Even More Bears

I went to Missoula yesterday. I didn’t have to go, but I am teaching the Christmas stocking class again at the quilt store there in a few weeks and they asked for the class samples to display. I am hesitant to mail anything anymore because apparently, all mail now goes to the moon (in the name of efficiency) to be individually hand stamped before coming back to Earth to be delivered. I have had several pieces of mail—mailed from the main post office in Kalispell, no less—go astray over the past couple of months. Even when mail does make it to its destination, the journey takes forever.

I also took some boxes of books to The Book Exchange and traded them in for credit. The store had a ton of quilting and knitting books but very few sewing books. I did get a book of canning recipes:

The recipe that roped me in is for Curry Tomatillo Pickles. I didn’t grow tomatillos this year, but I like them a lot and I love curry. That sounds like a winning combo to me. The Other Janet and I may have to have a pickle-making day next summer.

On the way home, I spotted a black bear in someone’s vineyard, happily munching on grapes. The bears are everywhere this year.

******

I need to work on the podcast website soon. That website is still on Squarespace 7.0. In order to take advantage of some new features, I have to upgrade to version 7.1. Squarespace will move everything over automatically, but I will have to spend a few hours cleaning up pages and making sure everything looks and works the way it is supposed to. I don’t have time to do that right now even though I am itching to get it crossed off the list. Hopefully, I can get to it in a week or so.

I’ve got three podcast interviews scheduled today. I don’t usually stack them like that, but it just happened that all of the guests had today free.

Sew Expo teachers got some of their class information this week. I am very excited about the changes the organizers have made. Class descriptions and grids will go up the second week of November, with registration opening in December. This is a change from past years when registration didn’t open until January. It also sounds like the number of class offerings have expanded significantly.

Things are happening.

Overrun with Squash

Our friend Anna lives across the road. She has a catering business and she uses almost exclusively fresh local produce. If I have extra of something, she’ll buy it and plan a menu around it. She loves the Georgia Roasters and any other squash I grow. Squash was one crop that did exceptionally well this year. (The pig manure we spread on the garden might have helped.) Yesterday afternoon, Anna and I brought most of the Georgia Roasters, the spaghetti squash, the blue kuri squash, and the buttercup squash into the greenhouse to cure. The Georgia Roasters are those long orange squash. We picked at least 30 of them.

There are at least another half a dozen Georgia Roasters out in the garden yet, but they were mixed in with the butternut squash—which still need a few days to ripen—and I didn’t want to trample the vines. I thought I had planted red kuri squash, too, but either it was mislabeled or I didn’t plant it after all. We are both excited to try the blue kuri.

Anna will use some of the Georgia Roasters fresh and freeze some. The blue hubbards are still out in the garden, as are the pumpkins, the acorn squash and the butternut squash. The beans are drying on those racks on the far side of the greenhouse. They look good. After I pulled the buttercup and some of the Georgia Roaster vines, I found several cabbages and some pepper plants. The cabbages grew nicely and probably will end up as sauerkraut.

We did not get the potatoes dug because the husband changed the oil in my Jeep after I got home from church. They can wait. I also brought in another wagon load of tomatoes. We have guests coming this week, but after they leave, salsa production begins. I am hoping to have all the canning done by the end of September.

We still haven’t had a frost. Unusual, but not unheard of. And I watched Ryan Hall’s video yesterday about the slight change in the El Nino forecast. This El Nino is still historic, but he noted that the tongue of warm water is closer to Japan than to the US, and when that happens, it’s possible that our part of the country will get more cold coming down from Canada instead of being warmer than average. Theoretically, if some of that cold combines with an atmospheric river, we could get snow and a lot of it.

[This is me praying for a hard winter to clear some of these transplants out of here. 🙏🏻]

The snowiest winter on record in Seattle happened during an El Nino winter (1968-69) when Seattle got 67.5 inches of snow. (Knowing what happens there when all they get is snow flurries makes me think the whole place must have shut down for weeks.) Spokane got 93 inches of snow that winter. An El Nino winter doesn’t guarantee the weather will be warmer and drier than normal.

******

Still no sewing. We’re so close to the end of National Sewing Month that I am not even going to try. I’d rather get all the canning and cleaning done and go into October with a wide open sewing schedule.

No Sewing During National Sewing Month

I had coffee with The Other Janet yesterday morning so we could catch up on what has been happening. She showed me photos of her reorganized sewing room—at least one of us is sewing. 😩

[The irony that it is National Sewing Month is not lost on me, believe me. If I had chosen the month for sewing, it would have been January or February. In my world, September is National Canning Month.]

And it’s not like I am sitting around doing nothing. I am knitting a bit in the evenings again, which I haven’t done in a long while. The hat is coming along nicely:

This is the upper part of the hat; I am going to pick up and work the ribbing later. I would like to make a quieter version, too, but I do not have very much muddy earth tone yarn in my yarn stash. Shocking, I know.

Otherwise, it has been a week of paperwork, of cleaning, of cooking, and not much else. Cabbage was on sale this week at the grocery store, so I have a crock of sauerkraut fermenting on the kitchen counter. I had no other good place to put it where I wouldn’t forget about it. I also need to bring in another wagon load of tomatoes today.

This will pass. Canning season will end, the weather will keep me indoors, and I will have time to sew again.

