Bass-ackwards - 7/25/18

This morning on social media, I saw a post that said something like, "If there's a way to do something wrong, I'll find it."  It made me think about the quilt on my sewing table right now.

There's going to be a wedding in our family in a couple of months.  As I pondered what wedding present to get the couple, I remembered a partially-completed quilt top in a box in my sewing room.  I started this quilt several years ago.  The design is called "Brilliant Cut," referring to the cut of a diamond, which I thought was a mighty appropriate pattern for a wedding gift quilt.  It may be the most complex pattern I've ever attempted.  I worked on it, hot and heavy, for a time, way back when,  then some other project caught my interest, and I put the quilt away.  Monday afternoon I dragged the box out to see how far I'd gotten and whether it would be possible to finish the quilt by the wedding date.

Digging through the box, I found that I'd completed eight of the 16" Brilliant Cut blocks.  Four more blocks just needed one final seam to set the round blocks into their background squares, and these were already pinned and ready to sew.  I finished those in nothing flat.

However....

(There's always a "however.")

It will take more than twelve of the 16" blocks to make a good-sized quilt.  Way back when I was originally working on this quilt, I had already decided that there was no way I'd ever finish enough of those blocks to make a big quilt.  I had found a simpler pattern - some type of star pattern - to make blocks to combine with the Brilliant Cut blocks to create a king-sized quilt.  The star blocks included  four-patch blocks situated in the corners in such a way as to create an Irish Chain pattern between the stars and the diamonds.  In the box, there were four completed star blocks and enough already-cut triangles, squares, and polygons to make 9 more.  I went to work.

The problem was that I'd not saved the instructions for assembling the star blocks.  I'd saved a picture of the block and could refer to the the already-completed blocks, but it still took a good bit of guess-work to figure out which way to turn the triangles, and on which side of the polygons they should be sewn.  I made a lot of bad guesses and had to un-sew a lot of seams.  In the process, some of the little triangles and polygons became distorted, and I had to cut new ones.  In short (too late for that?), this project was not nearly as far along as I'd thought, and finishing this quilt top is not going to be the piece of cake I thought it would be.

And then it'll need quilting.

Anyone want to place bets on whether there'll be a finished quilt in time for a September wedding?  ;)

Mulching - 7/18/18

Several years ago, The Husband began to make noises about taking out the boxwood shrubs in front of our house.  I didn't really want the boxwoods taken out.  They'd grown waist high and were doing a pretty good job of shading out the weeds.  Eventually, though, I relented, on the condition that HE should be in charge of keeping the weeds from growing up to the windowsills in the front of the house.  He said he would.

Fast forward to today.  The bed contained two scraggly rose bushes, a few pitiful hostas, one lonely hellebore, an ill-placed mound of creeping myrtle, an assortment of viney weeds (including poison ivy and dewberries), and about 50 little saplings.  When I walked out the front door this morning and saw that mess, I was disgusted, and decided that today would be the day I would do something about it.  After work, I stopped at the garden center and bought ten bags of mulch and some landscape fabric.

The sky was turning dark with rain clouds by the time I unloaded the mulch, and I could hear distant thunder.  Nevertheless, I put on some gloves, gathered some tools, and went to work pulling up weeds.  I dug up the hosta and the hellebore and moved them to a shadier bed in the back yard.  I cut the rose bushes back to nubs so they wouldn't rip my flesh while I worked around them.  About an hour into the job, it started to rain.  I said a bad word or two, and went in the house to start another task I'd set for today, making gazpacho with some tomatoes I'd been given. 

This gazpacho recipe called for fresh, chopped tomatoes, onions, red bell pepper, cucumbers, garlic, vinegar, and tomato juice.  I didn't have any tomato juice, but I had enough tomatoes to make juice, and by the time the juice tomatoes finished cooking, the rain had stopped, and I went back outside to work.

It was muddy, muggy work.  Mosquitoes were singing around my sweat-soaked head.  Horseflies buzzed me.  I soldiered on, and just about the time I laid down the last piece of landscape fabric, The Husband came home from work.  He seemed duly impressed with my progress.  He went inside, changed into shorts and a t-shirt, and came back out on the front porch.

By then, I was putting down the first bag of mulch and was anticipating having some help with the rest.  But no.  HE JUST STOOD THERE AND WATCHED while I did the other 9 bags. 

I am going to poison his dinner tomorrow night.

Plum Jam - 7/17/18

I made plum jam today - 10 pints - from plums I bought at the farmer's market.   They may turn out a little runny, but I believe they'll stay on a biscuit long enough to eat it.  ;)

Canning makes me think about my mother and her friend Evelyn, both of whom used to can anything they could get their hands on.  Tomatoes.  Cucumbers.  Beans.  Fruit.  If either of them had a pressure canner, I never saw it.  They water-bathed everything. 

