Last
Monday, I burnt the second photo/music movie to a DVD – this one, our trip to
Yellowstone. I was going such great guns
on these movies, and enjoying the pictures so much, I decided to do 2013, too –
our trip to Michigan. Loren enjoys the
DVDs... and so do other members of the family.
I think. Maybe. Or perhaps they’re just being polite.
Anyway,
Loren does, and I’m making them for
his birthday.
Do you ever
lose touch with friends, just because it’s a message-and-text world these days,
and some people don’t like to type/write/text as much as others do? Some are apologetic (or defensive) when they
don’t answer my notes very often, but I assure them I don’t mind. I like to hear from them, of course; but if
writing isn’t what they do, that’s okay, no worries.
I’ve always
loved to write. Ever since I was little,
I’ve written letter upon letter to aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends who
never, ever wrote back. But a time or two, I was later than usual with a
letter, or one got lost in the mail, and whataya know: aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends came out
of the woodwork to inquire into just where their letter had gone to, and what
in the world had happened to me! My grandmothers – and later, Larry’s
grandmothers – were the most faithful at writing. And they each wrote by hand, of course –
beautiful penmanship on paper.
Once or
twice people have asked me to stop
writing; they don’t have time to read all my drivel. I assure them that’s
fine; I’m not offended, and carry on with business as usual. What they
don’t know is that, upon hearing that they don’t properly appreciate my blither
and blather, I go kick the cat and shoot songbirds.
I’m kidding,
I’m kidding. That was just a joke, just a joke; you can laugh now.
I love my kitties... and I love songbirds. Instead, I go put cockleburs
in Larry’s socks.
Teasing,
teasing! I like Larry every bit as much
as I like the cats.
Monday
evening, I refilled my coffee cup and got on with the Michigan photo/music
DVD. When I look at my pictures from that trip, I can point out the exact
place we were in Iowa when Loren called to tell us that Janice’s biopsy showed
she had cancer. I offered to come back home, but he said that wasn’t
necessary. Then I see the place where we were stopped beside a pretty
lake in the Upper Peninsula, and Loren called and talked to Larry, telling him
that Janice had come through the operation okay, though the doctors had told
them there was no cure. A few days later, as we were traveling through
Minneapolis/St. Paul on our way home, Janice herself called me! I was
quite surprised. She asked me to make eight quilted mug rugs for her
nurses, who were treating her with such kindness. Later, she told me one
of them cried when she gave her the little piece of quilting.
Anyway,
Loren won’t remember that about the trip, I’ll betcha. I won’t mention
it. We talk about Janice often, but there’s no sense in making him think
of those bad days every time he looks at the DVD.
Tuesday, I
finished the movie, clicked ‘Save’, and then, while the computer was working
away at it (it took several hours), I washed a pile of dishes (did the Russian
Army eat lunch here??). And then I was
ready to start machine-embroidering tea
towels.
In
preparation to embroidering the ‘Superior Quality 100% Cotton Flour
Sack Tightly Woven Ultra Absorbent Heavy Weight’ towels, I did a bit of research.
The towels had a pretty crinkled effect.
Do I first iron out the crinkles,
I wondered, or do I not? What if I don’t, and the embroidery stretches it all out under the stitches?
I looked around online to see what
Jane Q. Embroidering Person might do.
Jane Q., it turns out, is not nearly
so concerned about the ironing as
she is the washing of said tea
towels. Indeed, there is no small
controversy over the matter.
Most people say to wash the towels
first. Some adamantly say not
to, as it winds up looking ‘used’ afterwards... but, for pity’s sake, these are
supposed to be ‘used’! Some of those ‘don’t wash’ people said to
tell the recipients the towels are for decoration only. Ha!
Okay, I get that, and I’m a ‘don’t
wash unless absolutely necessary’ person, and I like things to look crisp and
new ---- but I want these to be used. Therefore, I washed
them. We’ll see what they look like
after they’re run through the dryer, I decided. If I must iron them, I guess I’ll iron the entire towel.
That afternoon when I got hungry, I had
fresh raspberries with Wild Berry smoothie poured over them. Mmmm, mmm.
My favorite summer drink is fresh
lemon/limeade. I like lemonade or limeade, too; but my favorite is a half-and-half
mixture made with both lemons and limes. Juice the citrus... pour in lots
of water... some sugar... I like it fairly tart. We haven’t had any this summer – I need to
buy some lemons and limes next time I’m at the store!
I
called Loren to see if he’d like some supper that evening – but Hannah was at
his house, having taken him homemade Runzas.
She’d used a variation on Janice’s own recipe, so he was bound to like
it. And I wouldn’t need to take him
anything for supper.
Meanwhile,
Hester was bringing Larry and me supper – a gift for our anniversary. She brought chicken/ham cordon bleu, garlic
potato wedges, green beans, and fruit salad.
