Teaching, Teaching Everywhere

Robin and I went to Missoula yesterday. The roads were bare and dry, the weather was clear, and each of us had a list of things we wanted to get.

We started at the store where I bought my Janome 3000 coverstitch machine. I don’t know all the details, but I am pretty sure that the current owners bought/took over the Bernina and Janome dealerships from the woman who had them previously at a store located near Joann Fabrics. That store went out of business last May and this one popped up shortly after. The last time I was there, I saw that this store had the entire line of Amanda Murphy rulers. Our quilt store in Kalispell also carries them but has a smaller selection.

I bought a few more sets to round out my collection:

While I was paying for my purchase, Robin made an offhand comment to me about teaching rulerwork. The store owner, who was ringing up my purchases, got very excited. “Do you teach?” she asked. “We’re looking for people to teach classes here—any kind of classes. What do you teach?” I told her that I am currently teaching serger classes in Kalispell and she invited me to send them some proposals.

The universe has such a sense of humor.

We made our way to the other side of town to Joann Fabrics. I was curious to see if the Missoula store was in dire straits, too. It does not appear to be. This is a well-stocked and well-staffed store with regular operating hours. The spring fabrics are starting to arrive, including the spring knits. I looked at the selection of those and then spotted a large rack of fabric that needed further investigation.

This Joanns had about 20 bolts of a rayon/poly/spandex sweatshirt fleece, definitely a new fabric for our stores. How exciting! UNFORTUNATELY, ALL THE COLORS WERE MUDDY EARTH TONES. YES, I AM YELLING. There were bolts of sage green, mustard yellow, brown, taupe, etc., none of which look good on me. Where is the royal blue? Emerald green? Hot pink?

In the end, I bought two yards of a deep purple. Purple is not a favorite color of mine, but it was the closest I could get to something wearable. I will make a hoodie out of this fabric to see what I think.

By then, it was lunchtime. We drove downtown and scored a parking spot right in front of a small BBQ restaurant, so that’s where we ate. After lunch, we walked down the block to The Confident Stitch.

I really want to like this store, but it’s so hard. The selection is wonderful. They carry both quilting fabrics and garment fabrics. I’ve ordered from them online and been there in person. The atmosphere inside the store is just weird, though. I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s not an enjoyable place to shop. I did get some Robert Kaufman Essex Linen because they had it in colors I need for a project and this saves me from having to order it online.

We headed back to Kalispell mid-afternoon with a stop—of course—at the Amish store in St. Ignatius. I had a cup of coconut ice cream. Robin had Mountain Berry. I also scored a half-gallon of Wilcoxson’s Peppermint Stick ice cream there. Wilcoxson’s is a Montana company (Bozeman, I think) and I am a bit addicted to Peppermint Stick ice cream with hot fudge sauce on it. Unfortunately, that flavor is a seasonal offering and our grocery store is out.

I was back home just before 5 pm. We had a good day and I scratched my road trip itch temporarily. The Diva is running just fine despite all the dash lights, so I am fairly confident it will get me to Spokane.

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In other news, I cracked the serger problem—it was, indeed, an issue with that microfiber terrycloth. I switched to rounds cut from the washcloths I bought at the Dollar Store and they work just fine.

I’ll bust out about 50 or 60 of these in odd moments here and there in the next week and send them off. Robin also asked for a couple to try.

A Mystery at the Fabric Store

Something strange is going on at our Joann Fabrics. Their pre-pandemic operating hours were 9 am to 9 pm every day. About six months ago, they pushed back their daily opening time to 10 am. A few weeks ago, they pushed it back to 11 am. This week, I noticed a sign on the door indicating that “due to unforeseen circumstances,” they would be closing at 4 pm every day this week.

I know they have been having trouble finding employees. This seems a bit drastic, though, and makes me wonder what exactly is going on. I said to the husband that I did—for about 10 nanoseconds—consider asking Deb, the manager, for a green apron and telling her I would pitch in and help. They wouldn’t even have to train me.

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A few weeks ago, the husband pulled up a YouTube video on scissors. It was on a channel that he subscribes to. The guy devises all sorts of elaborate tests to compare brands of tools and then tortures the tools to see which brand performs best.

I knew at the outset that the Kai scissors would probably come out on top—they are the preferred brand of many sewists—and they did, but the Heritage brand came in a close second. They are made in the USA. The husband ordered himself a pair for his shop and they came yesterday. These are a hefty pair of shears (my Fiskars kitchen scissors are for comparison).

He said to me, “I bet these would cut Formica,” which is kind of a joke (not really) because 30 years ago, when renovating our first house in Pennsylvania, he used my good Fiskars to cut a piece of Formica. I just about had a stroke. He also killed several of my hair dryers using them as heat guns. Now he has his own tools.

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Our local Army-Navy store has ice cleats for 20% off this week, so I stopped in yesterday and bought a pair for my muck boots.

The Yaktrax don’t fit my mucks, although I really only wear my mucks to go back and forth to the chicken coop. (My daily winter boots are a riding boot style with a lug sole.) There is a slight slope down to the door of the coop, however, and it gets a bit treacherous when it’s icy. I’ve needed some cleats for my mucks, and when I saw the ones the husband had for his, I decided to get some for myself.

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I think that if Susan and I end up going to Spokane in a few weeks, I am going to call Kevin and ask him if they can run the super-duper diagnostics on The Diva and figure out why my dash is lit up like a Christmas tree. The check engine light won’t go off, I am still getting the drivetrain malfunction message, and now a brake sensor is telling me I need new brake pads despite the fact that the husband looked at all four wheels and determined there is plenty of brake pad left. (He was the one who replaced them last time, so he knows how long they’ve been on there.) We’re also still waiting on that starter solenoid. I realize that I am an unusual customer because I don’t replace my BMW every two years like most people who drive them, although Kevin has told me repeatedly not to get rid of it because they aren’t making diesels anymore. Part of me wishes these cars weren’t so heavily computerized, because the technology fails long before the mechanical parts do.

The car runs fine, and I plan to drive it until I can’t anymore. I don’t want to spend the money on a new-to-me vehicle right now.

Circling Around

I did not have a lot of time to work on this quilt yesterday because I spent the afternoon in town running errands and at Ruler Club, but I got a few of the smaller squares quilted with the new circle rulers:

I like this a lot. I’m still wondering if it’s “enough” quilting, though, or if I should add some fill. I might take it to Ruler Club next month and ask for opinions there. We had a good Ruler Club class yesterday. There are about 15 women signed up for this six-month session. Some are quilting on domestic machines, some on sit-down machines like mine, and some on machines on frames. The instructor uses a different machine in each session. Yesterday, she demonstrated on the same machine I have, but on a frame. It is fascinating to see the differences. (As much as I love teaching, it is also great fun to be a student.) I also took the Kindness quilt for show-and-tell, because I used one of the rulers we’re using in Ruler Club to quilt the narrow red border on that one. I think it helps to see how other quilters use the rulers on actual quilts, not just on the practice piece. I spread it out and we looked at it and people asked questions and offered suggestions.

The more I use rulers, the more I love them, which is a bit of a surprise to me. I thought, when I bought the Q20 last year, that I would be using it mostly for free motion quilting and edge-to-edge designs. I am also glad I got the table for the Q20 instead of a frame, because I think I would be frustrated trying to quilt on a frame.

The store owner suggested that those of us with sit-down Q16 and Q20 machines start another club and meet monthly, but I am running out of room in my schedule, LOL. She and I also discussed the idea of making the Serger 101 class a standing monthly class, which is fine with me. If I have students, I’ll teach it, and if no one signs up, we won’t offer it that month.