Most of the fruit we canned was in the form of jelly or preserves, and mostly it was fruit that we foraged.  Evelyn knew where there were good blackberry vines growing in a field, and we'd suit up in long-sleeved shirts, grab hoes (for snakes, and for moving vines to get at the center of the clump) and pickin' buckets, and go after them.  Chiggers would eat us up, but we did it.  Mother and Evelyn would split the berries between them and take them to their separate houses to process.  Afterward, they'd call one another to see how the canning turned out.

"I got seven pints."
"I got six and a sample."

My great-aunt Willie had fig trees in her front yard.  She never did anything with them, except maybe eat a few.  She'd call us when the figs were ripe, and we'd go over and pick them and make fig preserves, which we would share with her.  The thing I remember about picking figs is that it's an itchy job, worse than picking okra. 

I picked my first ripe tomatoes today.  I took one to Nanny's kitchen, washed it, sliced it in half, salted it, and ate it, standing right there at her sink.  It tasted divine.

We picked a few more cucumbers, and left a few to grow bigger.  Nanny took them to use for relish.

The squash vines are loaded with blooms, and there are a couple of little squash that will be ready in a day or two.

The ornery butterbeans are blooming; the green beans are not.

Okra is about 2" tall.  I planted it thick and went back and chopped down what I didn't want.  It seems I did my chopping too early - seeds keep sprouting

Hot, Hot, Hot! - 7/16/18

It seems I was destined to swelter all weekend long.

You may have seen in my previous post that the air-conditioner was not working at my office last week.  No biggie, really, since I wasn't there very much until Friday, when I had to wait for the repairman.  The office was still hot when I left.

I came home and worked on a painting project on the back porch.  The temps were in the high 90s.  The box fan that I set up to blow directly on me just stirred hot air.  Sweat dripped out of my hair onto my project while I worked.  The low temperature that night was in the mid-80s.  Sometime during the night, our power went out.  I woke up in a pool of sweat.

Saturday morning, I pestered The Husband until he finally agreed to replace the belt on my garden tiller.  We went down to the shop and raised the door.  It was like an oven in there.  We opened both doors and turned on the big shop fan, but like the fan on our back porch, it just stirred hot air. 

While The Husband went to work on the tiller, I went out to the garden and discovered that the cucumbers needed to be picked.  I thought that Nanny would want them for cucumber relish, but she had made relish on Friday and didn't want them, so I brought them home and started a batch (two batches, actually) of pickles.  Since this was my first canning adventure of the year, I had to go up in the hot attic for canning equipment.  For the next five hours, I stood over either hot dishwater or a hot stove.  Finally, about 4 o'clock, I got the last of the pickles into the jars.

We were meeting friends that night for dinner and a concert  - Alison Krauss at the Mud Island Amphitheater.  We've been to several concerts at Mud Island (an outdoor venue) on summer days.  Even though the days were hot, after sunset a pleasant, cooling breeze would always blow off the river.  Not this time.  From the minute we got on the tram to ride over to the island, sweat ran down my face and back.  The woman in the seat next to me sat with her legs spraddled, touching mine.  The more I scrunched in to move away from her, the more she spraddled.  Finally, about 30 minutes before the concert was over, I got up and went to the top of the amphitheater, where there was at least a little breeze.  From up top, I could see that some medics carried somebody out on a stretcher a few minutes before the concert was over - heat exhaustion, no doubt.  We rode home, sopping wet, with the car windows down.

Yesterday was another scorcher.  I put a final coat of base paint on my painting project at 7 o'clock in the morning, and it was already like breathing under water.  I did not go outside much after that; my butt was dragging.  To tell the truth, I think I was dehydrated from all the sweating the day before.  After breakfast, napped until lunch time, then I got up and started cooking.  Made a batch of bread, put a roast in the oven for dinner - had both ovens running for a good while.  At 6 o'clock, I finally turned off the stove, and we ate dinner.  In the living room.  Under the ceiling fan. 

An hour after dinner, a fierce storm blew in suddenly.  The power went out again and stayed out for two hours.  It got hot in the house before the power came back on, and I went to sweating again.  We sat out on the back porch for the last hour or so.  It was hot there, too, but at least the air was stirring.

Here's hoping for a cooler week!

My Lucky Day - Friday, 6/13/18

Today seems to be my lucky day (knock on wood, for the day is not over, yet).

The air-conditioner at my office has been on the fritz.  It was 80 degrees at my desk (and rising) when the repairman arrived at 10 a.m.  Fortunately, I did not have to stay while he fixed it.  I high-tailed it out of there around noon.

