A Good Sewing Day

Good morning, my friends. Following through on my promise to sew my guts out yesterday, I did exactly that. Early, I hoed the garden. Everything is looking good out there, happily. I uncovered the zucchini and the cucumbers. They had wire baskets over them to protect them from gnawing critters. I think they've grown large enough to stand on their own now. After that, I needed to put away the laundry from the day before. And then...all sewing, all the time.

There were two more embroidered blocks to quilt for the "Seasons" project. For summer, I did some pebbling in the sunflowers, and then a looping beeline connecting the various bees in the piece.

For the final block...just some swirls. I couldn't really see any particular theme in this one that would lend itself well to quilting, and so I just endeavored to fill in all the little nooks and crannies.

I'd only been at it for about 20 minutes at that point, and so I decided to go ahead and quilt the sashings. For this I did a double upsy-downsy ribbon motif. There are five horizontal sashings and two vertical ones. I ran out of bobbin thread as I was finishing the fourth of the horizontal sashings.

It's difficult to wind a bobbin with that monofilament thread, and I spent the rest of my quilting time on that. It killed my motivation to do anything more, and so I'll finish up the sashings today (hopefully). After that, I'll move on to the many thread changes for the pieced blocks.

From there, I headed into the sewing room, determined to get at least one of the Yoder sisters fused together. At first glance, this is a complicated and scary pattern, and short on instructions. Already, I'd taped the placement diagrams together.

But then I realized I needed to do more taping for the applique templates themselves. Probably I spent about a half hour figuring all this out.

When I was ready to sew, Sadie joined me. She likes doing "girl" stuff, and she thought this yellowish-gold dress would go purrfectly with her furs.

So after giving it some thought, it became clear that the first step was to make the dress. I'm assembling these on a teflon pressing sheet. I can fuse fabric to the pressing sheet, but it can be peeled up and repositioned if I need to.

Next, I needed to make the apron. There are two versions of the apron. I'm following along with the image included with the pattern. I'm making the second sister from the left.

Sadie can become a little overly-exuberant with her "helping," and so she was encouraged to find another job.

Then I went to work cutting six pieces for the apron. (There is a knot where the ties are that isn't visible in this image.) Keeping in mind that once I fuse fabric to fabric, I cannot reposition it, and so I gulped hard and fused the apron pieces to the dress.

Phew! No problem. And then I could finish the rest of her.

And lookie there...I can peel the whole thing off the pressing sheet in preparation for fusing it to the background.

I want to make all four sisters before I fuse them to the background, and so I set her aside to wait for the rest of her party of four to arrive.

Smitty showed up for the second sister. We don't like to talk about this often, but Smitty sometimes likes to dress up in drag. He thought the blue dress would be best with his furs.

And so I went to work making the second sister. This one is second from the right in the pattern picture. Her apron is different. There's an applique template included for a traditional Amish bonnet, but I kind of like the hats. I thought about doing a bonnet or two, but then I really liked the symmetry of the hats. I decided to stick with that.

And now these two are ready to go. 

It was past time to stop by then, and so that was the end of my sewing day. I should have plenty of time to finish the remaining two sisters today, and then I'll be able to fuse them to the background for top-stitching.

When I went back upstairs, I was surprised to find a deer eating the sunflower seeds I put out for the birds! A friend of mine who lives in Idaho said deer eat her sunflower seeds all the time. In 24 years in this house, I've never seen this before. Weird.

Okay, so I don't really know how the day is going to go. I'm hoping to have plenty of sewing time, but my asthma is simply not improving enough. I'm going to have to head to an urgent care clinic this morning, and I expect I'll get another nebulizer treatment. In my 72 years of living, I've never had an asthma flare-up like this one. I barely slept last night with all the coughing, and my rescue inhaler just doesn't seem to be doing enough to ameliorate my symptoms. I'm hopeful the wait won't be long. We also need to pick up a few groceries, and so I'm afraid the morning will be shot. With so little sleep last night, I foresee a nap this afternoon as well.

So, it's anybody's guess how the day will go. I'll be happy if I can start feeling better after nearly a full week of coughing. And with that, I'm off. The earlier I get going, the sooner I can get back to my sewing.

A Day Off

Good morning, my friends. It was good to take a day off yesterday. We hung out at the RV all day. Our friends and our sightseeing excursions have kept us busy while we've been in Escondido. It's all been a lot of fun, and the weather has been lovely. Nevertheless, a stay-at-home day was a nice little break. 

The kitties were all about it. They know just what to do on a day off:

I had a yen for a dessert yesterday, and so I baked this cherry pie for two. The cherry pie filling was homemade with cherries from our neighbor's tree. They have tart cherries. Our two trees are both sweet cherries. I've made filling from both. This one happens to be made with tart cherries.

