified me that I needed to go to town and pick them up, so I printed the page with the tracking number from the Amazon website and stopped at the main post office in town yesterday. The box was there.

This is just another in a long line of issues we’ve had with the postal carrier out here. Back in August, I had to remind the driver that the easement between our properties is not a road and she cannot drive 35 mph on it. On that particular day, our renter and her 4 year-old daughter were outside playing in their yard as she blew past, which is why I felt compelled to say something. The mail carrier apparently failed to notice the sign that said “Don’t drive like an asshole down this easement.” (The sign actually says, “Slow—animals and children playing” but you get my drift.)

I have the totes now, so I will work on getting the Kratky system set up. My mother suggested that I stay home this weekend and work on some of my projects. I have several.

I pulled out a bag the other night so I could press some pieces I’ve been using as leaders and enders:

When I was a freshman in high school, I took a semester of art. Our teacher, Ms. Furey, assigned us a project known as “88 Squares.” We were to draw a grid of 88 squares on a large piece of paper, choose two opposing colors from the color wheel, and fill in each square with a design using those colors in tints (add white) and shades (add black). I’ve always thought that would be a fun project to interpret as a quilt. These are 2-1/2” squares, and there will be far more than 88 of them when I’m done.

One of my other errands yesterday was stopping at the quilt store to talk to them about sit-down longarm machines. I’ve been looking at the HandiQuilter—and this store is a dealer, but they are also a dealer for the Bernina Q system. I am not an impulse purchaser. I like to research and think and research and think some more. I was mightily impressed by that Bernina, however.

The husband is very useful for talking through decisions like this; he doesn’t know anything about quilting, so he asks basic questions about what I am looking for and what I want to do, and that helps me to distill down my thinking. I do not want a longarm quilting frame. I do not want to devote the space to it, for one thing. I also have no desire to do custom longarm quilting, where the quilter moves the machine to create special quilting designs and effects. I would use it primarily to do computer-controlled allover quilting patterns, where the computer moves the machine in a specific design. As frame systems run into the tens of thousands of dollars, however, that seems bit extravagant to me. Most people who buy longarm quilting machines do so intending to custom quilt for other people, which helps pay for the machine.

A sit-down longarm machine is basically a bigger version of my domestic machine and does only one thing: free motion machine quilting. Rather than the quilter moving the machine, the quilter moves the quilt. I’m already used to moving the quilt when I quilt on the Janome, so quilting on the Bernina Q20 came really easily. Interestingly, one of the women working at the quilt store sat down and tried it after I did. She has a longarm frame and she had a lot of trouble quilting on the Q20 precisely because she’s used to moving the machine, not the quilt. You get used to different movements.

The decision now is the Q16 or the Q20. One of the limitations of my Janome is the throat size, or space to the right of the needle. My Janome has approximately 8” of throat space. Quilting anything larger than a twin size quilt gets to be a wrestling match because the excess quilt has to be folded up into that space. The Q16 has 16 inches of throat space—about double the Janome—and the Q20 has 20”. I think I’d be perfectly happy with the Q16, and it’s is (obviously) less expensive than the Q20. The only reason to get the Q20 would be because it could be upgraded to a frame system in the future. The husband says to make sure I don’t buy something I’ll outgrow too quickly. And I could certainly do some custom quilting for other people if I were so inclined.

I am still thinking on this. I have the cash available and could get either one. I also don’t know how long it would take for the store to get the machine after I order it. Input is welcome, if anyone reading has experience with these machines.

Frankenpatterning

I don’t sew clothes for fashion reasons. (The chickens do not care what I am wearing as long as I have a can of scratch grains in my hand.) I sew clothes because I am sick and tired of the poor-quality, ill-fitting pieces that are offered in stores these days. Almost everything is too short. Or is full of spandex that stretches out of shape. Or falls apart after one wash.

I could go on, but you get the picture.

I’ve stubbornly held on to a couple of pieces of clothing that fit me well, intending to recreate them at some point. Several of them are Liz Claiborne tops; of all the ready-to-wear labels, I have the best chance of finding clothes I like that fit well in that line, although the quality has deteriorated significantly in the past decade (thank you, JC Penney).

One of my favorite Liz tops is a black-and-white striped tunic with a plain round neckline. It widens slightly below the bust. I wear it a lot because it’s so comfortable and fits so well. The fabric is a rayon/spandex of a good weight—not too light, not too heavy. It’s been at the top of the list to duplicate. I wore it the other day and found myself wishing for a similar top, but with a turtleneck. It’s winter here in Montana, you know. The neckline on the Liz top is too low for a turtleneck. It might be okay for a cowl neck, but I knew that if I traced the top to make a pattern from it, the neckline was going to require some adjustment to accommodate a turtleneck.

I went in search of a turtleneck pattern. The Hepburn Turtleneck from Itch to Stitch seemed a likely candidate, so I bought the pattern and took the file with me on a thumb drive to town on Thursday. The blueprint place where the husband gets construction plans done printed it for me on their large-format printer for a whopping $4.00.

Step 1 was tracing the Hepburn Turtleneck pattern in my size. The actual turtleneck pattern piece is just a rectangle, but I needed to see and understand the front and back neck shaping.

Step 2 was tracing the Liz top. That was a bit trickier because it’s an actual piece of clothing, but I was able to get a good outline of the pieces.

Step 3 was to lay the two front pattern pieces out on top of each other and see where I needed to make adjustments. The Hepburn turtleneck is much more fitted and has a tighter armhole opening. I kept the armhole shaping for the Liz top, but moved the pieces around and drew in lines where I thought they should go. I ended up raising and closing the front neck opening by about 2”.

[I wish I had thought to take pictures of this whole process, but I was concentrating on what I was doing. I probably will use this same method on some other tops, though, and I’ll try to remember to document what I do.]

The sleeve was the trickiest part. The sleeve cap and sleeve on the Itch to Stitch pattern is shaped, which is something I’ve only seen on patterns for wovens.

The armscye on the front is correspondingly shaped differently than the back, to accommodate the difference in cap shaping. Knit fabric has enough give that most designers—knitting and sewing, both—draft a sleeve in which one half is a mirror image of the other half. I could have taken the easy route and simplified the sleeve shaping, but I was curious to see how it fit, so I approximated it as best I could for the lower and shallower armscye on the Liz top, giving bountiful thanks for years of knitwear design where I had to calculate sleeve cap shaping. This was new, but not wholly unfamiliar, territory.

Once I had a pattern I thought I would work, I cut the fabric—a rayon/spandex from Joanns—and started sewing. I’ve got my knits serger dialed in with settings that work nicely for this kind of fabric. (I have a knits serger and a wovens serger so I don’t have to keep changing needles and thread.) The pieces went together perfectly. I even serged clear elastic into the shoulder seams to stabilize them. Boo-yah.

The moment of truth?—I put the top on and didn’t want to take it off, which says to me that it was a success. I got a better picture on my dress form:

This is exactly what I was envisioning. (I am especially happy that I was able to avoid having flowers end up in awkward places on my chest.)

And now for the post-mortem:

• The fabric was lovely to work with. When I bought it, even the lady at the cutting table at Joanns remarked on how nice it felt. This seems to be an improvement over some of the knits they’ve offered in past seasons. It feels almost like peachskin.

• When sergers behave, they are a joy. Two shoulder seams (with elastic!), two side/sleeve seams, a turtleneck and boom!—the top is put together.

• I am getting better at coverstitching hems. If my serged seams got an A on this project, the hems got a B-. Coverstitch machines are fairly new to home sewing. I’ve got one of the earlier Janome 1000CPX machines, a generation which seems to have suffered from severe quality control issues. I followed the tips from a Facebook coverstitch group and opened the machine, raised the feed dogs, and oiled it thoroughly. Ever since then, it’s worked much better. I just need more practice with it.