*****

My friend Robert asked me if the deck at the rental house was done, because he hadn’t seen pictures of it on the blog. He and Deana stayed in the house over the summer when the deck consisted of large sheets of plywood over the joists. I took some photos for him and will share them here:

And the front:

We chose a neutral color of the recycled decking material because at some point, we are going to re-side the house and put on a new metal roof. I like the “beige with a bit a green” combination. It blends nicely with the surroundings.

The Knitting Stash is Deep

My hair is once again under control; I came out of the salon with my head feeling about 10 pounds lighter. Before my appointment, I met with a friend of mine who used to work at the quilt store. We talked about the sewing school and I asked if she would be interested in helping to organize serger retreats and other events and she was very excited. It was good to see her again and hear about what she’s been doing.

When I got home from town, I canned up another 10 quarts of tomato sauce. I think I may call that good and move on to making salsa. We have enough sauce for spaghetti once a week and an occasional pot of chili. I need to put away the canning equipment for a while so I can clean the house for guests.

I bought patterns from two new-to-me companies and had them printed while I was in town. Do I need more patterns? No. Is it helpful for me to sew patterns from different companies so I can give informed recommendations to my students? Yes. (I can rationalize with the best of them.) The first pattern is the On Repeat top from Pattern Emporium:

I haven’t made anything from Pattern Emporium yet, but this one got rave reviews on its release.

The other pattern is the Piper Tunic and Dress from Wardrobe by Me. When I finally nail the ultimate dress pattern, I am going to make about a dozen of them, probably all in linen.

Of course, in order to make anything, I have to actually touch a sewing machine. Perhaps that will happen this weekend, or perhaps I will be rolling up hose in the garden and digging potatoes.

Sew Expo has plenty of sewing-related classes happening the day before Expo opens, so I am going to offer a knitting class, instead. We are going to make a slip-stitch hat—it will lend itself well to scrap knitting and all sorts of fun color play. The pattern is literally only two rows/rounds, which makes it quick and easy enough even for beginners. After an inch or so, the work almost goes on autopilot, which is good for a class where people will want to visit and learn more about knitting in general.

I have to make a sample, so I went to my stash yesterday evening and dove into my totes of beloved Brunswick Germantown. That was one of the first yarns I used when I began knitting and I bought up all I could find when the mill went out of business. Lion Brand Wool was the only other yarn that ever felt to me like Germantown when I was knitting it. I pulled out some partially-used skeins and cast on for a hat after dinner.

I’ll take a photo after I’ve done enough that the color switching shows up.

Sew Something Studio

Today is launch day! The website is live, the Facebook ads are running, and now I wait to see if anyone in the Flathead Valley wants to take sewing classes.

Local peeps, you can help me out by liking or following the page on Facebook. Share it widely. Local sewing peeps, you can go to the website and sign up for the newsletter. If you want a specific kind of class, please let me know. I will get it on the schedule. Right now, I just have the Beginning Sewing classes listed.

I am meeting this morning with someone who has both sewing and event planning experience to see if she would be interested in helping me to plan a serger retreat for next year. I’ve already had someone from California ask me to be on the list to be notified if I schedule one. 😮 Retreats are the “special events” part of what I am offering.

I am juggling a thousand tiny little details and I am sure I missed something, so don’t hesitate to let me know if you see something egregious.

I enjoyed teaching at the quilt store, but that arrangement reached a point this summer where it wasn’t working any longer. The Mountain View Mennonite Church basement wasn’t being used and we had plans to renovate the bathrooms for the bike tour, so I approached our Leadership Team about having classes there. I think it will work well. I can store tables and machines in the space, the entrance is off the lower level parking lot, and the church is only four miles from my house and just a bit more than that from town.

*****

The Sew Expo class coordinator e-mailed me yesterday and asked if I would be interested in teaching a four-hour class on Wednesday, the day before Expo begins. We are discussing possible classes that would fit in that slot. It will make for a long week—I am already scheduled to teach six other classes—but if I am going to be there, I might as well teach. I can manage my stamina level.

I cooked down another batch of tomatoes yesterday. The sauce is waiting in the fridge for me to can it, hopefully this afternoon. It looks like we are in for a stretch of nice—and dry—weather. Still no frost in the forecast, so I’ll keep harvesting tomatoes as long as I can.

I have a lot going on right now, yes, but it’s a good kind of busy.

Rooster Training

As it turns out, the chicken that was camped on the floor of the chicken coop was on her way out. She was not protecting chicks. I found her dead in the corner of the coop yesterday morning. Sometimes, it is hard to tell what the behavior means. I still have several hens sitting on eggs so I remain hopeful that there will be chicks at some point.

And the best way to describe my training program for the baby roosters is that I talk to them. I talk to all the chickens, constantly. I talk about the weather, the deer and the turkeys, what’s in the bags of scraps that my friend Anna brings over for them—it’s basically a running commentary that gets them used to hearing my voice. By the time the baby roosters are old enough to start being aggressive, they have heard me blathering on for six months and don’t see me as a threat. In their minds, I am just the lady that makes a lot of noise and gives them food. Even the year that I had nine juvenile roosters in the coop, I didn’t worry about going in there.

Dave knew his name. I could say, “Dave,” and he would stop what he was doing and come over to me. When I go into the coop in the morning, the rooster is standing by the door to meet me. I say, “Good morning chickens! It’s time to go out! Follow the rooster!” and the rooster trots over to the door to the chicken yard and stands there until I open it. When it’s open, he starts clucking and encouraging the hens to go outside. When I leave the coop, I say, “Okay, ladies, the rooster is in charge!”

Do the roosters actually understand me? Probably not. Their brains are not very big. But we have a routine and they are used to it and I think that keeps the anxiety and drive to protect the hens from me at a minimum.

