February Photos

Monday, September 18, 2017

Journal: Quilts & Butterflies & Lots of Thread

There are still Painted Ladies by the thousands all over and around the Autumn Joy sedum.
The cause of this butterfly explosion, according to the Columbus Telegram and the Lincoln Journal Star is the decent amount of rain that fell in California earlier this year, where Painted Ladies start their migration.  The rain led to more flowering plants for nectar, which boosted butterfly numbers.
The butterflies’ migration can extend 9,000 miles and span six generations.  The butterflies currently found in Nebraska are migrating and preparing to lay eggs for the next cycle.
Larry is afraid that after walking down our front walk to the Jeep, swarmed by Painted Ladies, he’ll sit down in church – and butterflies will start emanating from him in huge fluttering swirls.  haha
A friend just posted a photo of herself on Facebook, then commented on how gray she has become.  I responded, “I like gray and white hair!  It’s always kind of scary when you are following what you imagine to be a teenager because of her swinging blond ponytail, then she turns around and you discover she’s 93 if she’s a day.  Gray is better. 🤣
A teenage boy recently complimented husband Larry and I with, “You both look so young!”  (We are both 56, and both have silver-gray hair.)  We duly thanked him.
After leaving the store, I told Larry, “Don’t get all conceited.  He thinks we’re actually 85.”
By Tuesday, any Friends and Relations (à la Rabbit, of Winnie-the-Pooh fame) I knew who had been in Hurricane Irma’s path had all checked in as safe.  One couple was without power, but their home was all right, and a neighbor was letting them use his generator for a few hours, then using it himself for a while, then letting them use it again, in order to keep both families’ freezers and refrigerators cold.  One friend had a tree come down and punch right through roof and ceiling into their living room – but the tree arched over the husband’s vehicle without harming it; he was glad for that.  My cousin and her husband, who pilots tour boats for Disney World, evacuated ahead of the storm, and managed to snag a hotel room in Chattanooga.  What is normally a 9-hour drive from Winter Haven turned into a 17-hour drive.  After a couple of days in Chattanooga, they went on to Shelbyville, Illinois, where her sister and husband live, and other cousins.  That’s my father’s hometown.
They headed back home in a few days, and found their house still intact.  They hadn’t even lost electricity. 
Early Tuesday afternoon, Teensy came back.  You’ll recall he had a little skirmish with a polecat Monday night?  My nose didn’t complain too awfully much at all when he came in and sat down to have himself a meal.  Those pet wipes I’d used on him the night before did a pretty good job, evidently.  Poor little thing, he was sooo thirsty.  I’d put water outside for him, both on the front porch and on the back deck; but he prefers running water from the tub faucet, pôr fąvör.  He just couldn’t quit drinking!  Maybe he tried cleaning himself off, and got the skunk parfum in his mouth.  That would sure make a guy thirsty.
Hummingbirds were at the feeder that day, and there was a pretty little chickweed geometer moth on the screen.  I grabbed my macro lens and got a few shots of the moth.  I’ve taken numerous photos of them, but have never once gotten one on a pretty background.
That afternoon, I cut my right index finger rather badly while talking to my brother Loren on the phone.  He didn’t know anything happened, as I kept still, and he couldn’t see me grimacing and rushing for a paper towel.
What happened was, I was getting something out of the cupboard when a box of aluminum foil fell out.  I stupidly tried to catch it, and the metal serrated edge of the box sliced a long, deep, jagged slash right through the pad of my index finger, from fingernail to first knuckle.  Since then, things such as bathing, washing my hair, and blow-drying and curling it have been difficult, with the index finger on my right hand out of commission.  I am not ambidextrous.  Amazing how injuring just one small digit can stymie a person.  Or at least it sure slows me down. 
It probably needed stitches, but I’m making do with butterfly bandages, Band-Aids, and triple-antibiotic medicine.  The most aggravating thing is trying to type.
It’s healing, but the tip of my finger might never feel quite normal again.
Once poor Teensy came in the house, ate, and drank his fill, he slept, and slept, and slept.  Getting skunked is an exhausting trauma!
I’ll betcha Teensy tried doing to the skunk what he periodically does to the other cats:  they walk past him (nervously, recognizing that devilish gleam in his eyes), and just as they get far enough to relax and suppose themselves safe, he swats them on the rump, THWACK! 
