Have you ever looked back at previous
projects you have done, whatever sort they might be, and compared them with
what you can do now?
I remember one of the first quilts I made. It was for Keith, our oldest, when he was
about five. I appliquéd a great big
sailboat on it – and stuffed it with polyfil. It looked sooo nifty...
And then I washed it.
That polyfil turned into a gob of small, hard
snowballs.
How was I to know one should divide
such things as that sail into smaller portions, so all the filling wouldn’t
shift?? Or, better yet, use batting, rather
than polyfil.
But... I shoved it back into place, tacked it
here and there... and Keith went on loving his quilt, lumpy though it was.
Tuesday afternoon, Loren and Norma came to visit
for a few minutes, bringing me a big package of batting that I will use for
Kenny’s quilt.
That night, I finished the Farmers’ Market
hexagon potholders for my great-niece Danica and her soon-to-be husband, Ryan.
I didn’t do the binding all by machine
like I usually do; I was having some trouble with tension on my Bernina, and
didn’t like how it looked, no matter how I adjusted it. So all but
one are attached to the back by hand. The one done by machine has a busy
enough fabric for the binding that the slightly-off tension isn’t noticeable.
It took enough longer to do it by hand that I
decided if I couldn’t get the tension right, I would take the machine to a
Bernina tech. I don’t want to do that large Bear Paw quilt binding by
hand!
For the rest of Ryan and Danica’s gift, I got
them a Southern Living Everyday Menus, and also decided to give them an
old cookbook that used to be my mother’s, Danica’s Great-Grandma Swiney. It’s called Biblical Garden Cookery.
The more I looked at that
old cookbook, the more I wanted it, too. Sooo... I found one on Amazon in ‘Used but
Very Good’ condition, and ordered it for myself. I would give my mother’s book to Danica, since
it has Mama’s name written inside the cover. Danica will be pleased to have it, I think. She was not yet in Kindergarten when Mama
died, but she visited her fairly often.
Wednesday, I made a little
video clip with pictures of the crop duster that had been spraying just north
of our house. I added The Stars &
Stripes Forever to it, and posted it on Facebook. Facebook promptly informed me that they had
muted it, thinking I had stolen the music! One of their honchos evidently needs to take a
short course in ‘Public Domain Music’ and ‘Royalty Free Songs’. 🤪🙄
Wednesday, I started
working on a table runner for a customer.
I had to put my former dressmaker skills to work, drawing and sewing all
these curves.
The
design is similar to one put out by a company called ‘Sweet Pea’. My customer found a picture, showed it to me –
but it’s done on a fancy-schmancy embroidery machine, and mine isn’t capable of
that. So... I drew something sorta like
it, and put it together. Instead of
using an embroidery machine to do the quilting, I would use my longarm.
By Thursday evening,
the
top of the table runner was complete, and ready to load onto my quilting frame.
I cut the backing, then put together
some pieces of batting by butting the edges and zigzagging.
Shortly after I posted this picture on a
quilting group, a couple of people asked me if I’d appliquéd those leaves onto
the table runner. hee hee It sorta looks like it, doesn’t it? And in a picture, it’s hard to tell if
something is fabric, or real. But those are
real leaves that came drifting down from our cottonwood tree right while I was
putting the runner on the deck, so I picked them up and laid them atop it.
Photographic artistry! 😄
An interruption for a late supper... and then
I returned to the quilting machine. I
got a couple of sections quilted, and quit for the day shortly before midnight.
A
quilting friend (who makes many lovely things of all sorts, I might add),
recently complimented me, saying I had ‘a knack for knowing where to go next (with
the quilting machine) to keep the design flowing nicely’.
“‘Flowing
nicely’?” I exclaimed. “Eeek, if you
only knew! Why, sometimes I’m going
along fairly sorta kinda well, glance ahead, think, Oh, no; where am I
going to go next, and what am I going to do when I get there?! This
causes me to make a panic-scribble right smack-dab in the middle of my lovely
design. So now you know.”
Another friend wrote to lament that she
needed to do bookwork, and kept finding all sorts of
other things to do, in order to avoid it. What she really wanted to do was to go to her
sewing room – but of course she couldn’t, because of that bothersome bookwork.
“That’s the ‘I Couldn’t
Do This Until I Did That, and I Didn’t Want To Do That, So
I Just Sat’ Syndrome,” I told her. 😏
Someone posted a picture of a baby wrap she
is planning to make. Victoria often
swaddled her babies all snug and cuddled tight when they were tiny, and they
seemed to love it. I couldn’t have done that with many of mine,
though: Claustrophobia! AAAAAaaaaa! Some couldn’t even
bear for me to cover up their tiny hands, even when they were sleeping!
They’d gasp and, still sleeping, scramble and thrash madly until those little
hands and arms escaped and they were free. Then they’d relax
again. Whew. I’m loose.
A couple of them would kick until there were
no blankets on their feet – and then they’d calm and go on sleeping.