I still have to schedule some serger classes with the other quilt store. And the T-shirt class is next Wednesday. Sometimes I think about my mother taking Stretch and Sew classes in the 1970s and I just laugh. Who knew.

My friend Susan and I are planning a trip for the end of the month, but we’ll have to see if the weather cooperates and if The Diva will behave. Susan’s daughter lives in Pullman, Washington, which is about an hour south of Spokane. I would take Susan as far as Spokane and her daughter would drive up to meet us and retrieve her for a few days. The big quilt store in Spokane has a class I’d like to take, so we’re looking at scheduling the trip around that.

Everyone wants to travel with me, LOL.

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I got the first tray of lettuce planted yesterday:

The way this works is that those rooting plugs sit in “net cups” suspended in the liquid growing medium. (I use Texas Tomato Food.) As the lettuce plants grow, their roots come down through the openings in the net cups to access the growing medium. I’ve got the lights adjusted so that they are fairly close to the tray, which keeps the plants from getting leggy. I can move the lights up as the plants get bigger. The lettuce I’ve been using is a variety called Green Ice that I had left over from last summer.

I’ll plant another tray in a couple of days. The shelving unit has room for six trays of 18 cups each, so we’ll have plenty of lettuce. I also might do a tray with some herbs like basil or thyme.

I picked up some different washcloths at the Dollar Store yesterday—these are cotton, not microfiber—and will experiment with using those to serge makeup pads for DD#2.

Tomorrow is sewing at the old schoolhouse up the road. I haven’t been for almost a month, so I should put in an appearance for a bit. Maybe I can finish binding the Kindness quilt.

Where is the Problem?

Troubleshooting is a process. When something isn’t going well, what is causing the problem?

• Is it the pattern? (ahem, Little Poppins Bag)

• Did you chose a project beyond your current skill level? While it’s good to challenge onself, challenging oneself too much just leads to frustration.

• Is it the materials? Are you trying to make a pattern with a woven instead of a knit?

• Is it the tools? Does your sewing machine need to be adjusted or serviced?

Of course, some of these categories overlap, which makes pinning down the problem even tougher. One thing I have noticed is that makers almost always assign blame to themselves, first: “I must not be understanding this correctly,” or “I’m a terrible sewist.”

[I, on the other hand, have plenty of confidence in my skills (too much?), and usually assume it’s a problem with the pattern or the presentation—or, in the case of sewing, the materials or the machine.]

DD#2 needs more reusable makeup pads. I made a batch for her a couple of years ago and they’re about worn out. I got a yard of the same organic cotton fleece I used last time as well as half a dozen microfiber washcloths. Because I was cutting up scraps yesterday with the Accuquilt cutter, I took the opportunity to cut circles of the appropriate size from both fabrics. Two circles—one of each fabric—get serged together around the outside to make the pads.

I’ve made these before. This is not unfamiliar territory, but I was having a terrible time with this batch. I checked the needles. I checked the thread. I vacuumed out the serger. I serged with the microfiber circle on the bottom. I serged with the microfiber circle on the top. I adjusted the presser foot pressure. I adjusted the differential feed. No matter what I did, the microfiber circle was scooching and stretching as I serged and the circles looked more like amoebae than circles.

I suspect it’s the microfiber cloth. It’s very thick and springy. I am going to see if the Dollar Store has some thinner microfiber cloths that might be more suitable. Making these shouldn’t be this hard.

[Microfiber fabric generates a lot of lint. I made extensive use of my lint roller while cutting. In a very strange bit of serendipity, DD#2 texted me mid-afternoon to let me know that she had been at Ikea and picked up two more packages of lint roller refills for me there. They were out of stock when we shopped at Thanksgiving. My kids are so thoughtful.]

After the makeup pad debacle, I thought I might experiment with making a neckwarmer from some cushy black microvelvet I found on the remnant rack. I paired it with a length of flannel, also from the remnant rack. Again, this is something I’ve done before, although with jersey knits rather than microvelvet (which is still a knit). I tested—always—and adjusted the settings to where I thought they should be, but when I serged one long side, I realized that the serger was gathering the microvelvet faster than the flannel. Ugh. I cut the stitching on that side, adjusted the differential feed, and tried again.

It took more fiddling than it should have, although it’s done. I like the neckwarmer and will use it, but by the end of the afternoon I had started to ask myself if maybe I should give all of this up and become a greeter at Wal-Mart.

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My Amanda Murphy circle rulers came yesterday:

I will spend this morning with the Q20 again. I have to do my homework for Ruler Club, which meets this afternoon, and I want to practice with the circle rulers on that yellow, green, and purple sample piece.

The rest of my lettuce-growing supplies arrived, so getting them set up is on the to-do list for this morning, too.

We are at the “skating rink” stage of winter, when it snows, then melts, then freezes. One of our friends on the fire department gifted these ice cleats to the husband a few weeks ago. These are a different design than the Yaktrax he usually uses.

The husband tried them out yesterday and said they worked well, so he’s just going to leave them on his rubber boots. The boots are on the boot dryer, in case you’re wondering why they are upside down like that.

Bacon Deliveries

Friday was messy, weather-wise, because it warmed up enough for the precipitation to come down as rain. And there was some wind. Still, it was nothing out of the ordinary for January in Montana. I do like it when it stays colder, though, because the snow looks prettier longer. As soon as it warms up even a bit, the snow on our 12’-12’ pitch roof starts coming down, and when the snow falls off the upper roof and hits the porch roof, it sounds like we’re under attack.

Seattle was cut off from the rest of Washington state for a brief period on Friday when I-5 was closed between Seattle and Portland due to flooding. Hopefullly, Snoqualmie Pass will open today. DD#2 informs me that the grocery store shelves are getting a bit bare because trucks can’t get through, although she’s okay for now.

We appear to be in for a stretch of dry weather, if the long-term forecast is any indication. That’s good, because I am itching for a road trip. The husband and I drove about an hour south to pick up the pork orders, but that wasn’t enough to satisfy me. I need a long stretch of open road. Missoula is doable. Spokane might be a bit trickier, but possible. Clearly, I am not going to drive to Seattle any time soon.

I delivered pork orders to Cathy and Tera after lunch on Friday. They had to get the pork into their freezers so there wasn’t much time for visiting, but Tera and I did discuss a possible quilt-related trip in April. Even a few moments together is sufficient time for us to come up with some kind of plan to get into trouble.

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I think I have decided how I want to quilt the smaller squares on the square-in-square quilt:

I roughed that in with disappearing marker. Unfortunately, I do not have the correct ruler for making those curves and don’t want to freehand them. I ordered myself a set of Amanda Murphy circle rulers, which should be here on Monday. I set this aside and got another basted top from the pile. I chose my wallhanging one, because I didn’t have to change thread. I am quilting a quarter inch outside the Os and inside the Os:

I likely will do something similar around the center squares. The diamond-shaped sections in the sashing might also get a motif. It’s a lot of start-and-stop quilting, which many machine quilters don’t like because it requires knotting and burying ends. Meh. I was a knitter for a long time and that requires a lot of darning in ends. I prefer that to “travel quilting” to get to the next section. I keep a pincushion with self-threading needles next to the Q20 and bury the ends each time I quilt a circle. That keeps the work neat and doesn’t leave them all to be dealt with at the end.

I see it all as part of the process. You can either enjoy the whole process or not, and I am choosing to enjoy all of it.

If you can’t find joy in the snow, you will have a lot less joy in your life but the same amount of snow.

Thus far, I like the 50/50 cotton/poly batting. It certainly beats that Fairfield stuff I used in the Kindness quilt. I just do not like that batting. I’m sewing down the binding on the Kindness quilt right now. I decided to use the backing strips that I cut off when I trimmed the quilt to make the binding. Had I been thinking ahead, I simply would have left enough backing on for a self-binding edge. Oh, well. This was only a little extra work.