I’ll betcha the ol’ skunk went a-waddlin’ past, unconcerned about the cat as he sat calmly,  waiting... waiting... waiting...  and then – ka-SLAP!!!  And the skunk, startled, let loose a small bit of stinkum before realizing, Oh, it’s just you, you stupid feline.  Skunks keep their spray as a last resort, as it takes a while for it to replenish, and once it’s gone, they are practically defenseless for a while.  They carry only enough of the chemical for five or six uses – about 15cc – and require some ten days to produce another supply. 
Teensy barely smells bad anymore, thankfully.  Mostly, it’s like a souped-up case of new-puppy breath.  😄😁
A large shoebox full of #60 Bottom Line thread for my quilting machine came that day, containing many colors I need.  I bought it from a lady who posted three lots of the thread on SewItsForSale.  The box arrived with the paper covering it all ripped and torn nearly off – and the whole box was covered with dirt, like it had been out in a dust storm.  But inside, all the thread was fine.
The UPS man apologized, saying it had arrived at their store like that.
Note:  it is never a good idea to cover a box you are sending with paper, never mind which carrier you are using.  It will almost always get ripped, and if the label is only on the paper and nowhere else, your box is going to be lost to the four winds.
The lady from whom I bought it was all apologetic, though it really wasn’t her fault. 
Ah, well.  No harm done, and it gives me the opportunity to make up tall tales about what might have happened to the box and where it might have gone. 
Maybe it got misdirected to the Saudi Peninsula and fell out of the helicopter during a terrible dirt storm.  But nobody in Al Khobar had a longarm machine, so they sent it back!
I bought another big shoebox full of thread from her a week after purchasing the first.  I now have over $500 worth of bobbin thread (it can be used on top, too, though I prefer heavier-weight thread for the top) for either longarm or embroidery machine – and I paid about half that amount.
The lady sent the second box of thread wrapped in paper – and it, too, arrived with the paper nearly ripped off, though not embedded with dirt like the last one was.
The lady called the UPS to report the matter, and they told her not to wrap her boxes with paper.  Do you remember the days of yesteryear, when packages were wrapped in brown paper and tied with string?
If you wonder why I order longarm thread... well, they don’t sell it in this burg – or at least, not the large cones I usually need.  Nor is it sold in any nearby town.  I get cones with 3,000 yards on them.  At Country Traditions in Fremont, they sell smallish spools of Aurifil long-arm thread, and they don’t have a very big selection of colors.  I like to buy from www.sewthankful.com, because it’s run by a Christian family... but it’s a small business, and they often don’t have the color I want on hand.  They have to order it from their supplier, so it can take 5-7 days to get here.  So if I’m in a hurry, I order from Red Rock Threads in Pahrump, Nevada.  Here’s a funny-odd bit of trivia about Pahrump:  it’s unincorporated, even though the population is about 36,500.
The thread I ordered late Thursday night, when I saw I was probably going to run out of top thread before I ran out of quilt, got here early this afternoon.  However, I already finished the quilt Friday evening.
Longarm thread is a lot longer-stapled than regular sewing thread, and thus doesn’t break as easily – a requirement for a machine that goes 1,200 stitches per minute or faster.  Domestic sewing machines are usually under 1,000 spm.  The APQS longarm machine goes about 3,600 spm.  That’s fast!
I like Superior threads.  They have quite a variety of types, colors, and weight.  I generally use #50 So Fine on top, and #60 Bottom Line on the bottom.  (The higher the number, the finer the thread.  There’s an explanation on www.superiorthreads.com, if you’re interested.)
Wednesday, I asked Victoria how she and Baby Carolyn were doing. 
Pretty good,” she responded.  “The baby finally slept most of the night last night and we got some much-needed sleep.”
She suggested I use Larry’s method of gorilla glue for my finger.
“Ah ain’t no gorilla; cain’t use me no gorilla glue-’em!” I protested.
After church, I finished quilting my customer’s quilt called ‘Easy Street’.
Thursday, I began working on the lady’s next quilt, which was called ‘Sidelights’ and was made of Asian fabrics.  The pantograph is called Paisley Park.
That afternoon, Loren brought us a jug of Martinelli’s unfiltered, not-from-concentrate, apple juice.  Mmmm... best apple juice ever.

