One Quilt Top Down, One to Go

I love seeing quilt blocks up on my design wall:

Yesterday was devoted to getting this quilt top put together. It is all done and just needs batting and a backing. I plan to stitch-in-the-ditch quilt along the seamlines.

Now I just need to get the second quilt cut and put together. I’d like to have both done by the end of September. They are a bit overdue as it is. The baby was born at the beginning of August and her older sister is 3. 😬

I have hit the ground running this month. I should have a bit of a breather after this weekend, although the pigs go to the processor next Tuesday and that’s always a big job. I want this pie social off my to-do list. Someone else is going to have to be in charge of them (spring and fall) in 2025. I looked at my calendar this morning and realized that I am double-booked for two events on Thursday evening, so I am going to have to have a talk with my assistant.

My friend Anna came over yesterday to get some cabbages. She has a plant-based catering business and the farmer she ordered cabbage from for this week’s meals never delivered them. I am happy to provide what I can because she pays me in food. She would pay me in cash but I requested food because any meals I don’t have to cook myself are a bonus. I overplanted cabbage thinking the ground squirrels would get some of the seedlings. I only wish the red cabbage had done as well as the white cabbage.

We looked at the tomatoes and the squash and Anna’s going to use some of those, too, in her meal planning in the next couple of weeks as stuff ripens. It is supposed to be 88F on Sunday.

Some friends of mine from back east are coming to visit in the middle of the month and I am ridiculously excited about this. One of my friends sews—she makes items to sell at farmer’s markets—and she and I are going to spend a day together visiting quilt stores. (Everyone else is going hiking. We have our priorities in order. 😇) It will be so good to see them.

I probably won’t put anything in the craft co-op sale—it’s at the end of September—unless I find a day to bind my stack of potholders. I am not going to beat myself up about this. The sewing I did last year consisted mostly of clothing, not stuff for market. I also suspect that I will have to pick up and deliver pork one of those days. I do plan to come and help because the sale is a lot of fun. I put together a basic website for the sale and I’m trying to arrange an interview for the podcast about how the co-op started.

Today is a shopping and errands day. Wish me luck.

Happy National Sewing Month!

September is National Sewing Month! According to the National Sewing Month website,

On September 21, 1982, at the request of the American Home Sewing & Craft Association, an industry and trade association supporting the sewing and craft industries, President Ronald Reagan, under Proclamation #4976, declared September as National Sewing Month “In recognition of the importance of home sewing to our Nation.”

National Sewing Month is presented by the Sewing & Craft Alliance with participation from the American Sewing Guild.

I plan to kick off the celebrations this afternoon by working on the I Spy quilt. There are many different settings for an I Spy quilt—I am using this one, which is based on the disappearing nine-patch block.

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The husband and I had a very productive day yesterday. I reorganized freezers and emptied one so I could defrost it. I harvested another bucket of tomatoes. I also discovered that the zucchini plants are far from done. There were some baseball bat-sized zucchini hiding under the leaves. They went to the chickens. A few smaller ones became a batch of zucchini fritters.

The State Fair apple tree produced half a dozen apples this year—all without insect damage—and I brought those in for the husband to snack on. That tree and the Lodi are my earliest producers. The State Fair produces heavily, but only every other year. This was its year off.

While I was busy with produce and freezers, the husband drove the backhoe around the property and pulled up stumps, including several rotted ones in the front yard. He also tried out the new rock rake attachment for the track loader. The ground is smoother now and mowing won’t feel so much like four-wheeling in Baja.

Our crew said they all want to work tomorrow, which is fine with the husband. This is the time of year when clients call in a panic, wanting to get their foundations poured before the snow flies. The guys have plenty to keep them busy, plus they’ll get holiday pay.

I plan to sew. I worked hard on Friday and Saturday and the upcoming week is very busy. I am going to need this afternoon and tomorrow in my sewing room. The quilt store is hosting a big serger event on Friday and Saturday and I plan to be there on Friday. Saturday is our homestead foundation fundraising pie social from 4-7 pm. I’ve been working on getting that event organized so it comes together in a more formal way; otherwise, it’s the same five people doing all the work. I said I would be the chairman once, get it organized, then hand it off to someone else to manage.

[We had someone ask us at the spring pie social if the homestead foundation would consider hosting a pie social or some kind of community get-together once a month. Truly, I think some people believe there is a committee in the sky that exists solely to provide things for them. These events are a huge amount of work.]

Some time this week or next—some of this can wait until after the actual event—I’m going to corral all my notes and all the flowcharts and lists I’ve made and compile them into a notebook. Bringing order out of chaos is one of my superpowers.

The Fruits of My Labor

The tomatoes are coming on strong. We’ve had to stake some of the tomato cages with 4' lengths of rebar because the plants are so big and loaded that they are pulling over the cages. I don’t prune my tomatoes, mostly because I can’t ever remember to do so. I hate to imagine how the tomatoes would retaliate (like the grapes) if I actually got around to pruning them. Growing them on pig manure seems to be sufficient for excellent production.

Tomato harvest will be an ongoing series of surprises because I can’t remember what I planted. I put the old standby varieties—Oregon Star and Cherokee Purple—near the front of the bed, and the only cherry tomato I planted was the Blue Boar Berry started from seed I scooped out of a tomato that had spent the winter on the ground. That BBB plant is producing like mad and I’ve already snacked on some of them. Eveything else is a mystery unless I crawl around on the ground and search for the tags.

The forecast for the next couple of weeks, at least, is for highs in the 80s and lows in the 50s. I am optimistic about getting ripe pumpkins and butternut squash. The beans are close. This is a pod of Emmalou’s Golden dry beans that I cracked open yesterday:

I cleaned off the Lodi apple tree yesterday morning. I have been watching that tree like a hawk because Lodi apples are like spinach, with an approximate five-minute window when they are perfectly ripe. Lodi apples are thin-skinned—no peeling necessary for pie filling—and don’t store well. I had exactly enough apples for one canner load of seven quarts and a fresh pie for the husband.

