I’m going
to have to really use the ol’ elbow grease, nose-to-the-grindstone, if I want
to enter anything in the fairs this year. Too many customer quilts, from
June through January! – I didn’t get many of my own things done. Hard
on eyes and joints, too. I’ve sent some of my customers the name of a man
who lives in St. Joseph, Missouri, who does computerized quilting on a couple
of Gammills (top-of-the-line longarms). He charges about the same prices
I do, and does nice work. I just really have to learn to say ‘that’s
enough; can’t do any more’ one of these days! The money is nice...
but a lot of the time I don’t make enough to make it worthwhile.
I want to
finish Todd and Dorcas’ quilt... make quilts for Jeremy and Lydia, Caleb and
Maria, Kurt and Victoria, ... I have fabric for rag rugs that I want to put in
my laundry room and in my new quilting studio... I have those vintage Sunbonnet
Sue blocks (made by grandmother, great-grandmother, great-aunts, and their
teachers, neighbors, and friends) that I want to get put together – even drew
up the design for it, in EQ7 (now converted to EQ8)... and I want to make gifts
for my family for next Christmas. Can’t do that, when I’m putting in
10-hour days on customer quilts, for six months steady!
Still, I
have a lot to be thankful for. Therefore, I shall quit griping!
(Somebody
hand me the packaging tape, to use on my mouth...)
It always
troubles me when I feel like I’ve done something for a customer that’s not
quite up to snuff. This last quilt, for example... the tension isn’t
right in some places. There are areas where you can see the bobbin thread
on top, and there are areas where the top thread has been pulled to the
back. I told the lady about it, and planned to use white fabric paint on
top to disguise the light green thread that shows through in the white areas of
the quilt, and green dye markers to camouflage the gold thread that had pulled
to the back in places. I offered to let her see it and told her I could
redo some of the bad areas (that would be a truly horrid chore).
She kept
assuring me it would be fine.
As it
turned out, the fabric paint was too white for the fabric, and looked worse with than without. The green dye from
the Letraset markers wanted to follow the threads through to the other
side. I quit, before I made matters
worse. I sure do hope my new machine handles some of these issues
better!
One of
the things that would’ve made a difference with this problem would’ve been if
there had’ve been two layers of
batting. That always helps the point of interlock between top and bottom
threads nest in the batting, rather than atop the quilt, top or bottom.
And ...
it’s a Christmas quilt! Christmas
is over. Siggghhhh... I knew this would happen, if I accepted a quilt for
custom quilting after November 1st. I did!
Really, I did! But the lady didn’t cause an iota of trouble about
it. She’s a kind and considerate lady; I appreciate customers like
her.
I’ll soon
be finding out if the Avanté is better! 😊
Bernina
is having all sorts of festivities this year, because it’s their 125th
birthday. Why, they’re even issuing a few golden presser feet!
Victoria sent me pictures of Baby
Carolyn taking the spoon from her as she was trying to feed her.
“Me do by
self!” hee hee She looked entirely pleased with herself.
Carolyn
is four months old now.
Baby
Carolyn seems to be doing things at a somewhat advanced pace. Sometimes it’s hard to judge these things,
because our offspring has a whole raft of little cousins and second cousins who
are doing things at about the same time – and sometimes we only realize they
are ahead of schedule when the doctors and nurses get all amazed at them.
When one
of Hannah’s children was just a baby, no more than 6 months old, she told the
doctor he was talking quite a bit, and the doctor smiled – one of those polite,
indulgent smiles that lets you know he’s thinking, Ah, yes, another one of
these mothers who thinks her child is a genius ------ and then that baby
carefully reached up and grabbed the doctor’s swinging stethoscope, put it up
to his own ear, grinned, and said, “H’lo?”
A friend from Malaysia, upon seeing my photos of the
little opossum that frequents our back yard, wrote, “Reminds me of the possums
in the city park in Bendigo (in Victoria, Australia.) In the evening, one walks around and the
little fellas come out for goodies. We did not give bread but brought
fruit like apples, oranges for a healthy snack for them. One mother with
her baby on her back was fed by us and she let us pet her little baby on her
back – so, so soft. At another spot in the park a possum was hanging by
his tail from a tree branch waiting for his snack and scared me when I turned
around and there he was in my face.”
I know a
lot of people don’t like opossums much – they’re afraid of all those sharp
teeth, and think the little critters look like big rats. Some people
think the opossum is very likely to carry rabies – but the truth is, while any
animal can contract rabies, opossums are much less likely than others, because
of their low body heat, which makes it difficult for the rabies virus to survive.
This is
from the RCACP (Regional Center for Animal Care and Protection):
Skunks, bats, foxes, raccoons, dogs, cats and some
farm animals are most likely to get rabies. Rabbits, squirrels, rats, mice, and pets like
gerbils and hamsters seldom get rabies. In
recent years, cats have become the most common domestic animal
infected with rabies.
I wish
everyone would get their pets vaccinated against rabies!
