As I
type, I’m sipping steaming Caramel Butter Crunch coffee from Christopher Bean,
and I can attest that it’s ‘MMmmmm, good.’
One day last week, I
posted a picture on Facebook of the quilt I was working on, and some woman
commented, “Hello I’m really sowrey but I really don’t need a quilt but thank
you anyways.”
Huh?
Perhaps when my
quilt post showed up in her feed, she thought I’d put it on her personal page,
as an ad? Who knows.
Last Tuesday was Election
Day. I spent the day quilting
away, with periodic forays into live news streaming online. Here’s the design I’m putting on the ‘Consider
the Heavens’ quilt. It’s called ‘Star
Spangled’, and was designed by Jessica Schick. The pattern is intense enough, it almost looks
like custom quilting, I think.
After a wee bit of a
rocky start with a few skipped stitches, I tried a different size and type of
needle – and happily discovered that my favorite needles work marvelously with
the variegated gold thread I’m using, despite the tech turning thumbs down on
those needles, both the size (16) and the type (ballpoint).
My late
sister-in-law, Loren’s wife before Norma, did all kinds of crafting, including
making a number of quilts. She
especially loved making clothes and toys and stuffed animals and quilts for the
children. She tied her quilts with yarn,
and considered my type of quilting ‘scribbling all over the quilt’, and was
pretty sure it ruined the quilts. But as
my quilting improved, she gradually changed her mind and decided it was all
right, after all. 😄
Janice was 17 years
older than me, and she and Loren sometimes cared for me when my parents were
traveling, when I was very young. I
loved her dearly. She made clothes for
me when I was little, and helped me learn how to sew.
A cousin asked me, “What
do you do with all the patterns after you use them? Do you have some kind of pattern exchange?”
Many of my patterns
are on my computer. So they’re still
there, on the computer. EQ8 has no
instructions with its patterns; they figure if you can design a pattern, you
apparently already know how to put it together, I guess! My books, which I do use occasionally, have
multiple patterns in each of them, and I have yet to use every pattern in every
book. The books are in a bookcase in my
quilting studio. So I still have all the
patterns I’ve ever used, whether in book or digital form.
The cousin then
asked if I thought I’d get tired of quilting before long.
My answer:
Nawww... I don’t get
tired of things, really. If I’ve been
doing it for 45 years (though I did a lot more clothes than quilts, when the
children were little), I don’t reckon I’m going to tire of it anytime soon! 😆
I love photography, too, and have been
taking photos since I was 9. I’ve been
playing the piano since I was 3. I have
a pretty good record of sticking with stuff. 😉
Also, I like a lot
of different styles, whether in quilts, clothes, home decor, etc. So each quilt I do is new and different.
By late
evening, I had passed the halfway point. I used 40-wt. King Tut
variegated thread in ‘Sheaves’ color on top, and 60-wt. Bottom Line in cream on
the glow-in-the-dark backing.
Each pass
from left to right took 27 minutes. The pantograph rows were 11” wide.
By this time, it was
clear that former President Donald Trump had won by a resounding margin. People who once seemed rational enough (and
some who never were rational in the first place) were throwing dreadful
fits and tantrums online and elsewhere. Search
‘election meltdowns’ on any social network platform, and you’ll see.
Women who think he’s
going to ban all abortions, though he never said that at all, are
screaming that he’s out to kill them. The same ones who think murdering unborn
babies is fine and dandy, say Trump wants to kill them – and their rationale is
that he won’t let them get an abortion even if their lives as prospective
mothers are in danger.
First, there are multiple
falsehoods in that one premise alone.
Second, let’s have some
statistics, shall we?
How
many abortions are there in the U.S. each year?
The
CDC and the Guttmacher Institute have each tried to measure this for around
half a century, but they use different methods and publish different figures.
The
last year for which the CDC reported a yearly national total for abortions is
2021. It found there were 625,978
abortions in the District of Columbia and the 46 states with available data
that year, up from 597,355 in those states and D.C. in 2020. The corresponding figure for 2019 was 607,720.
The
last year for which Guttmacher reported a yearly national total was 2020. It said there were 930,160 abortions that year
in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, compared with 916,460 in 2019.
