Journal: Quilt Show, Quilt Shop, & A Kaput AC

 

Here’s a picture someone took near Mullen, Nebraska, last Tuesday.  See the little dust swirl there on the hilltop?  That funnel cloud has made touchdown!

Mullen is 215 miles to our west.

One evening Victoria was sending me pictures of the children from various jaunts they were on that day.  “Willie thought Dollar General was ‘Dollar Dinner Roll’,” she wrote.  😄

That reminded me of a video clip I saw the other day wherein some children were helping their mother clean the house.  They live in the deep South, and they have the appropriate far southern drawl to prove it.

The oldest child, a cute little boy of about 6, announced to his mother after picking up a few toys in the living room and putting them away, “Now ah’ve got the entar livin’ room clean; it’s yoooour turn ta do a bit o’ cleanin’.”

“Me?!” says his mother, feigning surprise.  “What’ve ah got to clean?”

“Yer clozzit,” says Denny.  “It looks lahk a messy Dollah Gen’ral in thar.”

Tuesday by 9:45 a.m. it was already quite warm outside, on its way up to 89°.  The next three days would be nice, though, especially in the morning.  “Somebody boot me out the door and make me deal with the weeds!” I said to my online quilt group.

They are all too courteous to issue orders, though.  If anyone was going to order me around, it would have to be me, myself.

Here is the variety of greens I purchased from Marshall Dry Goods.  All are a lovely quality.  As I mentioned before, green is not my favorite color.  But aren’t these pretty?

I’m still listening to ‘The Civil War’ by Shelby Foote.  I’ve made it to Volume 2, Part 6.  Each Part is five or six hours of narration, though I generally increase playback speed to 1.25x.  Here’s a description of some of the roads various companies and brigades were attempting to traverse:  “Not quite firm enough for wagons, or wet enough for boats.”

This is Capt. George A. Custer of the 5^th Cavalry (on the right) with Lt. Washington (left), a prisoner and former classmate.  [Photo colorization by Sanna Dullaway for TIME; Original image: Library of Congress]

Did you know that the American Civil War was the deadliest war in U.S. history, by far?  Lasting from 1861 to 1865, it resulted in an estimated 750,000 deaths, possibly as high as 850,000, according to historians at Statista.  This is significantly more than any other American war, including World War II, which had about  405,399 U.S. deaths.  The Civil War’s high death toll was due to various factors, including the introduction of new weapons, outdated tactics, and the prevalence of disease.  The Minié ball, a muzzle-loading bullet with a hollow base, was highly destructive due to its unique design and the rifled muskets it was fired from, which significantly increased its range, accuracy, and lethality compared to previous firearms.

The Minié ball was made of soft lead and was slightly smaller than the barrel diameter, allowing it to be easily loaded and then expand upon firing to grip the rifling.  Upon impact, the soft lead flattened and fragmented, causing extensive tissue damage and bone splintering.  This resulted in severe and often fatal injuries.

The nature of the wounds caused by Minié balls, with their tendency to shatter bones, often necessitated amputation.  The medical knowledge and techniques of the time were not equipped to handle the severity of these injuries, contributing to high mortality rates.

Some of the descriptions of the terrible bloodshed in the Civil War are horrifying.

If anybody thinks the unrest in this land that we love – including riots, news that we cannot trust, and character besmirching from either side of the aisle – is very much worse or different than it used to be, they should by all means read The Civil War: A Narrative, a three-volume, 2,968-page, 1.2 million-word history of the American Civil War by Shelby Dade Foote, Jr.  Mr. Foote spent 20 years carefully collecting and documenting the data for his book.

Wars are awful for all people, no matter on which side of the battlelines they stand.  There were many good people on either side of the country, and brother often fought against brother.  That’s terribly sad.

Late Tuesday afternoon, I finished putting together the ‘All Creatures Great & Small’ quilt top.  It measures 95” x 96”. 

I then filled out online entries with Nebraska State Fair for three quilts I will enter, which is the maximum allowed per person.  I decided on the three that the judges here at the County Fair liked best. 

After supper, I unfolded the fabric I’d gotten for backing, preparing to cut and sew the necessary lengths together, press it, and then load it on my quilting frame.  I had purchased two pieces – six yards the first time, and another two later after designing the quilt and realizing it was going to be bigger than first planned.

The two-yard piece was fine.  But the six-yard piece had flaws throughout the fabric.  Some looked like spilled dye, both dark red and yellow; others looked like black permanent marker.  The marker seemed to be pointing out an area along the edge of the fabric where the print was all warped.  It looked to be either the start or the end of a bolt.

Of course I find such things right the exact moment I wish to use the fabric.  Siggghhhh.