The Lodi tree has produced in the past, but not as heavily as it did this year. The apples were nearly perfect. They had no bug damage. Everyone says it’s because the insects haven’t found the trees yet, but I think it’s because I don’t spray. I’ve never treated my trees with dormant oil or anything else. Some of those trees have been out there for over 10 years. Unless all the insects in the neighborhood are incompetent, I think they would have found them by now. In any case, I don’t plan to change what I am doing. I often think that sprays are like antibiotics—all they do is select for the strongest pests.

The Honeycrisp trees and the Red Wealthy produced a few apples, but they are not quite ready yet. Most of the apple trees took the year off or only produced lightly.

I also rotated stock in the pantry and made room for the quarts of salsa and tomato sauce that I’ll be making.

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I’m going to work outside this morning, but I’d like to sew this afternoon. I want to start putting the I Spy quilt together. Searching my stash for fabrics for that quilt has been great fun. The only fabric I had to buy was an X-ray print for the letter X, and fortunately all the Halloween fabrics are on sale at Joanns.

I stopped in at Hobby Lobby and bought enough of the blue quilted fabric for a jacket as it was on sale this week. I’ll order zippers next. I’ll probably also make a muslin of that pattern in fleece to test out the fit.

Finished is Better

Yesterday was slightly warmer than Wednesday, but I knew things would still be soggy in the garden. I stayed in and sewed and waited for the septic tank guy to arrive.

[The temperature was 35F when I woke up yesterday morning, so I am hoping nothing got zapped.]

I pulled out my bins of novelty fabrics and cut 5" squares for the I Spy quilt. I need to do a bit more cutting for that one and then I can begin sewing. I also pulled out a small Christmas quilt that has been basted and waiting and quilted it on the Q20. My first thought was to do some rulerwork on it, but the block was complicated enough that I knew rulerwork would take more time than I wanted to spend. In the spirit of “finished is better than perfect,” I pulled out a cone of red, white, and green variegated thread and quilted allover loops

Sometimes it is okay to let the thread do the heavy lifting instead of the quilting. The border is getting ribbon candy. This needs another hour of work and then I can bind it and cross it off the list.

I’ve got a couple of must-do tasks on today’s list. The apples on the Lodi tree are ready. They won’t last, so I need to get them off the tree and into a batch of apple pie filling. I also have to visit the garden to see what needs to come in.

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I caught up on podcasts on my drive to and from Seattle last week. I got way behind on listening to Seamwork Radio episodes; I like that podcast, although it leans a bit formulaic. The Sew & So podcast, sponsored by Bernina, did a great recap of the most recent Bernina University in Detroit in June. I also listened to the Sewing With Threads podcast from Threads magazine. In one episode, the host interviewed executive function coach Hannah Choi about how she uses sewing to help young people with executive function challenges (ADD/ADHD) to develop those skills. That was fascinating. I may listen to the episode again, because some of what she discussed could be helpful when I teach. I find that a lot of creative people identify as having ADD/ADHD, and even though I don’t struggle with those issues, they do sometimes pop up in class.

I am firmly in the concrete sequential camp and sometimes it is difficult for me to work with people with other personality styles. I know this. I work best when I can take on a task and complete it alone and without interference. I especially hate to be micromanaged, so I have to let people know that up front to avoid any friction.

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September is National Sewing Month. It is also the one-year anniversary of starting the podcast. I’d like to do something special to mark the occasion, but September is going to be a busy month. My desk calendar is already full of highlighted events. The schedule eases up considerably in October, and I am looking forward to my trouser drafting class with Kenneth D. King then.

Planning My Fall Sewing

The temperature never got above 41F yesterday, and it rained all day. (I think it was the same system that hit Ketchikan over the weekend.) If I hadn’t been thinking about fall before, I am now, although we are supposed to be back up around 87F by Monday. 😵‍💫

I had five students in my thread class on Tuesday afternoon. I do love teaching that class. It is full of lots of “A-ha!’ moments and I get so much satisfaction out of watching the students experiment with threads on their machines. One lady figured out how to program her machine to sew her name. She made personalized thread samples. Ryan, the store’s machine tech, was also in the class. He always asks such great questions.

But now I am thinking about fall sewing. I wore one of my Jalie Nathalie tops yesterday and it was all I could do not to pull out my bin of French terry and sweater knits and start sewing up cool-weather clothes. Instead, I spent the afternoon corralling and cutting scraps. The 5" square bin needed to be restocked and I had a stack of leftovers waiting to be run through the die cutter. That was a good task for a cold, rainy day.

I’ve added one project to the queue, to be started after the baby quilts are finished. Hobby Lobby has this lovely quilted fabric, and every time I see it, I think I should make a jacket from it:

I am not much for pastels, but it depends on the color. Clear, icy pastels—not the muddy ones Joanns carries—work with my coloring, and I do like this fabric. I think it would pair well with this pattern:

I like the idea of a zippered jacket, although I would probably ditch that front patch pocket. Of course, I am going to have to source and order zippers, because the pattern calls for a 29" separating zipper and two 7" zippers for the pockets. Finding matching zippers here is going to be next to impossible.

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We talked to DD#1 yesterday evening. Ketchikan is a small town, and she and DSIL have jobs where they interact with the public, so they know, personally, some of the people affected by that landslide. And getting around is going to be much more difficult. Ketchikan sits on a narrow strip of land between the water and the mountains. The main road through town is currently torn up for work on a water main, but the landslide blocked the bypass that routes traffic above and around downtown. Add to that thousands of cruise ship tourists—the kids have a calendar on their fridge that shows what cruise ships are in port each day, with the number of passengers—and traffic is going to slow to a crawl.

We are having the septic tanks pumped today, which is a necessary but not very glamorous job that needs to be done before winter. I’m going to see what needs to be done in the garden and perhaps make one last batch of zucchini bread.

