My
hollyhocks are in bloom – and there are more of them, with more colors, than I’ve
had for years. There are pink, fuchsia, and plum-colored blossoms. When I
was little, my mother showed me how to make hollyhock dolls, with a blossom for the skirt, a bud for the head, and another blossom for a hat. Little twigs made the arms.
These
days, you don’t have to rely on memories of a mother’s or grandmother’s craftsmanship;
you can just look it up online. I found
a youtube video showing how to make them:
Hollyhock Dolls. Here are written instructions: Make
a Hollyhock Doll (photo from this website below). And just look at all the cute pictures: Hollyhock Dolls
of Pinterest
P.S.: If you
decide to put together some of these dolls, you might want to first be sure you
don’t make some fussy li’l ol’ lady mad by denuding her hollyhocks of all their
blossoms. :-D
You should hear the Baltimore oriole
singing his heart out from his perch somewhere amongst our trees! I need
to find a good place to hang the oriole feeder.
Last Monday evening, I worked on the
block of Johnny Jump-Ups – and decided to call them ‘pansies’ so everyone will
know what in the world I’m selling when I post the pattern.
I
was appliquéing away – but had to stop every now and then in order to grab the
flyswatter and swat a miller. Where on earth did the multitudes of moths
come from??!
If
you’d like to hear a group of young ladies, including Victoria, sing, here is a
link: Where the Roses Never Fade. Scroll down to the 05-22-16 PM service, and
the song is at 18:22 minutes. Victoria is at the far right, back row,
with the white jacket with black polka dots and black trim.
Tuesday
I finished the Pansy block – all 71 pieces – and added a bit of embroidery and
beading.
No
watering was necessary that day, as it rained early in the morning. Meanwhile, it was 36° in Alert, Nunavut,
Canada – the world’s northernmost settlement.
(I knew you’d want to know.)
People
who live there were probably running around in shirt sleeves, exclaiming over the
excellent weather. The sun will be up
for 24 hours, there in the Arctic Circle.
Their ‘midnight sun’ lasts from the first week of April until the first
week of September. They experience ‘polar
night’ from the middle of October until the end of February.
It’s
a relatively dry place, although it can snow at any time of the year, and sometimes
snow from one year stays around until the next year, as it might never melt.
I’ve
always enjoyed geography – learning about far-off places, weather phenomena, and
suchlike.
Speaking of
geography... Hannah sent me a picture of Levi in a clothes basket, legs akimbo, totally
engrossed in a book. She wrote, “The places (and positions) this kid finds to read!”
As
I sewed, I listened to the audio book, The
Adventures of Kit Carson, narrated by a literary-challenged British woman
with a nugged-up ploze (as Caleb would say).
I
made it through the Prologue, wondering if I had it in me to abide this
slaughtering of perfectly good literature.
I’m not complaining about the accent; I like British and Aussie accents
just fine. It’s the reading ineptitude that
offends my sensibilities.
Why
do people who cannot read take the
privilege of doing so, record it, and then post it on LibriVox or Audio Books
or some such?! Aarrgghh. Somebody hand me the earwash.
I
have some stand-alone speakers that I plug into my laptop that greatly enhances
the sound. Good earbuds really improve
sound quality, too, but I can’t use them if I’m trotting around all over the
place while something’s playing on my laptop.
Later that afternoon, I heard the
roll of thunder, and scurried upstairs to bring in clothes from the line. A storm was approaching from the west.
I pulled up AccuWeather and discovered that it was snowing in northern Idaho!
I immediately wanted to be there.
I need a mountain fix! It’s
been too, too long since I’ve seen the mountains.
And it’ll be a while longer before I
get to see them again, too, as I’m pretty sure we used up this year’s allotment
of gasoline trekking to Florida and back.
That evening, I finished putting the
Pansy pattern into pdf form; it’s ready to post when the time comes. I’m disappointed with it. It’s too busy. It looks kinda like I wadded up pieces of
fabric and flung them at the background. I told Larry it looks like a beaver hut made
of colored fabric. The black and white drawing looked fine!
I wish I hadn’t thought I needed to make the size of the pansies in a proper ratio
to the other flowers. Three larger pansies would have been much prettier,
to say nothing of easier.
But... there it is! On to the
next one! I hunted through my lily pictures for a good one to draw.
((...considering...)) Maybe I’ll save the pansy block for another
project – such as the front of a little zippered bag. Up close, those flowers look fine. Then I could make another pansy block with
fewer but larger flowers.
Maybe I will. Maybe I won’t.