I'd been pondering a little painting project for a couple of weeks, but hadn't had the time or the materials on hand to work on it.  After leaving the office today, I stopped at the lumber store and bought myself a 1" x 8" x 8' board and some paint, and came home and got to work. 

Now, my project was never intended to be 8 feet long - it's only about 4 feet - but I thought it would be good to have extra wood, to prepare for the inevitable screw-up of the first draft.  Of course, that meant having to saw the board in half.  This prospect did not daunt me.  I have a chop saw.  I probably blogged about the little table saw that The Husband gave me for Christmas a couple of years ago.  Since then, I have also acquired a jigsaw AND a fold-up work table, complete with clamps and such.  Sawing the board in half was not supposed to be an issue.

Well, it turned out to be an issue. 

When I set up the table saw, it would not turn on.  The little red safety switch felt floppy and had no effect when moved.  I thought, Oh, no...the switch is broken.  I decided to flip it over and have a look.  The switch was housed in a plastic box that was attached with screws.  I couldn't see anything of the switch.  Found a screwdriver, unscrewed the box, but could not get access to the red part of the switch.  Put the box back on.  Flipped it back over.  Switched extension cords.  Nothing.

I had a mind to pry off the switch from the front (heck, it wasn't working, anyway, was it? and I still had a chop saw and a jigsaw, didn't I?), but then it occurred to me that maybe this was a common issue that I could read about online, some simple little fix.  So I searched for one.  Nothing.

But here's where my luck started to change:

I had registered the saw when I got it and, wonder of wonders, I still had the confirmation email.  It had a phone number on it.  I called it, and got a nice man on the phone fairly quickly.  I explained the problem:  "This little red safety switch is floppy, and the saw won't turn on." 

He said, "Is the yellow tab securely snapped in?" 
I said, "What yellow tab?"
"There's supposed to be a yellow tab."

Well, I started yammering about a yellow tab, and how I had no idea where - and this is where the REAL luck kicked in - ....

Laying on the floor under the edge of the cabinet where the saw had been stored was a yellow plastic thing, something I probably would have thrown away as extraneous junk the next time I swept the porch.  I don't know how long it had been there - could've been minutes or months.

I picked it up, and it snapped right in place.  I said, "Holy Moly!  Hold on while I see if this works."  I plugged in the saw, hit the switch, and IT WORKED.

I sawed my board in half.  :)

The first coat of paint is drying now.

Garden Report - 7/10/2018

The new belt for the black tiller was in the mailbox today.  I took it down to the shop and laid it near the toolbox, then went to work in the garden for a bit.

The pitiful row of butterbeans has been choked with grass for two weeks.  I have spent my energy elsewhere in the garden, since only 12 plants or so had sprouted on the 60-foot row, but the rest of the garden was in pretty good shape today, so I went to work pulling up grass from around the beans. 

Nanny came out to the garden after a bit, and we discussed the cucumbers.  The vines are producing fairly well - we're harvesting a dozen or so every couple of days - but the cucumbers are trying to turn yellow before they get very large.  Today, there were a good many that were the perfect size for pickles, but Nanny wants to make cucumber relish, and she likes big ones for that, but not big yellow ones.  I am afraid that if we try to let them get much bigger, they'll go yellow, first, so I suggested that we go ahead and pick the biggest ones and refrigerate them until we get more.  She didn't much like the idea, but she agreed, and we picked a shopping bag full.  I still don't understand her reluctance to use 20 medium cucumbers instead of 10 big ones in her relish. 

After about two hours in the garden, I decided to call it a day.  When I got back to my house, The Husband was home from work.  As I was taking off my gloves and my gardening apron, I said to him, "The tiller belt came in today." 

He said, not sarcastically, "Oh, good." 

I said, "I took it to the shop and laid it on top of the toolbox, so it'll be handy in case you get a sudden urge to fix something."

He gave me The Look.

I just ignored it, and went to the bathroom to wash my nasty feet. 

The urge to fix something did not arrive this evening. 

Birthday Loot

Look what I got for my birthday!




The Husband and The Grandson hooked me up.  They put it together on the back porch, and I immediately filled it with the compost I've been making.  Had a whole wagon full, and some left over. 

I said to The Grandson, "Let's go spread this around the tomatoes at 5:30 [when the garden is in shade]."  At 5:15, the bottom fell out of the sky, and it rained hard for about 20 minutes.  I wasn't about to drag the wagon, heavy with wet compost, down Nanny's long driveway.

When I came home from work today, I pulled it down there and shoveled compost around all of the tomatoes.  Don't know if it will help them, but it can't hurt them (can it?).  Even had a bit left over to do a few of the squash.