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The husband finished assembling the lettuce shelving unit. It fits nicely into the same spot as the old one.

I moved the old shelf into the yarn room for more storage. The whole basement needs to be cleaned and a load of stuff donated to one of the thrift stores.

Those two totes on the top shelf were part of the original lettuce system. I had to cut the lettuce again because the totes didn’t fit under the lights otherwise. I am not sure how many cuttings one can get from each batch—theoretically, it should be several as long as the roots are growing in the medium, but I did have to empty and clean those totes yesterday because there was salt buildup from the growing medium as well as some algae growing in it. I filled the totes with fresh growing medium. We’ll probably get another cutting of lettuce in a week or so.

I need to start lettuce seeds in the rooting plugs today so they are ready to go when the trays get here. I’ll take a picture and explain that setup in more detail in a future blog post.

Thus Far, a Nothingburger

Six inches of snow does not a “storm” make, in my book. Maybe I’ve lived here too long. The storm warning is in place until 11:00 am, but looking at the radar, the blob of precipitation seems to have stalled over Spokane. Missoula is getting freezing rain. We’ll have to see what happens when it’s time for us to go pick up the pork.

Snoqualmie Pass is closed until Sunday. I cannot remember that happening in recent years. Some of that is a shortage of plow drivers, to be sure, but the pass also has gotten an insane amount of snow and wind which is causing avalanches over the roadway.

The husband spent most of yesterday plowing, some with the plow truck and some with the track loader. He plows out the nearby neighbors’ driveways and they bring him beer in return. It’s a good system. He also makes sure the fire hall is plowed so he and the other firefighters can get the engines out for calls.

Despite the fact that I wasn’t truly snowed in, I stayed home from sewing. I was out Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday and needed to stay here and get some work done. I finished quilting the Kindness quilt and trimmed it for binding. I am a bit stuck. I auditioned about 15 different colors of Kona for binding and wasn’t happy with any of them. The quilt wants an aqua binding and I don’t have the right color Kona. (Shocking, but true.) I will dive into my stash of turquoise prints today and see if I have enough of something suitable. A black stripe cut on the bias might also work.

I then chose one of the remaining four tops that are basted and ready to quilt. This is a top that I worked on two years ago when my MIL was diagnosed with gallbladder cancer. It’s a very simple quilt made up of squares in squares; I made this one mostly to mess around with some color and fabric combinations. And now it’s a good one to practice rulerwork on.

[Most of my “practice” quilts probably will go to Ritzville next fall. At Ruler Club last month, we had a short discussion about what to do with our practice quilts. Finished is better than perfect, yes, but we don’t want to donate things that are obviously flawed. I think I take good care even when I am “practicing” a new skill, but that is something to keep in mind.]

In any case, I looked at the top and considered how to quilt it. There is no one right answer to this question except that it needs enough quilting not to fall apart. An allover design would work. So would quilting with rulers. I wanted to practice my rulerwork, so rulers it was. Which one(s)? I got out my box of rulers and looked through them.

Squares often look good with arc quilting—think orange peels—so I found a curved ruler of the correct size and arc shape. That would do for the larger squares. The other two will work for the smaller, inner squares, but I haven’t decided on which one yet. Or I could use both and alternate them.

Once I settled on thread—a pearl gray 40wt cotton thread for the top and a pearl gray 40wt Aurifil for the bobbin—work went quickly. I got all the curved quilting done on the large squares yesterday:

Is that enough quilting in those areas? I think so—keep in mind that I still have to quilt inside the smaller squares—but I’m not sure. I could quilt those orange peel areas with a small filler. Right now, I am leaning toward the on-point template for the insides of the smaller squares. I’ll do those and reassess.

[Looking at this photo now, as I write this bog post, I see that I also could carry through on the arc theme and echo the same kinds of arcs inside the smaller squares. So many decisions.]

This quilt also has borders, and I am thinking ribbon candy again. That’s fun to do with the ruler and gives a lot of bang for the buck.

I know that the batting is part of where I’m getting hung up. Most of the quilting instructors use either a polyester batting or a layer of cotton batting and a layer of polyester batting. Using polyester gives a much different appearance to the stitching, and I think it’s why so many of those instructors also quilt their tops so densely. Angela Walters noted that using polyester batting makes her quilts less wrinkly and allows them to hang better for display. If you’re a quilting instructor who doesn’t want to arrive at an event with a suitcase full of wrinkled quilts, you use polyester batting.

I love the old-fashioned look of crinkly cotton quilts, and as mine are going to be used and not hung up for display, I prefer cotton batting. At most, I might use 80/20 cotton/polyester, although one of the tops still-to-be-quilted has a 50/50 batting as an experiment because it’s the wallhanging for the upstairs hallway. I’ll let you know what I think.

Awaiting a Storm

We’re under a winter storm warning through tomorrow, for what that’s worth. The problem is that the National Weather Service has been issuing “winter storm warnings” for months for minuscule amounts of snow (in Montana, 1-2” is not a “winter storm,” sorry), so it’s hard to take these predictions seriously after a while. I’m inclined to believe this one may have some teeth to it just because Snoqualmie Pass is literally impassable at the moment. The WADOT Twitter feed noted that there is no way to get from the east side of Washington state to the west side right now because all three passes are closed.

[As a mother with a kid in Seattle, that makes me slightly nuts.]

The pork processor called yesterday to tell me everything is ready to pick up. Clearly, we are not going to try to do that today. The husband and I will go down there tomorrow morning if the roads are clear.

A package was waiting for me when I got home yesterday:

This is my new lettuce-growing shelving. The husband said he would put it together today as he is not planning to go to work. He’ll probably be out plowing at least part of the day.

I am a bit defensive about this shelving only because I don’t want to field comments like, “You could build that cheaper yourself.” Those kinds of comments tend to pop up in homesteading groups that pride themselves on bootstrapping and doing things on the cheap. I get it. I am also keenly aware that I am not the kind of person who would be able to build that cheaper myself. I cobbled together the existing system and it was a pain in the butt. A cobbled-together system the size we need would be an even bigger pain in the butt.

I’ve decided that my response to those kinds of comments is to point to some of that person’s clothing and say, “You could make that cheaper yourself, you know.”

Figuring out the best ROI on our time and money is a personal decision and one that differs depending on the situation.

I might sew today, but I might also make some curd. I have enough eggs to try out the blackcurrant curd recipe that Cathy sent me. I put all of the appliquéd Sunbonnet Sue blocks up on the design wall yesterday to assess what I need to do next. There are 26 finished blocks and another six completed motifs that just need to be appliquéd to the background fabric. I think I will finish four of those for a total of 30 blocks. I can do a setting of five across and six down—with sashing between—and make a quilt that finishes at roughly twin size.

The blocks are very cute, and because I knew the woman who made them, working on this quilt has a lot of special meaning.

Sergers and Circles

I thought yesterday’s serger class went well. Machines included a couple of late 80s-vintage Bernette sergers—one three-thread and one four-thread—a couple of older Husqvarnas, and two brand-new air-threading models (Janome and Bernette). I can safely say now that Husqvarnas are my least favorite sergers. I have never seen such needlessly complicated machines with such badly written manuals.

I was able to guide everyone in getting their machines threaded and making a chain. One student—there is one in every class—took off like a rocket and had three flannel baby blankets done by the end of class. Several others got at least one blanket done. Only two students never got past the threading and chaining stage. One was an older lady with a vintage Bernette four-thread serger that had belonged to her late sister. She said it was difficult with her eyes and her hands to thread the machine, and she knew coming in that she might have problems. The other lady’s machine made a beautiful three-thread chain, but we couldn’t get it to pick up the left needle thread. After class, I saw her talking to the store owner about a new machine, LOL.