From the
DFW Wildlife Coalition:
Opossums eat fruits, snakes (opossums are immune to all
types of snake venom, except that of the coral snake), insects, snails, slugs,
eggs, mice, rats, fish, frogs, crayfish, and carrion. If for no other reason than pest
control, opossums are great to have around!
In our
part of the country, opossums are known for gobbling up ticks by the hundreds. The more opossums around, the less ticks our
cats haul into the house – and the less I acquire when out gardening!
One time
Victoria, at about age 5, was looking at an opossum, and she shuddered, “Why
are their tails so ugly?!”
“God made
them that way, so they could do this—” I said, and showed her a picture
in one of our National Geographic books, something like this one:
That one
is young, and his tail isn’t very big. But it’s strong enough to hold him
up!
A mother
opossum can hang from a branch – even with a passel of babies (joeys) clinging
to her back!
How many
babies can you see here?
Somewhere,
I saw a plaque with a similar picture and the words, “Opossum: Nature’s Minivan!”
I’ve
always thought the Lord must’ve surely had a very enjoyable time creating the
animals.
I barely
got through announcing to all and sundry that we were going to have spring-like
weather all week until Friday when I learned Tuesday morning that there was a
snowstorm coming our way that would hit late Wednesday night and continue into Thursday. We could get up to 6 inches of snow.
But... early afternoon Tuesday, it was 48°, and the sun was shining warmly.
By late
that night (or early Wednesday morning), I was alllllllmost done with the final
border of the Christmas quilt. I had to
throw in the towel for the night. But I could say that, unless something
dramatic happened, I would get it done the next day.
I shut
everything down, came upstairs, and found Teensy sawing logs in a box. I tiptoed back downstairs, grabbed my camera,
snuck back up, took some pictures, posted them online.
“Looks
like your kitty threw in the towel before you did. LOL” wrote one friend.
Yeah, my
cats don’t work very hard for their keep.
😆
I put the
camera away, headed off to get ready for bed – and walked back through the
living room to find Teensy, still in the box, but crammed tightly up against
one side. Does that feel more snuggly,
or what?! I grabbed the camera again.
Wednesday
evening, just about time to get ready for church, I finished the Christmas quilt,
trimmed it, and removed it from the frame. I was glad that, upon releasing the quilt from
the frame, the red ravelings and seam allowances that were showing through the
white areas weren’t nearly so noticeable, and neither were the spots
where the tension hadn’t been so good.
After
church we went visiting at my sister and brother-in-law’s home, finally
exchanging Christmas gifts with them. John
H. and Lura Kay have a big family, too, with numerous grandchildren and
great-grandchildren, and they weren’t able to have a get-together with their
son Kelvin and his wife for a while because of Kelvin’s surgery a week and a
half ago, and the severe pain he’s been in. The surgery helped; he’s
doing a little better. The main surgery for his colon cancer is scheduled
for the 19th.
Since I
wanted to look at 1930s reproduction fabrics at Country Traditions in Fremont,
fabrics that might go with the vintage Sunbonnet Sue blocks, I made plans to
meet Carol, my quilting customer, on Friday at the nifty Milady Coffeehouse
where we met before. I looked at their
menu online, and discovered that the first refill of coffee is free. Did that mean we had a free refill coming, since
we neglected to take advantage of the offer last time? heh
We were
getting warnings of an approaching snowstorm.
For a while the weathermen said we might get 6” of snow. By midnight, they’d toned it down to 4”, and
by Thursday morning, everyone realized that the dusting of snow we’d received
was all we were going to get, though it was nasty windy and very cold.
I filled
the bird feeders, fed the cats, and washed clothes. I looked around
online for 30s fabrics. Then, thinking
possibly some of the Sunbonnet Sue blocks were made in the 1920s, I wondered if
there are 1920s reproduction
fabrics. Sure enough, there are.
In fact, if you have the money for it, there’s reproduction fabric for any era
you jolly well wish to replicate. Here’s just one of the many websites I
found:
There are
also places where you can have costumes and clothing made in whatever era you
choose... and there are places where, in addition to fabrics, they also
reproduce wallpaper, rugs, upholstery, and so forth. Some of those
companies cater to big movie producers – that’s where the producers get the
sets for movies of bygone eras. Interesting
stuff.
But... as
I looked, I found that I don’t really care much for reproduction fabrics.
I’m wondering... how about if I just use plain colors, rather than
prints? A big variety of them, in colors
that would’ve been typical of the era? Colors that match and coordinate
with the fabrics the ladies used on the Sunbonnet Sues?
I no
sooner wrote that than I remembered doing a quilt for a customer recently, with
those fabrics – and I really liked it. Looking
at all the pictures of that quilt, I’m thinking... those fabrics would indeed
coordinate very nicely with my vintage Sunbonnet Sue blocks.
