Journal: Rugs, Skirts, and a Mother's Day Cold

I’ve been noticing lately that it must be the style to have every other fingernail painted and decorated differently.  What this means is, I am in style!  My fingernails go like this:  short, long, crooked, short, long.

Loren and Norma are working on cleaning things out of Norma’s house.  Big job!  They’re giving things away to children and grandchildren – things that they’d given Loren or Norma in the first place, or things they might need.  As soon as things are fairly well sorted, they’ll call in the troops, and scores of able-bodied offspring will haul everything out and take things to their various destinations.

I woke up with a bad cold Tuesday, and it’s still hanging on.  So much for that flu shot we had to get three weeks ago; whatever I have must not be the particular strain that the flu shot was supposed to protect against.  It was so nice out, I should’ve been working in the flower gardens; but flower-garden work didn’t sound like any fun at all.  😒😕

Since I made my Facebook page public, in order to promote my quilting business, I get some oddball comments at times.  The other day, someone sent me this Private Message:

“Please post.”

?

I wonder what she wants me to post?  I thought about writing back, “Please send me details of make, model, and year, and I’ll post right away to Craigslist, eBay, and our local paper.  Thanks for requesting my services.  I charge $150/hr.  Invoice to follow.”

I’ve been posting, for crying out loud.  I’ve posted scenery shots, bird photos, rug pictures, quilt photos, skirt photos... 

Yes, rug pictures.  While I await a quilt from one of my customers, not wanting to tie up the quilting frame with the Americana Eagle quilt on which I plan to do time-consuming custom quilting, I’ve been cutting 2” x 3” rectangles of double knits for rag-shag rugs.  Tuesday I cut approximately seven yards of grays, burgundies, reds, and blues into rectangles, and Wednesday I cut a couple of yards of blues and creams.  That’s enough for at least two good-sized rugs.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been seven years since I made rag-shag rugs for our two oldest grandchildren.  Those rugs are still wearing well – they’d probably survive forever, if the thread was made of Crypton.  Here are those rugs:  Aaron’s and Joanna’s

Crypton, by the way, has nothing to do with Superman’s ‘Krypton’.  Rather, it’s a high-performance, durable fabric.  (So far as I know, they don’t make Crypton thread.  Yet.)

Hester wrote Thursday afternoon to say that Baby Keira was doing good.  Her doctors had put her back on the respirator for another week or so, as she was having to work too hard without it.  They would just concentrate on helping her grow for a bit.

This was not unexpected, and not considered an emergency.  She’s tolerating her feedings well.

Crabapple blossoms

Someone save me!  I’ve had an episode of ‘mustn’t waste this, gotta use this’, just like I always have when I’m plowing my way through double knits and come upon a couple of pieces of suit-quality knits.  One is navy with a herringbone pattern to the weave, the other is cream with little white nubs woven in, so it looks like raw linen.  And, though I tried hard not to, I thought, These pieces would make really nice skirts, and I need new cream and navy skirts.

And then, entirely without my permission, my feet took me to my pattern file (I have one of those deep metal files like they use in fabric stores, with three wide drawers), and several skirt patterns just seemed to jump into my hands.

The pattern was soon out of the envelope and spreading itself all over the fabric.  Aarrrgghh!!!  I’ve fallen off the wagon!

And the siren song with its dulcet tones trills on, sultry and alluring...

Soon I’ll be attending a meeting, standing and announcing, “My name is Sarah Lynn; I’m a seamstress and I like to sew.”

By evening, one skirt was done, with one more to go.  Two bins were full of rectangular pieces for rugs.  I took some time out for a supper of fresh corn on the cob, grapefruit, and cookies.

“Was that ALL you had for supper, Sarah Lynn?” asked a friend.  “I hope not!” to which I retorted, “Said the lady who once told us she had two different kinds of cake for supper!  Ha!”  

I cooked enough corn on the cob, we could’ve had three large roasting ears apiece, but we were both full after only two.  Next, a big, juicy red grapefruit… then a couple of German shortbread cookies… and we topped it all off with a Schwan’s Signature bar (Schwan’s vanilla ice cream with caramel drizzled through it, with a chocolate coating).  That was more than enough.  We both watch our weight – Larry, because if he keeps his weight down, he doesn’t have to take blood pressure medication; and me, because if I keep my weight down, arthritic joints don’t protest so loudly on my many treks up and down the stairs of our multi-storied house.  Those Schwan’s bars were rare treats for us.  Our diet is heavy on the vegetables and fruit.

Once supper was over, I finished skirt #2 and cut the leftovers into pieces for the rag-shag rugs.  I found some fabric that will work for rug backs in my bins downstairs – it’s a fairly heavy, tightly woven gabardine in medium gray.  I have a jar of some sort of rubbery stuff to paint on the back to make the run non-slip.  I was ready to start!

