I feel a rant coming on.
Let me get this out of the way:
Politics. I am sick of it. I can't even stand to watch the news anymore. I recently heard someone describe what is happening as being orchestrated by people acting like drunk monkeys with chainsaws. Perfect description. Absolutely perfect.
The worst part is that I feel constrained to even publicly state my disapproval.
WTF? This is America.
This is America?
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We got a whale of a storm last night. Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee all took a beating. The last time a tornado hit our county, FEMA was here immediately to address urgent needs and help us begin the recovery process. I hope the places that took tornado damage in this storm will have good assistance.
The storm filled our septic tank with water. The toilets will overflow if we flush them. We had the tank pumped about a month ago. If we have it pumped today, we'll have to have it pumped again after the storms predicted for the next couple of days. Doing our "business" is going to be challenging until the storms pass and we can do something about the problem.
I expect that my garden is drowning. A squirrel would mar up in that sludge. If the Anasazi beans don't sprout, it sure won't be for a lack of moisture.
Our yard is a shaggy jungle, surrounded by trees. Winter ice broke limbs all around the property. I've been picking them up for a month, but the storms keep dropping more. I'll have to clean up yet again before we can mow.
I'm sitting here on the back porch, watching the birds come for breakfast. Brown-headed cowbirds make a ridiculous "plop-PLOP" call when they're feeding. I just watched one chasing - on foot - a little brown sparrow who wanted to join the buffet. The sparrow wasn't giving up and could run faster, so finally the cowbird flew at the sparrow with puffed-out wings, like it meant business. And still the sparrow didn't give in, and it looked like an all-out brawl was about to happen. I hollered, "HEY! Y'all cut that out!" And everybody flew away.
But the sparrow came back first, with reinforcements. They managed to snag a few bites before the cowbirds came back en masse and startled them away.
I made pretty good progress on the quilt yesterday. After trying different methods of stitching the blocks together, I finally came up with a method that seems to work. I press one seam allowance under, overlap it with the other seam allowance, and machine baste it in place.
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Basted seam
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To stitch the seams together, I pinch both seams up (so I can access them more comfortably) and join them with ladder stitches.
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Pinched seams
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Once the hand-stitching is done, I remove the basting stitches. I'm satisfied with the strength and the invisibility of the ladder stitches.
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Stitched seam |
(Hopefully, those blue stamped seamline markings will wash out completely!)
This quilt will be 4 blocks wide by five blocks long, a full-size quilt. So far, I have assembled three strips of four blocks and will finish ladder-stitching the fourth strip tonight. Strips 1 and 2 have been sewn together. Strips 3 and 4 will be sewn together, then joined with Strip 5 (which is not yet assembled), and then I'll sew strips 2 and 3 together.
There's some hand-quilting left to do before I can assemble the strips. The four corners where the blocks join make a large un-quilted area. I am quilting four heart shapes, arranged like a clover leaf, in these bare corners. This quilting needs to be done before the quilt is fully assembled so that I won't have to handle the entire quilt the whole time. I joined strips 1 and 2 before I quilted their hearts. It was a pretty good lap-full, so before I assembled strip 3, I quilted the hearts on each block before I sewed the blocks together. It must have been luck that kept my stitching from encroaching the seam allowances too much to then sew the backing on the sewing machine when it came time to assemble the strip. (That sentence will probably make sense only if you've tried a quilt-as-you-go method and encountered the problem, yourself.)
I should run my errand before the next storm hits.