I spent a good part of most days last week sewing... and sewing... and sewing. Tuesday, I worked on cutting and sewing borders onto the ‘For Love of a Chihuahua’ quilt. I started with seven more to put on (five were finished last week), and got four of them done, and a couple more cut and ready to attach.
Wednesday was a sunny, pretty day. It was 77° at noon, with a heat index of 86°,
and an expected high of 83°.
That afternoon, I ordered two large fabric panels for the quilts I will be making for grandsons Leroy and Grant, two of Teddy and Amy’s boys.
Amy gave me a large piece of fabric with planets
and stars printed on it a while back – and it glows in the dark. I’ll use that on the back.
That day,
I came very close to getting the last three borders on the quilt. All that was left were two more sides of the
last skinny border, and I would be ready to start on the on-point squares. Those last two narrow pieces were ready to be sewn
on – but it was time to head off to our midweek church service.
As usual, Larry
was running late; the congregation would probably be singing by the time we
walked in.
But whataya
know, we got there before the singing commenced! Astonishing.
Thursday
was another bright, early-autumn day, with an expected high of 83°.
I got
those last two narrow strips sewn onto the Chihuahua quilt in only a few
minutes, and then started on the on-point blocks. Here’s the quilt, sans puppy
blocks. The panel and the white fabric
wrinkle if you so much as scowl at them!
I’ll
steam and press and iron before I start quilting it. If it’s still wrinkly afterwards, why, I’ll
steam and press and iron it again! 😏 No, it’s
usually fine, after it’s quilted, because it can’t lie in sharp folds any
longer, on account of the batting.
The
first order of business was to fussy-cut the small blocks. That’s when you carefully cut fabric in order
to feature a particular section of said fabric.
Here’s a fact: Fussy cutting
takes time and uses a lot of fabric. But
just look how cute they are.
So I take the time... waste some
fabric... 😄
I made
myself a fresh pot of coffee, a tall mug of strawberry-pomegranate 4C, started
a load of laundry, and then cut long strips and made the border and the corner
squares. After sewing them onto the
blocks, I folded under the edges at ¼”, using a few drops of Elmer’s school
glue (watered down a bit) to hold them in place while I pressed them. They were ready to be attached to the quilt.
Friday, I was back at work (or is it play?)
in my
quilting studio, appliquéing these ten puppy squares onto the ‘For Love of a
Chihuahua’ quilt, using a blanket stitch.
(It looks a wee bit whoppyjaw in the picture, but that’s just because
the quilt top was lopped over the quilting frame.)
Next, I put together the backing, made
of the same all-over Chihuahua fabric from which I cut the puppy blocks. After that fussy-cutting, I had 5 yards left – barely
enough fabric for the entire back.
I happened to glance out the window – and saw
that there were at least six Northern flickers in the shady grass on the other
side of the lane, gobbling up bugs. I’ve
never seen that many together. They’re
usually solitary. They must be getting
ready to migrate. Flickers are one of
the few woodpeckers that do.
We were invited to Kurt and Victoria’s
that evening at 7:30 p.m. for Violet’s 6th birthday. 7:30 was fast approaching... and Larry was
not yet home
from work.
So... I went on preparing the quilt backing. I cut the 5-yard piece into two 2 ½-yard
sections, sewed one seam down the middle, pressed it, and loaded it on the
quilting frame.
Larry arrived home just in time to help me
wrangle the huge, heavy, awkward, new roll of Quilters’ Dream wool onto the bar
under my quilting frame. I’ve used up
all but a few small pieces of all the other batting. I’ll save the little pieces for pillows.
While Larry got ready to go, I cut the right
size of batting from the roll, put it in place on the frame, and began loading
the quilt top. It was almost in place
when Larry called up the stairs, “I’m ready!”
So I left everything where it was, turned off the lights, and skedaddled
down the steps.
We gave Violet a soft-bodied doll with four extra sets of clothes, and a decorative, rustic rabbit that my late sister-in-law Janice had made. The rabbit is dressed in a checked flannel dress with an old-fashioned apron on top, and she’s holding little garden tools. The bottom of the rabbit is made of rib knit and weighted. It is similar to the rabbits we gave Carolyn and Malinda for Christmas, 2022; they were also made by Janice. The little girls never knew their great-aunt, as she passed away in 2014, before they were born. But their Mamas knew and loved their Aunt Janice, and the little girls like to hear about her. Janice would be very happy to know that I have now given away most of the things she had saved for gifts. A majority of them were in bins and boxes, waaaaay back under Loren’s wide front steps.
I was afraid the doll was too young for her,
but the next day Victoria sent me a video of Violet specifically thanking me
for that doll. She says, “I really like the doll you gave
me, and I really felt like I needed to tell you I really like it. It’s super cute! Bye; I love you!”
