Journal: Embroidery, Quilting, and Photography

Last week I moved a quarter of a million pictures out of my computer and onto external hard drives.  That was about 700 GB worth of pictures – all the photos I’ve taken since getting a digital camera in 2003, plus a bunch I’d scanned from old printed pictures.  The laptop was getting too full; there wasn’t much left of its 750 GB hard drive.  I didn’t really like having to do that; I like all my photos where I can pull them up in a couple of seconds flat, rather than needing to plug a hard drive in and take 30-45 seconds to do the same thing.  I keep all my data – photos, music, journals, patterns, emails, etc. – on two separate external hard drives, just for insurance.

I’ve been saying I should scan my big albums from days gone by – over 350 albums, each holding over 500 photos – but I’ve gotten to thinking, well, there are any number of people who can do that after I’m dead and gone; but how many of them will ever make this fancy quilt, hmmmmm?  And I happily press down on the sewing machine pedal again.

But... I just might change my tune and scan those pictures one of these days, since probably no one else WOULD ever do it, and there are a whole lot of good photos in those albums.  These days, people – especially young people – are more likely to look at photos on electronic devices than in an album.

Well, I’ll do it, if I ever run out of fabric and money, both at the same time.  :-D

A couple of big boxes of Wal-Mart stuff arrived at my front door Tuesday afternoon.  Mmmmm, mmmm... included were some bottles of Martinelli’s apple juice, Not From Concentrate.  Would you like filtered, or unfiltered, better?  Either way, it’s heavenly nectar.  Mmmm...

Kurt and Victoria have been putting some of their accumulated things into their house, as they have time.  They got a couch, loveseat, chair, and ottoman on Craigslist, and Larry helped move them in.  The table and chairs were Kurt’s great-grandmother’s. 

Wednesday, I scrubbed the tub (that becomes more of a Major Operation the older I get, and thereby Something Worth Mentioning)... paid a bill or two... clipped a bunch of weeds and spent hosta flower stems that were spilling out into the front walkway... printed my weekly letter for some correspondents who don’t have Internet... and then set my embroidery machine to work on a fruit basket for a tea towel while I put together the backing for the Buoyant Blossoms quilt.

I can’t just leave well enough alone and let my embroidery machine do the thread coloring the designer chose, with the accompanying starts and stops, oh no!  I have to add more colors, meaning more thread changes, and therefore I have to stop it manually at precisely the right instant in order to put in the next thread color.  ((...rolling eyes...)) 

In the middle of all this, Tabby of course decides he needs a few bites of his soft food, and he needs it right now.  And I never turn him down, because he needs every bite he can get.

Once the last seam of the quilt backing was done, I ironed it and began loading it on my quilting frame.  The back has three coordinating fabrics.  I sew them together in vertical stripes, as I can fairly accurately get them centered on my longarm frame.  Horizontal stripes... who knows where those’ll wind up!

Victoria made a yummy pasta/bacon/chicken/ranch dish for supper.  It’s really for Kurt and whoever happens to be with them, but she’s kind enough to leave some for Larry and me.  Usually.  ;-)

After stitching out this strawberry design, I ordered a different stabilizer – medium cut-away, this time.  The lightweight Solvy isn’t doing the job, and the interior stitching is pulling too tightly, so that the outline doesn’t wind up where it should.

The fruit embroidery is from Debbie Mumm’s collection, The Good Life.  There are fruit baskets, fruit, and flowers in the set.  Her embroidery designs are very good, with understitching beneath all the satin stitches and step-satin stitches, and usually as few of jump stitches as possible.  Every now and then you can spot an error in most embroidery designers’ layouts, especially if you happen to be watching your machine:  you can see it miss a spot... and then, after it gets some distance away, it returns to the missed spot and fills it in.  Kind of funny, to see it do that.  It’s like the machine itself thinks, Oops, missed that! 

My machine doesn’t cut the jump stitches; I have to do it manually.  So I’m more liable to notice, even if I wasn’t watching, if there’s such an error. 

Thursday when the mail arrived, I got a card with a collection called Puppies on Parade.  I can find very few pictures online of this (or any of my other) embroidery designs; guess I need to add photos of my finished embroidery to Pinterest in case other people might be in the same dilemma.  It’s hard to find these older cards with the booklets that show thread color, etc., still intact.  I’m doing a lot of guessing as I change threads – sometimes I get the darks and lights switched around, because I can’t tell from my little black-and-white screen on my machine which part of the design is going to stitch next. 

Oh, well; I figure, I made that piece unique! 

I did find pictures of three of the puppies on that card.  Aren’t they cute, and wouldn’t they make cute blocks on a quilt?

A quilting friend sent me a link for deluxe tea towels that, when purchased in bulk, are quite a good price.  I ordered a few; they should be here soon.

That evening, I stitched out a basket of apples.  This is a preloaded design on my machine, and it isn’t as nice as the previous baskets, bowls, watering cans, and suchlike.  It’s not a Debbie Mumm design – and it’s just not as good.  But I guess it’ll do.