• I think that turtleneck pattern piece needs some shaping, or needs to be shorter. It ends up pushing the neckline down in the front when I am wearing it. The cowl tops I’ve made all have shaped cowl pieces. I will have to research that a bit more. The turtleneck feels nice and cozy, though.

• The shaped sleeve caps/armscyes do make a difference. It’s subtle, but when I put the top on, it settles onto my body and doesn’t slide around like other tops tend to do. The front also has a slightly longer and curved hem compared to the back, which helps it avoid looking shorter than the back.

I’m going to retrace this pattern, incorporating some refinements, and then add it to my stack of “tried and true” patterns. The 5 Out of 4 Nancy Raglan is another tried and true pattern—I can cut that one out and make it and know that it’s going to fit well. I’ve discovered, though, that I prefer the Nancy Raglan in French terry or sweatshirt knits. I don’t like it as well in slinkier knits.

This truly was an accomplishment for someone with my lousy spatial perception skills. I actually managed to draft my own pattern. What’s more, it fits. I’ve got a stack of knit fabric and now I have confidence that I can turn that fabric into some great additions to my wardrobe. I spent most of yesterday on this project, but more than half of that was on drafting. This top could be put together, start to finish, in just a couple of hours.

I told the husband that I’m seriously considering jeans next. Joanna Lundstrom, who wrote a great coverstitch machine guide, just published a book on making jeans. I’d be thrilled to have four or five pairs of high-waisted, 100% cotton, boot cut jeans. We’ll see.

Oops, I Did it Again

I made Yet Another Candy Coated Quilt, or at least most of one:

This is what happens when I get into cleanup mode in the sewing room. I started putting together the rows I’d made and realized I was close to a finished top, so I kept going. I’ve got another hour or two of work left.

I also matched up the stack of quilt tops with backings. Some day when I have nothing else on the schedule, I’ll pin baste each of them with batting and roll them up to be quilted. I’ve got four of them ready to go—five, if I add in this Candy Coated. I am not counting the Noon and Night quilt, because we’re going to do that one on Tera’s longarm.

I am still kicking around the idea of getting a sitdown longarm machine. I don’t want to devote the space required to a frame system. As I said to the husband, though, every time I clear one bottleneck, another one appears. I bought a Studio die cutter so I could cut fabric faster, but now I make more quilt tops. More quilt tops means I need a way to quilt them faster.

He nodded and said, “Yes, that’s how it goes.” (He is no help at all.)

I am going to go talk to the owner of one of the quilt stores next week and see what my options are. The quilt store in Spokane where we took the collage class sells Juki machines. I love my Juki sergers, but with these indefinite lockdowns, I am reluctant to buy a machine there in case I need service on it. I won’t use the Juki dealer here. Right now, the HandiQuilter Sweet Sixteen looks like the best choice, but I am still researching.

Now that the sewing area is cleaned up, I can make a priority list of projects without getting distracted—in theory, anyway.

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

I canned the rest of the beef broth the other day, for a total of 23 quarts. The canning supplies will go back into storage now, only to be brought out if we run out of canned beans. Everything else is done.

I am still waiting for the rest of my lettuce-growing supplies to arrive. I have the net pots and the lights, but not the totes. We continue to have issues with our mail delivery here, and I may have to pick up the box of totes at the post office. I wish Amazon would just ship via UPS or FedEx. They are far more reliable.

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

I was a participant in a very interesting chat Thursday morning in one of the liberty-leaning groups I belong to. The topic was politics and religion—a third rail if ever there was one—but it went on for over an hour, and afterward, everyone agreed that it had been enlightening and enjoyable. People shared a wide variety of opinions. No one got offended or started slinging insults or calling names. I find it sad that a discussion like that is so rare nowadays that it requires me to remark on it. I also think that those are the only kinds of groups left where civil discussion can take place, because they hold as a fundamental principle, “Don’t tell other people what to do or how to live their lives.” Telling other people what to do or how to live their lives seems to have become the favorite pastime of many Americans these days.

I’ve decided that I am a digital extrovert, which is a new term I have come up with for myself. I am fairly introverted. Being around people in real life is terribly draining for me. However, I do tend to interact quite a bit with others online. I think the difference is that online, I can get up and walk away when I have had enough. Being without the internet for a few days was hard for me because I was missing those online interactions. And I have some really interesting online friends.

Noon and Night Makes an Appearance

I’ve reached that point in the season where I begin panicking because I realize it’s time to make Christmas presents. I’d prefer to start panicking, say, in August, but that’s usually right smack in the middle of canning season. Part of the issue is my desire to gift handmade items. The number of people on my list divided by hours in the day is a math problem with no solution. (I do have some breathing room this year because some people are getting wedding prints and albums.) Still, Thanksgiving is only a week away and Christmas rushes up right after that. I need to look at and rearrange the sewing to-do list this weekend.

The apron order is done. The Noon and Night quilt has been sashed and bordered. This is how it looked before I put the borders on:

I am quite tickled with it. I like the size, I like the overall look, and now I can move forward with writing the rest of the pattern.

I also need to address the backing fabric and batting. Tera and I talked about doing a combo of two different kinds of batts to help make the stitching pop. I have a black batt that will be placed just underneath the front. If I used a white batt there, I’d run the risk of “bearding,” or having the white fibers come through the stitching and show. That won’t be an issue on the backing, though, and I can have a second, white batt of either wool or polyester against that fabric.

I’ve had an ongoing issue with storing cones of thread. I prefer to keep my thread in boxes because the house gets so dusty. About a year ago, I picked up some great plastic storage bins at Hobby Lobby that were perfect for my serger and quilting thread cones. When the pandemic hit, they disappeared and I haven’t seen them since, despite checking at every Hobby Lobby between here and Seattle. The regular thread storage containers are back in stock. I finally broke down and bought a couple of these ArtBin boxes (6990SO):

and paired them with these inserts (6901AB):

I’m using the ArtBin boxes to hold my quilting thread and the Hobby Lobby ones for my serger thread. The ArtBin ones are much bigger, although they have handles and the Hobby Lobby ones don’t.

It’s time to start cutting out some tops, too. I want to get all the cutting done at once so I can assembly line pieces through the serger and the coverstitch without having to change threads too many times. I don’t care if my thread matches the fabric exactly, but it has to be reasonably close.

Accuquilt released a new die this week. It is so cute!

I have no idea what I would do with it, other than to appliqué gnomes all over everything.

I’ve got one more batch of beef stock to run through the canner, and I still need to defrost the freezer in the old garage. I’m almost done with one prayer shawl—it will need fringed—and have knitted a third of another one. At some point, I’ll get back to embroidering squash.

Sale-ing Through Town

My first stop in town yesterday was at Joann Fabrics. I got there about 15 minutes after they opened. I get an e-mail every morning that tells me what is on sale at the store. They sometimes do “flash sales” where they offer one-day doorbuster specials, so it behooves me to keep an eye on those e-mails. On Sunday, all of their knit fabrics were 60% off. However, I did not want to make a special trip to town just to buy knit fabric. I need to sew up the pile I’ve already got. I do need about a yard, though, of some knit fabric with pink in it for the lining of a cowl on one of the tops I want to make, and the remnant rack hasn’t yielded up anything suitable.

When I got there yesterday morning, I wandered over to the knit fabric section to see what the price had gone back to, and noticed that the doorbuster sign advertising 60% off was still up. (I check the date at the bottom of the sign to see when the sale price expires.) One of the employees I know fairly well was at the cutting table, so I walked over and asked her if she knew that the sign was still up. She went over and looked, then came back and said, “For you, I will honor the 60% off price.” I hadn’t really intended to buy anything—I just wanted to let her know the sign was still up—but I went ahead and got the chunk of cowl lining I needed because she had been nice enough to offer.