One of my roosters used to demand to eat scratch grains from my hand.

*****

I canned up the ham stock yesterday afternoon and put a few more bags of tomatoes into the freezer. I’d like to make the second batch of tomato sauce today although I might not can it until tomorrow. The schedule this week is fluid. I do have an appointment tomorrow to get a desperately-needed haircut. I try to get in at least every eight weeks, but it has been more than three months and my hairstyle right now is most charitably described as “poodle meets Newfoundland.” My hair has multiple personalities depending on the humidity level. I have always had thick hair and a lot of it, but it became a lot curlier after I had chemo. Here in Montana, when the humidity level is less than 25%, I can wear it straight if I blow it dry and use the flatiron. Anything more than that and it curls up no matter what I do to it. (I don’t even take my hairdryer to Seattle with me because there is no point.) Thankfully, the woman who cuts my hair knows how to layer it properly to take some of the bulk out of it.

The Jeep has also been loaded with the first batch of donations to take to one of the thrift stores in town. Books are next on the list. I’ve gone through mine and the husband said he will try to cull his collection, too. Those will go to one of the used bookstores, either here or in Missoula.

We moved the nightstands into the spare bedroom at the rental house. They look nice there. The husband installed the lights in the rental house garage, although we still need to get one more fixture. Home Depot only had two in stock. Next weekend, because the weather is supposed to be nice, we have to dig potatoes and put hoses away. I am trying to decide if I should cut the grass around the garden one more time. It would make it cleaner and easier to work out there.

Bears Everywhere

I have instituted a version of Swedish Death Cleaning because I am getting tired of being overrun by stuff. Also, we have people coming to visit, which always motivates me to do some thorough deep cleaning. The husband brought back a beautiful walnut roll-top desk from his dad’s house last fall and we wanted to put it in the living room so it didn’t have to spend another winter in the rental house garage. In order for that to happen, though, several other pieces of furniture had to get moved, in a specific order. I couldn’t move them without help or this already would have been accomplished.

I made a list of what needed to happen, in what order, and we tackled it yesterday morning. We started by moving a vintage sewing machine in a cabinet from our bedroom to the garage. Some of my machines need to get released back into the wild (taken to the thrift store or sold to people) and this was one of them. Many years ago, my father made me a map chest that holds all of my knitting needles. It needed to be moved from the corner of the living room up to the spot in the bedroom previously occupied by the sewing machine. We took all of the drawers out—I have to go through them now and organize my needles—and the husband moved the map chest upstairs. Also in that corner was a double-wide rocking chair. I don’t want to sell it because I used to sit there with the girls and read to them when they were little. That rocking chair went over to the rental house to one of the bedrooms.

Once the corner was empty, I mopped the floor and touched up a few holes in the walls where pictures had hung. The husband went over to the rental house garage and began loading the pieces of the desk into the truck. I helped him with the pieces that needed two people to move. A few areas on the desk needed re-gluing, so he set up some sawhorses on the porch to make those repairs. In the meantime, I strained the ham stock that had been simmering in the roaster and put it in the fridge to cool so I could scrape the fat off the top before I can it.

After lunch, I brought in another wagon load of tomatoes to ripen inside and put ripe ones in the freezer. While he was waiting for glue to dry, we got the apples and pears off all the trees except the Golden Delicious. Those apples need another week or two yet. The last task on my list was to clean up some nightstands. They had been in Sunnie’s house and given to Robin when Sunnie sold her house last year. Robin offered them to me. I have been looking for nightstands for the rental house all summer with no luck. I picked them up from Robin on Friday. They need to be stripped and refinished at some point, but I don’t have time for that right now. Instead, I washed them down with some Murphy’s oil soap, went over them with fine steel wool, then gave them a coat of Howard’s Restore-a-Finish. That stuff is pretty amazing. It doesn’t completely refinish the wood, but it brightens the existing finish and fills in any spots where the finish has worn away. I’ve used it before on sewing machine cabinets. The nightstands look fine for now and I’ll put them in the rental house bedroom today. (Thank you, Sunnie and Robin. 😊)

The husband and I reassembled the desk in the late afternoon. It looks very nice in the corner of the living room. We need to find a chair to go with it.

Our reward to ourselves for all that work was dinner in town and a trip to Home Depot. On the way to town, I spotted a black bear in a meadow, so we stopped to watch it for a minute:

I don’t know if this is the same bear I saw a few weeks ago or the same bear that wandered through our woods. (They don’t wear name tags, unfortunately.) Someone in our neighborhood had reported a black bear with a cub in that same area, but I didn’t see any cubs with this one.

A front is coming through today with cooler temps and more rain today, but after that, we are supposed to get about a week of really nice weather. I am hoping the rest of the tomatoes will ripen because there are a lot of them out there.

And I suspect we may have some peeps. I have had several broody hens sitting on eggs for the last couple of weeks. One of the formerly-broody Black Australorps was parked in the middle of the chicken coop, on the floor, when I went in there yesterday. She refused to move. That usually means a hen has chicks under her, although I didn’t hear any cheeping. I checked again when we got home from town and she was still there. Perhaps I’ll see some chicks this morning.