Truly, for a beginning serging class, getting students grounded in the basics of needles, thread, and fabric and walking them through threading their machines is about all you can expect in three hours. That’s assuming, too, that everyone comes in with a working machine. The vintage sergers don’t scare me, but they do have some quirks. The newer air threading machines are quite nice if you have the budget for one, but my Jukis are good, solid, inexpensive machines and I plan to keep using them for a long while yet.

I stopped in at the other quilt store yesterday and talked to the owner there about some serger classes. She also wants to offer a Serger 101 class. I will look at their class schedule for the next couple of months and see when they have some open dates.

Next up is the T-shirt class, two weeks from today.

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I picked up the other set of ribbon candy rulers at the store yesterday, as well as another spool of red Aurifil thread for the bobbin thread of the Kindness quilt. The borders and corners are done, and yesterday morning, I experimented with a pattern in the narrow red border:

I like it and will use it in the rest of the border. I made these with one of the Amanda Murphy Mini Lollipop rulers that we’re using in Ruler Club (which reminds me that I need to get my homework done on the practice quilt before next Tuesday’s class). I think I might have liked these a bit closer together, but I am not taking this out. I do tend to err on the side of less rather than more and need to work on finding a happy medium of quilting density.

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I’m slowly working on finishing up the projects I started last year. I would like to get back to the Slabtown Backpack at some point. I’m also in the middle of another Little Poppins Bag. I started it almost as soon as I finished the first one. This one is going much more quickly now that I’ve deciphered the horrible instructions, but I had to fix a pocket yesterday because I put it on upside down. The exterior is a directional print and I forgot to check the orientation when sewing on the pocket. Oops. Oh well, it’s fixed now.

It looks like we have a winter storm coming in tonight. I’ll have to see if I can make it to sewing tomorrow at the old schoolhouse up the road. If not, I’ll just hunker down here and work my way through the list of projects. I’ve researched some setting ideas for the Sunbonnet Sue blocks and I am pretty sure I know what I want to do with those blocks. That top should go together quickly once I’ve got the sashing made.

Round the Corner

I got the other long border and one short border of the Kindness quilt done yesterday, which forced me to deal with the issue of the corners. I researched some ideas and decided that making progressively smaller ribbon candies to turn the corner would be the best solution. That required, though, that I ditch the security of the rulers and freehand the ribbons. I roughed them in with a disappearing marker, which helped.

They are not perfect, but I am not unhappy with how they turned out:

A little bit of the marker is still visible, which should disappear soon.

I have one short border and the other two corners left to do. I would have continued working on the quilt and finished those, but the husband came home from work early and distracted me by being a shiny toy. I gave up quilting in favor of sitting and having drinks on the (inside) veranda with him.

I know, too, how I want to quilt that narrow red border. A few more hours at the machine and this one will be ready for binding. Then it’s on to the next one.

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I am excited about teaching my serger class today. I have my machine all threaded and ready to go.

The threading paths for the loopers and needles are color coded inside the machine, so I threaded each path with its corresponding color of thread. That makes it easy, on white fabric, to demonstrate a balanced stitch as well as to illustrate what happens when tension is out of whack. I’ve also got a pile of sample items with different kinds of stitches. I think it’s important to show practical applications for things like rolled hems and lettuce edges.

With eight students—and potentially, eight different machines—getting everyone up and running might be a challenge, but it’s a good challenge. I am so glad that beginning serging is its own class now and a prerequisite to other classes.

The quilt store north of town asked about me teaching serger classes there, but that hasn’t gone any further. Out of respect, because she asked me first, I did run the idea past the owner of the store where I am teaching today to see if she had any objections. She did not. The two stores seem to get along now, although I understand that wasn’t the case with a previous owner.

I’m not interested in drama. I just want to teach people how to use their sergers.

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I took advantage of a big sale at Accuquilt and purchased the English Paper Piecing Qube from the overstock bin at the end of December. It came via the FedEx truck yesterday. I’m doing enough EPP now that it will be useful to have those dies. Strangely, the order for the strip dies that I placed earlier in December—they were also on sale—shows that it is still “processing.” One of the items in that order was out of stock, so it may be that they are waiting for it to arrive before they ship the whole order. I think these new dies will round out my die collection for the moment. I tend not to buy the dies for individual blocks because I like to make my units oversized and trim them down. Most of my dies are for the geometric shapes, like squares and triangles. And strips, of course, because those are so handy.

Ribbon Candy

The Q20 and I will be spending a lot of quality time together this month. I have five tops basted and ready to quilt and a few other items, including table runners and my Ruler Club practice quilt, waiting in the wings. Yesterday, I sat down and finished the loopy flower pattern in the center of the Cultivate Kindness top. I was going to stop there, but I was itching to try the Ribbon Candy rulers I just bought, because I specifically wanted to try them in the borders of this quilt.

It’s possible to freehand ribbon candy designs. I sketch badly, however, which means that I don’t freehand quilt well, either (except loops). Rulers were invented for people like me.

I got out my handy double-ended tape measure—zero is in the middle—and located the middle of the border. Some quick calculations indicated which size ribbon candy ruler would work best in the border. I started at the middle mark and quilted to one end, then went back to the same spot and quilted to the other end. If I needed to do any fudging, it would be less noticeable at the ends. As it turned out, the design fit perfectly into the border.

I love the way it looks:

I am leaving the corner blocks undone until I figure out what I want to quilt inside of them. There is also a narrow inner border that needs something. I don’t like to overquilt my quilts, though. They need just enough thread, but not so much that they can stand up by themselves.

I am so glad we’re doing the Amanda Murphy rulers in Ruler Club. The Handi-Quilter ones were a good introduction, but I like Amanda’s rulers much better.

I find it so interesting that some of my friends have moved over to other fiber arts or are getting back to old favorite ones. If you’re on Instagram, follow JC Briar for some great eye candy. JC was my tech editor for many years and is an accomplished knitter, computer programmer, and teacher. Last year, she acquired a treadle Singer Red Eye named Rosebud. She and Rosebud have been making some great modern improv quilts lately.

And Cathy is weaving! She posted a picture on Facebook yesterday. She’s making a lovely scarf out of some maroon and beige Merino/camel blend yarn.

I should check in with Tera and see what fascinating things she’s working on.

I fringed two prayer shawls yesterday morning while watching the (three hour long) Joe Rogan interview with Dr. Robert Malone. I followed Dr. Malone on Twitter until they banned him last week. That’s all I am going to say about it. If you want to know what I think, you’ll have to speak to me privately, and I’m unlikely to engage further with you about it if you haven’t also watched the interview and only want to repeat social media talking points.

This arrived in Friday’s mail:

I don’t order a lot from Baker Creek; their seeds didn’t seem to do as well for us as the ones I get from Victory Seeds in Oregon. Still, Baker Creek has some intriguing varieties and I’ll probably order at least a few things from them.

[I did not do cowpeas last year but wondering if I should give them one more go . . . ]

I am ready to hit the ground running this week. Temps are supposed to moderate this week—it’s a balmy 10 degrees Fahrenheit right now—but snow is in the forecast every day. I am hoping The Diva does not decide to leave me stranded anywhere. The husband thinks it needs a new starter solenoid and ordered one, but apparently, there are none to be had in the United States and it’s going to be 6-8 weeks. I can drive DD#1’s Acura if necessary. I’d prefer to be driving my car, though.

Happy 2022!

I made one last run to town in 2021 yesterday. The quilt store north of town had exactly the fabric I needed to finish a project, and when I stopped in at the quilt store south of town, I discovered I have eight students signed up for the Serger 101 class this coming Tuesday. Yay! I am so excited about that. The Serger 101 class is a prerequisite to the T-shirt class later this month, hopefully to avoid the issue of students coming in not knowing how to use the machine.