Yummy.
Looks
like we’re all doing a bang-up job of taking care of each other!
Have you ever heard of ‘quilling’? Hannah, with a little help from Joanna, made
this lovely plaque for us for our 37th anniversary. More photos are here.
I’m just as sentimental over it as I
was when she made me paper flowers, when she was just five years old.
Wednesday,
with the tea towels (and everything else that had been in the hamper) washed
and dried, they clearly needed to be ironed. I steamed them, not
pressing very hard, and they still had that nice crinkled look. There
were no creases, so there would be no problem embroidering them.
I have Debbie Mumm embroidery cards
for my machine. This is the first time I’ve
ever used them. I got them cheap on eBay, because a) they aren’t
being made for this machine anymore (it’s a 17-year-old machine), and b)
the seller no longer had the booklet that comes with them. So I looked
the designs up online in order to find color photos of the designs, and to know
what thread goes where. Thank goodness
for the Internet!
Here is the first embroidered tea
towel.
A
friend asked how long it takes my machine to stitch out a design such as this. I hadn’t kept track, but I took a wild guess
and said about an hour and a half. I was doing other things while it
stitched, and hadn’t paid attention to the clock.
Well, a
couple of days later as I was programming the machine for another design, I discovered
that the embroidery time for each design – and in fact for each thread color in
the design, too – is listed right on my screen.
How ’bout that? It turns out my
guess was fairly close – the denser and more intricate designs took just under
an hour and a half.
So now
we know.
My machine is a Bernina Artista 180,
made in 1999. It was top-of-the-line in its day, but it doesn’t go nearly
as fast as the new ones.
I didn’t get the grapes positioned
quite right on the towel. It’s a little hard to tell from the screen on
my machine just how everything is going to look. I ‘need’ me one o’ them
thar fancy-schmancy machines with a big ol’ screen that’s in color! (Don’t
I?)
I know,
I know! I could trim off the bottom edge of the towel and sew it back on
at the top. ((snerk))
Almost
every day last week we were issued heat warnings. Most days, it was in
the high 90s, now and then topping the 100° mark, and the heat indices were
around 110°. And nearly all the menfolk in my family were out working in
it! I worried about them.
It was
good and right to worry, too, because no one actually got sick from the
heat. A couple of weeks ago, when I didn’t worry, two of them got sick! So you
see, my worrying was very helpful.
News flash, news flash! – Kurt and
Victoria found a house! They will rent for a little while – a year or so,
perhaps – until they build up some credit and save a little more for a down
payment on a house to buy. It’s a nice little house that was recently all
fixed up.
They will get their keys Thursday.
Friday, I started the next set of
tea towels. So long as I
use good thread, my machine can embroider away without any problem. But I
got several spools of embroidery thread that must’ve been left in the sun, or was
older than Job’s turkey or something, because it was brittle and broke
constantly. I kept trying and trying (and trying!) to use it, which was
quite frustrating. I bought Sewer’s Aid lubricant, and coated the spools
with it; that did help a bit.
I finally invested in new and better
thread – and I also discovered that plain old everyday thread works, too,
though it doesn’t have the same luster – and I’m using up the brittle stuff in
the bobbin when possible (it’s not too old and brittle for that, at least, and
it comes through the wash fine).
Anyway, with good thread, I don’t
have to monitor the machine (much) as it embroiders. So I got the bills
paid, 36 photo/music DVDS burnt, emails answered, and the clothes washed – while
the machine embroidered away. Friday I started piecing the next border
for the Buoyant Blossoms quilt on my other machine – the trusty old Bernina 830
Record – while the 180 embroidered.
That afternoon, I finally used the
gift card Hester gave me for Mother’s Day to buy a card for my embroidery machine. Here are the designs on it. Tells you I must be having fun with the
embroidery module, eh?
Did you ever hand-embroider a large
piece, and by the time you got back around to the starting point, you were so
much better at it, you felt like taking out all the first stitches?? You
could keep on going forever, though, if you started doing that.
I remember when hand-painted linens
were all the fad. Ladies would get together
and have embroidery-paint parties. I was just a little girl, but they let
me join in. I made a table scarf for my mother. It was a cryin’
mess, but she acted as proud of it as if I had done a Picasso.
The border I’m sewing for the
Buoyant Blossoms quilt has somewhere around 175 pieces. Good thing there are so many, because the
first set took long enough that I actually remembered I needed to take pictures
as I went along before it was too late. Always a bummer when you have to
unsew something in order to take ‘before and after’ shots. ;-)
Saturday afternoon, it got up to 97°, with a heat
index of 112°. Too bad we couldn’t be in the mountains of Glacier
National Park, where the temperature was in the lower 70s!
That
evening, I finished the tea towels and the majority of the second border on the
Buoyant Blossoms quilt. Close-ups here.
My machine tried to eat one of the towels.