How
the CDC gets its data: It compiles figures
that are voluntarily reported by states’ central health agencies, including
separate figures for New York City and the District of Columbia. Its latest totals do not include figures from
California, Maryland, New Hampshire or New Jersey, which did not report data to
the CDC.
How
Guttmacher gets its data: It compiles its
figures after contacting every known abortion provider – clinics, hospitals and
physicians’ offices – in the country. It
uses questionnaires and health department data, then provides estimates for
abortion providers that don’t respond. Guttmacher’s
figures are higher than the CDC’s in part because they include data from all 50
states.
The figures reported by
these organizations include only legal induced abortions conducted by clinics,
hospitals or physicians’ offices, or those that make use of abortion pills
dispensed from certified facilities such as clinics or physicians’ offices. They do not account for the use of abortion
pills that were obtained outside of clinical settings.
Over a
period of 24 years, only 1.14% of abortions were performed for the mother’s
life or physical health. Today,
doctors have the tools and the knowledge with which to work so that they can
handle almost any condition or disease a patient may have, without interrupting
the pregnancy. Just 1% of women obtain an abortion
because they became pregnant through rape, and less than 0.5% do so because
of incest, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Yet the battle
over exceptions for both has garnered outsized attention in the national
abortion debate.
How can
anyone believe it’s right to murder an innocent, unborn baby because he or she
was conceived through violence? The offender
alone should pay for his crime, not the baby.
Below is a chart tallying
the horrifying number of abortions in the United States since the 1970s.
The REAL
reasons (or at least the reasons given) for abortions? Here they are:
|
Reasons for Abortions
|
%
|
|
Not financially
prepared
|
40%
|
|
Not a good time to
have a baby
|
36%
|
|
Issues with
partner
|
31%
|
|
Need to focus on
other children
|
29%
|
|
Interferes with
future plans
|
20%
|
|
Not emotionally or
mentally prepared
|
19%
|
|
Health issue
|
12%
|
|
Unable to provide
a “good” life
|
12%
|
|
Not independent or
mature enough
|
7%
|
|
Influence from
family or friends
|
5%
|
|
Don’t want
children
|
3%
|
These
findings are the result of a five-year survey of people who have had at least
one abortion and were asked to give reasons they chose to terminate their
pregnancy.
A great number of people
who voted for Kamala Harris stated that her pro-abortion stance (‘Reproductive
Rights’ is the misnomer) was the main reason they voted for her. Some voted for her because and only
because she is a woman. Most, when
pressed, cannot accurately say what her positions are concerning economic and
business growth, school issues from Kindergarten to college, immigration
issues, addressing crime, funding for all sorts of absurdities for imprisoned
persons including illegal aliens, taxes, foreign aid, healthcare, and so
on.
They are no better versed
on Donald Trump’s stance on those same matters.
In fact, a large portion of people have no clear idea what the position
of most politicians is, partly because the politicians, rather than telling
us what they believe on important issues, spend all their time doing not
much more than badmouthing their opponents.
Ugh, that gets old.
Those who say Donald
Trump is morally corrupt can and should point the same finger at Kamala Harris
– and at Joe Biden, for that matter. Some
have apologized for things they have done wrong, but the media rarely to never
reports that, and they should, for it makes a difference.
Lastly, I absolutely
believe, with the Bible as my witness, that anyone who even thinks the
barbaric act of abortion is all right (except in that rare case of saving the
life of the mother), let alone those who actually participate in it, is a
murderer. It’s horrible and awful. This one thing alone is going to bring God’s
wrath down on this evil world.
King David, the beloved Psalmist of Israel, wrote in
Psalm 139:
13 For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my
mother’s womb.
14 I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made:
marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.
15 My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in
secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.
16 Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in
thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when
as yet there was none of them.
Jeremiah, the ‘Weeping Prophet’, wrote in Jeremiah 1:
4 Then the word of the Lord came
unto me, saying,
5 Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before
thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a
prophet unto the nations.
There are many more
applicable verses, but these two examples cannot be argued with, unless one is
blatantly dishonest.
One last staggering
statistic: The World Health Organization
(WHO) estimates that there are around 73 million induced abortions each year
worldwide. This is about 200,000
abortions per day.
Anyone who says there’s
nothing wrong with that knows better, by the very
God-given conscience they were born with.