The birds
were delighted that I’d filled all their feeders. In three minutes flat, there must have been two
dozen sparrows, goldfinches, house finches, cardinals, and juncos out
there. Now and then the blue jays swoop in and scare the little birds all
away. The downy woodpeckers with their
tough little bills aren’t afraid of the jays, though – and the jays watch the
Northern flickers carefully! Flickers
are slightly bigger than jays, and their bills are longer and stronger. They’re not usually aggressive, but they do stand their ground.
The ladies on the online quilting group were discussing
embroidery stitches. Several mentioned
that every time they needed to do a blanket stitch, they had to look it
up.
“Me, too!” I said.
“Can never remember that stitch, without looking at a picture.”
Does
anybody but me have trouble with French knots? Mine either pull right on
through the fabric, or looked like a loopy, messy wad. Hannah can do
perfect French knots one after the other, so that they look like perfect little
miniature rosebuds.
I’ve finally
learned to cheat at them, and now they look fairly decent: I catch a
thread of the fabric in the middle of the knot, and then the knot stays where
it’s supposed to. I can do them all right with silk ribbon, so there is
that!
The lady who made the Christmas quilt wrote
to explain French knots:
1.
Wrap the thread around the needle two or
three times, according to the pattern or your personal preference. More than that is hard to make look lovely. Two is usually simplest.
2.
Put the needle into the fabric right next to
where you came up.
3.
Snug up the thread: it should be snug around
the needle and not the least bit loose, but it should not be tight or you won’t
be able to finish the stitch. Also make
sure that there’s no thread going ‘straight up’ from the fabric. In other words, when you snug the thread
around the needle, it needs to be snug around the needle as well as snug to
the fabric. If it isn’t, that will make your French knot floppy.
4.
Hold the thread off to one side in order to
maintain tension on the wraps while you push the needle the rest of the way
through the wraps and through the fabric; do not let go of the thread until the
last little bit is being pulled through your wound threads. As the last of it goes through it should pull
down just a smidge – almost in a ‘donut’ sort of way, although that image will
be fleeting.
“Is there anything in there that isn’t what
you do?” she asked.
Ooooo,
yesirree, uh-huh, you betcha, yepper Bob, that’s perzackly what I do!
Except...
Except,
whilst I’m a-doin’ it, I look a lot like a flounder floundering about on the
floor of a fishing boat.
Actually,
I once found a good little tutorial on youtube, and was shortly making good
knots. My error had been in not holding the floss snug while pulling the
needle through with the other hand.
I looked
for the video just now... didn’t find it. I found one where the lady
spent 20 minutes explaining how to do it (and finally made a knot!), which
drove me totally bonkers even though I kept dragging the marker forward, so
that I only wound up watching a minute or two of it. Here’s one that’s a
little over 3 minutes long, which is already too long, if you ask me:
Oh!
Just found one that, while it’s a little longer, it’s a cute design, and the
lady is pleasant to listen to, not a bit boring, and she shows a couple of
different types of French knots:
Plus, she
does the last minute or so in fast motion; that’s always fun.
Thursday,
a little before noon, I looked out the window – and then sent Larry a
text: “The garbage men must’ve stolen
the trashcan.”
(Actually,
I knew he’d forgotten to put it out by the road.)
A couple
of hours later, I wrote to him again: “Just
found a message on my phone – trash collection is delayed one day. You
can still get the garbage out for tomorrow!”
He did...
but they never picked it up. Still
haven’t.
That
afternoon, the wood-burning stove made some strange noises. Pellets were obviously stuck in the auger,
and no pellets were dropping. It soon
shut down – never to start again. When Larry
got home, he scooped out the pellets to unplug the auger and get it going
again, to no avail. The auger motor must’ve
gotten burnt up, maybe because I didn’t turn it off before it shut off on its
own. A new motor and auger is $75. 😧
I took
pictures of my HQ16 and the frame, and posted them in various places, along
with the price: $3,000. Microhandles, $275.
Late Friday
morning, I headed for Fremont to meet my friend and customer, Carol, at the
Milady Coffeehouse in Fremont, to return her Christmas quilt to her. We had a lovely visit (and yummy lattes with
pretty little leaves of cream in the top). 😊
😋 When
the lattes were gone, we were given refills of plain coffee. Their coffee is too strong to suit me; but
Carol likes it okay.
Afterwards,
I stopped at Country Traditions quilt shop.
Everyone treated me like a celebrity, just because that’s where Larry
got me the Avanté, and also because I had vintage Sunbonnet Sue blocks in hand,
which made numerous ladies come scurrying over to see them.
This
block was made by Ella Winings, my great-grandmother: ß
Each
block has the quilter’s name embroidered on it. I sure wish I knew more
about those ladies. One was by one of my mother’s best friends, Francis
Wilson. When she and my mother were seniors in high school, they went out
on a local lake in a small boat with some boys. None were wearing
lifejackets. The girls did not know how to swim. And the boys
decided it was funny to rock the boat and make the girls scream. They
rocked it so hard, water would pour in over the sides.
My mother
told that story every once in a while, cautioning us all to be careful near the
water, to wear lifejackets, and to never play around like that with someone’s
life. “It’s a wonder we didn’t drown,” she said.