When we're traveling, I always use the refrigerated Pillsbury pie crusts. They're easy and convenient, but they don't always look terrifically appetizing after they're baked. I tried brushing this one with a little milk before baking it, and it browned the best of any I've done. So, for now, I guess milk is the secret.

While that was baking, I got busy setting up my sewing machine and other supplies for a day of sewing. Smitty kept watch for invading forces.

And then, I proceeded to sew together Block 9 of the Raggedy & Friends project. That was pretty quick.

Then, I sewed Block 10 together:

When I laid out Block 10, I realized I was missing the aqua piece at the bottom. When I did the cutting for these kits, I checked and double-checked and triple-checked everything I did, and so I was surprised to have a piece missing. Then, I checked the pattern and found yet another mistake. This was a free pattern, and so I shouldn't whine about it. On the other hand, I like to whine about stuff like this, and so I'll whine anyway. There has been a mistake in almost every block. It's annoying. And, yes, it's a free pattern, but my fabric and my time isn't free. Happily, I have along a full yard of some fabric for another project, and I used this turtle fabric to fill in the missing spot.

Mostly I've used solids in this project, but there are a few prints here and there, so this will be fine.

When I was finished harrumphing, I sewed together Block 11:

And that was enough sewing for a single day. Here are the other blocks I have for this quilt:

There's just one to go, but I need to finish the last embroidered section before I can sew it together. When that's finished, I'll return to the Gumballs project.

There will probably be more time for sewing over the next week, and so it'll be good to make some progress on these projects I brought from home.

Smitty has been caressing me with his tail as I've been writing. Smitty is an excellent blogging and sewing assistant. Everyone should be so lucky to have such a multi-talented cat.

We don't have any plans for the day...yet. We've talked about heading out for more avocados, but nothing is set in stone yet. For now, I'm going to eat some breakfast and continue on with the final embroidered section for the Raggedy project. The sky is cloudy, and I don't know if there's rain in the forecast. If it stays dry, I'll probably get out for another walk today.

I'm reading about the cold weather gripping much of the country. If you're in the cold parts, please stay warm, safe, and dry today.

Technical Difficulties

Good evening, my friends. We had an easy-going day today. We visited the Quilter's Cottage in Fallbrook, California. I was on the hunt for a backing fabric for the Shop Hop 4.0 quilt...this one:

I didn't find any fabric I liked. That's okay...I'll find something somewhere else. There will be more quilt shops down the road. From there, we walked in a nearby "preserve." We walked most of the trails in the Los Jilgueros Preserve. You can read about it at that link. While there, I took around 35 pictures. Sadly, when I uploaded them to my laptop, they went...somewhere...who knows where. Even Mike, the engineer, was unable to find them again. I saw them on the screen, and then they disappeared. We're at a loss. So...I regret that I have no pictures from our hike to show you. 

As a background, the computer automatically updated a few days ago, and we ended up with a "One Drive" app that seems to have decided it can do whatever it wants on the laptop. Mike spent some time this morning undoing everything it had done. Now, in our effort to find the pictures again, we added the One Drive app back to the laptop, and it went back to doing its dirty work. He'll have to undo all of that again, but somehow the pictures have disappeared, and we are unable to retrieve them. 

At this point, I'll just avoid deleting the pictures from the camera when I upload them until we're certain we can find them on the laptop. I won't lose any pictures that way, but we're still trying to figure out how to avoid this problem with One Drive. With that going on, I might take a couple of days off from blogging until we can get these technical issues set right. 

Sorry for the interruption in our conversation. I'll be back in a day or two.

Patterson, California

Good afternoon, my friends. Today we find ourselves in Patterson, California. Here's what I know about Patterson: It is known as the "Apricot Capital of the World," and holds an annual Apricot Fiesta to celebrate with many drinks, food, desserts and games. If you've been paying attention, then you'll remember I said we'd be in Tracy in my last post. I was wrong. (I know...weird, right?) We're actually some miles down the road. 

We've always traveled around 300 miles on driving days...usually more than that. For this trip, and hereafter, I've shortened our driving days to no more than 250 miles. Most days we're driving somewhere in the 200-225 mile range. As I plan the trip, I'll look from our last stop for a place approximately that distance down the road, and use that as a destination. Then, I look for RV parks in the area. This area was hard. Most everything was terribly expensive...ridiculously expensive. And this place is more than most any place we usually stay, but it was available. Sometimes it goes that way. 

So this is going to be a post of terrible pictures. It was dark and foggy the whole drive. Too dark to take very sharp photos, and besides, there just wasn't much to see. Let's start with the birds. I ended up with just this one shot, somewhat focused. It's a great egret.

We were traveling through an area with acres and acres of rice paddies. There were also thousands of birds, including large groupings of egrets. In my effort to show you all the egrets, I was ending up with images that look like the one below.