* * *
Wednesday, I went on
quilting just as if there had not been an historic election the night
before. It was a cloudy day, and everything
was all wet outside in the morning. It
must’ve rained in the early hours. I
quilted until time for our midweek service, and then off I went to church, sporting
small bits of thread on my church duds.
My quilting that day brought me to the last row and a half on the
‘Consider the Heavens’ quilt.
Thursday, I
paid some bills, then went to Walkers’ (where Larry works) to have an affidavit
notarized; the man who works in the office does that.
“But first I need to
find a sledgehammer to make my printer connect with my laptop,” I told a cousin.
Then, “Kidding! A ball peen will work just as well.” Then, “Kidding! I’ll just use an ax.” And finally, “Kidding! (I think.)”
Everything is still
in one piece, and I got the Bluetooth on the printer to recognize the Bluetooth
on the laptop. They get confused now and
then, because I switch devices periodically.
By 6:30 p.m. Thursday, I
was done quilting and had cut the quilt from the frame. By midnight, the binding was on it, and the
quilt was done.
The block above was
perhaps the most difficult of all the blocks – and certainly none of them were
particularly easy. It didn’t help any that
that blue background fabric on that block was thick and unwieldy, and there
were eight Y-seams. The fabric came from
one of my late sister-in-law’s bins of fabrics that she gave me shortly before
she passed away, and I’ll betcha anything it isn’t 100% cotton.
The more I quilt,
the more I like batiks – and I hardly have any at all in my smallish stash. Gotta use up the stash as fast as possible,
and then... buy batiks, I guess! But I
have learned that even what looks like a smallish stash can make an awfully lot
of quilts.
For supper that
evening, we had meatloaf – my mother’s recipe, with ground hamburger, crackers (Pretzel
flipsides, this time), and eggs. I
totally forgot to put the ketchup and brown sugar mix on top and bake it ten
more minutes! Come to think of it, I had
no brown sugar in any case. We put ketchup
on it after the fact, and it was fine – but not as good as when it’s cooked
with ketchup and brown sugar those last ten minutes. It’s better, too, when it’s made with ground
venison.
We also had peas and
carrots, applesauce, white cran-peach juice, and an apple crumb pie fresh out
of the oven, with frozen Cool Whip on it.
I love frozen Cool Whip on warm pies.
Larry doesn’t, so much, but puts up with it.
Oh – hee hee, the yippy-yappy
little neighbor dog is so frantic to bark at wheels, he even sets up a wild,
hoarse-toned squalling at the wheels on the garbage container as the man is
rolling it back down from the lane to his house. 😆 I stop everything to peer out the window and
watch this show.
Friday, I swept
the back deck and took pictures of the ‘Consider the Heavens’ quilt outside in
natural lighting. It was a drab day, but
sometimes I get better pictures than when it’s too bright. Plus, the deck is one of the few places big
enough to accommodate larger quilts.
This quilt is for
grandson Grant, age 11. It measures 74 ½” by 84 ½”. I used
Quilters’ Dream wool for the batting. The central fabric panel is called
‘Galaxy’, by Northcott. Amy, Grant’s mother, found the glow-in-the-dark
backing, ‘Space Planets’, by Camelot Fabrics. I designed the pattern
in EQ8.
I was now ready to
start a quilt for Leroy, Grant’s older brother, who will be 13 on Saturday. I won’t have enough of the glow-in-the-dark
fabric for the back of Leroy’s, but I’ll incorporate what’s left into it somehow.
It was chilly – 53°
– and damp outside. It was snowing out
in the Nebraska Panhandle, and several roads had been shut down on account of
ice and drifting snow. A number of accidents
had been reported. Farther west, in
Colorado, there were areas that had over two feet of snow, and it was still
coming down. Many roads were closed. Trinidad, where Larry grew up, wound up with
44” of the stuff. We were struck with
snow jealousy!
Harvest is now
finished in many areas. Corn harvest is
90% done in Nebraska, 92% done in Iowa, and Illinois and Minnesota are both at
95%.
That morning, Warren
had a stomachache, so he stayed home from school, and rode along with Amy on a
trip to a thrift store. She found a
little genuine leather wallet that was only $2.00, just the right size for a
little boy. She gave him a dollar bill
to stick inside it.
He opened the
wallet... began to insert the dollar – and look what he found, folded up small
in one of the credit card slots: a $50
bill!
