Not Just Yet....

The new tiller ("Mr. Easy," I'm calling him; this may change once I actually get to use him) is still sitting in Pop-Pop's shop, where I left him the day we brought him home. We've had a lot of rain this past couple of weeks, and it's been too muddy to do anything in the garden.  The spot where I planted carrot seeds has been under water the whole time, so I can probably cross that crop off my list.

Last night, Nanny invited us down for a slice of home-made German Chocolate Cake (she makes a mean one).  As soon as we walked through the back door, The Nephew held up two fingers.  "We've caught two things," he said, "a raccoon and a possum."  He was referring to the live trap he'd set in the edge of the woods closest to the garden.  I didn't ask what happened to the critters.

Pop-Pop said that the potatoes haven't sprouted yet.  "They've probably rotted after all this rain."  Lovely.  We might as well have let the raccoons dig them up and eat them. 

Since I haven't been able to do any gardening, I've had time to work on some of my quilting projects.  My sister's Iris quilt is ready.  When it came out of the quilting frame, I loaded my niece's Dresden Plate quilt.  I started that quilt nearly 10 years ago.  Work progressed smoothly for a while, but during the quilting phase, my hands gave out from carpal tunnel and arthritis, and I eventually abandoned the project and took down the quilting frame.  The quilt, completely hand-quilted except for the last 18", had been lying in a chair in my bedroom all this time, mocking me.  Though I hated to mix hand quilting with machine quilting, I figured it was better than not finishing it at all.  A couple of hours in the machine quilting frame did the trick.  

Once the Dresden Plate quilt was done, I finished the piecing on my brother's Whirling Star quilt and loaded it into the frame.  I'd only quilted a few inches of the first row when the machine (or, perhaps, the operator) malfunctioned and created a huge "thread monster" between the fabric and the feed dogs.  It took some doing to free the machine, pick the knots of thread out of the quilt, and untangle the thread from the bobbin case.  When I started to quilt again, the needle broke.  I inserted a new needle.  It broke, too.  I pulled the machine to the side to investigate and discovered that the bobbin race was out of time - I guess I'd gimped it up while trying to untangle the knots.  In any case, The Husband took the machine to the shop for me.  He brought it home last night and we set it back in place.  I should be able to get in a little quilting this evening before Margarita Hour rolls around!

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We were eating breakfast yesterday morning when the local Sears store called to tell us that our tiller was ready for pick-up.  As soon as we finished eating, we went to get it. 

It was in a big crate.  We backed up to the loading dock, and the store employee scooted it right into the bed of our truck, no problem-o.  There was a problem-o getting it out of the truck.  We finally had to peel back the cardboard crate, remove the wooden supports, and hoist it out with a chain and Pop-Pop's hydraulic lifting thing.  It took us about 30 minutes to get the handle and gearshifts on it. We oiled it up and gassed it up and plugged it up (it has an electric starter). 

With one push of the little red start button, the engine cranked. 

Hallelujah!  Joy!  Joy! 

This may very well change my life!  :)

We couldn't take it for a test plow, because the ground is too wet.  But you can bet I'll be trying it out before the week is up, if we don't get any more rain.

I took a look at the garden after we stashed the tiller in Pop-Pop's shed.  There is now an electric fence around the potato rows.  Something - raccoons, we think - has been digging up the potatoes we planted last week. 

I guess they've already eaten the ones we threw over the hill when Pop-Pop wasn't looking.

Magic Words

Over the weekend, when the family was lingering around Nanny's table, my son asked me if he could borrow the little black tiller to work on his flower beds.  I told him, "Sure."

Nanny said he ought to try to crank it before he loaded it, just to make sure it still worked.  "It's a booger to crank," she said.

I told him not to give up after the first few cranks.  "Sometimes, there are some magic words you have to say to it before it'll start."

Pop-Pop chuckled.  He's heard the incantation a few times.

"I bet I know a few of those words," my son said, grinning. 

Nanny said she wasn't convinced that the magic words actually worked.  "I've said a few 'magic words' to it, myself," she confessed.

We all laughed.  We've heard Nanny's "dad-gums" and "shoots" and "spits." We didn't think the tiller would have paid much attention to them.

"My magic word vocabulary might be a little bigger than yours, Nanny," my son said.

After lunch, we went outside to find the tiller.  It wasn't in Pop-Pop's shed as I had thought, but I found it in my shed.  I dragged it out and took it to Nanny's.  Josh put some gas in it and prepared to crank it.  I showed him how he had to flip this switch, and slide that lever, and push that turkey-timer button on the side.  "If it cranks," I told him, "run it out there and loosen up a row for some onions." 