To Alaska and Back

Earlier this summer, DD#2 and I made plans to go to Alaska to visit her sister in August. I left last Wednesday—in desperate need of a road trip—and tried something a bit different. Rather than drive all the way to Seattle in one day or stay in Spokane overnight, I drove to Ellensburg, WA and spent the night in a hotel there. I was able to use hotel points instead of shelling out $300 for a room in Seattle. Our flight to Ketchikan didn’t leave until after lunch on Thursday, which gave me plenty of time to drive the two hours from Ellensburg to Seattle, pick up DD#2 and her boyfriend, and get us to the airport.

I don’t have many pictures from our trip. This is my fourth visit to Ketchikan so I spent the entire time enjoying being with my kids. DD#1 is an occupational therapist but was able to adjust her schedule to be off work. We did some shopping—dodging thousands of cruise ship tourists—walked around Ward Lake, and went to the lumberjack show. Our SIL is the dentist at the Coast Guard station in Ketchikan, so he took us to the mess hall on base for breakfast Saturday morning and showed us the clinic. We also played a board game called Wingspan, which I need to get so Sarah and I can play it.

We saw a bear, from a respectful distance, although one later walked through the yard on the way to the beach for a salmon dinner:

DD#1 has the most amazing African violets:

She has the perfect window spot for them.

Ketchikan has a small yarn store, which I did not visit on this trip. There is a quilt store called the Whale’s Tail, which I am pretty sure has been there at least since 2009 when JC Briar and I did our Alaskan knitting cruise. When I visited the store in May of 2021, their stock was severely depleted due to supply chain issues. Goods are expensive to ship to Alaska in any case, and a global pandemic and loss of cruise ship business hurt a lot of the stores in Ketchikan. Unfortunately, even though the store hours showed the store as being open the days we were there, it was closed.

Fabulous Fiber Arts and More, however, was open. This is a small combination yarn and fabric store with a well-curated selection of products. I bought some fabric:

Barbara Lavellee is an Alaskan artist who moved to Sitka in 1970 to teach at a boarding school. She now lives in Anchorage.

While we were at the lumberjack show on Saturday, DSIL happened to look at the weather on his phone and noted that a big storm system was coming in. Sure enough, it hit overnight, with lots of wind and more rain than I’ve seen in a long time. I wasn’t sure we’d be able to get back to Seattle, but those pilots that fly in and out of Alaska have nerves of steel. We left shortly after noon, on the bumpiest flight I’ve ever taken, and landed in sunny Seattle 90 minutes later. I dropped off the kids and headed back to Ellensburg for the night, and that was when DD#1 texted me about the landslide. Their house is at the south end of the island, about 20 minutes from downtown. They weren’t directly affected, although they both stayed home from work yesterday.

Now I am back in Montana and feel—like I always do at the end of August—as though I am at the end of a marathon. The garden is beginning to look that way, too. I was out there getting lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumbers for a salad for dinner and had a good look around. I think that some of the pumpkin vines may have gotten a touch of frost; they are in a low swale in the garden and I wouldn’t be surprised if the air was cold enough in that spot overnight.

I am teaching my thread class at the quilt store this afternoon, but I’ll need to devote some energy to the garden this week and next. It’s time to start cleaning up for winter.

Finally, It's Done

After I attached the first part of the closure hardware to the Haralson Bag, I realized it would take less than an hour to complete the rest of the steps. It seemed silly not to do that.

I am gifting this to a friend of mine. I’m just happy it’s done. Would I make another one? Maybe, but not this week.

I’m not sure why I had so many issues with this project. The problems I had weren’t due to the pattern because Noodlehead patterns are some of the best. Bag hardware is always difficult to source locally. If I can find the correct size, it won’t come in the finish I need. If it comes in the finish I need, it won’t be in the right size. Same with zippers. Nylon zippers can be cut down with scissors; metal ones have to be a specific length unless I want to get out the toolbox.

I do love my rivet press. And I love sewing on the 1541, although I think I am going to have to fiddle around with the servo motor settings again to toggle them back to “stop with needle down.” That is driving me nuts.

School starts soon for the neighborhood kids. I feel like the community is once again breathing a huge sigh of relief that summer is over. We didn’t have any fires, the tourists will be heading home soon, and schedules will start to slow down for most of us. (Maybe not for the parents of school-age kids.)

The husband and I were watching a YouTube video the other night about preparing a dinner in the early 1800s. The menu was beef boiled with turnips, cooked carrots, hard-boiled eggs, and biscuits. What struck me most was how slowly and methodically the cook worked. There was no rush to get to the next thing. I don’t think we realize, sometimes, the speed at which everything moves now.

I’m not romanticizing life in the early 1800s. I know it was difficult. I suspect, though, that even life in the 1980s moved at a much slower pace than it does now.

Ground beef was on sale this week so I bought several family packs. I made a huge batch of meatballs yesterday; I mixed the ground beef half-and-half with our ground pork and seasoned it with hot Italian spice mix. I used a scoop to form the meatballs, then put them on a rack in the roaster pan to cook in the oven. The whole process takes a couple of hours, but by the time I was done, I had enough for dinner and plenty to freeze for future meals. Yes, I could go to Costco and buy some, but mine taste better and I know what’s in them. 😋 The husband ate 12 of them for dinner.

Cabbages and Squash

Some things did really well this year. The cabbage seedlings escaped being mowed down by ground squirrels and produced some really nice heads:

The smaller ones are a variety called Pixie, which are supposed to be softball-sized personal cabbages. They got a bit bigger than expected. The larger ones are the Early Round Dutch, which I’ve grown before.

Some of these might get made into sauerkraut. The rest I will wrap in paper and store them in the old garage. The temperature stays around 50 degrees in there.

The red cabbages are a few weeks behind.

I checked on the pumpkin patch, which is also doing well. We should have a few Georgia Roasters:

Elysian grew these a few years ago. They are very sweet. They will be more of a pale orange when ripe.

The pumpkins are coming along nicely:

This variety is called Winter Luxury. I should have plenty to can up for pies for the husband.

I am hoping for more butternut squash:

The reason I say “hoping” is because these need a few more weeks to ripen. If we get a killing frost early this year—which happened a few years ago—I’ll have a lot of unripe butternut squash.