Neither
she nor her friend Francis ever went anywhere with either of those boys again.
I bought three
yards of 106”-wide fabric for the background (alternate squares) for these
blocks, in a mottled color that very closely matches the color of the muslin
the Sunbonnet Sues are appliquéd onto. Since
a few of the old blocks have some stains that may not come out after all these
years (found a date embroidered on one block! – 1936, the year my parents were
married), I thought the mottled ivory/cream fabric would make everything blend
together and maybe any residual staining will just look like it was supposed
to be that way.
A
bonus: they were having a 20%-off sale on all fabric
throughout the month of January! So instead of costing $18.00 per yard,
it was only $14.40 per yard.
I looked
at the 30s fabrics, of which they had a grand plenty (they have ‘grand plenties’
of everything), but
decided not to get any, on the chance I just might have fabric in my stash that
will do.
And ...
if it’s not historically accurate... well, I won’t care, and I’m sure
none of the people in my family who will see the quilt, or who might wind up
with it someday, would ever know the difference, or care. We all like
breaking the ‘rules’!
Here’s my
EQ7 design (now converted to EQ8):
I thought
maybe I’d splurge and buy a new ruler for my longarm. I stood and stared lustfully at a large rack
of rulers... reached out and took a big set of circles off the rack... turned
it over and found the price tag: $126.50. !!!!!!!!!!!
Wow, I
put that package back on the rack in record time, and then I
trot-trotted away from there, lickety-split, pell-mell.
Well,
humph. They’re only $109.95 on the HQ website! ‘Only.’ Guess
I’ll keep using my cheap half-circle templates.
We got two sets of six each at Wal-Mart, then glued two of each matching
size together with clear glue, so as to make it thick enough to use with the
longarm. On some of them, the glue didn’t
go clear to the curved edge, so there’s a little gap – and the hopping foot
catches in it. Aggravating.
I got
home shortly before dark. I watered all
the houseplants (some of which badly need to be repotted), fixed supper, washed
some clothes and the sheets... then repaired some rips in the sheet that grew
by tenfold seemingly overnight. My repair job won’t last long; the fabric
is baaad. So I ordered new sheets with a high thread count; they
should be quite nice.
Some
years ago, my sister gave me a new set of high-quality sheets. Since they
have to be king-sized deep-pocket sheets in order to fit our mattress, they’re
not very cheap.
We had a
large fifth-wheel camper, and the bed in the master bedroom was
king-sized. I put the sheets from Lura Kay on the bed.
Then we
sold the camper.
I say it’s
Larry’s fault, and Larry says it’s my fault, that neither of us remembered to
get those new sheets off the bed. So for several years now, I’ve had no
spare sheets. It was time to buy a new set.
On the
flip side, we once found an expensive watch under a seat in a car we got at an
auction... and in one vehicle there was a CD in the player – Elvis’ Christmas
album! 😆
But the
best was when we got a used vehicle... and Caleb, who was about 5, found a
whole bunch of coins in a coin sorter in the center console. You should
have heard him exclaiming and giggling. He thought he’d hit the
motherlode!
My Jeep
has a built-in GPS. But it’s a 2008, and doesn’t automatically update
itself. So some of its information is extremely outdated.
I’ve had
my ASUS tablet for about a year. I’ve used Google maps on it now and again...
but when Larry’s driving, and I have my big laptop along, I like using maps on it,
since it has a large screen, and it’s much easier to see. Being so
prejudiced toward my laptop, I haven’t discovered some of the nifty things my
tablet can do. It was only recently that I learned it works exactly as a
GPS – only better: I plug in an
address... it gives me the route (with options of bypasses, shortcuts, etc.)...
asks if I need to be directed first to a gas station or restaurant... tells me about
weather conditions, roadwork, or accidents in my path. And of course, it
directs me nicely to my destination.
I learned
something else it does, when I met Carol at the Milady Coffeehouse in
Fremont:
I walked
in, sat down, took my tablet out of its bag ----- and it had replaced the map
with pictures of the inside of the coffeehouse!
Okay,
this tablet is growing on me. Fast.
’Course,
I still use the laptop most of the time, for editing pictures, writing my
journals, etc. I don’t like the way gmail behaves on tablets and
smartphones. It’s so much nicer how
it looks on the laptop ---- and better yet, when it’s transferred to
Outlook.
Saturday
morning, someone wrote to thank me for the ‘wonderful tips’ on my “Preparing Your
Quilt” page on my blog, which quite surprised me.
I wish
some of my customers would actually read that page! – or... I wish all of my
customers were as easy to work with as the last three or four have been, in
sending backings and batting that are nicely squared up. That’s one of
the more frustrating things to receive: backs and batting pieces that are
nothing but irregular quadrilaterals. 😝 Can’t load them on the frame like
that!