I stared at it long and hard, but it refused to go away.  I took pictures of it and sent them along with a complaint to Marshall Dry Goods.

Reluctantly deciding that it didn’t really show too awfully much on that busy fabric, I cut it and sewed lengths together, positioning the flaws where they might possibly, hopefully, wind up being trimmed off after quilting was done.  That wasn’t possible with many of the marks, though.  I then pressed the seams and loaded it on my quilting frame. 

Larry helped me put a new giant roll of batting on the bar under my frame.  I unrolled enough for this quilt, cut it, put it in place, and followed it with the quilt top.  I unrolled the pantograph, this one called ‘Bears, Moose, and Pine Trees’, and taped it in place on the quilting table.  I was ready to quilt – and it was bedtime.

I was nearly to the halfway point a day later when I received a message from Marshall Dry Goods:  “I am sending you another piece.”

Now, why didn’t I just start the next quilt and wait for this answer?!  They’re always good at answering and correcting any problems; I know this.  I repeat myself, but Siggghhh.

Ah, well.  I will use the fabric on another quilt.

I wrote a sincere thank-you note and carried on.

It was after midnight when I went out to get the bird feeders that night.  Raccoons were already there – a mother, and a quite small baby.  The mother promptly went scrambling down the triangular metal stand to the ground, one story down, tumbling part of the way, judging by the racket she made.  Her baby ran along the deck to go after her, but was afraid to try climbing down that metal frame.  He clambered in and out of the wooden railing on the deck, chirring louder, louder, LOUDER, until, with a whole lot more scrambling, the mother came back up the frame.  There was her cute face, peering at me anxiously between the spindles of the railing.

She came right back into the Danger Zone for her frightened, chirring baby.

I stood perfectly still at the door and just watched, so as not to further scare the baby and perhaps make him fall.  Somehow, the mother got her cub down, but whether she carried him (they’ll sometimes carry a baby in their mouths, like a mother cat does; but this baby was pretty big for her to do that and cope with getting down that triangular frame at the same time) or he followed her, I could not tell, as they were soon below the deck, and it was very dark outside.

Half a minute later, I heard them go rustling off through the grass after a safe descent.

No working in the flower gardens Wednesday morning, as everything was dripping wet from overnight rains.  I refilled the bird feeders, watered the indoor plants, and blow-dried and curled my hair while sipping Irish Crème Cold Brew.  Soon I was heading upstairs to my quilting studio, where I quilted until time to get ready for our midweek church service.

Thursday dawned very nice, only 62° when I went outside at 8:45 a.m.  It was just 67° by 11:00 a.m., and 70° would be the high.  Mosquitoes carried me off twice, but they let me go when they discovered I’d doused myself with repellent, and I made my way back home again.

I spent a couple of hours out there, and got two large gardens weeded.  

The Asiatic Dayflowers, aka ‘Mouse Ears’ for obvious reasons, are blooming.  These are Nebraska wildflowers.  When they’re blooming in my yard, that means I haven’t been weeding enough!  But isn’t this teeny tiny flower pretty?  It’s no bigger than my thumbnail.  I take pictures... and then pull them.

Some of the hostas don’t get enough shade, and the leaves get sunburnt, even when they get plenty of rain or water from the sprinkler.

I thought the Tall Lavender Phlox got beat to pieces a couple of nights earlier in a hard, pounding rain.  Instead, there were more blooms than ever.

I was working away when I realized that the loud noises I was hearing were coming from the air conditioning unit at the side of the house.  I went to look at it, which didn’t do any more good than looking at the marks on that fabric had done.

Thinking maybe the fan had hit a trumpet vine that had worked its way inside the casing, I peered underneath and behind it, but found nothing that might be causing the trouble.

At one point, the air conditioner sounded quite a lot like it was about to blow up; then it calmed down and seemed to recover.

When I went inside, I found that the AC was frozen up and barely blowing, so I turned the compressor off and the fan on.  After it started blowing better, I turned the compressor back on.  Once again, it didn’t sound very good.  I wondered if the fan could be hitting ice or frost inside the unit.  A few more minutes, and it sounded okay again, and it was blowing and cooling all right, sorta, kinda.

I heard the cicadas a couple of nights ago, one of the first times to hear them this year.  Cicadas, like most insects, have three primitive eyes or ocelli as well as the two large compound eyes.  The ocelli are sensitive to light and in conjunction with the compound eyes, they provide the insect with two distinct types of vision.