Eventually, I gave up trying. We saw lots of ducks, and probably a dozen hawks. 

We also traveled through the San Joaquin Valley. As of 2018, the gross value of agricultural production in the county was $2.6 billion. The top product was almonds, followed by grapes, milk, and walnuts. San Joaquin County is home to one of the largest walnut processing facilities in the world, DeRuosi Nut. We passed by many, many square miles of groves and orchards. In the image below, I was trying to show you the tumbleweeds that stack up along the fence lines. 

If you're unfamiliar with tumbleweeds, just know that they are iconic, dry, rounded plants (most famously the invasive Russian thistle) that detach from their roots in fall and are then carried by wind, scattering seeds for reproduction, a process that spreads them across disturbed, arid lands like deserts and roadsides, creating cultural images of the American West but also fire hazards and physical obstacles. Indeed, in one of our trips south, we found a whole lane blocked off on a busy Los Angeles freeway because it was filled with tumbleweeds.

Also, we saw many tidy acres of grapes...

And some other kind of berry...this looks like a new field.

It's hard to tell on these leafless trees, but these are probably almonds. When they bloom in the spring, they are lovely, and they fill the air with a heavenly fragrance.

And this being an agricultural area, we didn't see a lot of barns, but here was one I spotted as we pulled out of a rest area.

And you know you're in California when you see the eucalyptus trees. Eucalyptus trees are native to Australia, but you can read about how and why they made their way to California right here. There was a veritable forest of eucalyptus at the rest area.

Their peeling bark is interesting to look at.

So that's about all I can tell you about today's drive. We'll be heading south again tomorrow, and we'll end up in Taft, California, which is Mike's birth place. He left Taft when he was two and has no memories of the place at all. We've talked many times of visiting, just to have a look at Mike's origins. This will be the first time we've actually stopped.

Okay, so let's talk about this slide problem in the RV. I took some pictures this morning to help me explain. The problem, as I understand it, is that the gearing on either sides of the slide has gotten out of sync. Mike repaired it yesterday, re-syncing the gear mechanisms. But then when he tested it by bringing it in and then back out again, it made the same terrible clunking noise and was clearly out of sync again. We can tell because the two sides of the slide are different distances from the wall.

In the image below, I'm standing at the rear end of the fifth wheel looking toward the front where the bedroom is up those stairs on the right side of the image. The kitchen is on the left, and it has its own slide. The island sink is in the middle, and the dining area and two reclining chairs on the right. The problem slide is the one on the right.

In the image below, we've brought in the slide. You can see the room is a lot smaller. The wooden strip on the right side is the edge of the slide.

If I rotate my body to the right, you can see one of the recliners in the image below. On the right side of the image is the kitties' window leading to their catio. There's also a couch there. You can see they have plenty of access to their catio, and the couch is usable too. Yes...lots of quilts. The furniture is hide of nauga (sometimes referred to as "naugahyde"). Their kitty claws will poke permanent holes, and so we keep everything covered with quilts for both protection and comfort.

Walking to the far side of the room...now I'm near where the stairs lead to the bedroom...you can see there's still plenty of room to maneuver around in the kitchen. Smitty was helping me decide which pictures would best illustrate our situation.

In a nutshell, we've decided to simply leave the slide in for the next few days. We can bring it in and out, but that clunking noise is worrisome. For the time being, we want to avoid bringing it in and out on these day driving trips and overnight stays. The television is directly across from the recliners, and so we can still watch TV. The most inconvenient part of this is the small opening that allows us to access the table when we want to eat a meal...or when I want to write a blog post. Still, this is doable, even if we had to do this for the remainder of the trip. Except for that, it doesn't really cause us any problems insofar as using the space is concerned.

When the slide started acting up yesterday, we both felt pretty defeated. We hated the idea of ending our trip just two days from home, but we talked about it. Instead, I believe we came up with a workable solution: we'll leave the slide in until we reach Escondido. We have a full month's stay in Escondido, and a friend has recommended an RV mobile repair person who'll be able to come to the park there and repair the slide...maybe. 

Even if it can't be repaired on the road, we can just put the slide out and leave it out until we're ready to move on. From there, we have two weeks in Boulder City, Nevada...equal to one slide in and out. From there, we can move on to Pahrump for another two weeks and another in and out of the slide. We may decide to skip Death Valley at the end of our trip and head for home at that point. And then again, for the overnight stops, we'll just leave the slide in and make the most of it.

So, okay. We're both feeling pretty good about this way of handling this problem. We both really like this RV, and we both love RV travel. Still, these kinds of mechanical problems suck. And, as I've said many times, traveling is inconvenient. It doesn't matter how one travels, problems will crop up in the form of delayed flights, lost luggage, hotel snafus, and the like. Mechanical problems are the bane of RV travel. We've dealt with worse problems, and we'll get through this too. It doesn't have to end the trip.