Unfortunately, one of the two cotter pins that holds the handle on came out, and I couldn't find it anywhere.  Thankfully, I caught it before the little peg fell out.  I can get another cotter pin at the hardware store.

We're getting another hard rain shower right this minute. 

Garden Report - July 3, 2018

Well, damn.

Tonight after supper, we went down to the garden to plant okra.  I dragged the big black tiller out of the shed to till up the row.  About 1/4 down the row, the tiller ran out of gas.  I re-filled the tank, and when I tried to crank it again, the pull cord broke.  This tiller has an electric, push-button starter, but it has to be plugged up to electricity to work, and the extension cord wasn't half long enough to reach the garden.  The Husband and I wrestled the tiller to the back door of the shop.  On the way, while wondering why the tiller was so hard to push, we noticed that one of the tires was going flat.  We aired up the tire, plugged up the tiller, and it cranked right up.  Back to the garden I went.  I finished out the row and was about to start back up it for a second tilling when the tiller started making a funny noise.  Soon, the wheels and the tines quit spinning.  The Husband prodded and poked around under the engine cover and discovered that a belt had broken.

Lord, save me from mechanical equipment. 

In truth, I really can't be too mad at this tiller.  In the 8 years or so that I've had it, it has never ONCE failed to crank and/or till.  I do not begrudge it a little TLC after all this time. 

We did manage to get the okra planted.  It's a long row, enough okra for everybody in Tennessee, probably.

I also weeded the tomatoes and fertilized them with some calcium-rich fertilizer.  Maybe that will help the mushy bottom situation.

Nanny found little cucumbers on the bloom-laden vines.  Maybe we'll soon have enough to make pickles and relish.

The squash aren't blooming, yet.  Neither are the green beans.

I still want to plant a few zucchini.

Everybody else is picking their gardens, already, and here I am, still planting seeds.

Fishy things - 7/2/2018

So, far, the garden is not worth reading about.  We walked down there last night to check on the tomato worm situation.  Last week, we pulled off about a dozen worms before they had a chance to do much damage.  Not seeing any new poop yet, so hopefully we have won round one.  That's about the only good news.  The ground has been almost incessantly wet ever since I planted it.  Half of the butterbeans never came up, and I have not had time to plant the skips, nor have I had time (or the seeds) to plant any okra.  And today the farmer came and sprayed his beans again, so the plants that have managed to survive so far may get speckled.  *sigh*

But I didn't sit down to write about the garden.  I sat down to write about fishing.  Sort of.

My daddy loved to fish, and did so every chance he got.  He fished for bait, then he used the bait to fish for bigger fish.  He caught minnows out of a nearby creek, using a hardware cloth trap he made himself.  I watched him do it.  He would lace it together with wire and needle-nosed pliers.  Sometimes, he'd let me do a little of the wiring.  When it was finished, he'd take it down to the creek, bait it with a biscuit, and chunk it in the water.  He'd tie it to something on the bank, and go back the next morning to see if he'd caught anything.  Most of the time, he had, and he'd open the little hatch he'd built into the side, dump the minnows in a 5-gallon bucket half full of creek water, and take them home to await whatever fate he had in store for them. 

He also knitted nets - trammel nets and hoop nets - out of nylon twine, for himself and for others.  He used a wooden mesh pin that he whittled from a spare piece of window facing.  Although he preferred plastic needles, I've seen him carve wooden ones out of a plank with his pocket knife when he was short of time and/or money.  He would drive a nail into the window facing in the living room, and hang a loop on it.  Onto the loop, he would "cast on" his rows.

I used to beg to him to let me knit, and sometimes he would, but he would never let me start a net - he said that the first row was the hardest part - or knit the throat.  He would get a net going, then turn it over to me until either I got bored and wanted to quit or something different had to happen in the process, such as an increase or decrease.  How he calculated the size is a mystery, something he never explained (or I never learned).  I don't know how long the nets were, but I remember him sitting in a kitchen chair on the other side of the living room, knitting on a net that was hung on the nail in the window facing at the opposite end of the room, so they were pretty long.   I don't know how wide they were, either, but I remember him flipping great widths of net when he started new rows, so they were pretty wide, too. 

I recall holding big wooden hoops upright while he laced the nets onto them (he would let me use them as hula hoops until he needed them).  He generally used 5 hoops, but I didn't pay much attention to the shape of the net when it was finished, or how he sewed them up. 

Lately, the subject of net-making has crossed my path from several directions, and I decided to see if I could make some.  Last week, I made a minnow trap out of hardware cloth.  Had to get some online hints about how to make the throat, and wrestling that mother into place by myself was a mess (now I see why Daddy let me help him!), but otherwise things went well. 

Then the subject of hoop nets came up . . . .

It's too early to tell if it's "so far, so good."