“Wish you lived closer,” wrote a friend from Canada.  “I have a full cupboard (floor to ceiling) of garment fabric that will need to find a new home.  I pulled out at least a dozen different fabrics that would make great skirts, etc.”

The lady lives in Ontario.  I could hunt around online for, oh, say, a tractor or scissor lift or loader or ditch-witch in her neighborhood, show it to Larry every time he’s about to fall asleep (so that he subliminally thinks he thought of it himself)... and it wouldn’t hurt to talk about the British Columbian Rockies (which, I suspect, he believes run east and west, all across the provinces) ------ and then when we get to the location of the hunk of motorized metal whatever-it-is, I can point, “Oh, look, look!  There’s Aubree’s house (name changed to keep all and sundry from arriving on her doorstep), and she has fabric!”

Good plan?

Amongst the double knits, I found a wide navy and white stripe knit that would make the perfect nautical top to go with the navy skirt.  I even found a pattern for it, too.  Wouldn’t that look fetching for our 4^th of July picnic?

In sewing these two skirts, I once again marveled over the wonderful job my serger does with knits, whether single or double.  What I wouldn’t have given to have had a serger, back in the days of making my own knit clothes, in the 70s and early 80s!  And again when I made so many, many children’s clothes, all through the 80s and 90s.

Someone asked if shag rugs of double knit are comfortable to stand on.  Yes, they’re nice on the feet; but if you really want soft and cozy, make them out of T-shirt knits.  The thing is, I don’t have T-shirt knits – but I have several large boxes of double knits.  Sooo... double knits it is.

I spent all of Friday and Saturday sewing the rag-shag rugs, with a few breaks to sweep, vacuum, and wash dishes and clothes.

The orioles made short work of the suet, and I trotted outside to refill the wire frame and pour sunflower seeds into the feeder.  The orioles are not only brilliant, they also sing like opera warblers! 

If the birds knew how many times I’ve cut up an orange with the noble purpose of nailing it to a tree out back ---- and then snarfed it down myself, they’d congregate in giant flocks and attack me the next time I head out to my flower gardens.  😆

Maybe the solution for this would be to buy more oranges?

Do you know, I haven’t seen a single butterfly yet this year?  But the moths are back, yes indeedy.  A couple of nights ago, I saw several white satin moths.  Should’ve grabbed my camera, but I was too lazy.  Oh, haha --- I looked for a picture of one online, and came up with a couple ...... on my very own blog, circa 2015.  heh heh

In the yard, the fruit trees are in bloom, the daffodils and tulips are blossoming, and there are big buds on the iris stems.

The bunnies still haven’t a brain in their heads, and lollipy-lop through our yard regardless of fierce cats lurking way too close for comfort.  I suspect they’re making their nests right in the Danger Zone, too.

Teensy does his best to look innocent, but believe me, he’s not.

Here’s the start of a rag-shag rug.  More rug shots here.

I posted pictures from the yard here:  Bunnies, a Cat, and Blossoms

Dorcas wrote to say, “I just mailed your card this morning so it’s going to be late 😳 but Happy Mother’s Day!!!”

“Thank you!” I replied.  “I’ll hang onto my title as ‘Mother’ until the card gets here, so it’ll still be applicable.  😃”

This Mother's Day is the first for both Hester and for Victoria.

The ruffled daffodils are in bloom.  I like ruffly stuff.  I used to have hundreds and hundreds of ruffled and multi-colored tulips ----- but I made the grave error of interspersing them amongst the daylilies, and learned only after the majority of them had expired and vanished that daylily rhizomes put off a chemical that works almost like battery acid on tulip bulbs. 

At least I took pictures, when the tulips were in bloom.  Didn’t get many of the ruffled ones, though. 

As I work on this rag-shag rug, sewing pieces onto the ecru gabardine I found, I’m thinking, Wow, what a waste of this perfectly good gabardine.  I could’ve made a really nice suit out of it.

And I could certainly use a new ecru skirt...  Well, maybe there’ll be enough leftover fabric for a fitted skirt.  If so, I’ll do it up good, with topstitched seams, pockets, belt loops, and a pleated back vent.  I have the perfect pattern for it... 

Saturday afternoon, Larry bought a pretty silver frame at Hobby Lobby.  I printed one of our favorite pictures of Loren and Norma, taken at their wedding, put it into the frame, and that was Norma’s Mother's Day gift.

By bedtime, the rag-shag rug measured about 23" x 26"; so it was about a third done.  More photos here.

