Rainy Days and Quilt Blocks

The pager went off shortly after 4 a.m. yesterday morning for a structure fire in our district. The husband got dressed and went for the engine; I got dressed and headed out to get food for the firefighters. It occurred to me, about a mile down the road, that the grocery store might be closed because of the pandemic. The store where we have an account is normally open 24 hours but they had adjusted that at one point. I pulled off the road and called and discovered that yes, they are back to being open around the clock.

The adjustments we’ve all had to make pop up in the oddest places sometimes. I took for granted that the store would be open. If it had been closed, I would have had to come up with an alternate plan. We have a convenience store/gas station in our district and I’ve gotten sandwiches from them, but they don’t open until 6 a.m. and we have to wait for them to make the sandwiches. As it was, I went to the grocery store, cleaned out their deli case of all the pre-made sandwiches, and grabbed some apples and bananas.

The house was already fully engulfed by the time the call came in to dispatch, so it ended up being mostly a defensive response. I stayed for about an hour, then came home to feed animals. It’s heartbreaking to see someone’s home burn, but I never tire of watching our firefighters work together in such a coordinated and caring way. The husband is the tallest one on scene and he wears a black helmet as Deputy Chief of Fire Operations, so it’s not hard to follow what he’s doing.

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We have been sitting under a stationary low that has done nothing but rotate and dump rain on western Montana for the last couple of days. I am not complaining. This year has been enough of a meat grinder without adding forest fires to the mix, and every drop of moisture we get helps.

I couldn’t work outside, so I played with fabric. I think the universe is leaving me a trail of breadcrumbs. Where it might lead is an interesting question.

These are the two books I picked up in Seattle:

The one on the right is a book of block designs, with templates, which puts it squarely in the pre-rotary cutter era. The other was published right at the start of the rotary cutter craze and features mostly quilt designs made up of a single block. I don’t need books full of quilt designs as much as I need reference books with building blocks (no pun intended). I have resisted buying quilt books because I don’t want to end up with as many quilt books as I have knitting books, but these were a good purchase.

I also bought this book:

The book is great, but that title wasn’t doing it any favors. As it turns out—and I did not know this when I bought it—Fox Chapel Publishing has re-issued it as a revised and expanded second edition with a marginally better title.

I will now have to hunt down the second edition. This is a book for quilt block geeks, for sure. The author has broken each block down into grid size and subunits, with the math already done for making the block in several different sizes. She suggests going through and making each block to create a quilt block library. I thought I might try that and see how far I got. I started with the first two blocks, Big Dipper and Broken Dishes:

I have a whole plastic bin of orphan blocks and orphan block units that are either left over from other projects or were experiments I abandoned. I opened that bin and lo and behold, there was a stack of already-made hourglass units—the units that make up the Big Dipper block—left over from the neutrals quilt. I made one block, then laid out the rest of the units to see how many other blocks I could make. I had a total of nine finished blocks, which made the perfect size wallhanging:

It’s not fancy, but it used up the blocks and that’s a plus.

I moved on to the Broken Dishes block in the afternoon—noting again that this is an actual block with HSTs in a specific arrangement, not just a mishmash of HSTs—but you’ll have to come back tomorrow to see what I did with that one. This blog post is long enough.

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I am not going to win any points with Katherine for doing this, but she is one of my favorite people and I love this video. Our Pacific Northwest Mennonite Conference put this together last week and sent it to all the member churches to watch on Sunday. Katherine Jameson Pitts is our Executive Conference Minister. She also sews and quilts and I want you to notice the sewing machines on her office shelves, one of which is a black Singer 301.

And if you stop the video at the 3:03 mark, you will see the inside of our church. I think the picture was taken in 2014 when we hosted the annual gathering. You have not heard anything like the sound of several hundred Mennonites singing together in that space, which has wicked acoustics. I am probably up at the piano, but I see Margaret and a few others in that photo.