I leave you with a photo of the huckleberry mud pie we had for dessert last night. The bears aren’t the only ones who love huckleberries:

A Tribute to Dave

One of my blog readers, Karen, sent me an e-mail a few months ago about a project she was working on. She said that she has always loved chickens but lives in a place where they are prohibited. My posts about Dave inspired her to piece a wallhanging using a box of silk dupioni pieces she had collected. It is embroidered with DMC satin floss. She shared a picture of the finished wallhanging with me this week and it is stunning! Karen says she plans to enter it in the Georgia National Fair in October. It deserves a prize.

For those of you who are new here, Dave was my previous rooster and father to my current rooster. Dave was one of 19 eggs I incubated back in April 2020 when there was not a chick to be had anywhere in the county. I typically don’t incubate eggs because I get a lot of roosters that way, and of the 17 eggs that hatched, 9 were males. Dave was the best of the lot and truly, the best rooster I’ve ever had. This is a pic of him from 2022.

Little Roo, my current rooster, is also good, but doesn’t have quite the personality his dad had. I don’t know what I will do if this bloodline ever dies out because it has produced some good roosters. My roosters are not jerks because they go to Janet’s Finishing School for Baby Roosters.

Thank you, Karen, for commemorating Dave this way. 😊

*****

I am fighting a bit of a losing battle but I’m fighting it anyway. The kids are coming for a visit in two weeks along with DD#2’s future in-laws. I am trying to clean the house. I am trying to clean the house during canning season and I am pushing the biggest boulder up the highest hill only to watch it roll down again. I will have to do some last-minute cleaning just before they get here, but for now, I am trying to tackle the big, once-every-six-month projects. Yesterday morning, I had the husband take the pot rack down for me so I could clean it. I have to put it in the bathtub to do that. It’s a big job, but the rack accumulates a lot of grease and dust and needs to be cleaned periodically.

Today—because it is raining again and we were awakened at 3:30 this morning by the loudest clap of thunder I think I’ve ever heard—I am going to make a roaster of ham stock for canning tomorrow. I’ve got a bunch of bags of ham bones and scraps in the freezer and I need to do something with them.

I will get back to sewing soon. I am juggling about a thousand details with regard to the podcast and the sewing school right now and my bandwidth for actual sewing is fairly narrow. The raincoat is on the list because it’s raining and I don’t have a raincoat and I knew that would happen. I might start with something small, though, like a zipper pouch, just to remind myself that I know what I’m doing.

A Bear in the Yard

A black bear wandered through our yard last night. Our neighbor, Ali, saw it as she was on her way over to get eggs and alerted the husband. I was upstairs, reading a book, so I didn’t get to see it, but he snapped a pic just before it ran off:

I need to get the rest of the apples off the trees today. They should be ripe. We did not have a good huckleberry season and the bears are down here looking for food.

I have to run back into town this morning for a couple of hours to get a big rock chip filled in my windshield. It happened as I was driving down I-90 past Ellensburg, Washington, on Saturday. The chip is about the size of a dime. Safelite can get me in this morning, so I am going to get it fixed before it has a chance to run.

******

The class coordinator at Quilting Mayhem sent me an e-mail yesterday and asked for more classes because the ones I taught last week were so well received. We are aiming for classes in early January. I could also piggyback classes onto my trip over to teach at Sew Expo in March, although I would rather people came to Sew Expo to take classes.

And I am letting my big secret out of the bag this morning. I am going to begin offering sewing classes here in Kalispell.

This has been in the works since June—I have been building the website and familiarizing myself with the scheduling software over the summer. I will schedule some Beginning Sewing classes for October and will add more classes as I advertise and determine what people want. My Kalispell sewing peeps are welcome to spread the word. Let me know if you want any specific classes. Classes will be held in the basement of the Mennonite church in Creston. There is ample parking, and the basement can be accessed right off the parking lot so it will be easy for students to bring machines. I will provide machines for beginners who might not have one.

More information will come in the next week or so. I should have the website link and logo ready soon.

Vintage Sewing Books and Weird Knitting

I bought several books on this trip. I have been trying to avoid accumulating books—I have two large bookshelves of knitting books in my office and no room for more—but I have decided that when I find worthy sewing books, especially vintage ones, I am going to buy them. AI is spreading so much slop these days that I feel it’s important to have sources of correct information on hand.

There are three Half-Price Books stores I frequent in the Seattle area: Lynnwood, Tacoma, and Tukwila. I happened to be going through Tacoma on my way back to Seattle last Wednesday, so I stopped at that HPB and picked up three books for $23:

I’ve only glanced through them, but they look like they will be very useful, especially the pattern alterations one.

I’ve noticed something in the past several years with regard to teaching knitting classes. I didn’t teach knitting for almost 15 years and it’s only been recently that I am being asked to teach it again. I start every knitting class now by watching each student knit. I had to begin doing that because people were showing up in my classes having taught themselves to knit by watching YouTube, and some of their methods were so far off base that we couldn’t get to MY class material until I corrected what they were doing.

I don’t care if you knit with the yarn in your left hand or in your right. I can do both, although I prefer to throw because it’s how I learned 52 years ago. I really don’t care how you make the stitch as long as you understand what is happening with your stitch formation. However, I had one woman show up in a lace knitting class at Sew Expo a few years ago and tell me that she couldn’t knit lace because the holes always closed up. After watching her knit, I determined that she was twisting her stitches on her purl rows and indeed—she was closing up all the holes she had created on the previous row. I showed her what she was doing wrong and how to “read” her knitting, and she found me at Sew Expo the following year to show me a beautiful lace shawl she had made.