Birds were busy at our feeders yesterday:  downy woodpeckers, English sparrows, goldfinches, cardinals, brown thrashers, red-winged blackbirds, common grackles, house wrens, blue jays...  and on the ground, gleaning the fallout, were the mourning doves, Eurasian collared doves, song sparrows, dark-eyed juncos, white-crowned sparrows...  The latter two will be moving on north very shortly, I’m sure.

I didn’t get over this nasty cold enough to go to church, so I didn’t get to wear my Mother’s Day corsage, waa waa waa.  Bobby asked Larry why he didn’t wear the corsage, as a stand-in for me.  hee hee

I decided to wear the corsage anyway.  I can wear it at home, too, right??  I don’t have to just wear it to church, do I???!

I pinned it on.

Then I decided to take a selfie (hard to do, with a big ol’ honkin’ Canon EOS Rebel T5i, heh.  But ah done it!  A little crooked and a little off-center, but ah done it.

When Teddy was a baby, I looked down at him (sitting on my lap) in the middle of the church service to discover him making a terrible face, like this, sorta (no, that’s not him):

I removed a few petals from his mouth and whispered in his ear, “Leave my flower alone.”  And he did, though he glanced at the tempting thing rather wide-eyed a few times.

Remember the woman who sent me the Private Message, “Please post”?  Look what she wrote under the pictures of the rag rug I’m making:  “How too would help”  (Her keyboard, in addition to being impolite, must have no punctuation marks.  Pluss, it misspeels thangs.)

I replied with my standard, “?”

Yes, I realize she’s asking for a tutorial.  But those ‘toos’ instead of ‘tos’ always boggle my brain for a moment or two.  I could respond, “Say pleeeeeeeeeeze!  And then I’ll think about it.  But only if you learn the difference between ‘too’ and ‘to’.”

You know, punctuation (or the lack thereof) and misspellings don’t bother me, when they’re not mingled with rudeness.  Much.

Hannah made me a pretty little plaque of laser-cut wood on which she used pastel chalks and affixed quilled flowers......  here, I’ll just go take a picture of it.

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Okay, I’m back.  Did you miss me?  Here it is:  à

Last night Hester sent a picture, writing, “Keira loves her bathtime. 👶🏻 ”

“Her eyes are looking brighter!” I replied, “And the respirator is off!”

And this time they removed the little piece that they’d attached to her nose to hold the tube in place, because they don’t expect she’ll need it again.

“She’s definitely getting much more alert,” answered Hester.  “She’s 3 lbs., 1 oz., tonight.”

“That’s so good to hear,” I responded.  “Every little ounce makes a difference!”

Then I added, “It’s your first Mother’s Day!  By next year, you should have a bouncing baby just about ready to trot around the house.”

“Seems like a long time away right now, but probably will go by too fast,” she agreed.

When Hester was about 1 ½, she had a sad-sounding little question she asked every time we got ready to head out the door and go somewhere.  I asked her to repeat it... again... and again... and then I finally said, “I’m sorry, Mama doesn’t know what you’re saying!”

“Hestuh doesn’t, eezer,” she replied sadly.

I kept hoping she’d learn to say it clearly, but she stopped saying it before I figured it out.

A friend wrote to say that her family gave her some bird feeders for Mother's Day.  She wanted tips on getting birds to the feeders.

Since others have asked the same question, I’ll add my answer to this letter:

Get black oil sunflower seeds, not the harder striped seeds, unless you want only big birds – Brewer’s blackbirds, common grackle, blue jays.  The black oil sunflower seeds have softer shells, and all the different types of finches, sparrows, juncos, buntings, cardinals, etc., will be able to crack open the hulls to get to the seeds.  Of course the bigger birds will love them, too.

Get Nyjer seed for your finch feeders, not the cheaper mixtures that have a whole lot of millet for filler.  People think they’re getting by without so much expense, and they think the birds like those mixtures ---- but if they’d watch with binoculars while the birds eat (or check the ground carefully), they’d see all those birds clearing out most of that millet (little round yellow seeds) and whisking it away to the ground in order to get to the few preferred seeds in the mix.  If you don’t have a finch feeder (the kind with perches in front of the portals), you can get ‘socks’ filled with Nyjer seed; the little birds will cling to them and pluck the seeds through the wide weave of the fabric.

Peach blossoms

I found a value pack of suet for my wire suet feeder that many birds (orioles, downy and hairy woodpeckers, cardinals, blue jays, sparrows, grackles) love:  High Energy Suet

I even have pictures of a young robin trying his bestest to hover long enough to grab chunks of that suet.  His feet were all akimbo, wings flapping like crazy... so funny.  His mother stood on the deck rail and watched him, obviously thinking, Where did I go wrong?!  That dumb kid.  Worms!!  We were built for worms!!!