He gave the cord a good yank, and another, and another, and another.  He adjusted the choke, and yanked a few more times.  "You sorry son of a - "

"HEY!" I said, "Not yet!  You've started the chant too soon!" 

He fired off another round of magic words, and yanked the cord again.  The tiller fired right on up.

"Nah," my son said, adjusting the choke.  "You haven't been starting it soon enough!"  He revved up the motor.  "Whatcha want plowed?" 

'Tater Plantin'

The potatoes are in the ground, three long rows of them.  My son and his wife helped.  Tomorrow, we may all three be so "stove up" that we can't get out of bed.  'Tater planting is hard work!  The twenty-five pounds of seed potatoes yielded nearly a five-gallon bucket of potato chunks.  As I dug the trenches for the first two rows, my helpers came behind me, one dropping potatoes in the row, the other covering them up.  I gave out at the end of row two, and my son took over the trenching.  At the end of row three, he was pooped, too.  We looked in the bucket; it was still half full.  I looked at my son, and he looked at me.  He said, "Let's chunk 'em." 

"I second that.  Don't let Pop-Pop see, though."

We waited until Pop-Pop went back in the shed, then my son pitched the contents of the bucket over the hill.

Watch those lay there and grow better than the ones we planted.

We also planted some red onions, some fava beans, and some carrots.  (I have never had even one carrot seed sprout in the garden, but I had a packet of seeds, so I planted them.)  There is still plenty of room for cabbage and broccoli.

Yesterday, when the men-folk were in charge of preparing the soil, they decided we needed a new tiller.  I ordered one from Sears today, one that has an electric starter (yahoo!) and a handle that swivels to the side so that the operator can walk in the middles while he/she tills the rows.  It should be here Saturday.

Back in the Gardening Business

When I talked to my sister last Sunday, she said that I should hurry and finish her quilt because it's almost gardening time.  That thought had already occurred to me, but I figured I had a few more weeks before planting time.  The garden centers here aren't yet stocking their early vegetables, like broccoli and cabbage, and probably won't have them until at least the first of March.  I have sweet pea seeds, and fava bean seeds, both of which could be planted now, but, to tell you the truth, I've been kind of bummed out on gardening.  Last year's summer vegetable garden was such a phenomenal flop that I didn't even plant the fall crop seeds I'd bought.  I had decided to cut back this year - maybe just a few tomato and squash plants - and it won't be time to plant those things for a couple of months.

Yesterday afternoon, I came home from work, put on my "house clothes," and went to the quilting machine, thinking I'd knock out the rest of my sister's quilt.  (I only lack about a foot being done with the quilting.)  I'd just tightened the knobs on the quilting frame and was sliding the machine into position when the telephone rang.  It was my daughter-in-law, telling me that they were across the road at Nanny's house, and I'd have time to grab hugs from the grandsons if I'd come on down.  I jumped into some shoes and walked down the driveway.

Long before I reached the house, I saw a wide strip of freshly-plowed earth in the garden spot.  What in the world was up?  The garden never gets officially plowed this early!  For years, I've begged Pop-Pop to plow the garden for an early crop, but he has never, ever done it.  But there sat the little tractor, with the disk attachment hooked to it, fresh dirt on its blades. 

It was a pleasant evening, and everybody was out in the yard.  Pop-Pop was sitting, smoking a cigarette, in the doorway of the tractor shed.  I said hello to everybody, then turned to Pop-Pop.  "What got into you?" I asked him, nodding toward the garden.

"Time to plant 'taters," he replied. 
Taters?  Who said anything about planting taters?  I surely hadn't!  I'd tried growing potatoes a few years ago - you can probably read about it in my 2008 posts - and it was a screaming failure. 

"I figure 25 pounds of seed taters ought to do it," Pop-Pop added.  He thumped his ashes. 

Twenty-five pounds?  Good grief!  My one attempt at growing potatoes involved only a 5-pound bag of seed potatoes, just two half-rows, and that little bit nearly worked me to death.  I had permanently marked potatoes off my list of things to grow.

"Well, allright," I said.  "I'll go find some before the weekend."

He said he was going to disk it again today. 

"Put a couple more rows on it," I told him.  "I have some seeds...."

Learning Things the Hard Way

I should be quilting.  Or, more exactly, UN-quilting.  But I get so dang frustrated that sometimes I just have to say, "Scr*w this for a while," and go do something else.

The quilt I mentioned in the previous blog is about 90% finished.  A tip from a mailing list convinced me to first quilt all the way across the top border, then quilt the area between the side borders (leaving the side borders free), then quilt all the way across the bottom border.  I then unloaded the quilt from the frame and re-loaded it sideways, the point being to enable me to quilt the side borders in one long stretch, rather than in short bursts, as I would have done.