Last week, a woman came into my Knitting Tune-Up class and said she was trying to knit socks but she couldn’t get them over her heel. The alarm bells went off again. Sure enough, she was twisting her stitches on her purl rows. When the stitches are twisted, the knitting loses its elasticity. I gave her some options for fixing that problem and by the end of class, she had learned to make her purl stitches so that they didn’t twist. (She was also a rabid crocheter and we think that was contributing to the problem, because she wanted to make the same wrist motions in knitting that she did in crocheting.)

I never saw these issues 20 years ago. I have seen more bizarre ways of knitting in the past three years than I saw in the previous two decades.

Get off my lawn, LOL.

******

Vacation is over and I am back to work. Yesterday, I caught up on construction company paperwork, recorded this week’s podcast, and canned 14 quarts of tomato sauce. I plan to do another 14 quarts of sauce and that should be enough for this year because we still have some left from last year. Any tomatoes after that will be going into salsa. I probably need to can up a good 50 quarts of salsa this year because we’re almost out.

We’re supposed to have a couple of dry days before another system moves in this weekend. Tomorrow and Thursday have to be devoted to getting squash and beans moved into the greenhouse. I should have pulled the beans as soon as I got back, but I didn’t think we were going to get as much rain as we did yesterday. The beans will dry out in the greenhouse. The current system has been sitting over us and dumping water. Overnight temps are still in the 40s—not warm, certainly, but at least we don’t have to cover the tomatoes.

Four Thousand Miles Later

I have been traveling. I left August 25th and drove to Seattle, where I spent the night in a hotel by the airport and flew to Cleveland the next day. I was in Cleveland until Sunday evening, when I flew back to Seattle, spent the night in the hotel again, then drove over to the Olympic peninsula to spend two days with DD#1 and DSIL. On Wednesday, September 2nd, I drove back to Seattle, checked into the Airbnb, and taught four classes on Thursday and Friday at Quilting Mayhem in Snohomish. I had dinner with DD#2 and her fiancé on Friday evening, then drove home to Montana on Saturday.

[The kids and DD#2’s future in-laws will all be here on the last weekend of September for some wedding planning.]

I have a lot to cover from my trip, but I also have a lot to do here to catch up. This post is mostly to let you all know that I am still alive. I don’t like to advertise in advance that I am going to be away, or for how long. I could blog while traveling, but honestly—I enjoy the break. I have to remind myself to read my e-mail or I would ignore that, too.

I did some fabric shopping. My classes went well; the students were engaged and eager to learn and we all had a good time. I had many quiet hours of driving and did much thinking and planning.

The husband put tomatoes into the freezer for me while I was gone. Sauce production begins today. We have been getting quite a bit of rain here. The squash look great. We tried a watermelon yesterday—not quite ripe—and something like a honeydew melon that the husband ate. I am not sure how much longer the actual growing season will be. We might get another warm spell before the end of the month, but for now, it is cool and rainy.

This is one of the Blue Hubbard squash, which is the size of a small child:

The Georgia Roasters are ripe and need to be brought in. I despair of the butternut squash ripening unless we get some heat. I will get some pics of the Gargomel and Thunder Mountain tomatoes, because they are very pretty.

I am still unpacking. I probably will have photos of my fabric purchases to share, because I found a few treasures, but it might take a day or two. For now, I have to hit the ground running.

A Deep Sewing Stash

Yesterday began with a structure fire call around 6:30 am. The husband left to go to the fire and I headed to the grocery store to get some sandwiches and fruit for the firefighters. I was home again by 9 am. I got the apples off the State Fair and Lodi trees; the other trees have apples but they aren’t quite ripe yet. The Lodi tree had about two dozen apples, which is enough for a batch of apple pie filling, but I did not have apple juice on hand and didn’t want to run back into town to get some. (Bad planning.) I’ll stop at the store before church this morning and make the pie filling this afternoon. The State Fair tree only had about a dozen apples on it. I am not sure why apple production this year is so poor. My trees typically produce every other year. Two years ago, both trees had much more fruit.

I spent the rest of the day going through the house and cleaning up clutter and putting things away. Stuff comes in and stuff goes out and stuff just generally needs to be dealt with. I sorted through the boxes of sewing supplies I received from Kathyrn’s daughter, which included packages of blanket binding, rick-rack and other trims. Before long, I found myself in the midst of this:

I have so much bias binding and trim—my mother gave me all of hers, I got my mother-in-law’s sewing stash after she died, and I have my own collection, none of which has ever been sorted or organized. Now it is. I sorted all the packages and put them into their own zip bags and then into storage totes. If any of my Kalispell peeps need binding or rick-rack, call me. I probably have what you need. 🤪

I am not a hoarder, truly. I have a deep stash and it is reasonably well organized.

I went through my pattern library, too. It’s going to be time to start sewing cooler-weather clothing. I need to make some new long-sleeved Lark Tees. The Scout Tee expansion pack includes a pattern for long sleeves, but I think I am going to switch back to sewing knits for a while.

******

I spent some time on Pinterest the other day, thinking that I would put together some Pinterest boards of sewing and fitting resources to share with my students. In theory, a good idea; in practice, I found that Pinterest has been flooded with all sorts of AI slop, some of it really awful and featuring obviously incorrect information. I am going to recommend books, instead, and I am going to suggest that students start accumulating a library of good vintage sewing books. My top three are the Reader’s Digest Complete Guide to Sewing (any RD book, really), The Vogue Sewing Book, and The Singer Sewing Book.

