Journal: Rain, Sleet, Hail, Wind, --- and Quilts

 

In the last week, two or three friends have asked me how many quilts I have made. 

The truth is, I have absolutely no idea under the sun what that number might be.  As I scanned my old printed photos a couple of years ago, I was surprised time and again to come upon pictures of quilts I’d totally forgotten making. 

So the answer is this:  while I’ve made more quilts than I think I have, I’m pretty sure I haven’t made as many as others might think I have.  I often wind up with all sorts of time-consuming details, sometimes almost entirely by accident.

Back when I sewed almost all of the children’s clothes, and when I did a lot more cooking and baking than I do now, an elderly friend used to fret about it, regularly telling, “You’re going to get burned out!”  It didn’t matter what I was doing, I was going to get ‘burned out’.

I wonder what she thought I should’ve been doing?  Sitting in a rocking chair twiddling my thumbs? 

Last Tuesday was a chilly, rainy day.  At noon, the temperature was 45°, and the windchill was 29°.  The wind was blowing at a steady 20 mph, with gusts up to 30-35 mph.  And wouldn’t you know, I had an appointment in town that afternoon with the lawyer regarding Loren’s estate.  I was glad that the rain stopped about the time I headed out the door, and didn’t start up again until after I got back home.

Prior to heading upstairs to my quilting studio, I checked my email.  One of my blind friends had written.  At the end of her note, she wrote, “I just heard two tiny beeps.  I wonder what it was.  It wasn’t the computer, because it came through the doorway beside me, and I’m in the computer room.”

I wrote back and told her it was a couple of baby roadrunners.

I always try to be very helpful to my blind friends.

I spent several hours cutting and sewing, and by suppertime I had 32 triangles sewn to those three-piece units I was working on last week.  That left 148 to go.

At a quarter ’til 9, it hailed for a while, with small hailstones rattling on the roof and deck and against the windows.  Shortly after 9:00 p.m., rain came down in sheets.  The wind was blowing hard, and there was thunder and lightning.  Weathermen said this would keep up all night long.

Later, the temperature dropped, and there was a lot of hard sleet with a really blowy wind (as Victoria said once, when she was barely past a year old).  It sounded like someone was sandblasting the sides of the house. 

After supper, I sewed for a few more hours, making a total of seven hours of sewing for the day.  Gone are the days when I could sew for 12-14 hours a day (clothes, generally), with breaks for feeding the kids, reading to the kids, playing with the kids, taking the kids for walks, etc.

Nowadays, I keep the topical analgesics handy.   And I pause and enjoy the downy woodpecker on the suet feeder, and the little squirrel sneaking sunflower seeds from the feeders.

Wednesday after reading the news and a few obituaries, I wrote to the girls:

“When you write up my obituary, please don’t use Facebook or smartphone filters, okay?”

You see, I had come across an elderly lady’s obituary, where the photo they had used had clearly been subjected to a filter.  Her plump, smiling face would’ve doubtless been sweet and pleasing in its original form, but the filter had wiped off every crease and line on her face, added lengthy eyelashes, and put on a ‘headband’ of butterflies.  But who knows, maybe she wrote her own obit, and put the picture in there, too!

A friend had completed a quilt for her grandbaby that she wanted me to quilt, and after our evening church service she told me she would leave it in a bag on a bench near the door where we go out.  I said that was fine – and promptly forgot all about it, what with visiting with various family and friends.

We eventually departed, walking right past that bench – but there were numerous people seated on it and standing near it, visiting and chatting; so not only did I forget, but neither did I notice it.

We drove to Hy-Vee for some milk.  Larry went in to get it.  I didn’t give him any further instructions, but I hoped he’d get something yummy, too.  I pulled out my phone to check for messages.

The first one I saw was the one my friend had sent late that afternoon, asking if I’d like her to bring the quilt to church tonight.

The quilt!!!!

I texted Larry, “Hurry!!!  We need to go back to the church and get the quilt!  I forgot about it!”

His phone signaled ‘incoming text’ from a niche on the dash where he likes to set it while he’s driving.  🙄  But it was only a minute or two before he came back out.  In addition to the milk, he’d gotten blueberry turnovers.  There was no time to be glad about that at the moment. 

I told him the issue, saying, “We need to hurry, before everyone leaves the church!”

Telling Larry ‘we need to hurry’ effectively slows him down exponentially.

He sat and digested the news for moments on end before slowly reaching for the gear shift and pushing the button that puts the car into Drive.

We putt-putted (imagine putt-putting in a Mercedes 450 with twin turbos!) our way out of the parking lot, then waited patiently (well, ‘we’ were not patient; only one of us was patient, and it certainly wasn’t me) for far-away cars to approach and pass before pulling out onto the road and heading sloooowly back to the church.

Everyone was gone when we got there.

I said, “Drive around to the other side, and we can ask Dennis for his keys.” 