After
a lengthy search, I finally found the Platte County Fair entry schedule at the
University of Lincoln’s website. Last
year, the Platte County Fair website didn’t have a link to the schedule until
the day before the entries were due. Or
if they did, I certainly didn’t see it until then, and not for lack of looking. That website needs help. Open Class Fine Arts
entries are to be taken to Ag Park Friday morning, July 1st. Baked goods, floral displays, photography,
and pigs are to be taken Wednesday morning, July 6th. (Actually, ‘pig’ was in the next section, but
I like putting it with ‘baked goods’ just to make matters more interesting.)
Wednesday
I worked on the next flower block for the Buoyant Blossoms BOM, a tiger lily
design. After church that night, Larry and I went to Wal-Mart
and I got a box of small glass beads, including tube beads for the anthers on
the lilies. When we got home, I finished
the embroidery and the beadwork, and another block was done.
The fabric for the petals was cut
from RJR Farmers’ Market fabric by Robert Kaufman – specifically, Peppers
Multicolor. The bud fabrics are from an autumn trees print.
Before heading for the feathers, I edited
about 100 photos. I still haven’t put together a music/photo slide show
DVD of our trip to Florida; I need to get that done! Loren’s birthday is
coming up (August 9), and he really enjoys those DVDs I put together for
him. I’ve compressed photos for the project; now I need to weed out a
couple thousand. If pictures go flying through at about 20 pictures per
second, people will have a hard time seeing them, right? Right??
Trouble is, when I start going
through the shots, I look at each one and think, Gotta keep that one, gotta
keep that one, gotta keep that one... and I wind up with the same
problem: Too many photos.
Gotta delete, delete, delete! I’ll get it done. Soon. (No, I’m
not deleting originals; only compressed photos, which are in a different
folder. Once upon a time, about 17 years ago, when digital photos were
new, I saved a favorite – but very compressed – photo over the top of the
excellent-quality photo. And that was
the end of the excellent-quality photo. Have you have ever done
that?? I take great care not to have that happen again.)
Thursday,
I traced and cut templates for the next flower block, ironed
them onto fabric, then trimmed and clipped them in preparation to starching and
ironing the edges.
It was 93°, with a heat index of
101°. I always worry about the menfolk working outside in high heat on
days like that. My worry was not
misplaced; Kurt got sick from the heat that afternoon. Victoria picked him up at the jobsite where
he was working and took him home.
Friday was even hotter, and Teddy
got sick and had severe cramping, too.
Today was much better, with the
temperature only getting up to 82°.
In the last week, two or three
ladies have asked for opinions about quilting machines versus DSMs (domestic
sewing machines), and about FMQ (free motion quilting).
Opinions? I have lots of opinions! Here are a few:
Keep this in mind: if you
practice, practice, practice on your DSM but your quilting just doesn’t turn
out nice enough to suit you, that’s no real sign you couldn’t do it on a
sit-down midarm or longarm, or a longarm on a frame. Midarms and longarms
are machines made for this job; most DSMs, not so much. Some DSMs are
better equipped for FMQ than others. It has quite a lot to do with timing
precision between feed dogs and presser foot movement, plus presser foot
pressure, and not a little to do with desk surface.
So... never let a perceived lack of
skill on one machine stop you from trying a better one.
Motto: Always blame the
machine!
I quilted on my faithful Bernina 830
Record, purchased new in 1978, up until 2010, when I got a used HQ16. I
was sooo thankful to find that machine at a price we could afford. The
last quilt I’d done on my Bernina was a king-sized Mariner’s Compass, and after
finishing it, it took my elbows and shoulders a good six months to recover.
Larry set up the HQ16... I
downloaded a nifty pantograph... oiled and threaded the machine... loaded a
quilt... and went to work. I do believe it was the most difficult pantograph
on the Internet – but I liked it, and what did I know about complexity – or
lack thereof – of such a thing as a pantograph?
The ships’ wheels wound up looking
like notched blocks and the stars looked like five-leafed clovers. But... the quilt top was red, white, and blue
and very busy, and the panto didn’t show all that much. We won’t talk
about how it showed on the back. :-O
I put a prairie-point binding on it in order to detract attention from the
quilting and gave it to a friend whose birthday is on the Fourth of July, telling
her it was a picnic quilt. (The more
ketchup that gets spilt on it, the better.)
After a few pantographs, and after
drooling over wonderfully quilted quilts other ladies had done, I gave free
motion quilting a try.
Some of the books came with DVDs;
those were helpful, too. You can find video clips of some of these techniques
by these skilled ladies on youtube.