I went ahead and finished it, but I’ll keep it myself. I ordered more
towels; I’ll remake the damaged one, and make another set for my sister for
Christmas, since she’s oohing and ahhing over these.
Only the corners are left to do on
the borders for the Buoyant Blossoms quilt, and then they be ready to attach to
the quilt.
That
evening, Larry started putting up a tower for our Internet dish. For the
last several years he’s been raising the dish higher... higher... higher... and
the trees keep growing... growing... growing... until finally the pole atop the
house was as high as he could get it, and not entirely stable. So he
bought this sturdy tower from a friend.
It will lift the dish well over those trees. (He offered to chop
the trees down for me, first. I planted
those things! Leave my sugar maple and cottonwood alone!)
Larry likes
machinery. Big... little... anything with a motor. He’s bought and sold several scissor
lifts. That one’s for sale right now.
Eventually he concluded that his scissor lift wasn’t
quite up to the job, as it only goes up to 40’.
(Plus, his wife, in between taking pictures, kept saying, “That’s too
dangerous!” Wives are such... bothersome pieces of fretwork.)
! ‘Fretwork’ is a word! I wonder what it actually means. ((...looking it up...))
“Ornamental work consisting of interlacing parts,
especially work in which the design is formed by perforation.”
Hmmm. Well, I
think my way of using the word was much more useful and interesting. Here are more photos.
A friend on
an online quilting group apologized for getting a few of our names mixed
up.
“It’s okay,”
I told her; I get my own kids’ names wrong! For years, Lydia was ‘VicLydia’
and Victoria was ‘LydVictoria’. But the
most embarrassing was when I shouted, “ALEUTIA!!!” (the name of our big
Siberian husky) at Keith, our eldest. The children all dissolved into
great mirth and hilarity. It’s hard to work back up to the same head of
steam and shout ‘KEITH!’ with the same degree of indignation. Besides, no
one would’ve heard me in any case.”
My parents
often called me ‘Lura Kay’ – the name of my sister who is 20 years older than
me. We once attended a large family
get-together in Illinois. I was about
12, and looked several years older. Most
of them hadn’t seen my sister for 10-15 years.
“Why, Lura Kay!” numerous ones exclaimed over me, “You haven’t changed a
bit!”
After
church last night, we went to Loren’s house so I could help him retrieve a
couple of emails from his son Paul containing pictures of his new baby granddaughter,
Paul’s first grandchild. While the
computer updated, Loren gave us ice cream with Hershey’s syrup. Next, we went to Bobby and Hannah’s house to
get some deer stew for Larry for lunch today.
They were getting ready for their vacation – they left early this morning
to go to Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota.
Caleb and
Maria are going with Maria’s parents and the rest of the family to spend the
week at Calamus Reservoir, out in the Sandhills.
A friend
sent me a screengrab of her browser, to show me a picture of some beautiful
hand embroidery.
“AAAAaaauuuuuuuggggghhhhhh,” I wrote back, “you have me outnumbered!
You have 25 tabs up, and right now this exact very moment, I have only 21.
((...pouting...))”
I use
three or four different browsers – sometimes all at the same time. Sometimes several Chrome windows are up at
once (so I can scatter them around the screen, you know), and a number of other
programs, besides: Outlook, Word, Excel,
OneNote, Publisher, Live Photo Gallery, Paintshop PhotoPro, EQ7, Gramblr, WeatherBug,
Weather App (gotta have both, ’cuz WeatherBug chirps if a tornado is bearing
down on my head, while Weather App tells me the weather in a dozen other
interesting places), and probably an alarm clock and the calculator down in the
corner somewhere. Larry says I purposely
try to blow up my ’puter.
Larry
came home for a late lunch at 1:30 p.m., driving the boom truck. He parked it out front along the lane, at a
tilt, and went up on the roof to try to put the Internet dish at a better angle. He then headed back to a job – but his truck
stalled out at the bottom of the hill by the stop sign. He thought the fuel pulled from the right
tank... but it must pull from the left, and when the truck was at a tilt, it
drained from left to right. He called me
to come get him so he could collect all the stuff he needed to siphon fuel from
the right tank and put it back into the left, and a can of starter fluid. That truck is hard to start if air gets into
the lines.
He ran
out of starter fluid before he got the truck to start and stay running. I brought him home, and he took his motorcycle
back to town to get more starter fluid.
Some
time later, he got the truck started, drove the motorcycle home, I took him
back to the truck, and off he went.
There were
oodles of bright green frogs in the water-filled ditch beside the road where
the truck stalled out. I should head
down there with my camera...
And now
the Schwan man has come (and gone). We shall eat well tonight!
An apple
pie is in the oven, and I’m munching on frozen dark sweet cherries. Mmmm...
,,,>^..^<,,, Sarah Lynn ,,,>^..^<,,,
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