Our friend Dennis lives just across the street from the church, and is the designated person who turns off the lights and locks up after each service.

Larry debated, then said, “I don’t want to bother him!  He’s probably already in bed.”

I knew that it had to have been mere minutes earlier that Dennis had locked the last door.

“Drive around!” I insisted.

Larry reluctantly (and slowly) worked his way around the church.

“See, his lights are all off!” he announced jubilantly.

“No, they’re not,” I objected.  I could see lights on through the window.  Not the front lights, but lights, nonetheless.  “Pull over!”

He pulled a smidgeon closer to the curb, but kept creeping right on past.  “You can get the quilt tomorrow,” Larry argued. 

“When?!!!” I exclaimed.

“They probably open the doors for school at 8,” he said.

Rrrright.  I would want to get up at 6 in order to shower and make myself presentable, in order to arrive at the school at 8 amongst arriving parents with school children, and beg someone to let me retrieve that quilt (they’re careful with unlocked doors), if indeed the quilt was still there.  Someone might very likely have squirreled it away to some ‘safe’ spot by then.  My friend would never trust me with another quilt ever again.

I thought I’d call Dennis, but didn’t have his number in my phone.  I could get it from Victoria (Dennis is Kurt’s great-uncle), but Larry was coasting farther away, and would probably be in Madison County before I got the information.

My friend Penny lives next door to Dennis, and she, too, has keys to the church.  I decided to call her, though I didn’t really want to, as I knew she’d had a somewhat strenuous doctor’s appointment earlier that day.

Just as her phone started to ring, Dennis, having spotted us out his window, came out to see what we needed.  I rolled my window down.  “What did you forget?” he asked, grinning.

(Either he knows us, or he has this happen fairly often.)

Larry told him what we’d forgotten, just as Penny answered her phone.

“Never mind, I don’t need you anymore!” I told her, laughing.

She paused a moment, determining who I was, then retorted, “Okay, fine, it’s been nice knowing you; it was a good friendship while it lasted!”  haha

Well, Dennis unlocked the church, got the quilt, and brought it out to us.  I promised to remember him in my will.  (He laughed; he’s almost 6 years older than us.)

Home again, we ate a light supper (can it be called ‘light’ when you have blueberry turnovers for dessert?), and then I sewed for a couple of hours, finishing the addition of the large off-white triangle on all 180 units for the Safari Animals quilt before heading for the feathers.  (Yes, I stacked those units back up neatly after I took the picture. 😉 )

Paper-piecing slows things down, but it’s accurate.  I sure couldn’t rotary-cut those sizes!

Thursday, I loaded my friend’s quilt on my frame.  She used Riley Blake’s Beatrix Potter fabric line with cute preprinted blocks.  Since she’d already cut the scalloped edge, I used a bit of fabric spray adhesive between the fabric and the batting to hold it in place until I stitched down the edge with the longarm.

 The stuff I have (June Tailor’s Quilt Basting Spray) is kind of old; it was in my late sister-in-law Janice’s things that she gave me years ago.  It worked fine, despite its age; but it stunk just fine, too.  Bleah.  😝

Fortunately, the temperature was up to 53° and slightly breezy, so I opened both windows wide and turned the ceiling fan on.  The stuff makes my head pound even with the slightest whiff.  I soon turned on the floor fan, then donned another sweater, and a scarf, too. 

A lady on my quilting group told me that the new June Tailer adhesive spray has no strong smell at all.  I’ll remember that, if I ever run out of this stuff!  But that’s a really big can, and I have only used it twice – and sparingly, at that – in the eleven years since Janice gave it to me.

After quilting until nearly 1:00 a.m., the top borders were done, along with the top row of Beatrix Potter character blocks.

Friday, the weather was again fine for opening windows and turning on fans – and the big EdenPURE heater, at the same time, when it got too chilly.  It only got up to the mid-40s that day.

I cooked yams in the Instant Pot for supper, and baked fish in the oven.  The rest of the menu included strawberry yogurt, pecan sandies, and cran-grape juice.

By 11:00 p.m., Rows 2 through 4 of the Beatrix Potter character blocks were done.  There was one more row of characters, then the bottom borders.  They could wait until the next day.

Seeing my pictures, a quilting friend inquired, “Light custom, huh?!!!!”

“Well,” I responded, “there’s no heavy fill-in stuff... but it did sorta morph into at least medium custom, didn’t it?  😅”

I just can’t help myself, it seems.

Each time I advanced the quilt a row, I lifted the side borders, sprayed the batting, smoothed down the borders, stitched... and so on all the way to the bottom.  The borders at the bottom were a little too ‘friendly’ (wavy = too much fullness), so after spray-basting and then stitching them down, I doused them with starch and used a hot iron on them.  For some reason, that just made the waves turn into stiff ripples, and I was thinking, Oh, no, now what do I do?!!! – but by the time I got to that spot to quilt it, it was nice and smooth, and looked perfectly fine after I finished.