And with that, I'll leave you to the remains of your day. I have food to get us through the next two weeks, but Mike is looking all hang-dog and asking if we can go out this evening. A couple of margaritas will do us good. And, yes, we could make our own margaritas, but having someone else make them will help with healing. 

That's all I have for you today. We're expecting crappy weather for our drive tomorrow. Hopefully, nothing more than rain, but one never knows. I'll check back tomorrow from Taft, and we'll see where Mike got his start in life.

Service Call

Good morning, my friends. There was a pretty sunrise this morning. And, you know...red sky at morning...and all that. On the other hand, we're always expecting rain this time of year, and so the warning doesn't really surprise us.

After writing yesterday's late-in-the-day post, I spent some time stitching Tiny Treasure #17.

From there, I got busy with the last of the quilting for the Whimsical Garden. As I mentioned in yesterday's post, this was the motif I was attempting. I'd traced over it with a pencil several times, and it seemed simple enough.

Then I moved to the quilt. I had in mind to do a sort of more upsy-downsy version of this motif, and so I added two loops between each flower. And that was easy. Here's a look:

So there I was, happily quilting away, and looking forward to another finished quilt, when the machine started making a clanking/grinding sound, and then an ultra-sonic high-pitched whine. Then this message appeared on the screen.

Admittedly, it wasn't the first time this happened on this quilt. The quilt isn't to blame. First time around, I tried some things to clear it. Then I noticed the thread take-up lever was all coated with lint. I cleaned that off, and then I was able to continue on my merry way. But then, this yesterday refused to be cleared. I tried several things to clear it. I cleaned all the lint out of the bobbin area. Then I took the throat plate off and really gave it a good cleaning underneath. I used pipe cleaners to try clearing anything from the slot where the take-up lever is. I changed the needle. I rethreaded the machine and bobbin. Checking in with the Google, I followed the instructions on this page. This page is talking about the Handi-Quilter Sweet 16. My machine is a Baby Lock Tiara II, but the two machines are identical, except for the labeling.

Nothing I tried worked. When I could actually get it to a place where I could do some sewing, I used a practice piece to see how it was looking. The top looked okay, but the noise coming from the machine was concerning. Looking at the back, the bobbin thread was one big bird's nest. Okay. Clearly, it's dead, Jim. (Young people...ask your parents.) Having exhausted all the other suggestions on the page I mentioned earlier, it seemed I had no alternative but to follow this final instruction. The highlighting is in the original.

To say this was frustrating would be a colossal understatement. I had just this much left before I was finished! Look carefully, and you can see the thread tails where I started at the lower right corner of the image below.

So as I sat there considering whether it made sense to throw a tantrum when no one was at home to see it, I moved into "well, duh" mode. With such a small amount left, I could take the quilt to my domestic machine and finish it there. And that is exactly what I did. Consider that a big Harrumph. There's more than one way to feed a cat. (Did you see what I did there? I used a PETA idiom to avoid skinning any cats.)

Having vanquished the impediments to my finish, I laid the quilt out to have a look. It's pretty hard to see the quilting on this.

Here's a look at the border.

And here's a peek at the back.

Okay, and so now the quilt is folded up in the sewing room. I'll try to get the binding sewn on by machine today. While I was there, I took a look at my next project, "S" is for Sew.

These are the fabrics I pulled from my stash.

And then I went in search of the sewing machine panels. These were gifted to me. I forget who...if it was you, then thank you. 

I've been thinking of a way to incorporate the embroidered blocks with these five sewing machine blocks. The one at the lower left is the smallest, and the borders have been removed. I'm trying to figure out a way to use them to create a quilt top, but the math doesn't work out exactly. If nothing else, I might piece them together to create a back. I'm still mulling it over.

So from there, it seemed like a good time to quit. I was still feeling frustrated about my quilting machine. This morning, I turned it on again and did some sewing. It seems to be working fine, but we're going to take it in for service anyway. I think I've owned the machine for about ten years, and it's only been in for service one other time. Most certainly, it probably needs cleaning and lubricating, and I have a feeling the timing is what's causing the "needle sensor" failure. 

Since I won't need it again for at least a couple of weeks, it's probably a good time for a spa treatment. It's a heavy sucker, and it requires a big, strong man to heft it around. I happen to know a man, and I happen to know he's big enough and strong enough to get the job done. I'll buy him some lunch for his trouble. Also, I couldn't find sliced pancetta at the grocery store yesterday, and so we'll head to a local specialty market to get that. Also, we need some tequila to drown our sorrows. Sounds like a good day, huh?

If there's time for any sewing today, I'll blog tomorrow morning. If not, then I'll be back here on Sunday morning. Until then...please stay out of trouble.