The packet of seeds which were labeled Purple Beauty peppers turned out to be a hot yellow banana pepper. I would never grow any peppers that hot, so the whole packet had to have been mislabeled. I’ve had enough issues with my seed supplier over the past couple of years that it’s time to find a different one.

A brief but intense storm came through last night. The husband and I were on the front porch looking at a tree that had blown down in the woods when another one came down in the front yard:

We got a few hours of rain with the storm, so that was good.

The hardware for the Haralson Bag came in yesterday’s mail. If I can steal a few minutes from the schedule today, I’ll install it. I probably won’t be able to finish the bag yet, though.

More Pouch Patterns

I got everything crossed off my to-do list Friday morning. My class submissions for Sew Expo are done. They changed the submission process this year and it’s much easier for the teachers. Instead of asking us to submit fully-formed class proposals, with outlines, photos, etc., they asked us just to submit class ideas. The teacher coordinator then discussed the ideas with the teachers and settled on classes. Only after the classes had been chosen were teachers required to submit all the supporting documentation.

I proposed new classes to the quilt store for the next couple of months and got my serger mastery classes on the schedule for 2025. The pie social organization is coming together. I also recorded Part 2 of presser feet for this week’s podcast. After lunch, I prepped the kits for my upcoming thread class. Friday was a very productive day.

Yesterday morning, we had a worship planning meeting. It was only supposed to last 90 minutes, but it ended up being three hours because we got a bit sidetracked on a discussion. It was a necessary discussion, but it extended the meeting. I discovered, however, that I am able to knit approximately half a skein of Lion Brand Homespun—what I use for prayer shawls—in a three-hour meeting. I use three skeins for a shawl, with a fourth for the fringe. Now I know that it takes me approximately 20 hours to make a prayer shawl. Most of that knitting happens in bits and pieces, so the actual creation of a prayer shawl takes much longer, not that I would ever sit and knit for 20 hours straight.

It is apparent, I hope, why I knit in meetings. Sitting through a three-hour meeting without something to occupy my hands would send me around the bend.

Anna Graham of Noodlehead released a new pattern this week called the Plover Pouch:

I bought it; I buy everything Anna designs. It’s in the queue for later this fall.

I also found this pattern from Sew Lux fabric, which will be a great way to use up hexies:

I am trying not to rush time, but I am looking forward to fall and winter when I don’t have to eke out moments of sewing here and there. I’ll be able to make breakfast, clean the kitchen, then head upstairs for an entire day of sewing.

I do need to get out to the garden and check on a few things. We’ve had a few hot days and I should probably cut the cabbages before they split. And there are probably a few more zucchinis. . .

So Much to Learn

I spent way more time in town yesterday than planned. I ran in to drop off a check at one of the husband’s suppliers; normally, I pay bills once a month, but he ordered a sizeable number of new concrete forms recently and we wanted to get that invoice off that supplier’s books and ours. While I was in town, I stopped in at the quilt store and visited with Tera. We haven’t seen each other in months. The store was hosting a Claudia Dinnell machine embroidery workshop. Claudia teaches at our store at least a couple of times a year and her classes are always sold out. I think there were close to two dozen women (and their machines) in the classroom yesterday. The store owner wanted to know why I hadn’t signed up for the class—now that I have a machine with an embroidery module—but I have a limit of learning one unfamiliar technique per week. 🤣

Claudia designs huge, involved projects, but she also offers smaller ones. After I figure out how to monogram with the 880, I’ll probably move on to one of Claudia’s less ambitious designs, like these coasters:

I might be ready for one of Claudia’s workshops the next time she comes to Kalispell.

Tera and I caught up and made plans for Sew Expo 2025. She already has it in her calendar. We haven’t traveled together since Sew Expo 2023 and it’s past time for us to take a trip.

I also talked to the store owner and her daughter about upcoming classes. Ashlee, the daughter, is managing the store’s social media accounts and she asked if I could make a video to help promote some of my classes. I have a sneaking suspicion I am going to get dragged into video production, even if I go kicking and screaming. There is a reason the podcast is audio and not video—video production is so much more involved. If I do it properly, it’s going to involve me getting better lighting and finding a place to film. Ashlee wants just a 30-second clip to promote classes, though, so I came home and figured out how to record one on my computer. It only took me half a dozen takes to get one I liked. (Only.) We’ll see if it is what she wants.

I’ve had some requests for video tutorials or a video podcast. I don’t want to do tutorials. If I ever go to video podcasting, that will automatically cut down the number of podcasts per month—probably by half—because of the time it will take me to learn the editing software and do the editing itself.

I sometimes wonder if people think I have staff. I am a solo operation. I am a very organized and productive solo operation, but there is only one of me. Believe me, I wish I could clone myself.

Because I spent more time gadding about yesterday than planned, I really need to buckle down today. I’ve got to complete my Sew Expo class submissions for the approved classes. I have to record next week’s podcast. I need to make more kits for my next thread class. I have to get the job list finalized for the pie social so we can start recruiting volunteers. And I want to start getting classes on the schedule for late 2024 and early 2025.

We’re supposed to get more rain today, so I’ll have an excuse to stay inside and work.

En Plein Air

Painting class was so much fun. I told Sunnie that it will be one of the highlights of this summer for me.

Six of us gathered at Sunnie’s studio around 8:30 yesterday morning. We couldn’t have had a more beautiful day. Sunnie lives a few miles up the road from me, on a piece of property above and behind the homestead foundation’s community center. She’s on a bench with a lovely view out over the Flathead Valley.

Here are Susan and Gini getting settled:

Sunnie gathered us together, had us introduce ourselves, and gave us some basic instructions. Another friend of ours, Lindalee—who is also an artist—was helping as Sunnie’s assistant. Each of us chose a view that we wanted to paint. There is no shortage of scenery at Sunnie’s house. I chose to paint the view looking northwest over the valley into Whitefish, with Lion Mountain in the background.