I’ll spend some time this weekend getting my class stuff organized. I’ve also been watching Gail Yellen’s YouTube channel, because she has a lot of great serger technique and project videos. I have lots of ideas for classes for this year.

“Begin as you mean to go on.” Apparently, 2022 is going to begin with quilting, sewing, and serging. I can think of worse things.

I also picked up a set of rulers I ordered at the quilt store where I am teaching:

I want to use these in the border of a quilt. I’d like to get that quilt done, as I have four more in the queue behind it.

I’d also very much like to get started on a special project for my college roommate. She sent me the Sunbonnet Sue quilt blocks that her grandmother appliquéd and asked if I could make a quilt out of them. I want to get that top made and quilted before gardening season starts.

The new lettuce growing supplies are supposed to show up here this week. I will start another batch of seeds today so they are ready when the new system gets set up. We had salad with dinner again last night, and the lettuce I cut earlier in the week has already started growing back. The husband wondered if I should just grow lettuce inside all year and skip growing it in the garden. It does seem easier to grow it inside, but I’ll probably put a patch in the garden anyway.

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In weather news, it’s -1 this morning. (That’s the air temp.) We’ve been having a cold snap. The husband put the heat lamps on in the chicken coop so that Dave doesn’t get frostbite on his comb. He only puts the heat lamps on if it goes down into the teens. I know he worries about the heat lamps setting the coop on fire, although in true husband fashion, those heat lamps are bolted and clamped in place so they can’t fall.

I’ve been watching the weather all over the Pacific Northwest. Seattle is having a weird winter, for sure. They don’t usually get snow and they’ve had quite a bit recently. “Quite a bit” is only a couple of inches, but that’s enough to snarl things there. I-90 is intermittently open and closed going over Snoqualmie Pass because people do not understand that “all wheel drive” does not mean “all wheel stop.” I’ve driven that route dozens of times in all kinds of weather—once during a snowstorm—but right now, you couldn’t pay me enough money to make that trip. There are too many stupid drivers on the road. I think a lack of plow drivers is also contributing to the problem.

If there is one lesson I take from 2021, it’s that reality has shifted. I still think we’re in a downward decline, helped along by the events of the past two years. Systems that worked on 2019 don’t work as efficiently now, and in some cases, don’t work at all. Some of them may never recover. Some of them shouldn’t recover. That’s sobering, yes, but it also paves the way for new opportunities, and it seems to me that a bit of restructuring and re-prioritizing would not go amiss in the new year.

Our Many Projects

My father-in-law wrote in his Christmas card to us this year: “T & J—good luck in 2022 with all your many projects.”

That made me chuckle. I suppose the two of us do look unhinged sometimes with everything we have going on.

To wit, our lettuce just before I cut it for last night’s salad:

I cut about half, and that was enough for one salad. (Have you met the husband? You know how much he eats.) This is why I need to scale up the growing system. I left the roots, so the lettuce should grow back again, but it isn’t going to be enough. We need a bigger system. I did some shopping yesterday morning and this is on its way to us:

It is a three-tier Sunlite shelf from Gardener’s Supply. The system comes with the shelves and the lights. I will get the growing trays from a different company. Those Commander buckets in the top pic work, but they are too heavy for me to lift when they are full of water.

I get the whole concept of bootstrapping, and there certainly is a time and place for upcycling and using less expensive materials. The older I get, though, the more I understand when it’s appropriate to just spend the money and stop messing around. We have the money for a more formal system, one that’s efficient and easy to use. I will set it up so that each shelf is a week apart in growing, which should give us a consistent weekly supply of lettuce throughout the winter.

Gardener’s Supply was having a 20% off sale yesterday, so I also took the opportunity to order my soaker hose supplies for the vegetable garden for next season.

Having gotten my shopping out of the way, I went upstairs to sew. I am concentrating on garment patterns for me this week. I pulled all of the sweatshirt knits out of the stash. I also pulled out this Burda pattern (6315), which I traced a while back but never got to:

Burda patterns feature nice designs, but they are short on guidance unless you are good at decoding hieroglyphics. I made view C, which is the pullover sans pocket with the drawstring cowl neck.

[I am just not a pocket person. I think it’s because I don’t like the feel or weight of things dragging down pockets in my clothes. I don’t use them, so I don’t put them on clothing that I make.]

I lengthened the pattern, of course, and I didn’t put the drawstring in the cowl neck as it’s mostly decorative. (DD#1 gave me a test a few years ago and apparently, I do not like excessive sensory input, which means I don’t like my clothes to be fiddly. Perhaps you already came to that conclusion on my behalf.) The fabric is the same as some I used in a Nancy Raglan a couple of years ago (and still wear). I must have bought four yards at the time, because I had enough for this top, too:

(Where is my iron?) This only took a few hours, start to finish. The new coverstitch machine performed beautifully once I got the thread tension set where it needed to be for the heavier fabric. (Test, test, test.)

I ended up taking in some of the seams as this was more oversized than I wanted it to be. I then re-traced the pattern two sizes smaller for the next iteration. I don’t have enough experience with Burda patterns to know what size I need to make yet. I also redrafted the sleeves, because the ones in the pattern were big and floppy and I like my sleeves to fit more closely. I’ll probably wear this with a light turtleneck underneath.

I’ve got enough sweatshirt fleece for four more tops. I think I might actually make some that will be long enough to wear with leggings, too—almost like a sweater dress.

I’ve got a nice collection of patterns that fit me now. The danger is that I am going to make more clothing than I really need. But after years of clothes that don’t fit, wear out quickly, or only come in muddy earth tones, it’s lovely to put on clothes that are long enough, are made well, and come in colors I want to wear. I have my eye on some hot pink, emerald green, and sapphire blue sweatshirt fleece from Girl Charlee Fabrics. You’re not going to lose me in a snowbank, that’s for sure.

Hacking the Freya Pattern

I ordered this book over the summer:

The patterns include a knot-front top (the Joni top and dress, on the cover), and I wanted to see how Tilly designed and constructed her version. I might still make hers, although I think the construction is a bit fiddly. She has written her patterns for assembling on a sewing machine, so I have to make a few adjustments to do them on the serger. Along the way, though, I got distracted by the Freya pattern, which is a simple top with several neckline and length variations. I’ve spent the last couple of days tracing that pattern in both top and dress lengths. I made up a muslin in the top. That was educational.

The Freya top is a simple set-in sleeve top that nips in at the waist. The Rhapso-T by Zede and Mallory Donahue is very similar. I made up a muslin of the Rhapso-T and wasn’t thrilled with the way it fit, but learning about the boob bump adjustment was more than worth the price of that pattern. All of the T-shirts and tunics I’ve made since then, however, lack any waist shaping. That’s not because I don’t have a waistline. On the contrary—I have a defined hourglass figure, but after making up the first iteration of the Freya pattern, I realized that the reason I didn’t like the Rhapso-T was because accentuating my waistline makes my bust look bigger by comparison. My bust is big enough. It doesn’t need additional help.

[I buy lengths of knit fabrics on clearance for my muslins, which is better than wasting good garment knits for testing.]

Is there a happy medium? I re-traced the Freya top, but I graded out the waistline a bit. I also, as expected, had to lengthen the pattern. I’ll make up another muslin and see what I think. It would be nice to have a little shaping. If I can come up with a Freya top pattern that I like, I’ll make the dress version in one of the heavier knits in the stash.

