It’s rainy today. Teensy goes outside, comes back in, then
wants up on my lap to warm and dry his wet, muddy little paws. I tell him, “Stay down! Your paws are
all dirty! Yuck! Dirty!!!” – and the silly kitty, with
woebegone mien, retires to the corner, carefully cleans each little foot, then
comes back and tries again. Cats! They’re smarter than we give them credit for.
Somebody just asked
on a birding forum, “How do penguins make the igloos in which they live, there
at the North Pole?”
hahaha
No, she wasn’t kidding; that was clear from
her amazed and incredulous response to the answers she received, a) telling her that penguins, almost all
of which are from the Southern Hemisphere, and none of which are from the North Pole, carry their eggs, and then
their chicks, around on their feet, keeping them warm with a roll of fat from
their stomachs; and b) it was the
Eskimos of the Arctic who made homes of ice.
Her reaction to a): “No, really! I really want to know.”
Her answer to b): “All right, I KNOW your
[sic] pulling my leg with THAT, cuz PEOPLE don’t make ice nests.”
Don’t they teach these things in school
anymore? I learned about penguins,
igloos, and Eskimos in grade school!
Tuesday, I found myself with a dilemma that I’ll
betcha doesn’t happen to very many quilters very often:
The door to my quilting studio wouldn’t
open. The knob, a very old brass one, had failed.
It did that once before, and Larry fixed it. Or so he thought.
I took the knob off... took the brass plate
off... and then the knob on the other side of the door fell off and landed on
the floor, ker-PLUNK, so that I had myself a hole through which I could peep into my
quilting studio.
The hinges were on the inside of the door. I tried using a credit card to pry the
latch, but I couldn’t do it. Larry was
working in Cedar Bluffs, 70 miles away, and wouldn’t be home for many hours.
Soooo... I started a project I’ve been intending
to do for several years now: I began scanning photos from old
albums. Fortunately, in the little office across the landing from my
quilting studio sits my rolltop desk, in which is my printer/scanner. Also
fortunately, the dozens and dozens of bins full of albums and the bookcases and
the hope chest full of albums are not in the quilting studio, so I had
access to them. And fortunately once again, I hadn’t shut my laptop in
the quilting studio. I had coffee, laptop, scanner, and lots of
albums. Well over 350, almost all of them the big albums that hold about
500 photos each.
I wouldn’t run out of things to do, nosiree.
And if my eyes got tired, I could always clean the house. >>...gasp... <<
I also burned seven music CDs for Victoria
that I’d been promising her for a couple of months. But I’d like to know why my newer six-slot
burner was destroying one CD after another!
Four, to be exact. At least my older two-slot burner still worked.
😕
“Whatever will you do about that door?”
worried a couple of my friends.
“Larry will be home soon,” I assured them.
“He’ll make that door open up! He’ll
take a battering ram to it, if all else fails. 🤣”
Much as I would’ve rather been working on the
New York Beauty quilt, I did enjoy scanning
and looking at old pictures (bad photography though they be – my ancestors were
picture-centering challenged, it seems).
The next thing that happened was that
the scanning app I generally use with my computer/scanner was nowhere to be
found. Judging by information I read
online, a recent Windows update has wiped it out. The app I did find
was scanning at too low a resolution. I hunted and searched... searched
and hunted... hunted and searched... and finally found the place where I
could change dpi from 200 to 600. Much bettah.
Here’s a picture of me playing the piano at
about age 14, and another of me amongst the gnarled trees of Berthoud Pass,
elevation 11,306 feet.
By the time Larry got home, it was around
9:00 p.m. He pried
the doorjamb loose, and then used a tool to push the latch back inside the
door. He fixed the knob and put everything back together, including the
brass door plates that Victoria & Friends slopped paint on when they
painted her room, back when it was her room. One of
these days, I’ll hunt up some paint stripper and clean those things up.
One of these days.
Larry announced that I could quilt again.
But I was deeply involved in scanning those old pictures! I’m not fond of
interrupting one project for another. I would get back to the quilt the
next day, after finishing that one album.
Only one. That means there are still over 350 albums to go.