“Wowww!!!” I
exclaimed, “$50! He’s rich! He’ll have stomachaches more often now!” 😄
After an ongoing war with
towels that refuse to stay neatly hanging on the oven door handle for lo, these
many years, it finally occurs to me that someone should invent a way to keep
those towels put (other than crocheting buttoning tops for each towel). As always, happily calculating how wealthy I’m
going to be from yet another brilliant invention of mine, I look it up.
And, again as always, I
discover that towel clamps and sticky hold ’em-ups were already invented
decades – maybe centuries – ago.
So... why hasn’t
anybody TOLD me???!!!
I ordered some, and got
them in the mail Friday. As usual, the
USPS man flung the box (also containing vitamins) on the porch – and it was
raining. By the time I found it, the box
was a soggy mess. Fortunately,
everything inside the box was in plastic, either in a bottle or in a bag.
The towels on my oven
door handle were soon securely clamped into place. I arranged them so that a fold on each towel
on the right covered the clamp on the towel to the left.
Larry came home from work
a while later, washed his hands – and was promptly foiled when he tried
snatching a towel off the oven door handle.
😂
I started cutting the
pieces for Leroy’s quilt, ‘The Heavens Declare Thy Glory.’
Saturday,
I was getting ready to go visit my brother Loren when Larry texted to tell me
that one of his coworkers, José, who calls him ‘Uncle Larry’ (because the
Walker boys all call him that) (he’s actually their great-uncle), had
cooked some pork and wanted to give us some.
So, rather than taking the bypass around town, I stopped and picked up the
meat on my way to Omaha. They’d cooked
the meat in a large smoker in their detached two-car garage. It smelled scrumptious in there.
The skies were
dramatic that day.
Loren
does not seem very well at all these days.
He’s shaky and weak, and cannot often put a sentence together. But he’s always glad to see me, and spots and
recognizes me the moment I walk in.
When I
got home, I warmed up some of the pork from José, toasted and liberally buttered two slices
of the French bread Victoria made, and had open-faced sandwiches for supper. Yummy.
I finished with a slice of apple crumb pie.
Larry had gone to
Leavenworth, Kansas, to pick up a loader.
He got home late that night.
That
evening, I got 104 more pieces cut for ‘The Heavens Declare Thy Glory’ quilt, making
a total of 156 pieces cut so far for thirteen blocks, plus 12 one-piece blocks
with a solar system print. I will need another 156 background pieces,
plus several hundred pieces for sashing, cornerstones, and pieced borders.
Sunday
was Larry’s sister Rhonda’s birthday.
For one week, they are the same age.
It was also our daughter-in-law Jocelyn’s birthday. Jocelyn is Joseph’s wife.
Later that
afternoon, I was all dressed in my glad rags, ready for church. Larry was napping in his recliner. Hard of hearing though he is, it sure doesn’t
take much noise to disturb him during his Sunday afternoon naps. I try to creep around quietly, but the floors
in this old farmhouse creak, making him squirm around and mutter.
One time when
Victoria still lived at home, we were clattering around in the kitchen, making
and baking and washing dishes, and chattering away. Then we noticed that Larry, who’d been in his
recliner nearby looking at his phone, had fallen asleep. We grew quiet. Victoria was standing behind his chair, asked
me something in a whisper, and he said, said he, “SHSHSHSHSHSHSHSHHHH!!!!”
Victoria laughed so hard, she nearly sat right down on the floor.
Sunset was at 5:14
p.m. that evening, so it was dark by the time we headed to church.
We have a huge
cottonwood tree (somewhere around 50 feet tall) out back that I planted as a
wee sprig with only two little light green leaves, back in 2003. The top half of it has lost its leaves; the
bottom half is still full. In the front,
there’s a mulberry tree denuded of leaves on the east, full of leaves on the
west.
One night at about 1:30
a.m., I put on my shoes and went all the way out to the Jeep in the front drive
to see why there was a light on inside it.
After a bit of staring and wondering, I finally and belatedly realized
it was the moon, low in the sky, reflecting in the Jeep’s window.
This
afternoon Victoria texted a whole group of us, inviting
everyone to their house at Christmastime, and asking what date would work best. The usual hilarity ensued.
First, I offered to bring
fruit and yogurt.
Larry then joined
the conversation: “I’m seeing a lot of
dead animals along the hyways and byways. 🤔”
Me: “Whoever wrote the above message, I do not
know him.”