I tried out my serial adapter to try moving designs from laptop to sewing machine.  First, the cord was so short I had to switch laptop and sewing machine around, which was awkward.  More importantly, however, the adapter wouldn’t make a good connection.  When I tried removing it from the machine, the plastic cover over the circuitry and processor chips slipped right off slicker’n a whistle, exposing all those tiny wires and soldering points and everything. 

Okay... I see the error in buying that thing from Thailand for $0.01 plus $4.99 for shipping and handling.  The postal stamp recorded the actual shipping price at around $8, so the poor Thai chump lost money on the deal.  So did I, since it doesn’t work. 

I pulled up Amazon and found another serial adapter.  This one is a Keyspan product – brand recommended by the man who posted a video tutorial on the matter.  It cost $24.99, with free shipping if I ordered $50 worth of stuff.  I ordered $25 worth of coffee, and was all set.

I got the Buoyant Blossoms quilt loaded on the frame – backing, top, and batting.  After starting another tea towel embroidering, I began stitching in the ditch on the top row of the quilt.  This will be no fast job; I’m planning to quilt the livin’ daylights out of it. 

Here is the fourth tea towel – a lemon and blossoms:

Friday afternoon, Hannah and the three younger children came, bringing a card Hannah and Joanna had made, using the Cricut from Loren and various quilling techniques.  I’d ordered the card for Loren, whose birthday is August 9^th.  He’ll be 78 years old tomorrow.

I’d asked for a Bullet camper (the name of Loren’s trailer), trees, a stump, a saw ... and there it is.  Isn’t that nifty?

I sent them home with a bag of peaches.  Then I made some supper for Loren and took it to him, and on the way home, I dropped off bags of peaches at Lydia’s and Amy’s houses.  There is now only one large bag of peaches left in my refrigerator.  I’d better get them peeled and sliced tomorrow.  Larry and I had several for supper tonight.

By bedtime, two more tea towels were done:

A great-niece of mine is getting married next month.  I’m thinking maybe I could use some of these embroidery designs to make a pieced table topper or runner.  Or maybe some linen napkins with a little embroidered design in the corner?

Saturday morning, I fed the livestock (three cats)... did a bare minimum of housework... and then headed downstairs to start another set of tea towels and to continue quilting the Buoyant Blossoms quilt.

Oops, my stomach growled.  I’d forgotten to eat breakfast!  I debated over a sourdough biscuit, a banana nut muffin, or a bowl of Corn Chex.  Decisions, decisions...

I settled on half of a biscuit, half of a banana nut muffin, and a small cup of Corn Chex.  I say, if you can’t decide, have it all!

Food preparation is time-consuming, you know that??  And then... when you’re all done ... people just haul right off and eat it!  Then you have to start all over again.

This is why I like to quilt:  so far, nobody has ever eaten one of my quilts.

I started my machine embroidering a pansy.  Most of the designs I’m using take somewhere around an hour and 15 minutes to stitch.

Larry said this pansy looks like a gorilla – and now I can’t quit seeing a gorilla every time I look at it!

Meanwhile, I melted wax and began making a two-wick striped candle.  It smelled like a combination of lilacs, vanilla, mandarin orange, and chocolate in my sewing room.

As each layer hardened, I poured in a new color and scent.  Before long, scents of spiced green apple and cranberry/mulberry took the place of the first aromas.  For a while, I couldn’t tell if I was making a nifty candle or a muddled jar of mud!

It eventually turned out just fine.

A friend on a quilting group who’d been traveling with her husband wrote about a can of soda exploding in her luggage.

Ugh, that wouldn’t be much fun.  I’ve had things expand and leak in luggage, in campers, in my purse – usually on account of going from low altitude to high elevations.  I was once applying Capzacin to my neck as we were going over Raton Pass, which isn’t really all that high, but high enough, apparently, in comparison to where the Capzacin had been.  Ka-blooey! – the sponge tip blew off, and the stuff poured right down my back.

There was a blizzard going on at the time, and it was an odd sensation of freezing and burning – and it didn’t go away for a long, long time, even after a shower that night.

By bedtime, the tea towel set was done, and the stitching-in-the-ditch was finished on the top pieced border of the Buoyant Blossoms quilt.  In the towel set, in addition to the pansy, there are morning glory, long-stemmed roses, a tropical moth, a butterfly, and, just for the fun of it, a puppy.

I had to stop then, because I ran out of towels.  I’ve ordered more from a site where they aren’t as expensive as these that I’ve gotten on Amazon, yet they are called ‘deluxe towels’, and are advertised as ‘thick and good for embroidering on’.  If they’re truly a whole lot better quality than these of the Utopia brand, I’ll be explaining to some of my offspring why I like certain ones better than others!

We are having a huge influx of big black moths.  They’re right on schedule – every year, they show up about this time.  Some years are worse than others.  I looked it up last year, and learned that they’re not really very harmful, and they’ll vanish without doing much damage in a week or less.  I forgot what they’re called... thought I found a picture of one on someone’s blog... clicked on it – and discovered that the blog writer thought it was someone’s spirit come to visit her.