Cut oranges in half, smear a bit of jelly on them, and nail them high on a tree trunk, and orioles will love you so much, they’ll probably nest in your hair------- er, yard.  You can get oriole feeders and hummingbird feeders, too.  We only have hummingbirds as they’re migrating through; they don’t nest here.  But they adore my lilacs in the springtime and hosta blossoms in the fall.  For my feeders, I mix one cup of sugar to four cups of water, boil it, cool it, pour some in the feeder, and refrigerator the rest.  In warm weather, change the concoction every two or three days.

If you want bluebirds, chickadees, wrens, warblers ---- those birds with the smaller, thinner beaks ---- get a hanging tray and fill it with dried mealworms.  (Don’t do what I did once and just put a tray on a deck table; I discovered that, after the sun went down, the opossums and the skunks and the raccoons come gleefully waddling all the way up an entire flight of steps to get to deck!  Well, go ahead and do it, I guess, if you like spending money on dried mealworms and getting really cute pictures of opossums and skunks and raccoons on your deck table.  heh)

Okay, that’s a long enough thesis for now.  😉

And now the woman with the rude keyboard posts this:

“Trying to re enter my Facebook acct with the 6 digit code . Help please”

What I want to know is, how did she post that, if she wasn’t signed in?  She also sent me, via Private Message, a cartoon of Goofy, the Walt Disney dog.  The caption was in Swahili, I think.  Or Flemish.  How would I know?  I’m an Englishman.

She couldn’t have done those things if she wasn’t signed in.

I’d unfriend her, but I’d miss out on all this entertainment.

Victoria suggested, “I bet she’s trying to sign in from a different device.  That’s normally when they ask you for the two-way verification.  She could be signed on the computer or her phone, and trying to sign in on the other.  I don’t know. 😆”

Well, but... am I supposed to know her verification code???  I could write, “Please send me your bank account number, and I’ll send you a verification code posthaste.”

Oh!!!  I just discovered that she has three different Facebook pages – and she’s posting things – different things – on all three, and furthermore, all three of her are in my Friends list!  My Friends list is so large, I hadn’t even noticed.  Maybe she’s identical triplets (same face, same family, same location, same stats), and her mother named all three the same name so no one could ever accuse her of mixing them up?

Or maybe the woman makes herself a new page each time she can’t get signed in.

Well, I can’t ‘unfriend’ her now.  This could be as good as a soap opera.

Hannah is doing better, though that everlasting headache still bothers her.  There is still a vibration in her sinuses – “particularly when anything is in the key of F,” she wrote, which made me laugh.  (She shouldn’t write funny things, if she doesn’t want to tickle my funnybone.  I sympathize; really, I do; but that was funny.)

This reminded me of the time I knew something was wrong with my cute little Renault Le Car, back when I was a teenager.  Daddy, after peering under the hood, was so proud of me for knowing something was the matter (a vacuum hose had come loose), thinking I was turning out to be a good mechanic, just like he was. 

“How did you know something was the matter?” he asked.

“Because at 65 mph, the motor was humming a B flat instead of a B natural,” I told him.

He clapped a hand to his forehead.  “She’s just musical, not mechanical,” he moaned. 😃

Today I put my corsage in a little blue speckled metal enameled cup, filled it with water, and set it in the middle of the table, which is what I do with my corsage each year.  Or least, that’s what I’ve done in recent years.  No more of this carefully putting it back in its box and then into the refrigerator, in order to save it and wear it again to the next church service. 

Did I ever remember?? 

Not once. 

But when it’s here on the table beside my laptop, I can look at it, smell the flowers, and enjoy it for several more days.

I opened pretty cards some of the girls sent home with Larry last night, and found some money from Lydia, along with a note ordering me to buy something that I did not need, but that I wanted.  I wrote her a thank-you note and asked, “What if they’re one and the same thing – something I both need and want???”

I pondered... and suddenly I knew what I wanted to get (and I don’t really need them):

Boots.  Dress boots, to be precise.

I’ve especially wanted some ever since the last funeral we attended, when we had to walk through snow to get to the gravesite, and I had my black Sorels – perfectly good boots in their right, lined, warm, and non-skid -------- but I felt like a draggletailed tatterdemalion of a ragamuffin next to a slim little friend of ours in her dainty heeled boots.

I whispered as much to Victoria, who was on my other side, and she hissed back, “Well, at least they’re not yellow!!!”

You know, you really AREN’T supposed to cackle right in the middle of a graveside service.

“Hush!” I remonstrated, trying desperately to keep a straight face.

Okay, the boots are ordered.

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Now I need a new brown leather coat.

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