Pantographs don’t take as long as custom quilting, but the one I’m using on Nathanael’s quilt is an intense one, and I can’t go very fast, as there’s a lot of small detail.  Each row takes 36 minutes; I timed it.  Usually I can’t quilt continuously for 36 minutes; I have to take a minute or two break now and then for back, neck, hands, wrists, knees, and feet to regroup.  And then, to add insult to injury, my smart-alec watch vibrates, “Sitting too long, you potato you!  Move your carcass!”  Or something like that.

After four hours of quilting Wednesday and another four Thursday, I hit the halfway point.  I used a light tan thread that I hoped would show up nicely, but not be too ‘loud’, whether on the cream-colored fabric or on the printed animal pictures.  I’m pleased with how it shows up.

The lights flickered periodically that day.  I didn’t pay much attention, as that happens now and then – until my bobbin winder slowed down when I was winding a bobbin, at the same time the lights flickered.

Some time after midnight, I noticed that hardly any air was coming out of the vents, although I had turned off the compressor, leaving on only the fan, hours earlier.  

“Does it need a new filter?” I asked Larry.

It did not, but Larry put one in anyway in the morning, just in case.  It didn’t help.

Also, the electricity flow was not stable.  Various fans slowed down at random, then sped back up to normal.

I called the electric company and reported the issue.  We had something similar happen a year or more ago, and the culprit was a failing transformer out beside the old highway.  That time, too, it kept the air conditioner from working properly, and it also messed with the oven.

Linesmen arrived before long and checked voltage from the meter out to the road, then came to the door to report that all was well on their end.  They recommended calling an electrician.

Larry checked the voltage at the fuse box when he got home from work.  It was fine.

For supper that evening, we had spaghetti and meatballs, pepper jack cheese and pretzel FlipSides crackers, peach yogurt, and cran-grape juice.

That night, I finished the quilting of ‘All Creatures Great & Small’, and trimmed it from the frame.  

Below is a picture of the backing.  Next, the label and the binding.

By midnight, I had decided that the ac compressor had gone bad, and I suspected that every time it attempted to come on, it made the lights flicker, and fans and other things slow down. 

I turned the AC off entirely, fan and all, so nothing would get too hot and catch on fire.  Sure enough, the lights stopped flickering, and fans quit slowing down and then speeding back up.

So the air conditioner was causing the electrical problem, and not the other way around.

Saturday morning, I got up early to go to a quilt show.

Mmmmm, I love Cherry Preserves on my morning bagel half.  Smucker’s is always good, but I also like Bonne Maman.  I put peanut butter on part of it.  Yummy.

Then off I went to the Wolfe Country Quilt Show and Garden Walk near Bennington.  It’s a 75-mile drive.

Though there had been forecasts predicting rain in the morning, they were false alarms.  The day was sunny and hot and the skies were blue, with nary a cloud to be seen.  The show started at 9:00 a.m. and continued until 3:00 p.m.  I got there right before 11:00 a.m., and left at 11:45 a.m.  

I trotted all over that farm and got pictures of every quilt there (I think), and a whole lot of the flowers, too.  I took 362 pictures.  There were 209 quilts, or thereabouts.

It was such a pretty place, with quilts and flowers everywhere.

These quilts (above) were hanging from a back wraparound porch.  A grandmother was trying to get her young granddaughter to “Look at all the ‘fish’!” in the quilt on the right – but the little girl was standing near me as I took this picture, staring with all her might and main at the pretty fountain and little pool, trying as hard as she could to see the ‘fish’ of which her grandma spoke.

(Did the woman really think those orcas and dolphins were ‘fish’?  And if she knew better, why didn’t she call them by the right name to the child?!)

I’m not sure who this little boy in the tree was, but his mother was laughing and telling him to come down, and saying to me, “You didn’t expect to find monkeys hanging in trees, in addition to all these quilts hanging around!”  I think she is either related to, or good friends with, the farm owners.

The friendly, funny little boy was calling down to some of the ladies walking past, saying to a couple near me, “You two look nice enough, I’ll bet you have a YouTube quilt tutorial channel!”  

haha  He obviously knew about stuff like that.

Quilts were displayed on fences both permanent and movable, and some were on antique metal bedframes.

In the building below, they had homemade cookies and cold bottled water, tables and chairs – and two vintage pianos, back to back.  Antique stained glass windows, probably from an old church, hung in front of the outer windows.

When I left the Wolfe Farm and drove down the country road between the cornfields, there were thousands of Clouded Sulphur butterflies flitting about all over the place.

I headed to Nebraska Quilt Company at Fremont, just 20 minutes southwest, to drop off my Avanté quilting machine, as it needs to be timed.  Again.

I filled out the paper explaining what the trouble was with the machine, and then wandered about that big store, taking pictures and admiring all the quilts on display.