Ah, well. One less is... one less! I scanned
a picture of a friend when she was a little girl, standing with her late mother
in front of our church, then gave her the original. She was pleased to get it; she doesn’t recall
ever seeing it before.
Larry also set up my folding table for me. It’s a heavy-duty thing, and hard for me to
open. The legs are getting easier to open and extend the more I use it, though.
Wednesday
I got the beaded piping and the binding sewn onto the New York Beauty quilt,
and began stitching the binding down on the back. I hand-stitched it, for the first time in a
long time, as it would be a little too messy trying to ‘stitch in the ditch’
next to those beads whilst catching a mere 1/32 of an inch of the binding on
the back, as I usually do. There were
468 inches of linear stitching to do.
As
usual, Tiger and Teensy slept through it all in their cozy Thermabeds under my
quilting frame – big ol’ Tiger in the smaller bed, and the smaller Teensy in
the bigger bed. I have no idea how they came to this agreement.
“Those cats look sooo lifelike,” wrote a
quilting friend, tongue in cheek, when I posted these pictures.
Ha! Every now and then I stop what I’m
doing and stare at them for a moment or two to see if they’re still
breathing. 😅
And then they, subconsciously registering my
halt in activity, stop breathing momentarily, the better to hear what’s
happening (or not happening, as the case may be).
I
like these early days of spring, when we don’t have to cope with mosquitoes
outside. A few spiders have shown up
here and there now. Spiders and their
webs don’t bother me, unless a web gets wrapped around my head and a spider the
size of a Buick swoops in for the kill.
A friend mentioned that she
is troubled by gnats when out hiking in the woods – but if she stands next to a
large, intricate spiderweb, whataya know, no more gnats.
That gave me an idea for an invention: spiderweb netting to go around decks, porches,
patios... I could Get Rich Quick!
Or maybe just sell big barn spiders.
The DIY method. Or the DIYSI
method. (Do It Yourself, Spiders Included)
How would one work up a clientele base, I
wonder?
Larry usually has quite a
problem with allergies, but this spring, even though tree pollen has been high
for several weeks, he hasn’t had any symptoms at all. We think it’s because he
had all those bad teeth removed, and the abscesses have all cleared up and gone
away.
Thursday morning, I put my
big, new pot of impatiens back outside (there had been a freeze warning the
previous night), watered it, and then headed back upstairs to continue working
on the quilt binding.
When I quit for the night, there was only
half a quilt side to go.
I worked in the yard Friday morning; it was
the first time it had been nice enough
to work out there all week (unless I wanted to wear a coat and earmuffs, which
I didn’t). I usually go out with a
sweater on, but after five minutes of yardwork, it’s too hot for a
sweater. Tree pollen was still high. When I work outside in the
flower gardens, I take along a pocketful of Kleenexes. 🤧 By
early afternoon, it was up to 66°.
The Schwan man came,
and now the freezer is full again with yummy things.
I finished the binding on the quilt and began sewing on the pearls. The pearls on the outer edge of the scallop
are 3mm, and the one in the center is 4mm. The pearls are plastic. I debated between plastic and glass, then
chose plastic because a) they weigh
less, and b) they cost less. There aren’t quite as many pearls on the lace as I’d planned,
because when I put the larger 4mm pearls in those little loops on the lace, it
somehow made it look like a gargoyle’s face to me. There are 185 pearls on each block. There are 40 blocks, counting the four that
make up the pillow shams. So there will
be only 7,400 pearls instead of the 9,040 I’d thought. There are 6,660 on the quilt alone. It took me three hours to complete one block.
Somebody
wrote to me, “I notice you are using a dish and a piece of fur for your pearls?
I have found sticking beads/pearls to a
piece of 2” packing tape works great. Just
pin to the quilt as you work and pick the pearls off with your needle.”
I
thought, Fur? Huh? I looked back at my pictures, and realized, Oh! She’s
talking about the picture of the cat that’s hand-painted on the little china
dish! haha
I’ve
seen that recommendation of tape to hold beads and pearls; but I had to use
something cute for the photo, you know! 😉 Maybe I’ll switch to tape, if I spill the pearls.
Heh
I
thanked the lady for the suggestion (I am
pleased when people offer me tips and tricks, after all), and then I took
another photo, so those who thought there was fur in the dish could see what it
really was.