I well understood that feeling. My
mother, thinking she was telling a story I was too young to remember (but I
remembered; oh how well I remembered!), told about how when I was not quite
two, they’d make a bed of blankets for me in the back seat of their Renault
Dauphine (anybody remember those little cars?) (and remember when we didn’t
have to be strapped in? – and I lived to tell the story. Astonishing.) Anyway, I’d stretch out back there, point my
toes and reach above my head as far as I could until toes touched one side of
the car and fingertips touched the other, and then I’d howl, “Too tight!!!
Too tight!!!” 🤣
Friday afternoon, I was busily attempting to
finish the table runner, when the needle fell out of my Avanté and got wedged
in the bobbin area, and I couldn’t get it out. Nor could I get the three
little screws on the bobbin race unscrewed.
Sooo... I put fresh water in the birdbaths,
took pictures of flowers, fruit, and spiders, hauled the vacuum in from the
camper (with difficulty), emptied it, vacuumed all the rugs, washed the dishes,
and put the knickknacks and gewgaws back on top of the kitchen cupboards. They’ve been in a big box downstairs ever
since I took them down in preparation for painting three weeks ago or so. That box was almost too big for me to
manhandle back up those steep, curved stairs. But... I gritted my teeth,
set my jaw, kept a firm upper lip, and ah done it, ah did. Next, I edited some pictures and washed some
clothes.
A box arrived with another customer’s
quilt. And the Bear Paw quilt is waiting to be quilted, too. I
needed to be quilting!
“Don’t worry,” wrote a friend. “Larry will fix it.”
He actually came home a little early from work, so he
could do just that. He gathered up a few
tools, and was soon a-fixin’. Before
long, the needle bit was out, and he was putting the machine back together. It would have to be re-timed, of course, since
taking everything apart un-times it, even if the needle kablooey had
not.
He was having a bit of a problem fine-tuning it, though, because
big ol’ cuddly Tiger heard us talking, and that always brings him on the
fast-waddle. It’s evidently a friendly
noise to him, our conversing. 😊 So there was Larry, sprawled on my rag rug,
trying to peer up into the innards of the machine, and there was Tiger, rubbing
on him, head-butting him, and purring loudly. Larry’s laughing
wasn’t helping matters much, either.
But after a few false starts, I was back in
business.
We went back downstairs to have a supper of
croissants with Oscar Mayer’s mesquite-smoked sliced chicken breast,
vine-ripened tomatoes, lettuce, and mozzarella and Colby longhorn cheese, with
cottage cheese and pineapple for dessert.
A few minutes later, we had company – Kurt,
Victoria, Carolyn, and Violet came to visit. That was a fun little
interruption. They brought us another
essential oil diffuser, a gift for our anniversary. Now my house will smell good, anywhere we
go! I’ll take one in the camper, too.
Carolyn happily munched away on a piece of
lettuce, and then had some rice pudding; while Violet had some yogurt. Then we all gathered around the piano,
Victoria playing, and sang together.
After they went home, I quilted until I
needed to roll everything forward a bit, in order to finish the last few
inches. That seemed like way too
big of a chore.
When simple things look like mountains, it’s
time to head for the feathers.
Saturday, I finished the table runner.
I reset the tension on my sewing machine (a
Bernina Artista 180E), and once again it's stitching like a champ. I sew bindings on entirely by machine, first
sewing it to the front, then flipping it to the back, turning it under, and
pinning, and finally stitching in the ditch from the top for that last step,
rather than doing it by hand. The edge on
the back that is caught by that stitching is 1/16” wide.
This
is the same way I have always done cuffs on blouses and dresses, ever since I
started sewing, way back when Methuselah was a baby.
Several
people wanted to know how I did those leaves, wondering if I went up one side,
then down the other, or put leaves on both sides, working my way up as I
went.
I
went up one side doing leaves, came back down either outlining the leaves or
the spine, and then went back up the other side doing leaves. If I do leaves going up one side, and then try
to do leaves coming back down, those poor leaves look like they came from
different species of trees. 😅
Last night was Ryan and Danica’s wedding. Danica’s older brother Matthew is third from
the left, and her little sister Rachel is in the front row, far left.
Do ads with bad grammar in them bug you? There’s an ad on the rural radio that I’ve
been hearing for the last few days: “We
believe farmers are strong.
Resilience. And capable of
producing... blah blah blah.” See
anything wrong there? It comes on right
after every newscast, twice an hour; so in the time it takes me to take a bath,
wash my hair, blow-dry and curl it, about an hour and 15 minutes, during which
time I like to listen to the news, I hear that silly thing three times. Drives me berserk.
Today I’ve scrubbed the bathroom... washed
clothes... filled bird feeders, watered houseplants, put fresh water into
birdbaths... paid bills... and ordered necessities from the Pet Care Clinic and
Wal-Mart. As soon as I finish this journal,
I’ll edit a few pictures, then load my customer’s quilt on the frame. I have a bottle of Crystal Lite Grape
Recharge sitting on one side of my laptop, and Chocolate Almond decaf coffee on
the other. If I switch back and forth
too quickly, it makes my teeth hurt!