I also examined the sleeve shaping on the Freya pattern and compared it to my Liz Claiborne knockoff top pattern. I actually know quite a bit about sleeve shaping, having had to learn the relationship between armscye and cap shaping in great detail as a knitting designer. (One of my favorite stories is that of designer Norah Gaughan using calculus to work out her sleeve shapings. That is dedication.) The sleeves on the Freya are a bit wider than the ones on my knockoff top, I cannot stand to have sleeves flopping around (or bracelets, or lacy cuffs, or anything else on my wrists that gets in my way), so I narrowed the Freya sleeves accordingly.

This is all a process. And I will get back to other sewing (and quilting) soon.

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Joann Fabrics is a hot mess—both locally and at the corporate level—and I am wondering how long it’s going to last. Hobby Lobby really is their only big-box competition at the moment, and our HL has a relatively small fabric department compared to Joanns.

[Yes, we should all shop at our local fabric stores. I do, but until the quilt stores start carrying garment fabrics, I have to visit Joann Fabrics.]

Joann’s biggest problem was their point-of-sale system, which they have begun upgrading, finally. Entering remnants used to be a multi-step process of entering the regular price, the sale price, the discount, and the yardage of the remnant in order to get it to ring up properly. Overall, the system was as slow as molasses in January. Coupons didn’t always work.

The new system is not without its problems, however. I have learned to watch the prices ring up, because items that are tagged as being on sale on the floor will ring up at full price at the register. I keep coupons on my phone, but if the store has the old POS system, I have to go into my phone and toggle a switch so that the coupons will work. If they have the new system, I have to have the switch toggled the other way. The old system would e-mail my receipts to me. The new system does not, although I’ve been told it will in the future.

The website is an inventory nightmare. For some reason, they insist on showing fabrics that are no longer available either in the stores or for shipping. If they took their out-of-stock merchandise off the website in a timely manner, it would make searching for needed items much simpler.

At the checkout registers yesterday, I was the second person in line. There was one cashier working all by herself. (It was the poor lady from Texas who forgot to give me my bag of thread last week.) The customer in front of me was buying discounted Christmas merchandise and had two carts stuffed full of items, all of which had to be scanned individually. I knew they were short on staff, so I waited, but some of the eight people in line weren’t so patient. One lady demanded to know why the cashier didn’t call for help. The cashier apologized profusely and said there were only three of them working—one at the cut counter, one at the register, and one who was on her lunch break. Truly, it wasn’t her fault and there was nothing she could do. I thought she handled the situation with grace and humor. It’s a first-world problem, for sure, to have to wait in line at a fabric store.

Musical Hems

My mother hemmed DD#2’s pants yesterday (by hand, because she’s good that way) and I hemmed my mother’s pants on the new coverstitch machine.

I was curious to see how it worked out of the box, and I was not disappointed. I set the machine up, threaded it, changed to the clear foot from my other machine—the accessory that should come standard but doesn’t—and made a few test hems on a scrap piece of stretch velvet. The velvet was the closest I could come to the stretch velour of my mother’s pants. The only change I had to make was to loosen the presser foot pressure, which came from the factory set way too high. That is a common issue with those machines, for some odd reason.

[The machine was threaded but had not been stitched off. Stitching off a machine would be a great indication that the presser foot pressure is set too high, if Janome would bother to do that. I could tell the pressure was too high because the presser foot distorted the fabric as it was sewing. It would have distorted plain quilting cotton, too, so it wasn’t because I was coverstitching stretch velvet.]

Despite that, the machine coverstitched beautifully after I adjusted it:

No skipped stitches on the inside, even over the bulky side seams!

Normally, I stitch so that the threads cover the raw edge of the fabric. My mother had already tried to hem these pants on her sewing machine, so I coverstitched below that hem, then took her hem out and trimmed the excess fabric. Trimming doesn’t look quite as neat, but it works.

I’m delighted. I think this machine and I are going to have many happy hours together. I’ll keep the old machine to take when I teach classes. I have a basic serger class coming up January 4th and the T-shirt class starts January 19th.

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My sister and her boyfriend fly back to North Carolina today and my mother leaves tomorrow morning. DD#2 is here until Thursday. We had a nice Christmas. DD#1 sent a box of Christmas presents down from Alaska. I wish we had thought to take some pictures when my mother opened her “Men of Alaska” calendar, because her reaction was priceless. My sister bought me the Little House on the Prairie cookbook and a scratch-and-sniff book about whiskeys. (So useful!) We made lots of food and ate way too much of it. We watched the Browns lose to the Packers.

[No, Baker should not have thrown those interceptions, but it would be nice if the officiating wasn’t so one-sided. Face mask? Holding? Hello?}

I’ll start putting the house back together after church today. My schedule is completely discombobulated and have to think about what day it is. This always happens. And I’m already itching for a road trip. The January calendar is, thus far, mostly empty. That bodes well for productivity in the sewing room.

Unboxing the 3000

What have we here?

I know I said I wasn’t going to take it out of the box until after the holidays, but the box was in my way. Also, my mother brought me a pair of her pants to hem. They are a velour knit and need to be done on a coverstitch. Turnabout is fair play, I suppose, and it won’t take long to get this machine up and running.

The accessories:

Underneath, a machine! How exciting!

And here it is.

This new machine is very similar to my old one, although beefier and more polished. This machine also has the ability to do a top (decorative) coverstitch.

For those of you wondering what a coverstitch is, look at a hem on the nearest T-shirt. I most cases, it will look like two parallel lines of stitching on the outside of the garment. On the inside, there should be a looper thread that zig-zags back and forth between the two lines of stitching and covers the raw edge of the fabric. The tricky thing about coverstitch machines is that you sew with the outer, public, side of the garment facing, so you can’t actually see the edge of the hem you’re trying to cover. In essence, you’re sewing blind. You hope that when you’re all done, the machine hasn’t decided to skip a stitch somewhere and wreck the whole hem. I’m looking at you, old coverstitch machine.

On athletic wear or kids’ clothing, you will often see a decorative line of stitching on the outer side of the garment where seams come together. That’s a top coverstitch, and not all domestic machines can do that. This one can. It’s a feature I am looking forward to playing with.

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My mother, sister, the girls, and I have a tradition of having a spa day at either Thanksgiving or Christmas. We’ve missed the last couple because of the pandemic, but yesterday, the four of us went to The Lodge at Whitefish Lake for massages. (DD#2 is here, but DD#1 and her husband are enjoying their first Christmas alone together up in Alaska.) I used to have a phenomenal massage therapist. She had had a traumatic brain injury as a young adult, and as a result, she discovered she could “see” damage in people’s bodies. I asked her once what it looked like and she said it appeared as an area of blackness. I never had to tell her what what bothering me when I went in to see her—she knew as soon as she looked at me. Unfortunately, she moved to another state and I haven’t had a good massage since.

The massage therapist I had yesterday was almost as good—good enough that I will probably go back to see her every few months. Gardening keeps me limber, but I tend to lose some of that flexibility over the winter.

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The husband will be home today, probably spending the day out in his shop. The concrete batch plant shut down for two weeks. I feel like I should send them a thank-you note because that means he can’t pour anything. Also, we’re supposed to get a shot of arctic air this weekend with highs in the single digits. If there is one thing that can force him to slow down and take some time off—which even a bout of shingles couldn’t do—it is the weather. He’s also going to look at The Diva for me, because it is exhibiting a weird stuttering start when it’s cold and rainy out.

Adventures with Stretch Velvet

Despite what Instagram would have you believe, not every project is a huge success. Sometimes projects fail spectacularly. Sometimes they fall short just enough that they may as well have failed spectacularly.

I made myself a Christmas top Monday morning. It failed. It failed mostly because the fabric I had chosen did not have enough stretch for the pattern. Who knew that a difference of 4% spandex would matter? I used my “tried and true” tunic pattern, but because of my generous bust—those of you who knew me in high school will appreciate that irony—the top was too tight across the upper bodice. Despite the spandex, it didn’t have enough widthwise stretch.