******

A dry front came through last night with wind but no rain. Watch Duty—an app for tracking wildfire activity—showed 12 new fire starts west of Kalispell. I don’t see anything on our side of the valley, thankfully. The long-term forecasts are hinting at some pattern changes which could bring cooler and wetter weather. Let’s hope that materializes. I am tired of hot, dry summer.

A Grab Bag of Stuff

You have no idea how happy I am that September is right around the corner. This summer has felt like a marathon. All summers in Montana are like that, really, but this one has been particularly marathon-y.

[The bike tour raised over $30,000 for Mennonite Central Committee, by the way, so I would call that a big success!]

I think that some (much?) of what I find so wearing is all the peopleing. During the winter, we all tend to hibernate in our houses and socializing has to be more intentional (and desirable). During the summer, people are everywhere. I have taken to doing as many of my errands as I can as early in the morning as I can. The farm store, grocery store, and Walmart are all open at 7 am. I’ve had a couple of days where I have managed to get everything done and be back home by 10 am. Glorious.

The mail brought some fun things this week. I had Robin Long of Robin Ruth Design on the podcast last week. Robin lives near Ritzville, WA, and has developed a way of making mariner’s compass quilt blocks with strip piecing instead of paper piecing. I am no fan of machine paper piecing—which is different from English paper piecing—so I am interested in any methods for getting around that. As a thank you for having her on the podcast, she sent me one of her Fat Robin rulers and the pattern book for making the mariner’s compass block. I plan to start one of these this fall when things calm down a bit. And I am also hoping to connect with Robin in person, perhaps at the Ritzville relief sale in October.

Unfortunately, the USPS managed to break the second ruler that was in the (padded!) envelope, so she is sending a replacement of that one.

I also got this book. My mother will recognize the name on the cover:

Jaroslav Vajda’s father was the pastor at the church I grew up in, but long before my time. I think he was pastor there in the early 1900s because Jaroslav Vajda was born in Lorain, Ohio, in 1919. In the latter half of his life, he became a prolific hymn writer. His hymns are in Lutheran, Baptist, Mennonite, and many other hymnals. I mentioned him in the sermon I did a few weeks ago at church. Afterward, I decided to peruse the Concordia Publishing House website for other resources and found this little gem. One entire chapter is devoted to the Slovak hymns that he translated, including one called Čas Radosti, which our congregation sang at Christmas. This book is an inch thick, at least.

I traced off this pattern yesterday (view B):

When we were in Missoula a few weeks ago, The Other Janet bought some wide-wale corduroy in a gorgeous caramel color at The Confident Stitch. She is planning to make a skirt from it. I have corduroy in the stash, so I went searching through my pattern library and unearthed this McCall’s pattern. This isn’t high on the priority list, but the pattern is ready to make a muslin whenever I decide I have time. I like the culotte version, too, but I’ll start with the skirt. Culottes are awesome to wear with boots in the winter.

Once again, I love that sewing frees me from having to follow whatever trends are in the store. No navy blue pants or skirts this season? I’ll make some. Culottes are scarcer than hens’ teeth? I’ll make some. Nothing but crop tops for sale? I’ll make some that are long enough for me.

Carrying On the Traditions

We’ve had a lot of funerals for members of our church this year. At last count, I was up to five. Back in 2004, we had nine in one year.

We had lots of wonderful older ladies in our congregation and they are all gone now except for Margaret, who will be 99 in October. (Hi, Margaret! 👋🏻 ) A lady named Kathryn passed away a few months ago. Kathryn was an amazing quilter and cook and was the first woman elder in our congregation. Her daughter called me last week and wanted to know if I would take her mom’s Singer sewing machine. It’s a Singer 600—one of the last models with metal gears—and I knew it was in great shape because I had helped Kathryn with it. I don’t need another machine, but I have been finding people to pass some of these on to and I am sure I can find a good home for it.

[When Margaret moved to Indiana, she bequeathed me her collection of canning jars and not a canning session goes by that I am not blessing her generosity.]

I met the daughter at Kathryn’s house the other day. We went through the quilting supplies and there were quite a few that I can use or pass on to people at church. I know many of us will be happy to have something that passed through Kathyrn’s hands. I brought home a box of quilting and sewing books and these gems were in it:

I love vintage sewing books. They have such great information.

When JC Briar and I were together in June in Oregon, we talked about the concept of a “stash executor,” who is the person that your relatives call to handle the disposition of your sewing and crafting estate after you are gone. I have some informal stash executors, but I probably ought to formalize those arrangements at some point.

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I’ve been working on gathering my class materials for my Quilting Mayhem classes. The knitting classes already have handouts and I know what I want to teach. The fitting classes are more difficult to prepare for because some of the class content is unpredictable depending on who is in the class and what questions they have. I want to cover topics that are relevant to the students in the class. Theoretical concepts are great, but it’s better to have some real-world information. Thankfully, I keep some of my failed muslins because they make great class samples.

I wore my black Kona Crush Free Range Slacks yesterday and I think I need to knock out a few more—they are so comfortable.

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The squash are taking over the garden, literally. Some of the vines have grown out into the grass and I said to the husband that I wouldn’t be surprised if the Georgia Roaster plants—of which there are only two!—climb up and over the greenhouse. That is what happens when you put pig manure into your garden.

Last year, I got six or seven Georgia Roaster squash from two plants. I tried counting what was out there yesterday and gave up at 30. My friend Anna, who has a catering business, is very excited as she uses a lot of my squash in her recipes. And the winter squash will keep for a couple of months.

These are some of the Georgia Roasters.

There are some enormous buttercup squash, too.