Then I went over to the aisle of sewing notions to see about getting another stretch belt. There was a sign saying that all the sewing notions were 50% off, so I picked up a pack of machine embroidery needles, too. They run about $13 a pack and I need some to finish the collage wallhanging. As the young woman at the register was ringing up my items, she asked if I had any coupons. “I don’t think my coupons will work because everything is on sale,” I said. “No,” she replied, “the sewing notions aren’t on sale.” “Hmmm,” I said, “there is a sign on that aisle that says 50% off sewing notions.”

The poor young woman was a bit flustered by this news and got on her little radio to ask if anyone knew if the sewing notions were on sale or not. After a moment, I heard the store manager saying, “Go ahead and honor the sale price. We forgot to take the sign down.”

I know it’s a lot of extra work for the employees to have to hunt down all the one-day sale signs and take them down. I truly didn’t go in there to cause trouble. It’s probably a good thing I am in there so much and they know me well. The husband doubts they make any money on me, though.

I also did a big Costco run—hopefully the last one of 2020. The store was very busy, as was Hobby Lobby, because I think everyone has started stocking up for the holidays—and more possible closures.

I picked up a bottle of this as a treat for the husband:

It’s a limited edition beer from Big Sky Brewing in Missoula. Costco now has a special section of by-the-bottle craft beers. He really likes dark beers, but the selection around here is heavy on IPAs, so when I see dark beers, I tend to pick them up.

I also made a visit to one of the clothing stores downtown. My friend Twila works there, as does the young woman who made the cake for DD#1’s wedding. I was hoping to see both of them and I was in luck. I haven’t seen Twila in months, so it was good to check in with her and catch up. And I told Briza how much we enjoyed her cake at the wedding.

When I got home, I ran 12 quarts of beef stock through the canner (it’s yummy):

I say a prayer of blessing on Margaret every time I get out one of the boxes of canning jars she bequeathed to me. The rest of the beef bones are cooking down into another batch of stock, probably another dozen jars or so. No, I don’t strain my stock. It doesn’t matter once it’s in the soup.

My Kratky lettuce-growing supplies are starting to arrive. These are the net pots:

The idea is that these pots are suspended in a nutrient-rich solution under lights and grow without soil. I am starting small on one shelf of a wire shelving unit in the basement. If this system works, I’ll expand it and move it out to the old garage.

Mid-November Monday

With that big roll of insulating shade fabric out of the way, other projects are moving ahead. I worked on the custom apron order on Saturday, although I still have to make and attach the pocket. I serged the edges, then sewed and topstitched the pieces together on the Janome. This will be a sturdy apron that won’t ravel or come apart in the wash.

I also set up the Studio cutter to deal with scraps. I don’t like it when the scraps start to pile up. I’d much rather have a neat pile of ready-to-sew units than bags full of oddly-shaped leftovers. Our church sewing group isn’t meeting right now, so we haven’t been making tied comforters, but I plan to continue sewing tops together anyway. Maybe some of us can get together and tie a few. We had that comforter-tying party last January and that was so much fun. How long ago—and a world away—that seems now.

Speaking of scraps, I dumped all of my white/cream strings out on the bed to start sorting and sewing them into Yet Another Candy Coated quilt (probably #6 or #7 by now).

This was yesterday afternoon’s project, mostly because my brain needed a break. Sewing strips together doesn’t require a lot of mental energy. I didn’t think I had enough white/cream scraps for an entire quilt, but I was able to make all but four of the rows I need. And two scrap bags are now empty. Yay.

I’m not sure who will get this one when it’s done—white quilts are terribly impractical—but someone may want a quilt for a spare bed that doesn’t get a lot of use.

[I was sewing strips on Vittorio, my beloved Necchi BF, when all of a sudden, the belt broke and flew past my head. I am not a purist; I use stretch rubber belts on that machine because they are far easier to find than precise lengths of cogged or V-belts. Unfortunately, in a place where the humidity averages around 22%, they also dry out and crack. I get about 4-5 months of use out of each belt, so I keep several of the stretch Singer ones on hand. I scrounged one up and put it on the machine and I was back in business.]

This week’s priority sewing project will be finishing the Noon and Night quilt top. The rows are done; I just need to cut the sashing strips, sew the rows together, and put on the border.

Also on my to-do list this week is cleaning out and defrosting the big pork freezer in the old garage. I have to move what’s left in there to the small chest freezer before I can do that. The small chest freezer had a huge bag of beef bones in it. Those were roasted and cooked down into stock over the weekend (it smells heavenly), to be canned today.

My Kratky supplies should arrive this week, too. I'd like to have that set up by next weekend.

Those are my plans for the week. We’ll see what the universe thinks.

Presents!

What could be inside this lovely box?

Why yes, it’s the Alaska quilt kit!

Such pretty packaging. I am going to tuck this away until after the holidays so I am not tempted.

Tera makes a lot of her projects from kits. After last weekend, I certainly see the appeal of that approach over mine, which can best be described as “flying by the seat of my pants.” How do you all feel about kits?

I finished the insulated shades yesterday. Now that roll of shade material is on the windows instead of taking up valuable sewing real estate. I still need one shade for our bathroom window—two, if I also decide to put one on my office window. I am inclined not to, as I use that window to monitor what is happening on the road in front of our house. (People driving by slowly, broken-down snowmobiles, befuddled UPS drivers, etc.) In any case, I’ll need to buy more shade material and cover fabric, but I am waiting for another Joann’s sale.

I also ordered a birthday present for myself (I turn 55 in 10 days). Accuquilt was having a 50% off Studio dies sale, so I bought myself another strip die—the 3” one—because my scrap bag is overflowing again and I will need to do a round of cutting here shortly. I also bought the Bear Paw 14” block die and the equilateral triangle die. I am going to set up either my handcrank Singer 66 (her name is Jane) or my small treadle machine in the living room and bring down a batch of scrap quilt pieces to work on.

I might buy myself a few others things before the month is over.

I went to Harbor Freight the other day to get some 48” aluminum yardsticks. The husband wanted a couple and I needed one, so I popped in on my way to Hobby Lobby. I told him later that every single man in that store gave me the side eye while I was shopping, like they couldn’t believe a woman would be in there. It was very weird. I try not to do that to the men I see in Joann Fabrics. They are probably uncomfortable enough being in there without me looking at them strangely.

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

This is terrible on so many levels, but a deranged 50 year-old man drove through the Super 1 grocery store in Columbia Falls (just north of us, near Glacier Park) the other night. A few people managed to get it on video. I am sure it will come up in a Google search if you are inclined to look. He actually went in through the front doors, drove up the cereal aisle, turned around, and drove back out. Amazingly, no one was hurt or killed.

I ordered all my lettuce-growing supplies yesterday. I was going to try to source them in town, but after going to two stores and striking out, I defaulted to Amazon. The husband needed a small shovel and Home Depot was out of those, too.

It snowed all day yesterday, as I thought it might when I saw the storm system moving through the Cascades. More is expected today. My in-laws were here for Christmas in 1996—the winter of the big snow—and my MIL said it was like being in a snow globe. That’s how I am starting to think of this winter, too. Every time it stops snowing, someone shakes the snow globe and it starts up again. The chickens are stuck in the coop, The door to the chicken yard is open, and they will stand out there in a pouring rainstorm, but they hate walking around in snow. (Sometimes the husband takes pity on them and shovels the snow out of the chicken yard.) I fear it is going to be a long winter for them. I might buy some cabbages and hang them from strings so they have something to do besides peck at each other.

The Big Bright Spot of 2020

For all that most of 2020 has been a dumpster fire, this year also brought us the gift of a bigger family. DD#1 and her fiancé tied the knot on October 15, 2020, in a beautiful ceremony attended by two dozen friends and loved ones. (All photos very professionally done by the team at Lovelight Photography, who captured the joy and beauty of the day far beyond my expectations.)