A friend on an online quilting group
offered some good advice to me a few years ago:
“Practice drawing on paper.
You’ll be surprised how well your feathers look after you draw them 50
times. I know it may seem silly but that’s what really helped me the
most. Your feathers will be unique to you, like a fingerprint; but you
really have to draw them in order to find your fingerprint. Once you get
the basic shape down and want to do a specific block filled with feathers, draw
that block and draw the feathers about 10-15 times. It’s the ol’ muscle
memory you’re after.”
I did as she recommended, and it did
indeed make a big difference in my abilities with the longarm.
After a little bit of that, I put a
quilt on the longarm and commenced to feathering, sans pantograph.
Yes! I was feathering. Feathering, and it was fun to
do. Any feathering I had done until then had been accomplished by using
my laser light and a pantograph. Freehand is much more convenient,
if one can just do it. I enjoy doing rulerwork, too.
I’ll never be as good as some with
their exquisite custom quilting, but I keep trying, and I can see improvement
even in the last year. It’s such a satisfying feeling to take a quilt off
the frame, look at it, and think, Wow,
that looks pretty good, even if I do
say so myself!
Not many of us (and certainly not
me) have the best machine for any
given job, since not many of us are as rich as Midas. My ‘new’ Bernina – the 180 Artista I like so
much – has little quallyfobbles, such as stalling out that first instant I
press down on the presser foot. It regroups itself if I wait 5 or 10
seconds, and carries on with aplomb. I am not often patient enough to
wait those few seconds, so I grab the handwheel and give it a fast turn, and
that usually causes the computer in the machine to come to life again.
This, I know, won’t get better. The machine was built in 1999, after all.
Therefore... I drool over the new
Bernina 780s. Yeah, they’re over my
budget. :-\
Friday
afternoon, I made vanilla pudding, apple salad, lemon poppyseed muffins, and a
couple of different vegetables for Loren for supper. He came and picked up the food.
Kurt
and Victoria went to Jo-Ann’s Fabric in Omaha to get the chiffon she’d ordered for
sleeves and sashes to go with the satin for the main part of the dresses for
the ladies in the wedding party. That
means... I should get started sewing soon.
Victoria was delighted to find that the fabric matched absolutely perfectly.
Oh!
– I just got a notice that the photos I submitted to Google maps have now been
viewed over 50,000 times! How ’bout
that. I think they should pay me... oh,
about $2/view. Don’t you? I mean, I could really use $100,000.
I
was intrigued with the many bridges we traveled over on our trip to Florida. Those of any great size at all had names – and
I discovered Google maps had no labels on a bunch of them. So... I labeled them and submitted them for
review, and now some of those bridges are properly christened. I’m telling you, I should get paid! Or at least made famous, or something.
No,
never mind fame. I want fortune!
I
looked at my pictures to find a flower for the next block. Spotting one
of my water lilies, I decided that was just the ticket. Then I looked at the blocks I have done so
far... saw that the quilt could use a little more blue... and turned the water
lily into a blue lotus.
One
of these days, I just must learn to draft paper-pieced patterns with my
Electric Quilt program. I have a big fat
manual. Big fat manuals are good, right?
At
11:00 p.m., I belatedly realized that the water was still on outside – and it was
raining. I went out to turn off the
water, making a real fashion statement by tying a plastic Schwan’s bag over my
head. (Don’t worry; I left my nose
sticking out.) The plastic didn’t do
much good for my back, however, when I had to lean under a deluge flowing off
the roof in order to turn off the front spigot.
We got half
an inch of rain. Loren, on the other
side of town, got an inch and a half. 35
miles to our east, around Fremont, 7” of rain fell! Many areas flooded.
It was
overcast a good part of Saturday, and the yard was still damp, so I didn’t need
to water. Flowers are blooming like everything, and the birds were singing
their hearts out. Robins, brown
thrashers, blue jays, starlings, grackles, and red-winged blackbirds played in
a puddle in the lawn – and argued over whose turn it was next. The blue
jays dive bomb the others, the robins fly upwards together in a scrabbling
fuss, and the red-winged blackbirds make their metallic scolding chirps.
Tiger comes
into the house every once in a while, and makes himself right at home at the
feeding trough. But Teensy takes exception to this, and if Tiger gets too
close, Teensy hisses horribly. He purrs sooo softly... yet he hisses like
a steam engine. But Tiger trusts us now,
so I keep feeding him, and making sure he has fresh water on these hot, hot
days.