At 2:45 that
afternoon, Larry headed to Bomgaars and Menards for paint for the trim and
varnish for the pieces of oak flooring he’d inserted into the floor in my
quilting studio. I wrote a list for him, and included coasters for the
chair legs, a floor mat of some sort for the rolling desk chair, and some
skinny, strong nails with which to hang things in those plaster walls. While he was gone, I organized things
downstairs. Can’t stand to leave things
in a jumble.
Last year
when I helped my brother divvy up all the gifts he’d found in bins in his
house, gifts his late wife Janice had obviously been planning to give everyone,
we found boxes and boxes (and boxes) of Legends of China white tea. Every
big box had 100 teabags in it. Loren gave a box to each of my children,
to our sister, to each of her children, to Janice’s sister and her
children ---- and finally, there were only four boxes left. He gave them
all to me.
Now, I
like tea – but the tea I like is orange spice, cranberry almond, summer
berry, apple cinnamon, and suchlike. This white tea, while it’s supposed
to be good for you, well, it hardly has any flavor. And how in the
world was I supposed to use up 400 bags of white tea?!
I make a
pot of coffee in the mornings. In the evenings, much as I’d like more
coffee, I feel obligated to drink tea. Because... I have
teabags.
Well, I
discovered that if I throw 14 teabags into the Bunn coffeepot, run water into
it, and then let it steep for at least two hours (more is better), that stuff
actually tastes like tea, instead of water flavored with a toothpick.
I used up
the first box (finally) that night, leaving three more boxes. This
means... if I use 14 teabags every night, I could plow through those things in
21 ½ days flat!
An
elderly friend – she’s 94 – wrote to tell me that she follows a blog called ‘Clean
and Sensible.’ “And it’s not working,”
she informed me. “I spend an hour
reading it every day and so far the house is not getting cleaner or decluttered. But I shall keep reading and maybe it will be
clean one of these days!”
hee
hee That reminds me of when Nabisco first
came out with Wheat Thins. My sister Lura Kay said, “I grabbed a dozen
boxes off the shelf, raced home, and scarfed down one whole box.” ((...pause...))
“And it didn’t help a bit.”
I finished
cleaning my old sewing room downstairs; now it will be my gift-wrapping room. You’d think I live in the palace! – I have a ‘gift-wrapping
room’! <...fanning self briskly...>
When
Larry still hadn’t gotten home by 4:45 p.m., I knew he was done losted. MIA.
AWOL. And... just like I
thought... I would learn that he’d gone hunting. A friend had called him as he was en route to
town to tell him where he could go hunting on their property – and so off went
Larry like the critters after the Pied Piper.
“You just
escaped from the house on the pretext
of getting stuff for my quilting studio!” I accused him.
“Well,
but I got it, didn’t I?” he retorted,
showing me the goods. And he did get the trim around the old closet
area painted. That’s where my bookcase
now resides. The varnish still needs to
be put on the flooring, and the cords for the overhead lights still need to be wired
into the central light fixture.
I spent several
hours hauling more things from basement to second-floor quilting studio, such
as quilting rulers, longarm thread, embroidery thread, scissors, snips, seam
rippers, ... enough stuff to fill a large plastic tub at least three
times. I brought up several large items, too: the Sizzix eclips2 cutter, a floor lamp with
adjustable neck, and all the Red Snappers. By late evening, I had it all
put away and the bins back in the corner of the closet.
Larry finally
got home about 8:00 p.m., sans nails (and sans deer). Teddy was here,
waiting for Larry to give him a haircut. While he waited, I put him to
work admired my new quilting room, the Avanté, and the Baskets of Lilies quilt
I’m making for his sister Dorcas.
I put the
dowels for the Red Snappers into leader casings, found drawers and caddies for
all my tools... Reckon I’ll remember where I put those things??
The old
sewing room downstairs is now all nice and clean, and the carpet
vacuumed. The marble table is all cleaned off (that’s where I piled a
whole lot of stuff when Larry dismantled the maple wood table) and ready to be
taken apart and moved into the old sewing room. It has large, heavy
cherrywood legs, and the marble table top weighs a ton and is a beast to
handle.
The HQ16
frame was cleaned off, the machine dusted, and all the things that go with it
were together. The dresser near the frame where I kept all my quilting
paraphernalia is clean.
For
supper that night, we had orange roughy baked with red peppers, tomato basil
soup, steamed broccoli, pears, and Bavarian Crème/Peanut Long Johns.
Everything set well except for the long johns, despite the fact that I like
them. I can’t eat junk food anymore!
waa waa waa We had Martinelli
apple juice to drink, too.
While
cleaning things up downstairs, I found a bag with a couple of cameras in it
that my brother had given to me some time back, asking me to do whatever I
wanted with them, perhaps sell them. One was a nice little Olympus
digital. Teddy said Emma would be
delighted with it – and Teddy will be glad to have her using this camera
instead of his expensive one, since she likes to take pictures of birds,
nests, eggs in nests, baby birds in nests, etc. ----- and she climbs trees in
order to accomplish the task. I took pictures of the other camera – a
Canon SLR film camera in a nice case. The receipt was still in
there: it was purchased in 1983 for $179.