We worked for about an hour. Sunnie asked us to get up and stretch, and then we went to each student’s easel for a discussion. That was so helpful. Sunnie is an excellent teacher. She praised what each student was doing correctly, then gently offered constructive suggestions for improvement. Creating a supportive environment for learning went a long way toward easing anxiety for those of us who were way out of our comfort zones.

It took me a bit of time to get comfortable with what I was doing, not that I every got truly comfortable. Analysis paralysis and I are good friends, LOL. I did relax enough to flow with it and enjoy the process, though. I have a reasonably solid understanding of color theory, and mixing paints was a lot of fun. I was a bit fuzzy on technique, but that came with doing.

Here we are discussing Gini’s painting:

By the time noon rolled around, I was done and happy with my effort. We took a break for lunch. Some students had to leave. Susan, Robin, and I stayed—Susan was finishing her painting, and Sunnie wanted to help Robin and me finish and sign ours. And once my painting was signed, I found myself in Sunnie’s basement looking for a frame. Collecting frames is why Sunnie loves to scour thrift stores.

I am not in danger of taking up oil painting as another hobby, but I was pleased enough with my painting to hang it up here at home:

Sunnie also gifted me with two beautiful pieces of rayon woven fabric that she found while looking for frames at one of the local thrift stores. This is the red one:

This is a spectacular blue and green one—totally my colors:

And she got them for half price off on Senior Day!

I need to get my nose back to the grindstone today. I have a bunch of paperwork and other tasks that need to be tackled this morning. I don’t think I will make it to sewing but we’ll see. I’d like to get one more batch of zucchini bread into the freezer, too.

Assistance in an Apron

It’s a good thing the Haralson bag is on hold for a few days because I discovered I had the wrong size hardware for it. I know the correct size will be impossible to find locally, so I ordered it. Some bags sew themselves. The Haralson has not been that bag.

I ran errands yesterday morning and stopped in to see the accountant. I was in the middle of making a batch of zucchini bread after lunch when the husband called to tell me that the freight driver was 20 minutes out. The husband had ordered a rock bucket for the skidsteer and I needed to sign for it.

Sure enough, about 20 minutes later, a semi pulled into the driveway. Freight drivers hate residential deliveries because they never know if they will have enough room to get in and out. Fortunately, we have a big driveway. I went out, signed the paperwork, and returned to my batch of zucchini bread. About five minutes later, the driver knocked on the screen door.

“We need some equipment. I can’t get the rock bucket off the lift gate; it’s too heavy.”

This poor driver looked miserable. Not only was he making residential deliveries, he was stuck with an immovable rock bucket and his only salvation was covered in flour and wearing an apron.

I walked out with him, asking some questions along the way. What kind of equipment? Did we need the forklift or would the plow truck serve? Tow rope or chain?

[I have lived with a man for 37 years who believes I can read his mind and that verbal communication is superfluous, so I’ve learned that the more information I get up front, the less likely I am to get into trouble.]

After assessing the situation, I went back and grabbed the keys to the plow truck. I also called the husband just to have him bless this plan. He told me where the chains were stored. The plow truck has hooks on the front. Initially, the driver tried hooking the chain onto a hook but the hooks were too big. I turned the truck around and he hooked the chain to the trailer hitch. I very slowly and carefully eased the truck forward and pulled that rock bucket off the lift gate.

That was a first for me, although I told the husband I have no plans to quit my day job. The freight driver was obviously relieved that he wouldn’t have to spend the rest of the day stuck in our driveway.

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My friend JC sent me a quilt top to donate to the Ritzville yard sale.

I love this—totally my aesthetic. If I can eke out enough time between now and the first Saturday in October, I’d like to turn this into a finished quilt and donate it to the auction. JC does the most wonderful improv quilts—you can check out her work on her Instagram account.

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Painting class is this morning. We got rain yesterday morning and more is in the forecast for tomorrow and Friday, but today is supposed to be dry and overcast. This has been a very pleasant August. We are not being plagued by excessive smoke, we’ve had rain every few days, and the temps are staying in the high 70s and low 80s.

The guy at the farm store told me a funny story the other day while he was loading bales of wood shavings into my car. A lady came in and mentioned that she had just moved to Kalispell. He asked her if she was getting ready for winter and she looked at him blankly and said, “What?” He repeated the question. She responded that she wasn’t expecting it to get cold because the average high temperature here was 50F. 🙄

Haralson Bag Progress

I worked on the Haralson bag yesterday afternoon and made quite a bit of progress. I’m following Jess’s tutorial on her Oklaroots YouTube channel. She does an excellent job with her videos—they are very thorough.

I’m at the halfway point, I think:

The exterior is black waxed canvas from Klum House—I have mixed feelings about this substrate. I like that it is a thinner fabric and closer weave than the waxed canvas I get from AL Frances Textiles on Etsy. The “wax,” however, is a proprietary blend of mineral oil and other vegan-friendly oils. It is oilier than beeswax and makes the canvas almost feel wet.

The interior is water-resistant canvas. I’m not so fond of this fabric. It frays if you look at it sideways and the feel of it is a bit harsh. I think I would prefer using bonded nylon fabric for the interior, but I’ll reserve judgment until the bag is finished.

I’m sewing most of this on the Juki 1541, which is an absolute pleasure. The only issue I have now with that machine is that when I adjusted the servo motor to slow down the machine, I somehow toggled the needle stop position to “up” instead of “down.” I had it set to stop with the needle down in the fabric. I am trying to decide if I want to mess with the servo motor settings again to change that or if I should just leave it.

I did the interior zipper insertion on the 880. Smooth.

I may have to shelve this project for a couple of days. I have a busy week ahead. This morning, I have a much-needed massage. I am trying to schedule one every couple of months. When I get home, I need to record and edit tomorrow’s podcast episode. We have a homestead foundation board meeting tonight. Tomorrow, I meet with our accountant. We have a standing appointment every August to evaluate how the year is going and what needs to be done before December 31. That has been so helpful in making sure we are paying the correct amount of estimated taxes every quarter so we have no surprises.

