A Grand(s) Day - November 9, 2018

I had the nicest weekend.  My 3 granddaughters (ages 4 - 13), who moved 400+ miles away earlier this year, made a surprise visit.  They spent Friday night and all day Saturday with us.  Their boy cousin (age 11) came over on Saturday morning.  We went to a harvest festival, rode horses, went to a movie.  The girls moved to the other grandparents' house Saturday evening, and headed home Monday.  The boy stayed on with us until Sunday evening.

The baby girl's feet were the first to hit the floor Saturday morning.  She found me in my office, drinking my first cup of coffee and reading my email, and she climbed up in my lap.  We snuggled and talked for a few minutes.  When I asked her if she was hungry, she nodded sleepily, but when I said I would go start breakfast, she perked up and asked, "Can I help?"  My plan was to let her cut out the biscuits, but when I reached into the mixing bowl and started "scratching" the dough, she said, "I want to do THAT!"  So I let her.  She did a fine job.

All of my grandchildren are the most creative children in the world.  ;)  They like spending time at my house because I have paint and brushes and fabric and beads and ribbon and yarn and clay.  By now, they've learned how to properly wash a paintbrush, and they've learned to ask, "Can I use these scissors to cut paper?"  See?  I told you they are brilliant.  ;)

Quilting is dangerous work! 8/18/18

About a month ago, I decided that it was time - way past time, in fact - to finish a quilt that had been languishing in my quilt frame for about 2 years.  The problem was that my machine had been acting crazy - skipping stitches, making bird nests under the bottom, breaking the thread every few inches, and just generally acting a fool.  I threatened to sell it, and even took pictures to post on the local sell/swap site; whilst I deliberated, I took the partially-completed quilt off the frame and took it to a quilt shop where I rented a quilting machine to finish it.  Had to spend $20 for a lesson on how to use the danged thing, then $50 for a day's rental.

This rented machine was a doozie.  I put the quilt in the frame, threaded the machine, and sat down in a rolling chair to begin the work.  There was a thick rubber mat in front of the machine - 3 feet wide and as long as the quilt frame - and my chair would not roll on it.  I pushed sideways with my feet several times but the chair would not budge.  The shop lady helped me move the mat, and I went back to work.

The next morning, my right knee was swollen and tight, seemingly for no reason.  It hurt to put weight on it, and I limped around all weekend.  Monday, at work, when I needed to push sideways at my desk, my knee exploded with pain, and I realized what had caused the injury: pushing too hard, sideways, on the mat at the quilt store.  Since my work often involves climbing stairs, the knee gave me a few rough days, but it gradually got better.

At the rented quilting machine, I learned that the thread breakage part of my machine's problem wasn't the machine, it was the thread (it broke almost as badly on the rented machine).  And later, after doing a little research, I learned that if the quilt frame is not level and square, it can cause the machine to sew badly.  I decided to give my old machine another chance.  I had a half-finished quilt top in a box in my sewing room, and I dragged it out and finished it.  The Husband helped me level and square-up the quilt frame.  I cleaned the machine, loaded the quilt, and started the quilting.

The one thing that our leveling and squaring didn't fix was the "bump" in the center of the quilt frame where it joins together.  There must be a way to fix this, but I haven't found it.  It's just a tiny bump, but the sewing machine, gliding smoothly along on rails, hits that bump like it's a concrete wall.  Since there are wheels on both sides of the machine, it hits the wall again when the second set of wheels goes over it.  It causes bobbles in the sewing - all of my quilts have twin sets of bobbles smack down the center.  Today, hitting that bump caused me to SEW THROUGH MY LITTLE FINGER.  TWICE, it happened so fast.

When I finally disentangled myself from the sewing machine, there were 3 inches of thread hanging out of both sides (top and bottom) of my finger.  I came about as close to fainting as I have ever come.


  

Garden Report - 8/4/2018

You know what I think?

I think that gardens ought to be planted in the spring, when juices are flowing and plants are in the mood.

I say this because my last two late-planted gardens (this year's garden was rain-delayed until the end of May) have sucked.

For the plants, it must be like arriving at a party after the guest of honor has gone. 

The squash has managed to struggle, sunburned, through last month's ferocious heat, and they are loaded with blooms, but the plants pop out only a squash or two every few days.  Considering the number of "hills" I planted, I should be giving away squash if they were making properly. 

Same deal with the cucumbers. 

The tomatoes don't seem interested in ripening.  I saw one half-ripe tomato earlier in the week.  Some critter got it before I did.  Some other critter is nibbling at the green tomatoes and dropping them in the ground.  Oh, and a deer (or something of an equivalent size) bedded down ON two of the vines; there's a big "wallow" in the row.

The green beans are blooming half-heartedly.  Maybe they're waiting on cooler weather, like they did one other year. 

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!