The husband gets credit for suggesting the venue—Snowline Acres—as he had done some concrete work for Tom and Kristen, the owners. This is actually the old Kalispell Lumber building. Tom and Kristen bought the building, dismantled it, moved it to their property, and rebuilt it as this stunning wedding venue.

The wedding party was small. DD#2 served as maid of honor and DSIL’s older brother as best man. These are our girls:

And the happy couple, whose sheer joy at being together radiated throughout the whole evening:

The photographer and her assistant moved through the ceremony and reception without us even being aware that they were there. I was so much in the moment that it has been fun to relive the evening through the gallery of photos. The candids are especially entertaining. At one point, the photographer asked the husband and me to “gaze lovingly into each other’s eyes,” and I knew exactly how that was going to end. Of the many things I love about the husband, he has an uncanny ability to make me laugh at the most inopportune times:

But this is all of us now, a bigger, even more wonderful family because these two kids fell in love and got married:

I am going to be ordering lots of prints. We haven’t had family together like this for a long time and I want to be surrounded by all these great memories. I wish my MIL had been able to be there. She would have enjoyed seeing her eldest grandchild so happy.

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

I am hoping to get back into a routine today. It’s a bit disconcerting to realize how dependent we are on having stable internet service. If the power goes out, at least we have a generator. If internet goes out, we’re adrift and at the mercy of CenturyLink.

On Again, Off Again

I’ve been looking at this for two days now (it’s Thursday afternoon and this red light is finally green again):

People like to talk about how much time gets wasted on the internet—how much more productive we could be without it—but I’ve just been through 48 solid hours of Not Getting Anything Accomplished. It wasn’t even about not being able to get dopamine hits from social media, which I think I can live without. It was about not being able to conduct business, check bank accounts, make UPS labels for Amazon shipments, and shop for the supplies for my lettuce-growing system. If I were still transcribing, I would have lost two days of work. We had internet for about an hour yesterday before it went out again.

[We do have a robust data plan, but reception on our cell phones here is spotty. If I want to surf the internet on my phone or tablet, I have to go stand in the middle of the garden. I didn’t need to check Twitter badly enough to break trail through 10” of fresh powder.]

I wish that CenturyLink would have put the service box somewhere other than on a corner that people routinely miss when the road is icy. That box has been hit repeatedly.

I did get a few things done. I made three more insulated shades—two for DD#2’s bedroom and one for the laundry room. The shades went to the top of the queue mostly because the roll of shade material was taking up a lot of space in my sewing area and I didn’t want to have to work around it. The most time-consuming part is cutting up the roll into appropriately-sized shades. The sewing doesn’t take very long as it’s just two side seams and a top and bottom hem. I’m going to try to get the two done for DD#1’s room and the one done for our bedroom this afternoon and then I can cross those off and move on to the apron order.

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

Yesterday morning’s blog post was going to be about taking the pigs to the processor, but the post I wrote went into the ether and I don’t feel like trying to re-create it. Suffice it to say that it snowed Tuesday morning. A lot. Enough that what is normally a two-hour trip stretched out an additional 45 minutes. I rode along pretending that I was in Quaker meeting because the husband did not need me chattering at him like a magpie while he was trying to pull a 24’ stock trailer containing 1800 pounds of pigs on icy roads. Thankfully, he had just had a new set of snow tires put on that truck last week.

The processor said our pigs looked healthy and well fed. He told the husband while they were unloading them that quite a few animals have come in recently that were underweight. We’re not expert farmers by any stretch of the imagination, but we make an effort to give our livestock a good home and a good life, and it was nice to receive affirmation that we’re doing it right.

We’ll make a return trip in a couple of weeks to pick up the orders and deliver them to our customers.

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

When we were shopping with DSIL’s mother last week, I found a wind chime to add to my collection:

I like it because it’s kind of odd.

In other news, the wedding pictures are back from the photographer (Lovelight Photography here in Kalispell) and they are stunning. I need a day or two to get organized about which ones I want to order and then I’ll post a couple of highlights here.

Disconnected

I will write about yesterday’s adventures in a bit—while we were hauling pigs to the processor, our neighbor texted me to ask if our internet was down. We have been without it for about twenty-four hours now. It just came back up, so I am catching up on comments.

Marshmallows for Livestock Management

We loaded pigs into the trailer yesterday afternoon. I wish I had thought to take a picture while we were out there, but I didn’t have my phone with me and we were on a mission. The husband backed the trailer up close to the gate to the pig pasture over the weekend. Because of the angle, he can’t get it right to the gate, so he puts up a chute system that funnels the pigs out of the pasture and into the trailer. They require some coaxing, however, as they know where the electric fence line is. Even when the fence is down and not active, they are reluctant to walk past it.

The first year we had pigs, it took us several hours—well after dark—to get the pigs into the trailer. We’ve gotten better since then. The husband stood inside the trailer with a loaf of bread. I was outside the trailer, next to the chute, making a trail of marshmallows for them to follow. Marshmallows are a treat. And once one pig discovers that the farmer is handing out treats, the other ones usually come over to see what’s going on.

The pigs have to step up to get into the trailer; the husband had put a pallet down as a step and coated it with sand for traction. As the pigs went into the trailer, he convinced them to stay there by throwing pieces of bread at them. At one point, we had five pigs in the trailer and one very recalcitrant pig lying in the pasture digging up grubs. I had to do some sweet talking with a lot of marshmallows to convince that one to get up while hoping the others wouldn’t decide to come back out. The husband had rigged up a pulley system for the door, so as soon as the last one went into the trailer, I pulled on the rope to close the door. He fastened it and then came out the man door at the front of the trailer.

The whole process took us about an hour. The pigs spent the night in the trailer. This morning, the husband will back the truck in, hook up the trailer, and we’ll make the almost two-hour trip to the processor to drop them off. It’s a solemn drive, but it’s also tinged with relief because it gets very difficult to manage six 300-pound pigs when it’s dark and cold and snowy out. The husband will have one less chore to do in the morning and evening now.

All of this year’s pork has been spoken for. I am hearing reports of processors being booked well into 2021, so while we’re up there, I think I’ll ask our processor to put us on the calendar for next fall.

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

If you’re on Instagram, you may have noticed that they are blocking hashtags “to help prevent the spread of possible false information and harmful content related to the election.” Unfortunately, this means that I can’t use #squashsquad—which, by the way, has nothing to do with any election in any country anywhere—to get the instructions for the latest SqSq square. This frosts me on so many levels, the most galling of which is that I am tired of having my intelligence insulted. I do not need some entity “protecting” me from misinformation. I am perfectly capable of sifting through what’s out there and coming to my own conclusions.

Fortunately, the instructions are available on Sue Spargo’s Facebook page, but it took me a bit of time to figure that out. I wonder how she and other makers who rely on Instagram for their business marketing feel about this kind of censorship. (Let’s call a spade a spade.)

I am very tempted to delete my Facebook and IG accounts altogether, just on principle. I refuse to participate in this kind of nonsense. And before anyone tells me that I’ll be cutting off my nose to spite my face, I’d like to note that my pattern sales are back up at the same level they were before I left Ravelry, which proves that if people want your product, they’ll look for it.

I have more thoughts, but I don’t want to start a contentious argument in the comments section (and I’d appreciate it if everyone else refrains from doing so, as well). I don’t care who you support or what you believe. This kind of stuff should concern you.

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

I’ve got a (mostly sewing) to-do list started for the rest of November:

• Apron order

• Finish the Noon and Night quilt and write up the pattern

• Insulated shades for the rest of the windows

• Slabtown Backpack

• A couple of knit hoodies/tops

• Get the Kratky lettuce growing system up and running

I also ordered this:

This is the Alaska quilt designed by Edyta Sitar. I am going to make it for DD#1 and her husband. I went ahead and ordered the kit—which I almost never do—because it contains all the pieces laser cut and ready to sew. I think this will be my January project. Edyta has a series of YouTube videos on making this quilt, and while it looks complicated, it’s really only four shapes and straight seams.