On Wednesday, I am taking a painting class from Sunnie. She is offering this as a fundraiser for the homestead foundation. Sunnie specializes in oil painting. We are going to paint “en plein air”—outdoors—at her studio up the road. I think there are half a dozen of us registered for the class and it should be great fun. I may or may not share the results. 😂 I think the last time I painted with oils, I was a freshman in high school in Miss Furey’s Art 101 class.

And, of course, there is the garden. The zucchini isn’t showing any signs of slowing down.

Sew Flow

The author of the book Uptime, Laura Mae Martin, talks about the concept of “deep work,” or those large blocks of time where a person can sink into a project with no distractions. That can also be referred to as “flow” or “the zone.” I crave those periods of time. I can get things done in little bits of time here and there, but I have to fight the temptation to use those bits of time to sit down at the computer and doom scroll.

[Joel Salatin, of Polyface Farm, keeps a list of jobs that can be done in 20 minutes or less so that if he or one of his workers finds themselves with 20 minutes before lunch, for example, they can knock a task off the list.]

I did not work on homestead foundation stuff yesterday. I made breakfast, cleaned up the kitchen, and made sure we had no escapees in the chicken yard. The husband helped me stake some of the tomato cages with 4' pieces of rebar, because the tomato plants are so big and loaded with tomatoes that the cages are falling over. The peppers, though—the ones that were labeled “Purple Beauty” bell peppers—are all a yellow variety. For all I know, they might be hot peppers. I’ll have to taste one. That is just weird. I could understand one plant being mislabeled, but “Purple Beauty” was the only pepper I started in the spring, so the seed packet must have been wrong.

The husband had his own to-do list to tackle. The fan motor in the furnace went bad back in January or February, so every time the furnace kicked on, it made a horrible noise. He replaced the motor yesterday. The furnace will be quiet this winter.

Speaking of winter, our rabbit was in the yard yesterday morning and we both noticed that it is already starting to turn white. I have been watching the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) reports and we are heading into a La Niña period. Interestingly, our biggest winters have occurred not when we have a strong La Niña, but when we have a neutral one. During the winter of 1996-97, it began snowing here on October 15 and never stopped. The last of the snow didn’t melt until the end of May. We had so much snow at our house that the dogs were able to scale the piles of snow and walk around on top of the garage. My in-laws came to visit at Christmas and my MIL said it was like being inside a snow globe. And that spring, there was not a U-Haul to be found because so many people were moving out of the Flathead Valley.

Click on the chart if you want more information.

This winter is supposed to be another neutral La Niña. If we get a repeat of 1996-97, a lot of transplants may be re-evaluating their plan to live here. Is that a bad thing? I think not. There is a reason Montana has never had a huge population of people.

Back to sewing . . . I finished the armchair caddy for my recliner:

It’s a weird mix of prints but I liked the color combination. And now all my English paper piecing supplies are close at hand.

I also started a baby quilt and an “I Spy” quilt—both destined to be gifts. I need to get them made soon. I cut out the last zipper pouch from the large quilted piece of fabric, and I cut all the pieces for the Haralson bag, now that I have correctly-printed pattern pieces. (My Brother laser printer does not scale and print patterns properly.) I would have started sewing the Haralson bag but it was late in the afternoon and I was running out of juice.

I wish for more days like yesterday. I’ll have more this winter (especially if it’s a long, snowy winter), but I have to get through canning season, first. All those tomatoes will end up as sauce and salsa.

Lettuce Lettuce Everywhere

I have cracked the code for consistent lettuce production. I’ve got a row in the big garden that is producing, a couple of beds in the herb garden that will be ready in another week or two, and I seeded a row where the arugula was. (It bolted.) That should give us lettuce well into the fall, and when I can no longer grow lettuce outside, I’ll restart the system in the basement.

I’ve been indulging in my favorite salad every day this week:

Lettuce with a light vinaigrette of walnut oil and white wine vinegar, liberally sprinkled with walnuts, dried cranberries, and bleu cheese. So good. The lettuce variety is Ruby. I found it at Victory Seeds over a decade ago and I plant it every year. It is dark red and green, a bit frilly, easy to wash, and the taste is amazing—not bitter even when the leaves get big. This is also the variety I grow in the basement system over the winter. Last year, the husband said that our homegrown lettuce has spoiled him for anything that comes from the store—like most foods.

[Kalispell peeps, we still have a couple of pigs left if anyone is looking for pastured pork. They go to the processor the first week of September, with delivery at the end of the month.]

I also cut some of the collard greens and blanched and froze them. I gave up on spinach years ago because there was a five-minute window between “too small” and “oops, we bolted.” Blanched and frozen collard greens work just as well—or better—in soups, and collards don’t bolt. I’ll continue to cut and freeze some every week until they give up.

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The chicks have made it their goal to catalogue every single means of escape from the chicken yard. They are finding ways to get out that never occurred to me. I had to put them back in three times yesterday. Each time, I scolded them, their mother scolded them, and even Dave put in his $0.02 worth. The chicks are fat and sassy. The husband got more chicken wire out of the shed last night and will make another attempt to toddler-proof the yard.

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I worked on homestead foundation stuff and the craft co-op website until lunchtime yesterday. I’m making progress. I try not to get frustrated about it, but sometimes it feels like rowing upstream. I chair a fundraising committee for the foundation comprised of dedicated volunteers who meet monthly. Our fundraising goal last year was $15,000. We ended the year having made almost $20K, so this year, we set a goal of $25K. I think we can do it because we are more than two-thirds of the way there. The problem is getting board members to attend meetings so we can decide how to spend the money. Last month, we didn’t even have a quorum. And when I hear the “Well, I’m busy” excuse, I just want to scream. It’s not like I am sitting at home wondering what to do with all my free time.

We have a board meeting Monday night and I am afraid I might not be able to keep my opinions to myself. 🫤

I sewed all afternoon. I knocked out a few more zipper pouches and worked on another project that has been sitting on the cutting table. My moth-themed bonded nylon arrived from Wonderground Fabrics and I am dreaming about what to make with that.