Hannah: “He accidentally
selected the wrong chat. 😅”
Me (with the accompanying picture): “He meant it for Hillbilly
Hunters of Nebraska.”
Hannah: 😂
Victoria: “So... is that your
offer to bring some sort of smoked roadkill for the main course? 🤨”
Me: “And is the smoke via applewood, or diesel
exhaust?”
Caleb: “Probably clutch
smoke”
Caleb again: “Or electrical”
Hester: “I’ll bring the
dessert to go along with that. 🎃” (Inserts picture of elderly pumpkins)
Victoria: 😂
Larry: “Don’t forget to
bring a truck load of whip cream. 😉”
And
there the conversation ended. A fun discussion
– but nary a one of us mentioned any date for our get-together. Guess we’ll have to try again one of these
days!
I just opened a new bag
of Christopher Bean coffee – this one, Butter Pecan. It’s good, too. I should order some of their seasonal flavors
while I have the opportunity; they don’t offer those flavors for sale very
long.
My new watch is
pretty nifty. It tells me... hmmm... right
this minute, my heartrate is 65 bpm, and my blood pressure is 122/44. That’s been about normal for me, for
years. I put a picture of this colorful
African bird, a Lilac-Breasted Roller, on my watch face.
The band is soft
vinyl, and very comfortable. It tells me
how many hours I sleep, and how many of those were deep sleep or light sleep. Sometimes it miscalculates, if before I go to
bed, I sit in my recliner and do something with my laptop. If I tuck my left hand in the pocket of my
heating pad, the watch evidently thinks I’ve gone sound asleep; so it tallies
up an extra hour or so of sleeping, when I know I didn’t get that much sleep.
I was chatting with
Hannah a little while ago, and she told me that her Australian shepherd, Willow,
was listening to the neighbor dog bark, and then went and pressed the Talking Button
that says ‘hungry’.
“Do you suppose she
means the barking dog is saying he’s hungry? 🤔”
wondered Hannah.
“Maybe the barking
dog actually said so,” I suggested, “in Dogbarkese!”
“He barks at
squirrels that show up at their bird feeders,” said Hannah, “and then the
owners stick their heads out the door and bark back.” hee hee
Victoria sent a video of
baby Arnold blowing kisses. He says ‘hi’ and ‘bye’
and ‘dada’, and does all sorts of things that are advanced for his age. He’s pretty pleased with himself when he
learns something new.
A
quilting friend posted a picture of a chunk of batting that got quilted onto
her quilt top when she forgot about it, turned on her computerized longarm, and
walked away from it for a few minutes.
I
consoled her with my own story:
I was once checking the
stitches on the back side of a quilt, using my handy-dandy big mirror and a
flashlight – but the overhead lights were shining through the quilt, making it
impossible to see if the tension was correct. So I grabbed a Butterick suit pattern that
happened to be lying on the end of my quilting table and plopped it down atop
the quilt to stop the light from shining through.
Deciding the tension was
fine, I slid the mirror back into place, turned off the flashlight (sometimes I
forget to do that, too), grabbed the handles of the quilting machine, and
carried on. I was using a pantograph,
and thus quilting from the rear of the machine – so I did not notice that I’d
left the pattern on the quilt.
I have a really tough
longarm. It quilted right through the
Butterick pattern without so much as a tremor or a quibble.
Furthermore, once was not
enough; I did it again the very next day!
After that, every time I
tossed something onto the quilt to block the light whilst checking the tension,
I stuck a ruler or a Side Snapper on the rear handles, as a reminder.
So now I slide the mirror
back into place, turn off the flashlight (if I don’t forget), try to grab the
rear handles, snarl, “What in the wor-------” and then “Oh. Yes.
Quite so.” (in a Winnie-the-Pooh tone)
Me, I don’t have
ALLzheimer’s; only Halfzeimer’s, ’cuz I only forget half of everything I
need to remember.
And now I must pause with
Leroy’s quilt for a bit while I make a pillowcase for his little sister
Elsie. Her 8th birthday is
Thursday. I’ll use the leftovers from
the Playful Kitties quilt I made her last year.
I ordered a
new pillow, too; it should arrive tomorrow.
,,,>^..^<,,, Sarah Lynn ,,,>^..^<,,,