Sometime later that day, I looked at the calendar and realized that it was exactly 25 years ago that day that my father had died.  Hard to believe it’s been that long.
Friday afternoon, I was quilting away on my customer’s Asian fabric ‘Sidelights’ quilt... looked at the cone of variegated coral thread... and knew it wasn’t going to last.  I hated to think I might be stalled out until my thread from Red Rocks arrived.  I could remove this quilt and put on another... but I’m never very fond of that idea.
On a whim, hoping things might have changed and they would now stock it, I grabbed the phone and called my favorite quilt shop in town, Sew What, which is owned by a lady with whom I went to school. 
“Do you have longarm thread?” I asked when someone answered the phone.
The woman on the other end of the line (or radio wave, as it were) didn’t have a clue.  About anything, I don’t believe.
(No, it wasn’t my friend from school; she knows where every speck of lint is, in her store.)
The lady went for help.  Maybe she’d never heard of a longarm.
Maybe she’d never heard of longarm thread.
Maybe she’d never heard of thread.
Maybe she really worked at the flower shop next door, and had hit the wrong entrance, and nobody, including the woman herself, had noticed her error yet.
Someone else picked up the phone.  “Hello?”
I restated my request.
She didn’t know either, but walked back to the thread rack to take a look.
Then, “No, we don’t carry longarm thread,” she said in a tone of finality.
I waited a moment, wondering if she really knew what she was talking about, and if I should rephrase the question.  I could hear her plunkity-plunking spools of thread around.
Then she muttered, almost to herself... “Machine quilting thread... long-stapled...”  She petered out.  “Nope,” she reaffirmed.
“Well, but that’s it!” I exclaimed, getting all excited.  “Do you have any variegated thread?  In coral?  I’m using King Tut.”
“Oh?” she said doubtfully.  “No, this isn’t King Tut.”  (pause)  Since I hadn’t yet politely taken ‘no’ for an answer, as she seemed to hope I would do, she added discouragingly, “Yes, here’s some variegated coral; but it has many tones in it, all the way from pink to orange.  I doubt if it would match.”
I doubted if it wouldn’t.  “What time do you close?” I asked, and she told me.
I grabbed my dwindling cone of thread, stuck my feet in sandals, snatched up my purse, and trotted out the door.
They had no cones, as she’d said; only spools.  Spools with a measly 500 yards on them.  But the variegated YLI coral thread was very, very close to matching perfectly.  On my customer’s busily flowered fabric, any disparity would never be noticed.
I paid $8.83 (counting tax) for those 500 yards of thread.
A spool holding 400 yards of Coats & Clark Dual Duty general purpose thread, which is what a majority of seamstresses use, costs $1.79.  The 3,000-yard cone I just got today cost $23.95.  I would need six spools of YLI thread to equal the amount of thread on the Superior cone.  And that would come to a total of $52.98!!!  Good grief.
But I really, really needed to finish that quilt.  So I bought the thread.
And finish the quilt I did.  Now I’m ready to quilt Lydia’s cute ‘Lil Ladybug’ quilt.
That day, Victoria sent a picture of Baby Carolyn, asking, “Doesn’t this look like me?”
The sweet little baby was just working on a smile, and a whole bunch of work it is, too.
“Quite a lot!” I answered Victoria’s question.  “New babies’ earliest on-purpose smiles are often a thoughtful job of face-working, aren’t they?  I got so many pictures of first smiles with faces so similar to this.  What they’re doing is working hard to imitate the smiling faces looking down at them.  So very sweet.”
Shortly thereafter, Lydia posted an adorable picture of dear little Baby Malinda.  Being two and a half months older, she’s just about got those smiles down pat.  😍
Isn’t it something to think how these tiny lives have so much potential, and yet, right now, they are totally, absolutely, completely dependent on others to love and care for them?  And they totally trust that they will be cared for, without consciously understanding it.  Precious little babies.