What I Did on My Fall Vacation

This past week was a gift to myself for having survived tourist season, canning season, and the run-up to the wedding. My friend Tera and I have been wanting to make Laura Heine collage quilts. The technique/pattern is ridiculously obfuscated, so we thought it might be better if we stumbled through it together. I found out that the small quilt store in Spokane was offering a weekend class, and because we also like to travel together, we arranged a girls’ weekend away.

As it turned out, I also needed to deliver the rest of DD#1’s belongings and wedding gifts to them. They are staying with DSIL’s parents on the Olympic peninsula while they wait for orders to come through for DSIL to report to the Coast Guard base in Ketichikan, where he will be the dentist. I left home last Monday morning with the BMW packed to the gills:

I powered through to Seattle, where I met DD#2 for dinner. Given the events of this past summer, the husband and I thought it was prudent for her to be out of the city during the election, so on Tuesday morning, she and I got on an early ferry for a quick trip over to the peninsula.

We arrived at DSIL’s parents’ house mid-morning.

I love visiting his parents. His mother is a fabulous cook and baker and staying with them is so relaxing. We got all of the kids’ stuff unloaded into their storage container on Tuesday afternoon. On Wednesday, we took a trip into town to so some shopping. Alas, the quilt store was closed because they were moving to a new space. We went to Joann Fabrics, though, where I found a unicorn. The customer who ordered the apron I’ve been working on originally chose a fabric that was no longer available from Joanns. I had made a shorter apron out of that fabric, but it was a remnant and I had no more left. When I checked Joann Fabrics’ online inventory system—which is, admittedly, less than accurate—it showed there was no more of that fabric to be had at any store between here and the west coast. The customer chose a different fabric, but just to be thorough, I checked for her original choice while we were in the store. It was there! The bolt had a few yards left, so I bought all of it. I’ll let the customer decide which fabric she wants, and if she goes with her alternate choice, I’ll use this for a quilt back.

DD#2 and I headed back to Seattle on Thursday morning. (DSIL’s parents made it clear to DD#2 that she is welcome there anytime, which is a great comfort to me.) She went home and I continued on to Spokane, where I got some dinner and checked into the hotel for the night.

Tera drove over from Kalispell on Friday morning. We met up and did some shopping at the quilt stores before stopping for lunch at Nordstrom and checking into the Airbnb. Our quilt class at Regal Fabrics and Gifts had a Friday session from 4-6 pm. There were only seven of us in the class, mostly due to space constraints and social distancing requirements. Irene, the owner, has a lot packed into the space she’s got. She would love to expand, but rent in that area is on the high end.

This is the second class I’ve taken at Irene’s store. Both have been excellent. The teacher for this class was a former middle-school math teacher. She knew how to pace the class and present information. She explained the technique and set us the goal of getting our collage background done during Friday’s class session. Tera had bought a kit for her collage, so all her fabric pieces were the same size:

My background was a bit less coherent. Originally, I had planned to do one piece of background fabric—a Tim Holtz print, which is pretty busy on its own—but the teacher suggested I do several different background fabrics. I am still struggling with that design decision, as my background ended up much busier than I thought it should be. A collage should have a lot of visual interest, yes, but it shouldn’t be unintelligible, and I included one fabric that is shouting over the others, as you’ll see in a moment.

We got started bright and early Saturday morning. The large focal point of the collage is built on a Teflon sheet and then adhered to the background with Steam-A-Seam. My collage picture is of a tomato pincushion:

I chose this pattern because it looked like one of the easier ones, and it was. Tera had a lot of intricate cutting to do on her octopus and hers took longer.

After placing the large motif on the background, we filled in with little bits and pieces here and there. I got to use several of the sewing-themed fabrics from my stash.

Once all the bits and bobs are in place, the whole thing is pressed with the steam iron to set it in place:

Mine still looks like it’s missing a few things because I plan to add some surface embellishments with hand and machine embroidery. Once that’s done, the piece is layered with batting and backing and quilted.

This was Tera’s octopus after the main motif was placed but before she added the extra bits:

I was happy that we were able to learn the basics of the technique in the class, although I would do a few things differently next time. Getting a kit is not a bad idea. I should have brought a different selection of fabrics with me. Without knowing exactly what I was going to need, though, I had to guess. We were able to buy stuff in the store, but I have enough fabric in my stash without adding more just for a few pieces on my collage. And I would definitely do a much less complicated background next time.

I do want to finish this piece. I also have the large wallhanging pattern for the sewing machine and the rooster. I’d like to do the rooster wallhanging for sure. I want the rooster collage to have the same colors as my junior rooster, Dave, so I need to get a good picture of him. This is the kind of project that needs a dedicated space. I’ll probably set up a table, lay out the collage, and build it over a period of a couple of weeks.

Tera finished her octopus in Sunday morning’s class session. I worked on a prayer shawl, as I had gotten my collage done by the end of Saturday’s class. We left at noon with a bit of trepidation as it was snowing and we weren’t sure what we would be heading into. The highway was bare and dry from Spokane to Lookout Pass. The Montana side of the pass to the rest of the way home, however, was a mess. Tera and I both have a lot of winter driving experience, and I only rarely encounter what I consider white-knuckle driving anymore. This wasn’t terrifying. It was just more of a slow grind, having to travel 35 mph in what are normally 70 mph zones. We made it, though, and the husband had dinner waiting for me.

Now I play catch up. The pigs are going to the processor tomorrow, so we also have to get them into the trailer some time today.

Going Offline For a Bit

Heads up—I am going to be off most social media next week, except for checking in occasionally to the homesteading groups I belong to. There won’t be any blog posts. I’m doing that for my mental health.

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

For my Kalispell peeps—if you or anyone you know is interested in pastured pork, let me know. (Janet at BigSkyKnitting.com is a good e-mail or text my cell number if you have it.) Because of government regulations, we can only sell whole or half hogs. We cannot sell individual cuts. I still have two whole or four halves available. We take our animals to Beeman’s up in Eureka, near the Canadian border, and have been very happy with them. They call each customer and ask how they want the meat cut and packaged. I expect the meat to be available toward the end of November. Smoked items take a bit longer. We pick up from Beeman’s and will deliver. I’ve also got an ad in the Mountain Trader for the next couple of weeks.

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

When my mother was here for the wedding, she helped me mark some jeans for hemming. Kohls finally got Gloria Vanderbilt high-rise jeans back in stock in 12 Longs, so I ordered four pair. I wish they would lose the spandex content, but I can live with it. I need the Longs not so much for the length in the legs but for the length in the crotch. These are perfect in that regard. I needed to take off an inch or so at the bottom, however, and yesterday afternoon, I got all of them hemmed.

I watched a documentary on Soap Lake, Washington, while I sewed. Soap Lake is an interesting place. It’s about 20 miles north of I-90, above the towns of Moses Lake and Ephrata, Washington. In the early part of the 20th century, it was a mecca for people with all sorts of illnesses who came to “take the waters.” When modern medicines were developed, people no longer needed the mineral waters of the lake to help their medical problems. (Apparently, the water is great for people with eczema, psoriasis, and other skin ailments.)

I stayed in Soap Lake last October when I went to Charisma Horton’s embroidery retreat. It’s a sad little town, now—almost a ghost town—but still a beautiful place. I spent three nights at an Airbnb whose front windows looked east over the lake. The sunrises were stunning.

I’m still plugging along on the SqSq block. I said to the husband last night that I am rather blown away by the people who’ve already finished the first six blocks. I am still on block #1. Slow stitching, indeed.