So I’m glad I gave it to her.
Most of Kurt’s family was there, including
both sets of his grandparents, who have been our good friends since before I
was old enough to remember.
When we walked in, Willie, 2, greeted us with
an exuberant, “Hiiii!” – then, before we had a chance to reciprocate, he
whirled around and ran pell-mell for the kitchen, crying, “EAT!!!” as he
ran. haha
They’d waited for us to arrive before
lighting the candles on the pretty birthday cake Victoria had made for Violet,
so we could sing Happy Birthday to her, too.
Obviously, Willie had been waiting with all his might and main!
One of the little cousins, who’s about the
same age as Willie, is a reserved little girl – at least in public, she is –
and I can rarely coax a smile out of her.
However, she was playing with Willie with his wooden train set, and I
was taking photos of Willie. Every time
I aimed the camera at him, he gave me a big grin, and as soon as the flash went
off, he tossed his head back and guffawed, as Willies are prone to do.
Little Lucille, who quite likes her small cousin Willie, looked on with a smile – and the next time I aimed my camera at her, she gave a big smile, just like she’d seen Willie do.
When we got home, I finished loading the ‘For
Love of a Chihuahua’ quilt on my quilting frame. I’m ready to start quilting! This one is going to have an E2E (edge-to-edge)
pantograph called Sonnet, and I’ll use a variegated coral King Tut thread.
Saturday, I debated whether to go visit
Loren... or to head the other direction to an estate sale in Wood River, 85
miles to our southwest. It’s a little
farther to Wood River than it is to Omaha.
My eyes have been gradually getting more troublesome (on account of
Benign Essential Blepharospasm), as I haven’t had any Botox injections since
March. While the homeopathic pills do
help, or at least I think they do, they really don’t help enough. I’ll have another treatment as soon as our
Health Savings Account is restocked.
Anyway, this problem with my eyes weighs heavily in my decisions about
where I go.
Then Larry decided he would be home in time
and could go with me.
In the pictures posted online from this
estate sale, I had seen sewing machines, ironing boards, irons, quilts, and
what I thought were stacks of ‘layer cakes’.
A ‘layer cake’ is a collection of 10” squares of coordinating quilting
fabrics – usually about 42 squares, which is roughly equivalent to 2.75 yards
of fabric. See those stacks there, in
the middle of the picture?
The sale had been on since Wednesday, though;
so it was debatable whether or not there would be anything of value left.
It took us an hour and a half to get
there. When we walked in, I spotted a
few of the remaining quilts hanging on the far wall, and headed that way.
The layer cakes were still there.
Except...
They weren’t layer cakes.
You wanna know what they really were?
They were stacks of quilting
magazines, tied prettily with lace and ribbon, just like layer cakes often are!
There was no fabric.
I did buy eight quilting books (not
magazines, which invariably have only patterns for beginners, and ah hain’t no beginner)
at $1.00 apiece, and most had the original price on them, which was anywhere
from $20-25. (Aside: why do ‘patterns
for beginners’ show the majority of their quilts, though made in different
colors, nearly all the same tone, or nearly the same, with practically no
contrast at all?!!)
The ladies,
whose late mother had owned the things that were being sold, knew who I was! 😮 They had already told me there was no fabric
for sale – and then I found that pieced arc for a Wedding Ring quilt inside the
spiral-bound book (see it there in the photo, top right?).
Showed it
to them, I said, “Look, you did have fabric for sale, after all!” They were laughing, and laughed all the more
when I said, “I’ll bet whoever was making that quilt looked high and low for this
piece.”
For good
measure, I told them about losing a pointy Mariner’s Compass block atop my head
after I perched it there to take a picture for the grandchildren. 😅
I also got three collectors’ dolls for
some of the granddaughters and a large teddy bear for one of the little
grandsons. Larry found a bright blue
insulated suit to wear when riding his motorcycle.
On our way back, we stopped at the
Goodwill in Grand Island and got two men’s shirts, one of which I plan to cut
apart for fabric. I had originally
chosen three shirts, but one evidently jumped back onto the rack when I wasn’t
looking. Then I went out to the Mercedes
while Larry paid for them, and I didn’t know until we got home that there were
only two.
Of course it was the nicest of the two
I wanted for fabric that leaped out of the cart and escaped. It looked like new. The other, the one I wound up with, not so
much – but the only worn-looking part of it is on the front placket and the
collar, which I’ll be cutting off anyway.
Siggghhhh...
Shirt #3 is a Cabela’s brand, and it really is brand new – and it’s in Caleb’s size, and his birthday is in two weeks. At least it wasn’t this one that went AWOL.
I pulled out the receipt
to see if we’d paid for that third shirt.
Nope, we did not.
Each of those shirts cost $4.99. I think that’s the most I’ve ever paid for a
man’s shirt from the Goodwill.