My choices were to a) change the pattern to accommodate the fabric or b) change the fabric to accommodate the pattern. (The chances of finding something in ready-to-wear are less than zero, which is why I am making myself a Christmas top.) I went to town Monday afternoon to see what I could find. Our Joanns had more of that fabric, but not in the same deep teal I had chosen originally. I didn’t have time to mess around with a new pattern for that fabric, so I went with plan B. I chose a different fabric.

[I have made a note to myself to make my Christmas outfit in August next year so that I do not run into this problem again. Someone remind me if I forget.]

Joanns has a variety of stretch velvet. I knew enough not to bother with the costume velvet as the colors are garish and the quality is cheap. (I don’t know a lot of sewists making heirloom Halloween costumes.) The color choices in the garment-quality stretch velvet were black, cranberry, shell pink, and a teal green called “spruce.” I went with spruce.

Stretch velvet isn’t hard to work with if you already have some experience with knits. The hardest part is cutting the pattern pieces, because the fabric wants to slither all over the cutting table.

This time, I incorporated a very clever adjustment to the front bodice known as the “boob bump.” I learned about this in Zede and Mallory’s Rhapso-T pattern. The boob bump only works on fabrics with a sufficient amount of lengthwise stretch—I couldn’t have used it on the other fabric even if I had remembered to add it to the bodice—and basically acts as a bust dart. The stretch velvet was stretchy enough without adding the boob bump, but I wasn’t going to take any chances.

Pieces cut, I then spent an inordinate amount of time trying to locate the serger thread I had purchased to match the fabric. Eventually, it dawned on me that I must have left it at the store. I had ended up at a register with a very rattled cashier who wanted to tell me about moving to Kalispell from Texas—where she had lived for 30 years—and that she wasn’t adjusting to winter at all. She had given me the bag of fabric but not the bag of thread.

I found a different color thread to use for the assembly. When I went back to town yesterday afternoon, I stopped in at Joanns to retrieve my thread because I needed it to coverstitch the hems. They had it waiting behind the counter.

Never let a machine know you are in a hurry. If I had all the time in the world, the coverstitch (my old one) would make a beautiful hem without so much as a hiccup, but because I wanted to get my top finished, the machine decided that it would coverstitch nearly the entire hem before skipping one stitch. A skipped stitch wrecks everything that came before it because the thread breaks and the whole hem threatens to unravel. I didn’t want to unbox the new coverstitch machine and try to figure it out—the devil you know is better than the one you don’t—so I persevered until I had a reasonably good hem. It just needs to stay in place for a few hours while I am wearing the top. I can redo it on the new machine later.

The top is done, hallelujah:

It’s nothing fancy, just a simple tunic that I will pair with a pair of slim black pants, but I can cross it off the list.

When I stopped in at Joanns to get my thread yesterday, I took a few minutes to wander around to see if anything new was on sale. (Of course I did.) As I looked over the clearance fabric section, I spotted two bolts I hadn’t seen before, even though I scour the clearance fabric regularly. Lo and behold, they were bolts of some ponte knit fabric in navy and a gorgeous deep blue:

AND they were 70% off! I took what was left of the navy blue—not quite two yards—and two yards of the blue. They were labelled “spring ponte” and are less hefty than the ponte I used for the Kensington skirt. I think some pants might be nice.

Indoor Lettuce

Growing food indoors, especially lettuce, is a big topic in lots of homesteading groups. People have designed setups ranging from simple and inexpensive to ones worthy of commercial operations. I can grow lettuce easily either in the greenhouse or outdoors from about March to October. The winter months are the problem.

[The greenhouse can be heated with propane, but the lack of light is the limiting factor. We just don’t get enough sunlight during the winter months to grow anything out there. Also, because of its location, the greenhouse can be difficult to access when there is a lot of snow on the ground.]

I bought the supplies last year to set up an indoor growing system but didn’t get to it. This year, I was determined to give it a go. I planted lettuce seeds just after Thanksgiving. This is what they look like now:

That plastic tub is filled with a liquid growing solution and the plants are in net cups that sit down inside the lid. The roots grow down and access the solution. A Barrina light is suspended above the plants. The husband joked that this was enough for one serving of salad for him. This is true. However, I consider my little experiment a success. Now we have to figure out how to scale it up about 500% and get a succession planting schedule in place. Kalispell has a store that specializes in aquaponics/hydroponics, so I plan to stop in there and see what systems they have available. This setup works, sort of, but not for the amount of lettuce I would like to grow.

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The husband took care of defrosting the freezer in the garage for me over the weekend, so that’s all clean and ready for pork. The pork won’t be ready for another week or two yet. Tera said she’d go with me to pick it up. I haven’t seen her since we went to Salt Lake City in September.

I used some of my birthday money to order a few Accuquilt Studio dies. They always have big sales around Christmas, and the Studio dies are 60% off until December 24. I now have most of the strip dies I need, which are great for making sashing and churning through leftovers.

I want to get the backlog of tops quilted and bound by the middle of January. Our sewing group at church is also planning a comforter-tying party for a Saturday in February. We held one two years ago, just before the pandemic started (how long ago that seems), and it was a huge success. I took my bin of 5” squares to church so that some of the other ladies could take them and sew them into tops for tying.

No Remnants on the Rack

The remnant rack at Joanns is 75% off right now, so the selection is pretty thin. I did manage to snag a couple of Christmas prints, including this blue and purple snowflake one. DD#2 spotted the fabric and asked for a Christmas tree.

She says she thinks she can leave it up as decoration through January because it is more winter-themed than Christmas themed.

I cut and sewed several of these the other day and will leave them to stuff when people are here and I need some handwork to do. DD#2 and I have a pile of mending between us. I think we will set my mother to hemming pants. She is good at that and likes to have something to do when she visits. (I come by that inability to sit and do nothing honestly.)

DD#2’s tree is a slightly different pattern than the pattern I used previously. I am trying to decide which one I like better. I think my final version may end up being an amalgamation of the two.

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Yesterday started with an early-morning meeting of our pastor search committee. Our pastor has indicated that he would like to retire within a year, and thus we begin the process of finding someone to fill that position. Fortunately, he intends to stay in the community, where he is an active member of our Mountain Brook Homestead Foundation. We also hope he will continue to come help us butcher our chickens.

After the meeting, I came home and canned up 10 quarts of chicken stock that had been simmering in the roaster for two days.

I started making stock that way for convenience’s sake, because I can do three chickens at a time and the roaster sits on top of the dryer, out of the way. This batch yielded 10 quarts of some very nice, very rich stock. Our chickens tend to be on the skinny side, but I took the meat that was on them, chopped it up, and put it in the freezer.

The canner finished processing just before I left again for quartet practice. Our quartet consists of two brothers (Ken and Steve), their sister (Elaine), and me (the honorary sibling). We met at Elaine’s house to go over some of the music for this morning’s service. I like singing with them because the four of us know enough about music that our practices often involve not just singing, but taking the music apart and putting it back together. We are comfortable singing together and that makes a big difference.

While I was gone, DD#2—bless her—cleaned the bathrooms and the living room. I still have a lot to do in the next three days, including taking a load of stuff to the thrift store, cleaning the other two bedrooms, and making a last-minute grocery store run. We also have to get the Christmas tree put up and sort out DD#1’s ornaments to send them to her in Alaska.