Meanwhile at home, Larry called the air conditioner repairman, who came and looked at our unit.  Sure enough, the compressor was shot.  Furthermore, the thing is over 22 years old, and he can no longer get replacement compressors or other parts for it.  A new one is – hang onto your hats – $10,000.  (I would later learn that the price of central air here in semi-rural Nebraska is almost half the price of central air in other parts of the country.  😯)

So Caleb let us use his two freestanding AC units that he’d been using until he could afford to replace his own central air, which had lasted twice as long as ours did.  Larry went and got them, and then set one up between the kitchen and living room and the other in our bedroom.  They have big vent hoses that go out through the windows, and drain tubes under which we placed five-gallon buckets.  It’s quite humid, with humidity in the mid-60s and the dewpoint in the mid-to-high 70s; so those buckets fill up fast.  I’d better pay attention to them when Larry isn’t around; I don’t want to have to carry a five-gallon bucket of water anywhere!  Five gallons of water weigh almost 42 pounds.

We also had the little air conditioner in the upstairs window on the landing turned on, the doors to the rooms closed, and the door at the bottom of the stairs open, with my new Dreo fan at the bottom.  That helped, too, but not much.

At 7:30 p.m., it started pouring rain.  I wonder what happens if rain comes pouring into those vent hoses? 

This quilt was done entirely by hand – appliqué, quilting, and all.  Whoever made it did a beautiful job; their stitches are so neat and precise.

At 8:00 Sunday morning when I went upstairs to get a skirt and top from the closet in the little library where I keep my church clothes, I no sooner opened the door to that room than my glasses fogged up, rendering me practically sightless.  It was hot in there!  And humid, too.  Ugh.

In a minute or two, the glasses defogged, and I chose an outfit.

I came out, shut the door, and opened the door to my sewing room in order to iron my clothes – and the same thing happened all over again.

But I got the clothes ironed and escaped before I had a meltdown.

I forgot to close the door.

By the time we got home from our morning church service yesterday, it was 90°, with a heat index of 97°.  We were thankful for the freestanding AC units, even if they don’t keep the house as comfortable as central air does.

I walked toward the bedroom to change clothes, and a hot, humid draft of air from the stairwell nearly blew me back out the front door.

What on earth?  Did that little air conditioner up there in the window give up the ghost??

I trotted up the stairs to find out – and discovered the door to the sewing room that I’d forgotten to close.

Siggghhhh...

Larry made pancakes for our lunch.

After church last night, we had leftover pizza, yogurt, and strawberries and ice cream for dessert.  Larry doused his with chocolate syrup.

This morning while I blow-dried and curled my hair, I sipped Danish Pastry Cold Brew.  Mmmm, yum.  I’ve been trying Christopher Bean’s little bottles of Cold Brew concentrate in various flavors.  It’s good, and it’s convenient; but it’s not as good as when I make Cold Brew with freshly-ground coffee beans in the new Cold Brew gallon jug I recently got.

I shined up the bathroom, ate breakfast, and cleaned the kitchen.

I made another mug of Cold Brew – and discovered that Apple Cinnamon French Toast Cold Brew is delicious.  Next time I order from Christopher Bean, I’ll get the whole beans and make these last two flavors in the gallon jug, and it’ll be even better.

At noon, Larry went to Menards to get another freestanding air conditioner for the upstairs.  He’s installing it in the little library right now.  It’s big enough that it should keep all three rooms up there quite comfortable.  The one he got can also be used as a heating unit.

This afternoon someone from Walmart delivered two 40-pound bags of black-oil sunflower seeds.  He was driving a minivan, and after bringing the second bag to the front porch and returning to his vehicle, he pulled forward on the lane and then began backing into our drive – without closing the back hatch on his van.

Aaacckk! I thought, He’s going to back right into the Mercedes!

Fortunately, though, he evidently realized his error when he attempted to look in his rear-view mirror.  He hit the brakes, pressed the button that closed the hatch, and then, once it was shut, proceeded on his way.

Would you believe, the oven is now randomly beeping and showing “FC Doorlock Error”?!  I jabbed aggressively at a bunch of buttons, locked and unlocked the oven door, and glared at it.  After just three small tantrums, it subsided, and has held its peace the rest of the afternoon.

Wow, I just walked outside to bring in the bird feeders, and discovered it’s a whole lot cooler out there than it is in here!  When did that happen?

I have now opened some doors and windows, and am letting the noisy air conditioning units take a break.

Time to ----- well, I was going to say, ‘time to start on Nathanael’s quilt label’; but then I saw what time it is. 

Time to head to my recliner!  I’ll work on the label and the binding tomorrow.

 

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

 

More photos of Wolfe Country Quilt Show and Garden Walk here.

More photos of Nebraska Quilt Company here.