I have been dreading this point for weeks.  First, I was almost dreading unrolling the quilt and seeing the whole project in all (or 90% of) it's glory.  Up to now, I'd only seen 9"-wide stretches of the quilt.  I knew that I'd encountered multiple little problems along the way, and I hadn't always been happy with the way I'd fixed them.  Would the sum total of all these little messes make the whole thing look shabby?  Secondly,
this is my first "real" quilt with this machine; turning this quilt in the frame during the quilting process is a step I had not practiced. 

Note to self:  don't try a new technique on something important, as there will always be unanticipated kinks.

I unloaded the quilt a couple of days ago.  Before re-loading it, I spread it out on a bed to examine it.  Thankfully, though it is far from perfect, the overall effect was not as bad as I had feared.)  Deeming it worthy of finishing, I re-loaded it into the frame.  It took several tries to get it right.  I had trouble getting the borders to lie flat and straight.  I had trouble transferring my quilting design to the fabric.  Then, when I finally began to quilt, I had trouble with extra fullness in the border.

Now, a professional quilter would be wondering why I'm having so much trouble getting these side borders to lie flat, and might suspect that my borders weren't straight and flat to begin with, but that person would be wrong; I was meticulous in my measuring, cutting, and sewing; this sucker was straight and square, once upon a time.  A professional quilter might also wonder why I didn't transfer the quilting design to the fabric before I put the quilt back in the frame.  That person might be correct in suspecting that, in some things, I am just plain dumb.  In any case, after quilting the first row across the first side border, I found that there was a big mess of puckers under the quilt, where I hadn't been paying such close attention.  I'm going to have to take that row out. 

But not right now.

Drawing with Thread

Last fall, while on a camping trip, I visited a small-town quilt shop and, to make a long story short, came out with a used short-arm quilting machine and frame.  It came with a bunch of pantographs - or is it pantograms?  I never remember -  a laser pointer, a "Cruise Control" thing, and a DVD showing how to thread the machine.  It was just too good a deal to pass up.

I could not wait to get home and try it out.

I loaded a "sandwich" of old bed sheets and left-over batting into the frame and started practicing.  It didn't take long to figure out that pantographs (?) and laser pointers are not for me.  It makes me nervous not to watch the needle as it moves across the fabric.  I pulled up a chair, sat down in front of the machine, and soon realized that I could "draw" with thread.  My pantograph shelf is now a "stuff" shelf. 

The picture to the right is a shot of an "iris garden" quilt I'm working on.  The quilting machine did all of this.  It is a mish-mash of trial and error, but it's much more forgiving of the errors than one might think.  This is just the top; it has batting and backing behind it, but I intend to cut most of that away before making the final "quilt sandwich" for the quilting process.  (I'm hoping for a trapunto effect.  We'll see.)   Batting and backing are not necessary, as I learned while doing the borders without them.  Here are some other things I learned in the process:

1.  Stabilize the fabric you're about to embroider.  I did not stabilize mine, and am noticing some pulling around the design.  (Hopefully, this will "quilt out.")  Next time, I'll try something like iron-on interfacing or embroidery stabilizer. 

2.  Water-soluable stabilizer is great for transferring patterns to the fabric.  Draw/trace right onto the stabilizer and then pin it to the fabric.  It stays put very well.  Glad "Press & Seal" wrap also works well, though there'll be some debris to remove.  Paper patterns can be pinned or taped to the fabric and sewn over, too.  One word of caution:  if you intend to re-trace the design, whether on paper or Press & Seal, pull the paper off after the first stitching, as re-tracing the design will most certainly create tiny "bobble pockets" which won't want to give up the paper. 

3.  If your frame has any bumps - bolt heads, or seams in the metal - fix them before you start.

4.  Try the foot pedal rather than a speed controller for delicate or tight areas.

5.  Keep good tension on the sides of the fabric. 

6.  While "painting" the design, keep in mind the direction/shape of the object you're painting, and move the machine in that direction; when filling a circle, move the machine in circles.

7.  You don't have to fill every speck.  In fact, you can use empty spaces for highlights, just as you can when drawing with a pencil. 

8.  Create shading by putting down more thread on the dark side of objects, or by switching to a darker thread.  If a dark thread seems too dark, sew a lighter shade on top of it. 

9.  Vary your "filling" patterns for different objects.  Use long straight lines, meandering lines, tiny circles, cross-hatching.  You get the idea.

10.  Use whatever kind of top thread you want, but fill your bobbins with embroidery bobbin thread.  You won't have to change bobbins nearly as often.

11.  Do an internet search for "thread painting."  There are technique videos out there.  Some of them are done with machines that have a zig-zag stitch (my quilting machine does only a straight stitch), but you can still get ideas for filler patterns, etc.