Surprises in the Garden

After the rain we’ve gotten, the yard and garden needed some attention. I mowed on Wednesday and trimmed with the weed whacker yesterday morning. I found a few surprises while I worked. A couple of my grapevines have produced grapes!

Those grapevines are driving me nuts. The upper vines all looked dead well past the time they should have been leafing out. I cut everything back to the new growth at the ground, intending to train up new central trunks. I lost track of what the vines were doing—they are obscured by the jungle of tomatoes—and in the interim, they have decided to take over the world. Ironically, these bunches of grapes are on the vines that have always been the least productive. Go figure.

The UPS driver complimented me yesterday on how good the grapes looked. He drives by the big garden on his way to the neighbor’s house and we compare notes on our crops every summer. He also has grapevines and said that his were very slow in leafing out this year.

That whole section of berries is getting a major overhaul next year. I have to move the elderberry bush and I’d like to put in more blueberry bushes.

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I did a wonderful interview on Wednesday with a young man in Canada who has a sewing YouTube channel. If I get the file edited today, that will be next week’s podcast. Toward the end of the interview, he asked if he could ask me a few questions, and that turned out to be a lot of fun. He wanted to know how drafting knitting patterns compared to drafting sewing patterns. The two processes are alike in some ways but very different in others. Because knitting is a numbers-based process, most of my knitting pattern grading was done using spreadsheets. Most sewing pattern grading is done flat or with some kind of CAD program.

I am going to work on a two community projects this morning, one of which is compiling the list of volunteer tasks for next month’s homestead foundation pie social. I said that I would chair the upcoming pie social and create a handbook for it, but after this one, someone else needs to take over chairing it. I am chairman of the plant sale (and the fundraising committee) but I refuse to be chairman of all three of the foundation’s major fundraising events. (We host a spring and fall pie social.) Other people in this community need to step up and start taking some responsibility. Everyone wants the fun but no one wants the work. I’m getting tired of shoving my business to the side because the homestead foundation needs so much help. It could be a full-time job if I let it.

The other project is working on the craft co-op website, but the bones of that are in place and that project shouldn’t take too much time.

After that, the rest of today and tomorrow will be devoted to sewing. I can’t have a podcast about sewing if I never get to sew. I might make a few more zipper pouches but I really want to make that Haralson bag. The edgestitch foot I ordered for my Bernina came in and I’d like to try that out, too.

I had a hair appointment yesterday afternoon in town, so I stopped at the quilt store on my way. Two of my students were there with their new 990s. The 990 is quite the machine. Both of them were setting up their embroidery units and they told me that now that I have an 880 with an embroidery module, I need to come and take embroidery classes with them. I probably will. Sometimes it’s fun to be the student instead of the teacher.

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The National Weather Service confirmed four tornadoes touched down in northeast Ohio on Tuesday, including the one near my mother’s house. As of last night, over 5000 residents in Avon, where I grew up, still didn’t have electricity because the power companies can’t restore the lines until they cut up and remove all the downed trees. It’s a mess, and now they are getting rain from Debby.

I Pay Attention to the Weather

The husband teases me about watching livestreams of the weather, but I make no apologies. I like to know what’s happening. I was baking a batch of zucchini bread yesterday afternoon and had the Fox weather channel playing on YouTube so I could listen to the coverage of Tropical Storm Debby. All of a sudden, they broke to the Fox affiliate in Cleveland and noted that a tornado warning had been issued for Lorain and Cuyahoga counties. Lorain county (specifically Avon) is where I grew up. Cleveland is in Cuyahoga county. I switched over to the Max Velocity livestream and he noted that a tornado had possibly touched down in Bay Village, where one of my aunts lives.

It was about 2:00 pm here and I knew that it was about time for my mother to be getting home from work, so I called her house. No answer. I called her cell phone. No answer. A few minutes later, she called back from her cell phone but I could barely make out what she was saying. She said she would let me know when she got home. A few minutes after that, she called from the house phone and said she was was okay. She was on driving home on I-90 when she saw the storm just ahead of her. She got home safely and was heading down to the basement.

I’m seeing photos and reports of lots of damage in that area. My mother said there were branches down all over her yard and a tree had fallen across her street.

We had a few rumbles of thunder overnight and some rain, but nothing like what ripped through northeast Ohio yesterday.

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I spoke with the teacher coordinator for Sew Expo yesterday and we settled on a slate of classes. I am teaching six: an all day sweater-drafting class, a couple of 2-1/2 hour knitting classes—including one on helping knitters learn to “read” their knitting and correct mistakes—a 90-minute lecture on writing and publishing knitting patterns, and my thread class. The teacher coordinator suggested I talk to Wonderfil about setting up in their booth to do some demos after my class.

I am fine with teaching knitting rather than sewing. She said that only two applicants had submitted proposals for knitting classes and she wished she had more. (JC? I sent you an e-mail.)

I need to complete the submissions for the classes that were approved, but I’ll have less prep work than I did last year because most of them are ones I’ve taught before.

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The husband and one of our employees moved the new sewing table upstairs for me before they left for work yesterday morning. It fits perfectly into the same space as the old table. The new table did not come with an acrylic insert; I checked with the previous owner of the table and she said that she had it set up so that when the machine was on the hydraulic lift, the extension table that came with the machine was almost flush with the surface of the table. I set mine up the same way and it is working well, so I may skip getting an insert for it. I do prefer sewing on a flatbed.

I hemmed a denim skirt yesterday:

The skirt was the right length, but the bottom was raw. I guess that’s the trend. I prefer a more polished look, so I turned up a hem and sewed it using the jeans foot and the dual-feed mechanism. So slick.

I also knocked out another quilted zipper pouch:

I’ve been interfacing the linings with SF101 but I think I may switch to a lighter interfacing with the next one. The SF101 is a little too beefy.

Presser Feet and Pouches

This week’s podcast episode is part 1 of an overview of sewing machine presser feet. When I am not doing an interview, the topic of the podcast tends to be whatever happens to be relevant in my sewing life, and this week, it was presser feet. I’ll have to finish part 2 in a future episode, and presser feet for sergers and coverstitch machines will be yet another episode.