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

Anna Graham at Noodlehead released another bag pattern yesterday—yay! This one is called the Pepin Tote. I’ve already purchased and printed the pattern.

I’m not sure where in the queue it will land, but at least now I have the pattern.

A Bunch of Threads

All the masks are done and one batch has been mailed to the east coast. The others will go west and northwest.

The prototype apron is finished:

Even though it’s a prototype done in some Joann’s clearance fabric, I am quite happy with it. The customer liked the sawtooth design but wanted something much longer. I wasn’t sure how the added length would translate. I also wasn’t sure where and how to scale up the design to maintain the balance. In the end, I winged it and trusted my instincts. I added most of the increased length and width to the gores of the body, then scaled up the bottom sawtooth sections so they matched. All seams were sewn, then finished on the serger and topstitched by machine.

The final design will have a pocket and I might still add a pocket to this one. For the prototype, though, I was most interested in the overall look. I prefer full-body aprons because I am messy, but this would be a good one for church to wear over a dress (if we ever get to have potlucks again). The only thing I might do is to deepen the angle of the sawtooth sections. When I scaled them up, they got a bit lost.

And certainly, if I run out of things to do—like that will happen soon—I could write up the pattern.

I finished the couching portions of the first SqSq block:

I need to add embellishments to the stem and leaf next.

The Squash Squad blocks that Sue Spargo designed and that most people are making are quirky, bright ones. I am usually all about quirky and bright, but my SqSq blocks are leaning toward more realistic colors. Part of that is because I want to use the supplies I’ve got, but I think part of it is also that I grow these veggies in my garden. I must subconsciously want them to look more like the real thing. We’ll see. I’ll finish the first one and re-evaluate. I can always redo them in brighter colors.

The husband went to fire training last night. I spent some time organizing my plastic shoebox full of embroidery thread.

Most of this was bequeathed to me by my mother, supplemented by thrift store purchases. I’ve got to come up with an alternate method of storing these, probably in smaller plastic containers by color. This collection included some partially-used skeins, which got wrapped around bobbins to be stored in a tray.

My YouTube viewing this week while sewing has included a number of documentaries on the history of Seattle and Spokane. I am learning a lot. Apparently, one of the richest people in Seattle history was a madame named Lou Graham who ran a brothel there in the late 1800s. Prostitution was illegal, so when she brought women in to work for her, she put down their occupation as “seamstress.”

I watched an hour-long documentary on rumrunners in Spokane during prohibition and another on the history of silver mining in North Idaho. And while making that apron yesterday afternoon, I got the inside scoop on how Spokane managed to host the World’s Fair in 1974. A group of businessmen had a vision to turn the railyard downtown into the site of the fair, but to do that, they had to get the land from the railroads, demolish everything, and build the infrastructure for what is now Riverfront Park. That was quite an amazing story.

For my viewing pleasure today, I am going to line up a bunch of videos on the Kratky lettuce growing system. I’d really prefer to buy a starter system rather than cobble together something on my own, but I should at least have a solid understanding of what I am looking for. If I can get something up and running by the end of November, we could have a nice supply of lettuce all winter.

The First Day of Vacation

Today feels like the first day of vacation! I finished the tomato sauce yesterday—for a grand total of 93 quarts—and for the first time in months, I don’t have a laundry list of tasks that NEED to be accomplished before I fall into bed at night. Whew.

I do have an apron order to fill. I worked on that a bit yesterday morning while waiting for tomatoes to cook down. It’s a modified version of this one:

The customer asked for a longer version, which meant re-drafting the pattern. I pulled out a length of some clearance fabric so I could make up a prototype and test the changes. I’ll put that together today, and if it meets with approval, I’ll make the actual apron.

I’m also halfway through a batch of masks for DSIL and his dad and brother, all of whom are medical professionals. They liked the gray Kona ones with nose wires that I made for DSIL, so I am knocking out about three dozen.

The thought of being able to sew all day is wonderful. I’ve also been collecting supplies for the quilting class that Tera and I are taking next month.

We seem to have gotten through the worst of the early freeze. Yesterday, the high got up to 34 and it felt downright balmy. And next week is supposed to be warmer than normal.

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

I had a phone visit with my naturopath yesterday. He said all of my bloodwork looked great.

My naturopath is a brilliant guy, but I appreciate him most because he is willing to think (and treat) outside the box. We sometimes joke that I am my own clinical trial. I started seeing him 15 years ago out of desperation, but that turned out to be one of the best moves I ever made. When I hit 40, I developed all sorts of problems. I went to my doctor and said, “I am exhausted, my hair is falling out, my skin is dry, I am gaining weight” (which had never been a problem), and she said, “Oh, you’re just eating too much and not exercising enough.” We went back and forth like that several months. She even offered to put me on antidepressants to treat my “body image” issue. I finally got her to check my thyroid levels. She called and told me they were normal and very reluctantly said she would refer me to an endocrinologist if that was what I wanted. I decided that I would see what this naturopath said, instead, so I made an appointment with him.

He tested everything. Lo and behold, not only was I hypothyroid, I was fairly severely hypothyroid. Looking back, I honestly don’t know how I managed to function during that time. I went to see my original doctor and told her what I had done. She whipped out my thyroid test and said, “This was normal!” I looked at the test results. My active thyroid hormone level was 0.1 above the bottom of the range. When I pointed that out, she did have the grace to look sheepish and apologize. She acknowledged that “in range” did not necessarily mean “normal.”

I never went back to her. My naturopath put me on thyroid replacement, which immediately made me feel better. (Montana law allows naturopaths to write prescriptions and order labwork.) We tweaked a few other things and he helped me investigate the MTHFR issue. Over the past couple of years, I have been able to cut way back on my thyroid medication, too, which flies in the face of conventional wisdom. Doctors will tell you that once you go on thyroid replacement, you are on it for life because your own thyroid stops making hormone. Healing my thyroid was not my goal, but somehow I managed to do it anyway. (I think cleaning up my diet had a lot to do with that.) I went from taking thyroid hormone every day to taking a tiny dose 2-3 times a week.

Now I just check in with my naturopath twice a year unless I have problems. He blessed my plans to start experimenting with some intermittent fasting. I accidentally fell into that pattern this past summer—I tend to eat most from about 6-noon, and sometimes forego dinner altogether because I am just not that hungry. We’ll see what happens.

Food as Poison

I’ve talked a bit about food as nutrition, and now I want to go in the other direction and talk about food as poison. And no, I don’t think that “poison” is too strong a word, because it’s clear that the standard American diet is killing a lot of people.

Many people view the MTHFR mutation—especially in people who have two copies of the mutation—as an inability to detox harmful substances from the body. What might be fairly benign in someone else could cause a lot of problems for someone like me. I have eliminated a lot of stuff from my diet, including the Big Three:

• High fructose corn syrup

• Wheat/gluten

• Soy

I started with high fructose corn syrup because it provides empty calories and because it’s getting harder and harder to find corn products that are non-GMO. HFCS seems to be in everything—I have found it in commercial canned beans, which is part of why I can my own now. The simple act of cutting out foods containing HFCS can help a lot of people.

[If you really want an eye-opening look at the food industry, I recommend reading The Dorito Effect, by Mark Schatzker. We are being programmed to ingest way more calories than we need.]

Wheat was the next thing to go. Am I truly gluten intolerant? I’m not sure. I suspect that my true intolerance is to glyphosate—RoundUp—that gets used on crops as an herbicide but is also used as a desiccant on grains and legumes to dry them before storage. However, I still have problems with organic wheat and even ancient grains like einkorn, so there is something else going on. I get both inflammatory and digestive symptoms. They don’t manifest immediately, which makes it hard to judge my tolerance level, but I’ve gotten better at that over time. I’ve also experienced some cross-reactivity with foods like brown rice, which produce a similar inflammatory effect. And there are some wheat by-products that cause problems for me; maltodextrin is one.