After leaving the Goodwill, we drove
through Pier Park, where I took pictures of Canada geese, wood ducks, mallards,
and a few mallard-domestic hybrids.
There is also a miniature Statue of Liberty in the park, and fountains
in the lake.
Here’s a gorgeous little wood duck,
and below is the female. He’s faster’n
greased lightning, and a little spitfire besides, vigorously chasing away all
the other male wood ducks who dared get too close to his mate. They can propel themselves so rapidly through
the water, they kick up a wake that would do a speedboat proud. They tear around after each other like demons
on flippers, while the Canada geese seem (mostly) impervious to the entire
show.
We ate supper at Lee’s Family
Restaurant. Some of the workers there
now are grandchildren of the people who started the restaurant in 1972.
I had a BLT sandwich and a cup of homemade
chili, hot tea with lemon slices (they bring a small insulated teapot full of
hot water to the table, and refill it if a person wishes), a glass of cranberry
juice, and hot rhubarb-strawberry pie with ice cream on top. Larry had a mesquite turkey sandwich, homemade
chicken vegetable soup, ice tea, and butterscotch pie.
Sunday after church, we had lunch with Kurt
and Victoria. She fixed chicken/vegetable/potato
stew; it was scrumptious. We stopped on
the way at Hy-Vee and got some bagged lettuce salad with the cheese, almonds,
and dressing included in separate bags; I mixed it together when we got there. For dessert, we had wildberry pie that they’d
gotten Saturday at Perkins Family Restaurant, with ice cream on top.
I came away from their house with a couple of
small fingerprints of wildberry pie filling on my skirt, courtesy of Willie, who
was giving me one of his loving hugs at the time of the berry transfer. Nicest wildberry skirt-smudges I’ve ever had.
Last
night after we got home from our evening church service, we had a lunch of
sliced Roma tomatoes, fresh from Victoria’s garden that afternoon, on toast and
peanut butter. I love that combination. Larry would never try it, all these years – until
last tonight.
When
pressed, he finally acknowledged that it was edible, and he would eat it again
---- if he had no jelly or honey to put on his toast and peanut butter. 😄
At about a quarter after ten, I heard the
unmistakable sound of raccoons having some sort of fracas. I looked out on the back deck – and there
were four three-quarter-grown kits and their mother out there having a grand ol’
fussin’ time over the bird-feeder smörgåsbord.
Several of them, after a few seconds of
consideration, headed for the steps when I flicked on the light, but two stayed
– including the mother, who flattened herself on the railing until she looked
like nothing more than a raccoon rug.
Even her head seemed to flatten out.
But she didn’t take her eyes off me.
The kits soon came rollicking back up the
steps, and went back to scrounging up sunflower seeds from the deck. Any time one of them got too near their
mother, she snarled and hissed, warning them off the feeder she had
claimed. I decided to let them have
their fill, since the sunflower seeds were a week old, and the birds aren’t
eating much right now, as there are insects and ripened seeds in abundance all
over the countryside.
This afternoon, I was chatting with Victoria,
when I interrupted our conversation to say, “Yikes, a
heffalump is running on the house!” Then, “Well, maybe it’s just a herd of
squirrels.” And, “Ooooo, they’re having
words! Disagreements! Issues! Fisticu— uh, fistipaws!”
Victoria promptly sent me this:
I informed her, in contradiction to
this information, “It is very common for whole tribes of
squirrels to be gallumping about, around here!
They’re probably siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, great-grandparents,
and tribal enemies.”
And then, after another moment of
contemplating her screenshot, “!!! You took issue with my word ‘herd’!”
She responded, “😂 It didn’t seem
like that could be right.”
hee hee I knew it wasn’t right, but I couldn’t
think of ‘scurry’ to save my life. And I
did once know those terms. It’s
so reasonable – a ‘scurry’ of squirrels – how could I ever forget?
She then sent a video of Willie
singing “I’ll Be a Sunbeam”, cute as can be.
“He’s right on tune,” I remarked. “You do realize he’s saying ‘sunbean’ though,
right? 😅” (She did.)
One of our children sang ‘Sunbean’,
too. Hester, I think. You can tell – even if you can’t really hear
it – because their lips don’t go together at the end of the word, but instead
their little tongue goes to the roof of their mouth. Sunbean. 😄
“It is very easy to teach it to them
right,” said Victoria, “but it’s so cute, I don’t, right away.”
It suddenly got so windy early this evening,
the Dipladenia and the Begonia pots on the front porch blew over. I placed them closer to the house and watered
them thoroughly, hoping the extra weight would hold them down. And it did.
Bedtime!
Tomorrow, I plan to quilt... and quilt... and quilt.
,,,>^..^<,,, Sarah Lynn ,,,>^..^<,,,