KEH Camera puts out ads saying they will purchase old cameras, so I
checked it out.
Yep, they
will indeed buy it from me ----- for $1.00. Yes, that’s right, one
dollar.
However,
I see that the camera body alone, without any lens, is selling for around $45
on eBay. I belong to a photography forum called Ugly Hedgehog; I could
list it there for free.
I also
discovered there is still film in the camera – and wouldn’t you know, I popped
open the back in light, so at least 2 or 3 pictures were ruined, if they haven’t
been ruined already by the length of time the film has been in the camera.
I’m
beginning to feel quite fond of this lovely old camera, and am thinking how
nice it would look on display on one of my old treadle machines (which still
need to be carried upstairs). Those treadles are dusty! This
house acquires dust quite badly, because we live on a gravel lane, and because
there are cornfields all around, and because there is a never-ending wind that
gleefully and maliciously scoops up topsoil, then rushes straight at our house
to dump it, squealing with spiteful merriment. (Bet you didn’t know
Nebraska wind and dust could be so malevolent, did you?)
Maybe I’ll
keep this old camera. Loren would probably be happier with that
plan than if I sold it for a paltry sum. He’s sentimental about Janice’s
things – but he also wants to keep his house nice and clean, and not cluttered
with things he never uses. He likes to
give things to family and friends who might use them. He’ll be pleased that Emma can use the
Olympus.
After
supper, I got back to work. I had just enough oomph left to empty another
bin and find a place for everything. I really, really like everything to
have a place, and to be in its place.
(Just because everything isn’t always in its place doesn’t mean I
don’t like it there, heh.)
And then
I was ready to hang pictures and whatnot.
Here I
stand, hammer in hand... but Larry forgot the nails.
Larry,
how could you?! 😄
He did bring home a couple of nonskid mats,
the tops of which are a nice brown/gray tweed. He tucked one edge under
my cutting table to hold it in place. I gave it a try, and it works great
under the wheels of my desk chair. I put the stick-on coasters he bought under
the legs of the other two chairs. So now the oak flooring is protected.
I hauled
my printer upstairs; it’s now inside my rolltop desk, which is just across the
hall in the little room that used to be my office, and will now be my office
again. Then I carried up my Rowenta steam station, and Larry carried up
the ironing board. We put those in the little office, too. There
might’ve been room for them in the quilting studio, but they fit better in the
little office, and it’s only a few footsteps away – no farther than it was
between marble table and ironing board downstairs.
I washed
the thick runner I had downstairs in front of my cutting table; I’ll use it
next to my quilting table. It came out of the washer looking brand new
again. I found it at the Used Furniture Store uptown for $5, if I remember
right. I thought it was nifty, because it almost looked quilted, with
Hawaiian appliqués on the cream squares.
I noticed
that there is plenty of space on the shelves in the closet of the library –
right next to my new quilting studio (library = Caleb’s old room; studio =
Victoria’s old room) for several of my fabric bins – probably all of those that
hold my scanty stash of quilting fabrics.
That would make things handier than having it all downstairs, two
flights down from the quilting studio.
I needed
those nails Larry forgot to get me! Wanna hang stuff, wanna hang stuff.
Wheeeeeeeeeeee!!!
Isn’t this fun?!
Todd and
Dorcas’s quilt is now spread over my new frame. I need to finish the
appliqué work, and then get to quilting. Custom or panto, custom or
panto, that is the question. Just as soon as their quilt is done, I’ll
accept some quilts from customers again.
Larry did remember the nails, the next
day. I’ll start hanging things, as soon
as this journal is done.
Yesterday,
a lady wrote to ask the exact dimensions of the HQ16 quilting frame, and the cost
of shipping to Alabama. By evening, she
had decided to buy machine and frame, and by this morning, she’d already sent
money through PayPal. So now we are in
the process of taking the frame back down to 10’ so it will fit in the space
she has allotted for it, and getting it ready for shipping.
A
quilting friend just completed cutting a mammoth amount of quilting scraps and
fabrics into the sizes she most often uses, and sorting them by coordinating
colors into plastic bins.
Upon
looking at her photos of this big project, I wrote to her, “Wow, doesn’t that
just make you want to... sew??!”
Reminds
me of when I sewed most of the children’s clothes. As soon as Christmas
was over, I’d pull patterns from my cabinet (I have one of those large metal
cabinets like they have for patterns in big fabric stores – got it when a local
sewing store went out of business)... pull out every piece of fabric that might
possibly work for somebody, in some pattern or another (I scrimped and saved
and combined coordinating fabrics as best I could – I was preparing to become a
bona fide quilter, without even being aware of it! ha)... and then I’d start
cutting. I’d lay the pattern atop each cut outfit and start on the next,
and keep going until everybody’s Easter outfits (and maybe Valentine’s Day
dresses for the girls) were all cut and ready for sewing.