When my hands need a short rest from all this
beadwork, there are plenty of things to see from the windows of my quilting
studio. A little ways east of us, someone
is building a new house. One day a truck
pulling a side-dump trailer hauled 7 or 8 loads of sand to the site. It must not have been quite enough, because a
smaller orange dump truck brought more sand Friday afternoon.
To the north, a farmer is planting his
cornfield. Toward the northwest, a
neighbor man was putting gravel on our lane, and white rock on his drive.
Saturday, I got the pearls put on three
blocks. It took seven hours – 2 hours
and 20 minutes per block. I’m getting
faster! There are 36 blocks to go. At 2 hours and 20 minutes per block, I have
84 hours of pearl-sewing to go. Maybe I
can speed up even more?
A quilting friend wondered how long it took me
to count the 185 pearls in a block, and how many times I lost count and had to
start over. 😅
Like this:
I counted the beads on one scallop... then counted how many scallops in
the block. There are slightly more than 20 scallops per block, and 9
beads per scallop. That ‘slightly more’ scallop calls for 5 more
beads. Ergo, 185 beads per block.
Remember that Mosaic Lighthouse quilt I made back
in 2015? The one with 19,200 half-inch
squares in it? Well, some woman, upon
reading the number of squares, announced that she didn’t believe anyone could
really count that many squares without losing track.
Didn’t they teach basic geometry and multiplication where that woman
went to school?
Here’s all one needs to know, to figure out the number of squares in that
quilt: the mosaic part of the quilt
measures 60” x 80”. That’s 4,800 square
inches. There are four half-inch squares
in each square inch. That makes 19,200
half-inch squares. Sigghhhh...
Here is one of the flower gardens I’ve been
working on. Lilies, tall lavender phlox,
hostas, tiger lilies, rhododendrons, D’Oro Lilies, Autumn Joy sedum, and irises
are coming up. I need to put another
layer of bricks atop the first.
Aarrgghh, the squirrels are
really busy in the rafters of the dormer again!
They barely pause their construction and deconstruction and remodeling
even when I pound on wall and ceiling directly under their feet. Time to buy more bug bombs and then, once
they’ve fled the premises, block their route back in. Again.
Destructive little things, they are!
Kurt and Victoria invited us to their house last night after
church. They had crackers, cheese, and
meat, and we contributed potato salad.
Kurt made lattes, and Carolyn
was happily offering us pieces of this and that. 😊
I worked outside for about
an hour this morning before deciding I’d been splatted with enough raindrops. It was chilly and breezy – 50°, with winds
gusting at 32 mph. It didn’t really seem
that windy. After pulling out a
wheelbarrow-load of grass that was growing amongst the irises, I swept the back
deck, threw away some shingles that had been blown off the roof, and then tried
out the non-motorized reel mower I found under the deck, since it looked like
it was just my size. Plus, it’s
non-noisy and non-smelly; I like that part.
Mainly what it did was
smoosh down the crabgrass I rolled it over. Maybe the grass was too tall and too damp for
it to cope with. Oh, well. The smooshed crabgrass looked better than the upright
crabgrass had done.
There’s a squirrel feasting on the sunflower
seeds. I keep scaring him away... he keeps returning.
A white-crowned sparrow is in the lilac bush, singing away. Yesterday, I heard a yellow-rumped warbler,
but never saw it.
Brown thrashers have been
eating from the suet feeder, and now there’s one in the cedar tree out front
warbling like the prima donna in a commedia dell’arte.
Several years ago, upon
reflecting on the similarities between the brown thrasher’s and the Northern mockingbird’s
songs, I did a bit of research to determine what family those birds are in. Lo and behold, just as I’d begun to suspect,
they are both in a group of New World passerine birds from the Mimidae family,
as are catbirds and 15 other species of mockingbirds. The Northern mockingbird is the only
mockingbird commonly found in North America.
The last load of clothes is
in the dryer. Tomorrow morning, it’ll probably be too cold and rainy to work
outside. So... I’ll attach pearls to the New York Beauty
quilt. Unless I get locked in my bedroom, or something. 😅
,,,>^..^<,,, Sarah Lynn ,,,>^..^<,,,
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