Journal: Elections & Quilts & Clouds

 

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 8^th 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          ,,,>^..^<,,,