I need to make a thorough survey today of the garden after my dentist appointment to get the permanent crown on my molar. There are lots of tomatoes out there but they aren’t ripening as quickly as I expected, although we are usually harvesting tomatoes well into September.

The husband came home with a bag of cucumbers from one of his homeowners yesterday. He said the guy tried to give him zucchini, too, but thankfully, the husband refused politely. 👀

I Saw a Bear

I was on my way to town yesterday morning when I came around a corner and saw a black bear. I pulled the dash cam video for you. Make sure your sound is up because the husband thinks it’s funny when I gasp. 🙄

I need to get the apples off the trees today. The bears are probably hungry and looking to fatten up for the winter. We did not have a good huckleberry season.

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I finished my Free Range Slacks yesterday afternoon.

This is the first time I’ve made the narrow-legged version and I hadn’t realized that they are almost a barrel-leg type pant. That doesn’t matter to me as I love the way they fit and feel. More of these are definitely in the plan. (BTW, the crotch is not as low as it looks in the photo.)

I wish I had started sewing clothes for myself a long time ago. I would have had a lot less frustration when shopping.

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Today and tomorrow need to be devoted to getting ready for my Quilting Mayhem classes. I have been making lists of all the stuff I need—both sewing and knitting—and will start packing later this week. I think I will also make another roaster of stock and get that canned.

Stock and Slacks

I added six quarts and a pint of chicken stock to the pantry yesterday:

I still have more chickens to cook down. These were laying hens that we butchered when they stopped producing. They don’t have a lot of meat on them, but I took what was on the bones and put it in the freezer.

After lunch, I sewed. I started a pair of Free Range Slacks from black Kona Crush in the narrow leg version. Kona Crush isn’t available anymore (😭) but I bought the end of this bolt—about four yards—at The Quilting Bee in Spokane in April. I also have yardage in a deep green, a cadet blue, and a pale pink. Yes. the fabric is supposed to look permanently wrinkled.

I didn’t rush through these, but I got more done than I expected. By the time the husband got home from drilling 46 holes into concrete on a job in Whitefish, I had finished both legs:

I’ll turn one leg inside out, slip the other leg into it, then sew the crotch seam. After that, all I have to do is attach the waistband and insert the elastic and hem them.

Mowing the yard is on the list of tasks for this afternoon. The grass usually goes dormant in July due to lack of rain, but the yard looks messy and all that rain we got on Friday will probably encourage the grass to grow again. (“Grass” is a loose term as the yard also has a lot of other stuff growing in it.) Some of the apples look ripe, too, and need to come off the trees.

A Blessedly Rainy Day

Yesterday was a lovely day. We got a nice, steady rain for most of the day. The air feels clean again and I am sure that the plants in the garden appreciated all of the moisture. I’ve been running the drip hoses, but there is nothing like a good soaking from the heavens.

I put some chicken and vegetables into the roaster yesterday morning to cook down into stock. I’ll can the stock this morning. After 24 hours of simmering, it should be nice and rich. The pantry is looking a bit bare and I need to get cracking on food storage for the winter.

And I sewed. I made a top using that Simplicity raglan pattern, S8909, the one I was fooling around with back in May:

It doesn’t look like much on the hanger, but I love the way it fits and looks when I have it on. (I need to figure out a good way to get some photos of me wearing some of this stuff.) I dithered about putting the flounce at the bottom of the sleeves and may still do that. Normally, I cannot stand fabric flapping around my wrists—how on earth is anyone supposed to cook or play the piano that way?—but these are 3/4 sleeves (more like 2/3 sleeves) and I don’t think the flounce will be in my way. But I also think the sleeves are fine the way they are.

This was a quick sew, about four hours start to finish. I almost went back to the stash to find fabric for a second version. I did not realize how desperately I needed a good raglan-with-darts base pattern until I stumbled upon this one. I’ll make a long-sleeve version and may even frankenpattern a cowl neck onto it, like View A in this old See & Sew pattern:

I could also lengthen it into a dress. After all, that was the original pattern.

I wonder why raglan patterns with bust darts are so rare. I just don’t see those kinds of patterns very often. Most of the time, instead of bust darts, the fullness is rotated into the neckline and changed into gathers or pleats (as in the See & Sew pattern). I like those styles, too, but I really like having the bust dart option.

I’ve got something to wear to the reunion, which was the goal, and this coming week needs to be devoted to getting my Quilting Mayhem class materials together. I might knock out another top if I get all of my class prep done early in the week.

Oh, the Pressure

We got a little bit of rain overnight, but we also got thunder and lightning. I can only hope that any strikes don’t smolder and break out later. At least the high temperatures will be staying in the upper 70s.

We have an all-high-school reunion in a couple of weeks. I am trying to decide what to wear, which means making something. I have been agonizing over this since bike tour ended. The clothing I make looks better on me than anything I could buy because it fits me well, and I’d like to look good for this event. I’ve made a lot of tops this summer for daily wear, but nothing that fits the more special event category.

Back in May, I ran up a muslin of this pattern:

I shortened View A into a tunic and adjusted the raglan sleeves a bit because they were drafted for an NFL linebacker. (I have broad shoulders, which I why I like raglans, but these were ridiculous.) I really like the way the muslin fits and looks. I had it on for re-evaluation yesterday afternoon when The Other Janet stopped over to get some zucchini and she concurred. The only reason I abandoned the muslin back in May was for lack of time. I decided that this will be what I make to wear to the reunion.