People often comment that I seem to get so much done, and I was thinking about that again yesterday. Some of it is thanks to my energy level, but a lot of it is due to good planning and working efficiently. The couple of hours between the meeting and quartet practice was just enough time to eat lunch and run that canner load. I was motivated to do it partly because I couldn’t let the stock cook forever and partly because I have a good canning system. I set the pressure canner on the stove with water in the bottom to heat up while I strained the stock and filled the jars (which had been run through the dishwasher earlier). By the time the jars went into the canner, the water in the bottom of the canner was boiling, so it didn’t take long for the canner to come to pressure. I turned the stove off before I left, and by the time I got back from quartet practice, the canner was cool enough to open.

Most people have more time than they think they do. A lot of people fritter away time they could be using on productive tasks. And I am always thinking three or four steps ahead. I know I’ll be sitting and visiting this week. What can I work on while I am doing that? Where are the bottlenecks that are keeping me from working efficiently? How do I fix those? What can be automated or done in such a way that I don’t have to babysit the process? That’s just the way I think. Also, it helps to be married to someone who thinks exactly the same way, because I am motivated to keep pace with the husband, and he outworks most 20 year olds. He is feeling better, by the way. Thank you to everyone who has been asking about him. The shingles are healing up and the pain has lessened considerably. He is able to sleep better at night.

We Ate and We Laughed But We Didn't Sew

Yesterday was our craft co-op holiday potluck. I only had to drive up the road to Arlene’s house, which was good because it snowed all day. I didn’t feel like going any further. Sixteen of us gathered for an afternoon of fun.

The table was set in a fall theme—Arlene joked that we would have Thanksgiving first, then change the table to Christmas for dessert.

We had a business meeting followed by an amazing potluck lunch. I took a simple egg bake with eggs and our sausage. Sarah, who (like me) does not do gluten, brought lasagna with thin slices of turkey as the “noodles.” I thought that was brilliant and plan to try that soon.

[Gluten doesn’t kill me, but it does make me uncomfortable, so I have to have a really good reason to eat it. Potlucks are tricky sometimes. I usually take something I know I can eat.]

We had a gift exchange and I got the bag Susan had brought. It contained dried pears (yum), homemade raspberry jam, this lovely blue tea towel—which at first I thought she had purchased, but which she appliquéd herself—and a tin of ginger snaps from Trader Joes. (The husband is enjoying those.) Sarah brought a bar of soap for each of us, and the “napkins” at each plate were dishcloths made by Arlene.

The husband saw that little mug rug and said, “Did they make that just for you?”

I so enjoy this group.

Susan and I had a quick brainstorming session after lunch because I volunteered to head up the plant sale this coming spring to raise money for the Mountain Brook Homestead Foundation. That was Elysian’s brainchild from last spring and it was so successful that they would like to do it again. Because a lot of what they sold started in my greenhouse—and will again in 2022—I said I would be in charge. Susan will help me. And I think there will be another garden tour. My garden will look much nicer this year.

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I attended an online meeting last night hosted by the Forest Service. The area across the road from us is a combination of state and national forest land that is used for hiking, camping, skiing, and other activities. A few months ago, we were notified of a “collaboration project” to move forward with making the national forest land across the road a “focused recreation area.”

It sounds as if this process started even before we moved here. I was unaware of that until this meeting, and we’ve owned this property since 1994. Thankfully, there are some people in the neighborhood who were part of that earlier process 30 years ago and know some of the history. They were also in attendance at this meeting.

I am not opposed to people using public lands. That’s why they are called public lands. What those of us who live here do NOT want to have happen is for those areas to be overrun. We already have enough traffic on our road as it is. There is a buffer of state land between us and the designated forest land, but it is possible that access to that area would be from the road that currently runs through state land. We also don’t want the area opened to motorized vehicle access.

The next meeting is in February. We will have to see what happens. I plan to continue to participate in the process.

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I spent an hour rearranging freezers Wednesday afternoon. The big freezer in the garage is empty and ready to be defrosted. The Christmas ham has been located. What’s left of last year’s sausage has been moved to the freezer in the laundry room to be used up. I’ve got a roaster full of chicken stock simmering and I’ll can it tomorrow. I’m going to put my last couple of tops together today (including my Christmas top) and organize the other bedrooms so they are ready for guests next week.

Hurdles on the Way

It has been a bumpy couple of days, which is why the blog posts have been few and far between. I am hoping things smooth out a bit now.

The pigs were scheduled to go to the processor yesterday. Last week, the husband asked me to look at his back, and I discovered that he had broken out in shingles. I’ve had shingles and know how painful they can be, but mine were limited to a small patch about 3” across on my lower back. His spread from the middle of his back around to the front. He was past the window for antivirals at that point—and he wasn’t going to stop working long enough to go to the doctor, anyway—so he toughed his way through them. I could tell he was hurting, though, because he didn’t do much this past weekend beyond getting the trailer set up for loading pigs.

Loading pigs is an arduous process. The husband can’t back the trailer into the pasture; he has to back it close to the gate, then rig up a chute from the gate to the back of the trailer. He puts their food and water inside the trailer and closes off the pig palace. The pigs know, though, that to get to the trailer, they have to walk past the (no-longer-electrified) electric fence, and they are reluctant to believe they won’t get shocked. They also don’t like it when their feet leave the ground. Getting them to step up onto an unfamiliar surface takes some coaxing. And of course, the ground where the chute is located is virgin soil that they haven’t plowed up yet, so they have to stop every so often and dig for truffles. A flock of turkeys came to see what was happening.

It’s a process. Every year, it takes most of the day before to get them into the trailer.

I came home from town Monday with several bags of marshmallows, which are the pigs’ favorite treat and useful for getting 1800 pounds of pork moving in the desired direction. The husband was close to getting them into the trailer when the neighbors stopped by to say goodbye to them. These neighbors have been feeding the pigs scraps all summer—which we appreciate—but as soon as the pigs saw them, they thought the neighbors were bringing them scraps and took off to greet them. At that point, there was no getting them back on track. It was getting dark and starting to snow. And we had run out of marshmallows.

Neither of us slept much Monday night. The husband was in pain and worried about loading the pigs. Getting a date with a processor is incredibly difficult, and I had assured this one that we would be there first thing Tuesday morning. We ran through various scenarios about what we would do if we had to cancel.

I called our friend Smokey in the morning. Thank goodness for Smokey. He has extensive livestock experience and came right over. Between him, the husband, and our employees, they were able to coax the first five pigs into the trailer. A stubborn sixth one took a bit of manhandling, but not much. While they were busy, I called the processor to let him know what was going on. He knew the roads were icy and said we didn’t have to rush.

We were at the processor and unloaded by about 11 am and home by 1:30 pm. I grabbed some lunch, changed clothes, and then headed back into town for Ruler Club at the quilt store. After dinner, the husband parked himself in his recliner—the one place where he has been able to sleep comfortably—and I curled up on the couch under a quilt. We both went to sleep. DD#2’s plane was scheduled to arrive from Seattle at midnight. Normally, he would go to get her, but I wanted him to get some sleep. I set my alarm for 11 pm, went and picked her up, and went back to bed.

We’re both dragging a bit this morning, but the big hurdle of getting pigs to the processor is behind us. With all the issues we had with this year’s batch, I am not sure either of us is eager to commit to raising them next year. We’ll see. In any case, Smokey is getting a big gift of ham and bacon for all his help.

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I probably won’t do much sewing for the next couple of weeks beyond finishing the tops I’ve already cut up. I have more cleaning to do. The craft co-op Christmas potluck is tomorrow. I have to defrost a freezer.

One of the members of the Facebook Necchi sewing machines group shared this video this week. Apparently, the old Necchi sewing machine factory in Pavia, Italy, is scheduled to undergo transformation into a shopping area. They plan to name it “Supernova” as a nod to Necchi’s most famous machine. The video is in Italian (I am going to see if DD#2 can translate), but the shots of the old factory are fascinating.