At a quarter ’til 5 this afternoon, as I
calmly sat at the table typing away, it suddenly occurred to me: Mail my
customer’s table runner!
I leaped to my feet, dashed downstairs,
grabbed a vinyl padded envelope, raced back upstairs, then up another flight of
stairs to my quilting studio, snatched the table runner, galloped back down those
stairs, wrapped the table runner in tissue paper, stuffed it in the
envelope, pulled up the lady’s address, scribbled it on the envelope, yanked my
purse out from behind my nightstand, crammed my feet into my sandals, snagged
my tablet on my way out the door (so I could get some batting at Hobby Lobby
and use the 40% coupon on said tablet), ran to the Jeep, went spinning back up
the drive and onto the lane throwing rocks hither and yon, and roared off to
town.
I got to the post office at 5:00.
They close at 5:00.
But the door didn’t have the ‘Closed’ sign on
it yet.
I leaped out, grabbing purse and envelope as
I went, and dashed pell-mell up the ramp to the door. It was
open. I trottity-trot-trotted toward the inner door to the inside office
where they check packages – and there was the man just getting ready to lock
the door. He smiled at me and held the door open for me.
I thanked him, hippity-hopped through, and
rushed over to the counter.
The lady took my envelope, looked at it, and
asked, “Did you want to send it overnight?
This is an overnight envelope.”
“No!” I exclaimed. “Can we slide it
into something else?”
She pulled out another sturdy envelope, and
we made the transfer. (And this time, I really scribbled that
address.) As she weighed it, she
informed me, “That overnight envelope would’ve cost over $25!”
Eeek.
Anyway, the table runner has been mailed and is
well on its way.
I headed for the door, and the tall man with
the keys smiled at me again – and locked the door behind me. Whew!
I poppity-popped off to Hobby Lobby (can’t
get slowed down very easily, after such a mad rush)... ran inside --- and discovered
the batting shelves nearly empty. No wool batting for my customer’s
quilt.
I drove around the corner to Sew What,
one of our two local quilt shops.
No wool batting. The lady there
suggested the other quilt shop, Claus ’en Paus – but they’re closed on
Monday.
Ah, well. At least the most important
part of my errand was successful. 😃
I told my customer – who is also a good
friend – this story, and she, sweet lady that she is, said, “Wow! You
nearly killed yourself! You have to
slow down a wee bit. I’d have really
felt bad if something happened to you.”
Then she added, “Thank you for trying to sneak that overnighter past
them. You have to keep them on
their toes. LOL”
Hee hee
I like her.
I reassured her, “Well, I didn’t turn any
cartwheels or somersaults, or anything, and I didn’t run over any old ladies or
small children or teacup poodles, and I stopped at every stoplight and stop
sign, and best of all, I didn’t get a ticket! The speed limit on the
highway is 70 mph. Therefore, I set my cruise at 74 ½ mph. I won’t
get stopped unless I’m 5 mph over the limit! 😉”
Tomorrow, I just might call the Hobby Lobby
in Norfolk to see if they have wool batting. It’s kind of pricey, and if
I get it at one of the LQSs, it’ll be full price – so I’d save money, driving
to Norfolk, if I could get it at Hobby Lobby. It’s 41 miles from our house
to Hobby Lobby’s front door (in Norfolk).
Hester sent pictures and a video of Keira
with Spooky, their calico kitty. They’re
both standing and looking out the front door.
Little Keira will be walking soon. She
and Spooky are great friends. Spooky is
just a little older than Keira. At the
end of the video, Keira carefully pats the cat and says, “Pat, pat.” Kitty lovingly wraps her tail around the
little girl. 😍
Imagine Keira at 2 lbs., 8 oz., a little over
a year ago – and look how sturdy and healthy and bright she is now! We
have an awful lot to be thankful for.
Here’s a story Dorcas recently told about
Trevor, who’s 3 ½: They’d gotten some
food at Chick-fil-A. Trevor asked if he
could go play in the Play Place.
“I don’t know, honey,” Dorcas replied, “There
are a lot of germs in there.”
“They aren’t germs!” Trevor assured her. “They’re friends!” 🤣
My flower gardens need to be weeded
again. I pulled a few weeds a little
earlier today, but those gardens need a couple of hours of diligent work. A lot of the leaves on various plants around
the place look pretty ‘lacy’, on account of bugs and caterpillars chewing away
at them. But I don’t much want to spray insecticide, for fear of harming
good bugs, butterflies, birds, and cats.
Do you know what a WOMBAT is? No, not the Australian marsupial; the
acronym! You don’t? Then I’ll tell you. There are two possibilities:
WOMBAT = Waste of Material, Batting, and
Thread
Or... (my favorite):
WOMBAT = Waste of Money, Brains, and Time
And with that enlightening piece of
information, I shall leave you to your own business, monkey or otherwise.
P.S.:
Here’s a real wombat. In
case you wondered about that, too.
(The wombat is the animal in the front.)
,,,>^..^<,,, Sarah Lynn ,,,>^..^<,,,
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