I did not replace wheat with “gluten-free” foods, or at least very few of them. Foods that have been labelled “gluten free” often have lots of junk carbs and sugar in them to make them palatable. If you’re looking for substitutes, choose items with almond or coconut flour as a base. Bob’s Red Mill, for example, makes a paleo almond flour pancake mix that got rave reviews when I used it during wedding week to feed guests. That mix and 100% maple syrup are my guilt-free way to enjoy pancakes on the weekends. I found it hard to give up pasta, but there are some brown rice and other kinds of alternative pasta products that work just as well.

Soy is a huge no-no, for two reasons. One is that most soy is GMO and/or grown with liberal applications of glyphosate. The other is that soy is estrogenic. I have plenty of estrogen and don’t need or want any more—I’ve been on bioidentical progesterone for many years to counteract it—so I avoid soy like the plague. As I mentioned before, though, soy is highly prevalent in products sold in “health food” stores. And it’s in most oils and oil-containing products, like mayonnaise (even when they are labelled as being made with olive oil).

Getting these things out of one’s diet takes work, but it becomes second nature after a while. I had to stop and think about how I shop and what I buy because I do it automatically now.

• Buy organic, although with the understanding that “organic” is a term that has been co-opted by large food manufacturers and has been rendered meaningless in some situations.

• Choose minimally-processed food. If the label has a bunch of unfamiliar, chemical-sounding ingredients, it’s probably not good for you.

• Keep a food journal, identify triggers, and avoid them.

• Get into the habit of reading labels.

• Go heavy on the vegetables and less so on the fruits. Grow your own if possible.

• Shop the outside perimeter of the grocery store and stay away from convenience foods.

• Cook from scratch. This is the big one, which is why this is so hard for most people. I understand that cooking from scratch takes time. I spend 20-30 minutes making a salad for dinner—just the salad!

• Don’t try to do it all at once. And don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good. I’ve been wheat-free for almost 10 years now and don’t even notice it being gone, but it took a few years to get to that point. Accept that there will be trade-offs. Our animals don’t eat 100% organic feed other than what they find in the pasture—commercial organic feed is hard to find and ridiculously expensive. I’m aware that some residues may trickle down into what we eat, but I know how the animals were raised otherwise and that tips the balance.

I’m also finding a lot of good alternatives these days—Costco, for example, has started carrying an avocado oil mayonnaise that is quite good. Also check out local suppliers. When I do buy milk or cream, I get it from Kalispell Kreamery.

For me, growing my own food is a form of self-care. I want to feel as good as I possibly can and be active for a long time. The best way to do that is to control what I put into my body. (Gardening is also great exercise.)

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

I managed to find some heavier-weight embroidery thread in town yesterday. I started at one of the quilt stores, which offers quite a few classes on Sue Spargo patterns. They had many of the thinner threads, but not the thicker thread I needed for this technique.

I knew that the local yarn store also carried embroidery supplies, although they just moved to a new location. When I stopped in, none of the embroidery supplies were on display. I asked the owner (I presumed), and she said, “Come back here,” and led me to a back room where all of the embroidery threads were still in boxes and bags. She left me there (this is how you know you’re in a small town) and said I could pick out whatever I wanted and bring it up to the register. I bought quite a few hanks. I’ll go back when I need more.

The heavier thread is for a technique called “couching.” The thread is laid on the surface and held in place by a thinner thread. I couched the outline of the spaghetti squash last evening and started the other surface details:

Having to source alternative materials adds another layer of creativity to projects like this. I am aware that my interpretation may not be what the designer had in mind, but I am happy with how my Squash Squad blocks have started out.

I’ve got a phone checkup with my naturopath this morning—we touch base twice a year—and the last of the tomatoes are cooking down. I will be so happy to have that done. The canning supplies will go back into storage until next year and I can delve into my sewing projects with abandon.

Food as Medicine, Part 2

I am struggling a bit with writing these posts, because they include a fair bit of criticism of the health care industry. I have several good friends who are physicians. I know them to be kind, caring, competent people who share my frustrations about the limitations of treating people under the current system. I don’t hate doctors, but I have had some less-than-positive interactions with a few. Ultimately, I think it it boils down to a gross lack of understanding about nutrition.

I mentioned that my mother also has the MTHFR mutation, but her issues manifested a bit differently. (Genetics is a complicated topic.) She had a lot of trouble as a baby with what is known commonly as “failure to thrive.” The doctor tried her on breastmilk, cow’s milk, and even goat’s milk, and nothing helped. My aunt was two years older and had never had those kinds of issues. Eventually, my mother was able to start eating solid food and grew up normally.

She always appeared and felt anemic, however, to which the doctors’ standard answer was “Take more iron! Eat more liver!” My mother loves liver, partly because I think it made frequent appearances on their dinner table when she was growing up. However, as we found out later, my mother’s father, her next-youngest sibling, and one of my cousins all have hemochromatosis, which is a buildup of iron in the body and can be life-threatening. So here was a situation where one child looked like she was anemic from lack of iron and another one had too much.

The iron supplements never really helped my mother’s “anemia.” When the Cleveland Clinic began posting lab results online in patient accounts, my mother asked me to log in and take a look at the results from her regular checkups. I am not a doctor and don’t play one on TV, but as a medical transcriptionist for an oncology clinic and also a leukemia survivor, I am familiar with blood test results and what they say.

I noticed on one of her tests that her MCV—mean corpuscular volume—was elevated. The MCV is an indication of the size of the red blood cells. Hers were larger than normal. I looked at other lab tests and saw that the MCV was persistently elevated. Apparently, no doctor in 60+ years of looking at my mother’s blood tests ever thought to investigate that further.

I remembered the stories about her issues as a baby and put those together with the symptoms she had had all her life. I called her up and said, “I think you have pernicious anemia.” Remember what I said about my body craving high-folate foods? My mother’s diet tends to be heavier on red meats and other forms of food high in B12. Huh.

Pernicious anemia is the result of the body not being able to absorb vitamin B12. It’s also found in people with the MTHFR mutation. (I don’t think that we had had our genetic testing, yet, when I suspected that my mother had pernicious anemia.) The problem is that supplementing B12 orally does no good because the body lacks the ability to process and absorb it. I found a company that sold transdermal B12 patches and ordered a box and had them sent to her.

Some of her symptoms resolved. She went back to her doctor and explained what was going on. Her doctor tested B12 levels and then scoffed at the possibility that she could have pernicious anemia because the levels were normal. Normal blood levels do not necessarily indicate that the B12 is getting where it needs to be to do the job it needs to do, but as far as the doctor was concerned, my mother was fine. She still takes B12, although now I think she does a sublingual form because the patches are hard to find. Some people do monthly B12 shots.

I haven’t had issues with B12 absorption—or if I do, they are so mild as not to be noticeable—but I do take a B-complex every day. (I take one without any folate or folic acid in it.) The form of B12 that I take is hydroxocobalamin. The more commonly-available form is cyanocobalamin, which is produced in laboratories to be shelf-stable but is less effective.

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

I’ve got my first Squash Squad block—the spaghetti squash—assembled and ready for embellishing.

I have some thoughts about this. Sue Spargo is a brilliant designer with a devoted following. She has built up a successful family business. However, if I were to do this wallhanging project with all of the threads and embellishments she specifies—and they are gorgeous—I think I could easily drop $500 in one fell swoop. That seems a bit excessive for a wallhanging. I am using what I have and only buying what I don’t. (I have to see if I can find #3 perle cotton somewhere in Kalispell—wish me luck.)

I ran jars #58-70 of tomato sauce through the canner before church yesterday morning. We will bring the last of the tomatoes over this afternoon to thaw overnight, and I’ll finish up sauce tomorrow.