By suppertime, the Beatrix Potter quilt was all done.  I did not trim it, as my hands were a bit stiff and achy that day, and I didn’t want to mess up those scallops.  The quilt measures 50” x 57”.

After supper, I got back to working on Jeffrey’s Safari Animals quilt.  First, I hunted through my fabric for some dark cream and light tan fabrics for the next set of triangles, but couldn’t find anything that would work.  Why does everything in my meager stash have flowers on it?!

Then I spotted the gold mottled fabric Amy gave me a while back.  It’s backing fabric, 108” wide – but there’s not enough for backing for even a full-sized quilt, so I’ll use it for piecing.  It perfectly matches the animal pictures.  But what to go with it?  And then I thought, How about the back side of the same fabric?  I flipped back a corner...  Yep, this’ll do. 

As a quilting friend once said, “I paid exactly the same price for the back side of that fabric; I can use it, too!”

Here are the baby eaglets in the nest at Big Bear Valley.  Can you tell an airplane is going over? 

Last night after church, we stopped at Hy-Vee to get peanut butter and syrup (very important, since there were leftover pancakes), but someone was painting stripes and curbs in the parking lot, and I promptly got a thumping headache, so we headed down the block to the new Super Saver.  There’s hardly any place to park, because they haven’t torn down the old store yet, and it’s right where the new parking lot will be.

We saw numerous friends from church at the stores, still decked out in their glad rags, just like we were.  😄  I stayed in the Mercedes, as my eyes were being particularly troublesome.

Larry’s third or fourth cousin texted me; she’s the one who is in a nursing home in Minnesota.  “You do know that you aren’t supposed to go to the grocery store when you are hungry,” she advised, as she often does.

I wrote back, “Yes, but we all think it’s better to go to the store when we’re hungry, because then we get yummier things, more items than usual, and don’t have to go back to the store quite so soon!  😄”

Sure enough, Larry came out with not only the peanut butter and syrup, but also frozen yogurt and honey-roasted peanuts to put on it.  Yep, I’m glad when he goes to the store hungry.

When the children were little, we’d make the trip to the grocery store a special outing with the whole family.  Each child would get to pick out something special (not junk food; something healthy and good).  We’d let them help us decide the menus, and they all helped me cook stuff.  We often went late in the evening, so Larry could come, too.

When we shopped late at Food-4-Less, very few customers were in the store.  Employees would be stocking shelves, and there’d be empty boxes sitting around all over the place.  Larry would pretend to get his foot stuck in one, and go clumping along with the box ‘stuck’ to his foot.  This convulsed the kids, especially since they were trying so hard to be quiet.

One time one of the stores had a huge tank with live lobsters in it.  The children stood and looked and looked at those things.

Later, Joseph, who was three or four at the time, told someone, “We went to the zoo, and it was right in the grocery store!”

A couple of weeks ago, I splashed a few drops of water on the number pad of my laptop’s keyboard.  Grabbed a tissue, I wiped and dabbed madly – and then belatedly noticed what was happening on the screen.  I had accidentally texted this to the girls:

+-

+-*++-*

+-*+

-+

+-

+-

+

I quickly wrote, “Oops.  Sorry.  Small near calamity.  Nothing serious.”

Hannah promptly sent this:

I explained what had happened, adding, “Fortunately, the keyboard on this laptop is water-resistant.  (At least I got your attention!)”

We then discussed music.

“I wrote a report on John Philip Sousa when I was in third grade,” I told them.  “My mother took me to the music store, and we got a record with his marches on it.  Ooooo, I loved that.  (I loved writing the report, too, you know.)”

“His marches make great 4^th of July music!” said Hester.

I then sent the above animated loop, telling them, “I tried to find the old marching song ‘Dominoes’ to go with that gif, but all I could come up with was Fats Domino singing When the Saints Go Marching In.  (Listen at your own risk.)” 

This afternoon, Victoria sent pictures of the children.  They were having an after-school snack of Blueberry Green Tea and apples with sunflower butter.

Victoria fixes them snacks that are yummy and fun and healthful, all at the same time.

Yuki kitty was sitting right between Carolyn and Violet.

Today is grandson Josiah’s 15^th birthday.  He’s Teddy and Amy’s fifth child.  I took him his gift a little while ago – a pen set with lots of small magnets, and the book All of Grace, by Charles Spurgeon. 

While there, I petted their humongous Anatolian shepherd, Atka, and two big puppies, and then I looked at and petted some of the dozen or so day-old lambs they just got near Yankton.  They’ll have to bottle-feed them.  These are lambs that have somehow lost or been rejected by their mothers.

Amy was just making up some bottles; the children will help feed the lambs.  Elsie could barely wait.

Bedtime!

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