I washed
clothes and hung them on the line, watered the indoor flowers, watered the cats, fed
the cats, fed the birds, refereed the cats, hung another load of clothes on the
line, — and eventually it occurred to me:
the reason my stomach was growling was because I’d forgotten to eat
breakfast. So I ate some raisin, date,
and walnut oatmeal.
I gots Halfzeimers. That’s better than Allz-heimers, you
know. I only forget HALF of what I need
to remember, as opposed to ALL of it.
I wish there was more time in a day,
in a week, in a year! I can remember feeling totally aggravated even when
I was a child, upon hearing someone whine, “I’m booooored.” Ugh, just DO something, then! I said that
to a playmate once, in great vexation. And to another who moaned, “But I
don’t know how!” I retorted, “Well, learn, then!”
People who run out of things to do
should get themselves in gear and do things for others. That would keep them busy, wouldn’t it?
Okay, the cats were petted and
admonished (again) (Teensy talks bad to Tiger, and Tabby the Curious
Blunderbuss blunders into the middle of the fracas), another load of clothes was
hung on the line, the dishes were – oops. The dishes still needed to be
washed. Bother! Why can’t everyone just eat with their
hands???
I
washed the dishes and finally headed downstairs to work on the Blue Lotus
block.
Larry
went to Loren’s house that afternoon with his scissor lift, raised it to the Wi-Fi
dish two stories up, and refocused it, relying on his smartphone to tell him if
he was getting a good signal. Soon Loren
was back online.
I
got the Blue Lotus all together – and three of the petals stuck out like sore
thumbs. Lexmark Promarker dyes to the
rescue! I ‘painted’ those petals, and now they match much better. There are three more I might add some shading
to. ‘Flatness’ in the colors can spoil the effect of the flowers, whereas
proper shadowing with hues and tints can give it the 3D appearance I’m trying
for.
Sometimes
I get carried away with the Promarkers, and wish I’d have stopped about 15
seconds sooner. I generally labor under the theory that ‘if a little is
good, a whole lot is better’ – never mind the fact that I have proven myself
wrong innumerable times.
The
first time I saw a picture of one of these flowers was years ago, in a National
Geographic photography book someone gave me. I actually thought for a
moment that the colors were inverted (the book was printed almost entirely from
Kodachrome slides), until I realized that if that were the case, the water and
sky wouldn’t be blue, nor would the lily pad and background trees be green.
Sunlight
was playing through the dense trees, and the photographer had caught a beam as
it landed directly on the center of the flower, giving it an appearance of being
lit from within. Quite the spectacular image,
it was.
I
finished the embroidery on the Blue Lotus block late that night.
Sunday
was Father's Day. Victoria made Larry
some blueberry cornmeal muffins, and took some to Kurt’s house, too. Bobby and Hannah gave Larry some banana bread
Hannah baked in a pretty little jar, some dark chocolate espresso beans, and a
marine air horn. Caleb and Maria gave
him a ThermaCELL mosquito repeller (that should be a word. Why isn’t that a word?), complete with butane
cartridge refills. Teddy came in shortly
after we got home from church, bearing a couple of piping hot T-bone steaks,
fresh out of the oven. Hester had
brought a strawberry-peach cobbler the night before.
After
the evening church service, we took Lawrence a card to go with the weedeater we
gave him a couple of weeks ago. The
outside of the card read, “We’ve had our ups and our downs...” and the inside
finishes, “...but you’ve turned out pretty well!”
Norma
gave us apple pie, strawberry pie, vanilla bean ice cream, and coffee.
Larry
had a mighty tasty Father's Day, didn’t he?
We
just finished supper – ancient-grain-encrusted cod, peas, triple-berry (raspberries,
blackberries, blueberries) mix, the last two blueberry muffins, and the last of
the strawberry-peach cobbler, topped with Sea Salt Caramel Cashew ice cream.
I’ve
just posted photos taken May 30th:
Swallowtail
on Lilacs, Teensy and Tabby
Yesterday
afternoon, I sent this picture of a strrrrretch Hummer to Teddy, with a subject
line of ‘What you should’ve gotten instead’.
Notice the tag axle – that’s for those
times the swimming pool is full (I think).
Now,
before I start on the next flower block, I shall put together the patterns for
the last two.
Here’s
a composite of what the finished quilt might look like. I put my blocks
into the design in EQ7. The coneflower
block is duplicated in order to fill up the still-empty spot:
One
more flower block to go! Or two, if I
remake the Pansy block.
,,,>^..^<,,, Sarah Lynn ,,,>^..^<,,,
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