We put a heater in the pigs’ water tank, but pigs like to investigate and play with anything new and interesting, and the heater is now MIA. The husband thinks it is buried in the pile of straw and one of the pigs is sleeping on it. It was 5 degrees when I woke up this morning. November 10 seems very far away right now.

Food as Medicine

I put down some of my thoughts on food; if this isn’t something that interests you, keep scrolling. I will include other items of note below the fold.

My first introduction to the direct effect that food has on health—in other words, more than just the general understanding that nutritious food is good and junk food is bad—came when I got pregnant the first time. It’s a long, sad story, but the upshot is that that baby developed without a brain. That kind of birth defect is incompatible with life. That was also around the time when researchers had determined that those kinds of birth defects, known as neural tube defects, were the direct result of a failure to metabolize folic acid (vitamin B9). With all subsequent pregnancies, I was put on a folic acid supplement. (More on that in a moment.) I went on to have two healthy kids.

A few years ago, I heard about a specific gene mutation that has been linked to all sorts of medical conditions, including anencephaly (what my baby had) and spina bifida (which is the failure of the spinal canal to form properly at the base of the spine). The gene codes for something known as MTHFR, which stands for methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase. (You can see why they came up with an abbreviation.) Methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase is an enzyme that is involved in several different metabolic pathways. The gene mutation means that the body produces less of that necessary enzyme—in some cases, as much as 70% less.

The MTHFR gene can be mutated in one or both of two locations, C677T or A1298C. Curious, I had myself, the husband, and the girls tested through 23andme.com. I also asked my mother, my sister, and my father’s only surviving sibling to be tested. The results confirmed my suspicions. My mother, my sister, my aunt and I all have two copies of the mutation at C677T. We get a copy from each of our parents. I will assume for sake of argument that my father also had two copies, but because he died in 1993, I don’t know for sure. He had to have had at least one copy to pass it on to me. The husband has one copy of the other mutation, at A1298C (as did his mother). My girls have one copy of each mutation.

Mutations are not always bad; there are instances in which a gene mutation can confer an advantage instead of a disadvantage. In my case, though, it is most certainly a disadvantage, and identifying it explained much of my family’s medical history. In addition to folic acid deficiencies, the C677T mutation can cause high homocysteine levels. Homocysteine is an amino acid. The body naturally recycles it into other amino acids with the aid of B vitamins, specifically B9, or folic acid. If folic acid metabolism is impaired, homocysteine can’t be recycled efficiently and builds up in the bloodstream, causing inflammation and cardiac injury.

We have lots of blood clots, strokes, and heart attacks in my family. On both sides. (Some of that has to do with the fact that my mother and father are at least fourth cousins and possibly third cousins, which is a story for another time.) We also have a lot of thyroid disease and a few other bizarre medical conditions. As far as I have been able to determine, this mutation isn’t involved in blood cancers so it doesn’t directly explain why my father had multiple myeloma and I had leukemia (and I think one of his paternal aunts may have had lymphoma). I believe the A1298C mutation has been associated with acute lymphocytic leukemias, but I had acute myeloid leukemia.

Unfortunately, treating this deficiency is not as simple as popping a folic acid pill every day. The folic acid that is available as a supplement is a synthetic version that actually exacerbates the very problem is it supposed to treat. There are other forms, such as methylfolate and folinic acid, which can be used instead. I cannot take methylfolate, which is considered the best supplement for people with this mutation. My naturopath and I have tried for several years to find a dose I can tolerate. I am so intolerant of methylfolate that the tiniest amount will cause terrible anger and anxiety issues. He prescribed an iron supplement for me a few years ago. I took one pill—one pill—and felt like I wanted to rip someone’s head off. I looked at the ingredient list and sure enough, it contained a tiny amount of methylfolate. He thought it was a small enough amount that it wouldn’t cause problems. Now we know better.

I’ve found that I can tolerate an iron supplement with calcium folinate in it, so that’s what I take.

[I belong to a very helpful Facebook group for people who have two copies of the MTHFR C677T mutation. I am not the only person with the methylfolate intolerance issue. Interestingly, that group is also overrepresented by people with autism and vaccine injuries in their own or their family medical histories. I am not anti-vaccine, but I don’t discount the fact that this gene mutation can wreak havoc in lots of different ways.]

And to bring this back to food, I’ve long wondered why my preferred diet is heavy on leafy greens—all green vegetables, really—beans, and rice. (I should have been born in India.) All of those foods contain high levels of naturally-occurring folate. My body was telling me all along what it was missing. I am not a vegetarian, but I don’t eat a lot of red meat.

I’ll continue this in the next couple of blog posts, because I have a few other comments to make.

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

I canned another 20 quarts of tomato sauce yesterday to bring the total to 47 so far. The third batch is cooking down on the stove. I decided I might as well get it all done at once so that I don’t have canning supplies strewn from one end of the kitchen to the other for the next three weeks. Hopefully, I will have the freezer emptied and all the sauce made by Monday.

The Hobby Lobby embroidery piece is finished.

I might turn it into a small pouch or something. I don’t need anything else to hang on the wall. Now I have to find another project to work on in the evenings. Those Squash Squad blocks need a bit of prep before I can work on them.

We did get snow yesterday, about 4” or so, and a bit of wind overnight. Spokane set a new record with 6.8” of snowfall at the airport. I haven’t heard how Missoula fared. Dispatchers in Kalispell were kept very busy yesterday with a lot of car accidents. (Slow down, people. Four-wheel drive does not confer magical driving abilities upon you.) We’ll have to see if this snow hangs around—the forecast is for slightly warmer temps toward the end of next week, but that could change. I’m anticipating that winter is here to stay now.

Two Is One and One is Frozen Water

We got bit by the “two is one and one is none” rule yesterday morning—the heated base underneath the chicken waterer decided to die. The husband had already repaired it once. I think it is beyond redemption. (Yes, that is snow in the background.)

Of course, the farm store was sold out of heater bases. I ordered one from Amazon, but it won’t be here for a week. I texted Elysian to see if she had an extra she wasn’t using. She didn’t, but she had a submersible heater that she loaned us to use in the meantime.

While I was at the farm store, I picked up an additional submersible heater for the pigs’ water tank. During the summer, they drink from nipples mounted on the outside of the shelter. The husband had to disconnect the water line to the nipples, though, because overnight temps have been below freezing. The water tank is now their main source of water.

The pigs go to freezer camp on November 10, so we only have to deal with these issues for another couple of weeks. If we wanted to keep pigs year-round, we’d have to build a barn.

I was able to get all my errands done yesterday and then spent some time preparing for this impending storm. I am subscribed to our local NBC station’s weather alerts, which is helpful but sometimes disconcerting when a disembodied voice breaks the silence and announces, loudly, that “A winter storm warning has been issued for your location!” I’ve been watching the Spokane news station as well. They are expecting 3-6” of snow there. The question is whether the storm hits Spokane and then dives south, in which case, Missoula will get hit worse than we will.

The husband has decided to hang around here today. He wouldn’t be able to get much done anyway as the snow is supposed to start around noon.

I’ve got the next batch of tomatoes cooking down. I don’t think it will be as big a run—20 quarts, maybe?—but it’s forward progress.

We had the last of the lettuce in our salad the other night:

This came from a tray of plants in the greenhouse. I can tell they’re not getting enough light anymore, and if we want to keep them from freezing, we’d have to make sure the propane heater is on every night. I’m going to feed what’s left to the chickens. It’s time to start investigating a winter growing setup. I am leaning toward a Kratky system—both Nicole Sauce at Living Free in Tennessee and Jack Spirko of The Survival Podcast have implemented this system and rave about it. We have room for something like it out in the old garage, which is far easier to get to in the winter than the greenhouse.