So I quit looking at moth pictures really fast, feeling more like bugs were crawling up my spine than ever.  I’m glad the spirits of our beloved deceased are with the Lord!  Yes, the Bible says they are in that great ‘cloud of witnesses’, so we understand they know some things that go on here on earth, though we are not given details.  But we do know this:  they are not flitting about impersonating large black moths.  Ugh!

My computer is behaving like an elderly person who is slowly acquiring dementia.  It’s over four years old.  My computers before this one only last three years – and I’ve used this laptop even more extensively than the others.  It’s been a good one!  One of these days, I’ll have to get a new one.  I don’t relish the idea of changing all my data over to a new computer.

It’s a fairly easy job, though it can be time-consuming if one has a lot of data or needs to reload a bunch of programs.

It generally takes me two full days to slap the sense into a new computer.  (That’s what Larry says I do to it, anyway.)

This little critter was on our front door glass last night, right up at eye level:

It’s a gray tree frog.  It’s mostly green, because it’s very young.  Only its feet and lower legs have begun turning the usual mottled gray and brown.  There are enough bugs out there that that little guy should double his size in short order.

Victoria took a picture with her smartphone.  It’s not quite so, uh, detailed.

She looked at my pictures... cleared her throat... looked at her picture... and remarked, “I like my frog better.”  Kurt laughed at that.

Hannah wrote to ask if I’d taken a picture of Loren’s birthday card yet, as I’d promised.

Aaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrgggggghhhhh!  I forgot! 

And I’d already given it to Loren, because he was planning to head off to Colorado today for a short vacation.  So today, just before he left, I went to his house and took pictures of his card.

Do you remember when Rita, one of my blind friends, asked me if I could find a friend of hers – a preacher’s wife, Kathy?  She’d lost contact with the people, and they didn’t seem to be in the last location she knew of.  Well, I found her – through a pdf file on a Facebook page of their old church.  They’d moved to a new church in a new state, and people from the old church were wishing them well – and someone named the new church.  I found the new church... found a Facebook page – and finally, waaaay down in the archives, I found the people’s name – and their Facebook page.  I sent a message... and she finally answered me, a week or two later.  She had been in the hospital, and hadn’t been on the Internet. 

Well, Kathy wrote to me Sunday, asking if I would take pictures of Rita and her dog Jackson, as she’d love to see them.  So after I took the picture of Loren’s card, I went to Rita’s house and took pictures of her and Jackson. 

Jackson is camera shy.  Most dogs are.  They are unimpressed with shiny round bazookas aimed right at their faces, and they know a blinding flash will erupt at any moment.  {shiver}

Nevertheless, I got about 30 really good pictures.  I’m pleased with them.  45 minutes later, I was home again, editing the shots. 

I was so pleased with them, upon seeing them on my big screen, that I called Rita and offered to print enough for her to give all our friends in Christmas cards come Christmas.  And that’ll be my gift to her.  People will be pleased to receive her picture, I’m sure.

She’s been my dear and beloved friend since I was 8 years old, and she was, oh, about 20 or so.  Since I’m 55 now, that means we’ve been good friends for 47 years.  We used to go for bike rides on her tandem bike.  I remember on the very day I graduated from high school, we were coming down a hill north of town, when out in front of us, some distance down the hill, walked a doe and fawn.  There was a spectacular sunset, and I’d been describing the colors – pale turquoise and aqua stripes around a piercingly brilliant orange ball of fire, all mixed in with salmon pinks, and fiery crimson and indigo rays, with purples and lavenders above, and puffy clouds in soft whites and pearl grays overhead.  Then came the deer.

“Coast, Rita, coast!” I hissed, and she stopped pedaling.  (She was one for pumping with all her might and main – not smoothly, either!)  I quietly described the deer, right down to the fuzzy white spots on the fawn, and his short little tail wagging as he tripped along on tiny hooves, trying to stay right at the rear haunch of his mother.

After they crossed and we went on down the hill, Rita paid me what I consider one of the best compliments anyone has ever given me.  I take it out and dust it off and look at it now and again:  “When I’m with you, I feel like I can just see these things!”

Andrew and Hester are on vacation in Seattle.  Hester sent a photo, saying that it’s only 60° there.  Their hotel looks out into Elliot Bay, on Puget Sound.

I’ve put the second load of clothes away... collected hollyhock seeds for a friend, enough that she should be able to start a nice stand of hollyhocks. 

The Schwan man came a few minutes ago.  I bought two cartons of frozen yogurt, steak burgers, and apple pie. 

Now I’m wishing I would’ve ordered his frozen blueberry muffins; I’m hungry for some!  I thought I had a Krusteaz mix, but evidently not.

Lydia once made a dozen blueberry streusel muffins while we were gone.  We arrived home late... smelled blueberry muffins... sighed and drooled with pleasure... and scurried to the kitchen to find the treat our dear daughter had left for her weary traveling parents.  

There were none.  Anywhere.  None.  Nowhere!  None!!

Our tall, thin daughter had eaten them all.

Time for bed!

,,,>^..^<,,,       Sarah Lynn       ,,,>^..^<,,,