My stash contains a lot of two-yard cuts for tops. It also has several three-yard cuts for dresses. This tunic needs about 2-1/2 yards, so I had to find the longer pieces. I located a black-and-pink rayon batik that I think will work well, and it will pair nicely with black pants. (The reunion is partially outside and I have no idea what the weather is going to be like.) Making this top is going to be my project for today.

Burda 5614 is a very similar pattern.

I am still searching for that elusive dress pattern. Maybe the Simplicity raglan pattern will end up being a good one if I make it in the original length.

You can tell that I don’t do frou-frou. I am not a ribbons and ruffles kind of person.

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Out in the garden, the winter squash and the tomatoes look fabulous. I will have pumpkins, butternut squash, buttercup squash, Georgia roasters, blue Kuri, red Kuri, and Delicata squash. I probably will have cabbages and dry beans, too, but not nearly as many as I had hoped.

I’ve been cleaning and organizing the pantry and making a list of what needs to get canned: salsa; beef, ham, and chicken stock; beans; tomato sauce; and some pie filling. One of the local grocery stores always has a case sale in September and I plan to stock up on some things there.

Fire Hall Wall Pour, Part 1

Part of the wall pour for the new fire hall happened yesterday morning, so I stopped on my way home from town to take some pictures. I say “part” because the husband only had enough 4' concrete forms to do half the wall. (It’s a big fire hall!) The crew will strip the forms today and put them up for the other half of the wall. I am not sure when that will get poured.

The husband manned the boom to make sure the right amount of concrete went into the form. One of our employees followed behind him with the backpack vibrator to eliminate any air pockets. There was another group of guys further back who were finishing the top of the wall.

This is why I wage a constant war against dirt in my house. 🤪

The pump operator moves the boom around with a joystick control.

You can see that it is still smoky here. We are supposed to get some rain and thunderstorms tomorrow and Friday. Hopefully that will clear the air a bit.

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It occurred to me, while I was working on this Grainline tank pattern, that perhaps I needed to address the fit of the back pattern piece to help make the front pattern piece fit better. Duh. That seems like such a basic concept, but I also think that we get so stuck on trying to figure out where the problem lies—usually the problem we can see in the mirror—that we develop a bit of tunnel vision. I am being fairly picky about the fit of this woven tank because it fits more closely than a top with sleeves.

When Ryliss Bod was helping me to fit that dress pattern last fall, she noted that my back neck-to-waist measurement was shorter than average. We shortened the back dress pattern piece by about 3/4". I remembered that little piece of information and decided to try the same adjustment on this Grainline Willow tank. I had some gaping at the back of the armhole, so I shortened the top at the upper back, between the neck and the base of the armhole, by about the same amount.

What a difference that made to the fit! The back fits better and now the front fits better, too. The irony is that I needed to shorten the back pattern piece but lengthen the front pattern piece. The front fits nicely on the upper bodice with no gaping or wrinkling. Everything hangs straight. I made my second muslin out of some black cotton fabric that the Other Janet gave me. I just need to bind the neck and armholes and hem it.

I should take a good look at the fit of my other woven tops to see if those patterns could benefit from a similar adjustment.

Beware Overfitting

I ran two sessions of pickling class on Saturday. It was a lot of fun. The morning group consisted of women who also quilt and sew, so they got a tour of my sewing room(s). One of the students in the afternoon class was a young woman who grew up in the town just east of where I grew up in Ohio. (She is from Westlake, I am from Avon.) That was a fun coincidence. She is also taking the mending class I am giving tomorrow evening at the Community Center.

By yesterday afternoon, I just needed to make something, so I made a muslin for the Grainline Willow Tank:

I like this very much, although the sizing on these Grainline patterns is generous, at least in the D-cup size range. If I make the size indicated by comparing my measurements to the size chart, the garment is too big. I always have to go down one size. The muslin fit well, though, and I like the way it looks. (I am wishing I had made some of these tanks earlier in the summer, because they also would have been in heavy rotation.) I am going to incorporate the rounded chest alteration that I mentioned in the previous blog post, just to see if it makes any kind of difference. I am beginning to suspect that that is one of the standard alterations I’ll need to make going forward, much like always having to lengthen patterns by 2-3". I’ll run up a second quick muslin today—I have leftover chunks of fabric from other projects and this top doesn’t require much—to see what I think.

The process of fitting comes with the temptation to overfit in an effort to eliminate all wrinkles and drag lines completely. That’s an unattainable goal, and an undesirable goal as well. And overfitted garment doesn’t allow for much movement. We don’t demand perfectly fitting clothing in our ready-to-wear garments—and believe me, I look at people’s clothing and the way it fits every time I am out in public—so I wonder why we strive for that in our me-mades? There is a middle ground where clothing fits well but may still have the occasional wrinkle or drag line, and that’s okay.

My big thing is bust darts. I have seen so many garments on models where the bust darts are clearly in the wrong place. Most of the time, they are too high. The rule I use is that if I extend the line of the dart at the same angle from where it ends on the garment, that line should extend through the apex of the bust. I understand that the fit model may not be the person for whom the garment was made, but still, a well-placed bust dart is the one feature that tells me the sewist knows what he or she is doing when it comes to fitting. And altering the position of a bust dart is not difficult.

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I have some breathing room before the next big event, so I am hoping to get a lot accomplished this week. (I’m whispering so the universe doesn’t hear me and upend my plans.) I need to start getting my class materials together for my classes at Quilting Mayhem in Snohomish, WA. And I need to make a couple of batches of zucchini bread. ‘Tis the season.