Friday night I finished quilting the ‘Sidelights’ quilt, and Saturday I quilted a sports-themed table runner for Hannah’s children’s piano teacher, the elderly lady who has had a return of cancer, and is trying hard to finish quilts for her family while she still feels well enough to do so. 
I posted some photos:
Sunday morning I barely had time to get ready for church, even though I allowed myself 2 ½ hours.  First, the sweater vest I steamed was too small.  Not much, but enough that I didn’t like it.  Stands to reason, though, since it was one I wore in high school, 40 years ago.  When I went to steam the next one (which happens to be too big, but that’s better than too small), the iron spewed all over it, because I pressed ‘steam’ before the thing was hot again.  On top of all that, this booboo on my right index finger slows me down a lot.  Fortunately, I had yet another sweater to don.
Good thing I’d cut my hair the day before, so it didn’t take so long to dry and curl.
Some friends of ours who had been vacationing in the Tetons, Yellowstone, and Glacier National Parks were home again.  They posted some of their beautiful photos on Instagram, including some of Old Faithful Geyser.
Once upon a time we were at Old Faithful, along with hundreds of people sitting around the geyser, waiting for it to erupt.  We had seven kids with us; it was two months before Caleb was born.  Hester was three.  Everyone was chattering... and then the geyser spluttered loudly, and everyone abruptly quieted in anticipation. 
Into this silence Hester piped, “It’s about to sprout!!!” – and that was the end of the silence.
Bobby and Hannah and family came visiting last night after church, bringing a scrumptious pear dessert Hannah had made, with ice cream to go with it.  The pear filling had cream cheese in it, and there was a streusel topping.  Not too sweet... just right. 
We enjoyed the visit.
The butterflies are still going strong around here. 
On the West Point radio station, the announcer said the butterflies are coming from South Dakota.  Hmmm.  That’s New and Different information.  I wonder who’s right?
Time for a bit more research...
++++++++
Ooooookay.  Here’s The Rest of the Story:
Royce Bitzer, an entomologist at Iowa State University, said there is an abundance of Painted Ladies in areas across the region, including in South Dakota, Minnesota and Iowa.
Larson attributes the butterfly boom to the ample rains earlier this year in California, where the Painted Ladies get their start. The rain produced more flowering plants, providing an abundance of nectar that boosted the Painted Lady population.
The butterflies spend the summer in cooler places like North Dakota and Canada, Larson said, but as fall approaches they head south, passing through Nebraska.  In a week or two, they’ll be heading for warmer climates.
So now we know the whole answer.  The radio and the newspapers didn’t really contradict each other; it was just that neither one told the story in full!
We also have white-lined Sphinxes (aka hummingbird moths) buzzing around the hosta blossoms.  I should try photographing them again, this time with my camera set on ‘sports mode’, and maybe that would speed the shutter up enough that I could catch those wings with a little less motion.
A cousin of mine who lives in Montana just posted a picture of snow in the mountains.  She has snow on one side of her home; wildfires on the other.  They hope the snow and cooler temperatures will put out the fires.
Our neighbors have gone on a cruise to Alaska.  Meanwhile, Larry is carrying for their goats, chickens, guineas, and the garden.  All the eggs and the garden produce is ours to keep.  Now we need a couple heads of lettuce to go with all these delicious tomatoes!  I had a peanut butter/tomato sandwich for supper.  If you haven’t ever had one, and decide to give it a try, for pity’s sake, toast the bread.  Don’t tell me you don’t like it, if you haven’t toasted the bread.  Bleah.
Here’s Teensy, snoozing in my chair.  You’d think the cat would get cramps in his toes, the way he sleeps with them curled up so tightly.

And now, I believe a soft-to-medium-boiled egg fresh from the henhouse would hit the spot.


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



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