Sometimes
it took me two full days to get all those things cut (and that often included
three-piece suits for the little boys). (By the time they got to be
teenagers, I rarely sewed their suit jackets; we usually bought them at
Burlington Coat Factory.)
Anyway, I
still remember the delight of having everything cut, stacked neatly on the desk
beside my sewing machine, ready to pick up the first thing on the pile and
crank up the trusty old Bernina. I just plain liked that
feeling!
There’s
one more large dresser downstairs that I need to clean off, and then I’ll be
satisfied (mostly) with the state of things down there. One of these
days, I’ll sort through all the bins and boxes and totes my late sister-in-law
Janice gave me a couple of months before she passed away. Loren gave me more after she died, too. I’ve used a few things, such as polyfil,
Steam-A-Seam II, trims, fabric, etc., but it needs to be sorted, and like
things put with like things. Oh, I used up every last spool of her
thread, too.
No, I
didn’t! ---- just discovered a few more spools in the oak cantilevered sewing
box my brother gave me a year ago for Christmas. Here’s the box, there’s
my bookcase, there’s the trim Larry painted – and there is the section of oak
flooring that still needs to be varnished.
The
doilies that Loren put into the box, which Janice had crocheted, are now on the
top shelf of the bookcase, under some sewing-room-appropriate knickknacks – all
of which Janice gave me.
Ladies on
the quilting group have been discussing husbands who have a penchant for
micromanaging them.
I asked
Larry, “Are you going to micromanage me when you retire?”
He opened
his eyes wide and stared at me. “Noooooo!!!” he said. ”I value my life!”
Actually, it’s me, not him, who is
more inclined to be a micromanager. Gotta
learn not to be so critical, one o’ these days.
There have been several inquiries about the HQ16. Too bad I didn’t have half a dozen of them to
sell! But... I don’t want to be like
rancher Kevin Asbury. Do you know that name? Here, this is from the National Public Radio
organization:
For two years, mustachioed and smooth-talking Kevin Ray
Asbury ran a racket that went a little something like this: He lured customers with top-shelf Angus
cattle. They would buy into the herd, or
sell their own for breeding.
The only problem was Asbury kept using the
same cows, telling multiple investors they were theirs. With their money, he moved on up — built a million-dollar
home and drove around in a Mercedes. Everyone in town just thought he was doing
really well – until the scheme cracked.
He was
actually showing investors cattle on other people’s ranches, in order to get
their money!
So, like
I said, I don’t want to be like that, and sell five machines when I only have
one. 😉
A fellow quilter wondered why I hadn’t done a lot of this
Fruit Basket Upset – moving things from downstairs to upstairs – before
Victoria left home.
“’Cuz ze girl
wuz in ze way!” I
responded. “And because I was
satisfied with my rooms downstairs; they were fine, really – although only the
main sewing room was totally finished.”
Victoria
had partially taken over the entire upstairs, once Caleb moved out. She
was using his room as her crafting room.
Then
along came Kurt, and Victoria forgot all about crafting, for a time.
Caleb,
before he was married, had used my little office upstairs for a storage space
for some of his remote-controlled vehicles and airplanes.
Then
along came Maria, and he forgot all about remote-controlled vehicles.
Sooo...
we booted out the kids (they think they went on their own, haha!)... and now I’m
claiming the whole house! Well, most of it, anyway. I got
the upstairs all cleaned, right down to the smallest piece of lint, late last
winter. It’s been waiting... waiting...
waiting... for me to move up there, all this time.
But...
I look up and see Larry’s Cannondale road bike in the living room, not three yards
from where I’m standing, perched in the new Cycleops
Magneto Trainer he just got, so he can ride his bike indoors
when the weather is bad.
I think
the man thinks this is his house, too! ((...gasp...))
Anyway, I’m
glad I didn’t move things until now – because now I have a new Avanté
and frame that everything has to fit around! 😊
Oh! I just discovered that the next box of tea
isn’t Legends of China white tea; it’s Prince of Peace Premium Pu-Erh Tea! This is a dark
tea, as opposed to a very light
tea. I just made a big pot of it – a
little too strong. Easy enough to fix;
just add more hot water. And maybe a
couple of packets of Truvia sweetener.
Wonder what the last two boxes are?
(They’re way downstairs in a box <...gesturing toward the basement stairs...> and I’m way up
here. <...pointing at self...>)
Waaaaaaait.
This stuff doesn’t taste right.
Checking it out...
Okay, now
I’ve discovered that this ‘dark’ tea is called ‘post-fermented’ tea. There is a controversy about it. Some say it’s non-alcoholic; others say it
has trace amounts. I don’t like it. Neither do I want anything with ‘trace
amounts of alcohol’. Therefore... I
shall pitch it.
Yaaay! That means I only have two boxes of tea
left! Wonder what’s in them?
Lydia
sent several adorable pictures of baby Malinda, including one in which the baby was dressed in an adorable cable knit bunny outfit. It's so lovely. It took her quite a while, since she seldom
had more than a few minutes at a time to work on it.