I stopped in at the quilt store yesterday morning and discovered that not only do they sell used machines, sometimes they have used furniture for sale. I was able to get a table for my 880 that fits perfectly into the existing space, at a deep discount off what something similar would cost me if I purchased new. I can sew with the machine set up in my current table, but I can’t use the knee lift and that was beginning to drive me nuts. Buying used is a win-win for everyone.

Our renters have a thriving graphic design business. They occasionally run into bottlenecks getting items produced locally. A few weeks ago, they mentioned they were thinking about buying an embroidery machine. I asked Tera if she were willing to sell hers—and she was—so I put them in touch with her. It sounds like they’ll be buying her machine and learning to embroider some of their own merchandise.

I didn’t have a lot of time to sew yesterday, but I managed to knock out a quilted pouch:

This is one of the Rosie Caldwell quilted pouches. I quilt a piece of yardage—usually a remnant—on the Q20, then cut out the pattern pieces. That is far easier than quilting each individual pattern piece. These will probably end up at market in September. If I keep a stack of them by the machine, I can knock them out in odd bits of time here and there.

I am itching to start some bag patterns. I really want to get back to the Haralson bag, and I have plans for a few others. I ordered more of that bonded nylon from Wonderground Fabrics because I love the way it feels. I adore this print:

This will probably end up being some kind of fun sewing accessories bag for me. I’m looking at the byAnnie A Place for Everything pattern.

We are still getting periodic rain showers. I’m hoping to work in the garden this morning before the predicted thunderstorms come in this afternoon. I know the grass will need to be cut again soon and I am sure the weeds are coming back with a vengeance.

The chicks are running fearlessly all over the coop and chicken yard—the husband observed that they are probably a lot more resilient than we think. They get right in there with the crowd when I toss out scratch grains.

A Cousin Comes to Visit

My cousin Darlene and her fiancé are here in Montana this week (from Houston). They are getting married tomorrow evening in Glacier Park. We made arrangements to have dinner together last night at our favorite steakhouse in Kalispell, Mercantile Steak. Darlene and Charlie came to our house, first, so we could show them around, and the four of us went into town together.

[The chicks figured out how to escape the chicken yard despite my attempts to childproof it, so we spent some time before we left for dinner getting them reunited with a frantic mama and closing up the hole. Toddlers of all species have an uncanny ability to find the weaknesses in the system.]

I’ve had a yard of rayon sitting on my cutting table for a week earmarked for yet another Déclic top. That has turned out to be a favorite tried-and-true pattern, especially when our temperatures get up into the 90s. I knocked it out yesterday afternoon in time to wear it to dinner. I love this print. This is a Moda rayon:

The more I use that 880, the more I love it. I have always been of the opinion that skills matter more than the equipment—a talented pianist can coax lovely music out of the most humble instrument—but a high-end machine makes sewing so much easier and more enjoyable.

We enjoyed a perfect Montana evening. Dinner was excellent and Darlene and I got to spend some time reminiscing and laughing together. Our mothers are sisters, we grew up in the same town, and we were in the same class together in high school.

The fires in Oregon and Washington have provided some spectacular sunsets recently. Darlene sent this picture she took on their way back to the Airbnb:

It’s raining again this morning. I had my coffee out on the porch so I could sit and enjoy the cool air.

Summer Mornings in the Garden

This will always be my favorite time of day, no matter the season:

I especially love summer mornings in the garden. I snapped this shot at around 7:30 am from the middle of the potato patch.

The squash and cukes are doing great. (They were also planted on pig manure.) We will have a bumper crop of pumpkins. I hauled in enough zucchini yesterday to give some to my neighbor, Theresa. I know her family loves them. The peas Anna brought me yielded eight pints for the freezer after shelling and blanching. Those will be wonderful in soups this winter.

It has been a good gardening year, once we got past the 30-degree lows in mid-June.

I finally decided on garden furniture for the herb garden. I will wait until next spring to get it unless there is a sale. Stutzman’s Amish Furniture in Polson makes tables and chairs out of recycled poly lumber. They had some on display at the Amish store when Robin and I stopped for ice cream last week.

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The one-year anniversary of the podcast is coming up in September. I’ve enjoyed hosting it and plan to continue, but I am frustrated by the lack of e-mail etiquette I’m encountering. Some of my guests come to me through the guest form on the website. Others, I e-mail directly because they may not know the podcast exists. I have reached out to half a dozen people about being guests on the podcast. I am very specific in my requests. I explain who I am and what the podcast is about. I offer to interview them over Zoom at their convenience. I suggest/ask for potential dates and let them know I am happy to work around their schedules.

It is like pulling teeth. I will get an affirmative response with no other details. ("Sure, I'll be on the podcast," and that's it.) Followup e-mails about scheduling go unanswered.

I get that I am not Joe Rogan, but if you express interest in being on the podcast, I expect you to meet me halfway. I now send one followup e-mail, but that's it. My time is valuable and I am not in the business of making people feel super special by pursuing them.

I see a huge divide between people who are successful and people who are just muddling along, and it isn’t always because of lack of opportunity. The people who operate at a high level and get things done are the ones who answer my professional e-mail inquiries with a professional response, even if it’s a “No, thank you.” (I’ve received a couple of those.) Being on a podcast is free publicity, which makes this even more of a head-scratcher. Why wouldn’t you want to get the word out about what you’re doing?

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A few months ago, I accidentally broke the tension stud on my Necchi industrial. Of course, there are no donor machines of that model and I could not find a suitable replacement stud among any of my machine parts. I took the stud to a machine shop here in town, which kept it for several weeks before telling me they couldn’t replicate it.

I did an internet search for machine shops in Spokane and one popped up that looked promising. I called the shop yesterday morning and explained what I needed. The guy on the other end of the phone said, “Text me a photo,” so I did. After a few minutes, he texted back and said that he thought he could replicate the part. He also gave me an estimate of the cost. (See what I mean about being professional?) I’m going to drop off the broken part the next time I’m in Spokane, and hopefully I can have that machine up and running again before long.