When our
kids were little, I had fabric (some of it donated)... but not many
pennies. If I wanted the children to have new clothes, I had to sew. Good thing I liked
to sew!
One time
I was trying to get a collar just right. Lydia, who was about three years
old, was standing next to me, dolly in arms, silently watching, rocking the
dolly. I sewed a seam... took it out...
redid it... took it out... redid it... sighed...
Lydia looked
at me sympathetically and said, “Mama, do it make you nuts?”
It’s only
2° F this afternoon, with a wind chill of -18°.
Cooooold, cold. The cats are staying all cuddled up in
their Thermabeds.
One of my quilting friends, speaking of her husband (the
‘what they do when they’re retired’ conversation had not yet lagged), wrote, “My
husband likes to be busy. He even goes to the neighbors looking for
something to do.”
Larry
winds up doing stuff at the neighbors’, too – but it’s because they come
here, looking for him. We
have an Applebee’s gift card from one of the neighbors, given in appreciation
of Larry caring for their chickens and goats a couple of weeks ago.
Another
lady wrote, “My husband got in my way after he retired. I made him get a hobby. Now we have sausage coming out of our ears
and I get to quilt!”
Haha I put in my two-cents’ worth, “Oh, you ladies
are making me laugh! Meanwhile, your
husbands are all on their ‘MyWifeMadeMeGetAHobby’ groups telling each other, “
– and now we have quilts coming out of our ears!”
The first lady added, “Our ‘young’ (50-something)
neighbors don’t know how to do much of anything. It seems Dan is fixing
something for them, every time he turns around.”
That can
get old, if favors are expected and not reciprocated. “Ye suffer if a man
take of thee!” We used to have some neighbors who expected me to sew
their holes together, repair their Dark Ages computer and make it work fasssst
online. They were well-to-do, too --- owned several restaurants and
motels around the country, a couple of ranches and other properties, etc. But they didn’t want new clothes, if I could
sew their holes together! Furthermore, I
couldn’t make their computer fasssssst online, since they refused
to pay for anything other than dial-up Internet.
When I
once refused to take six inches off the bottom of a western-cut suit jacket,
the lady went into some odd combination of ‘I’m hurt/insulted/surprised’
snippiness. She’d bought her husband an extra-long --- because it was on
sale. And she’d told the sales woman, “It’ll work! We have a
neighbor lady who can tailor anything.”
(I’d made
the error of showing her the cute little suit I’d made Teddy in a size four –
cut from the suit I’d made Larry when we were both 17 years old.)
Anyway,
this extra-long suit jacket was for her husband --- who stood at 5’ 4”.
You realize, if I’d’ve cut six inches off that thing, there would’ve been
pocket flaps hanging down beyond the suitcoat’s hem? >...snerk...<
Furthermore,
if they paid me at all, they tried to do so with old bits and pieces of sewing
paraphernalia that they’d picked up at old farming auctions. The lady
once gave me a bin full of grosgrain ribbon and elastic that had deteriorated
so badly that when I picked it up, it went to dust right in my hand and caused
Caleb, who has asthma, to have a coughing, sneezing fit. Grrrr.
I was soooo unimpressed.
The next
time the lady was chatting with me, she remarked, “Well, I’d better be going! Got a doctor’s appointment.”
So I said
cheerily, “Okay! See you later; hope everything goes well. Don’t
forget the chicken.”
She
looked blank. “The chicken?”
“Yes,” I
said innocently, “To pay the doctor!”
I waved
and trotted off, trying not to laugh at the look on her face.
She paid
me in money the next time I did some
sewing for her.
Miserly
she was; stupid she was not!
Here’s
Larry, working on the frame for the HQ16.
Hopefully, it will be ready to ship tomorrow.
My
quilting customer and I have the same doctors.
I asked her, “How do you like the way he comes bursting through the
doors of the exam rooms, without bothering to slow down from the clip at which
he was executing his hallway run?”
She
laughed.
I once had
my nose (and hands) in some display on the counter in an exam room – a 3D
heart, maybe – when BOOM!!! – the door flew open, and the doctor dashed
in. I jerked my hands back, put them hastily behind my back, and
exclaimed, “Well, you could at least clear your throat first, or something,
before you roar in like that!”
He
laughed, of course.
One time
Larry and I were at the clinic with a passel of kids. We were all ushered
into an exam room – a large one, in order to contain our tribe. The kids
seated themselves here and there. I was standing near the partially-open
door, not realizing anybody was out there in the hallway at all, reading a
chart on the wall.
“Larry!”
I said, “You’re exactly the right weight!”
((...pause...)) “Are you 7’
4”?”
With
that, the door flew open and Dr. Luckey rushed in, laughing. “Well, are
you?!” he asked Larry.
Yep, we
like our doctors! It’ll be a sad, sad
day, when they retire.
This is
the lightcatcher Hester gave me for my birthday, now hanging in a window in my
new quilting studio. Isn’t it pretty?
,,,>^..^<,,, Sarah Lynn ,,,>^..^<,,,
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