Bacon Deliveries

Friday was messy, weather-wise, because it warmed up enough for the precipitation to come down as rain. And there was some wind. Still, it was nothing out of the ordinary for January in Montana. I do like it when it stays colder, though, because the snow looks prettier longer. As soon as it warms up even a bit, the snow on our 12’-12’ pitch roof starts coming down, and when the snow falls off the upper roof and hits the porch roof, it sounds like we’re under attack.

Seattle was cut off from the rest of Washington state for a brief period on Friday when I-5 was closed between Seattle and Portland due to flooding. Hopefullly, Snoqualmie Pass will open today. DD#2 informs me that the grocery store shelves are getting a bit bare because trucks can’t get through, although she’s okay for now.

We appear to be in for a stretch of dry weather, if the long-term forecast is any indication. That’s good, because I am itching for a road trip. The husband and I drove about an hour south to pick up the pork orders, but that wasn’t enough to satisfy me. I need a long stretch of open road. Missoula is doable. Spokane might be a bit trickier, but possible. Clearly, I am not going to drive to Seattle any time soon.

I delivered pork orders to Cathy and Tera after lunch on Friday. They had to get the pork into their freezers so there wasn’t much time for visiting, but Tera and I did discuss a possible quilt-related trip in April. Even a few moments together is sufficient time for us to come up with some kind of plan to get into trouble.

**********************************************

I think I have decided how I want to quilt the smaller squares on the square-in-square quilt:

I roughed that in with disappearing marker. Unfortunately, I do not have the correct ruler for making those curves and don’t want to freehand them. I ordered myself a set of Amanda Murphy circle rulers, which should be here on Monday. I set this aside and got another basted top from the pile. I chose my wallhanging one, because I didn’t have to change thread. I am quilting a quarter inch outside the Os and inside the Os:

I likely will do something similar around the center squares. The diamond-shaped sections in the sashing might also get a motif. It’s a lot of start-and-stop quilting, which many machine quilters don’t like because it requires knotting and burying ends. Meh. I was a knitter for a long time and that requires a lot of darning in ends. I prefer that to “travel quilting” to get to the next section. I keep a pincushion with self-threading needles next to the Q20 and bury the ends each time I quilt a circle. That keeps the work neat and doesn’t leave them all to be dealt with at the end.

I see it all as part of the process. You can either enjoy the whole process or not, and I am choosing to enjoy all of it.

If you can’t find joy in the snow, you will have a lot less joy in your life but the same amount of snow.

Thus far, I like the 50/50 cotton/poly batting. It certainly beats that Fairfield stuff I used in the Kindness quilt. I just do not like that batting. I’m sewing down the binding on the Kindness quilt right now. I decided to use the backing strips that I cut off when I trimmed the quilt to make the binding. Had I been thinking ahead, I simply would have left enough backing on for a self-binding edge. Oh, well. This was only a little extra work.

**********************************************

The husband finished assembling the lettuce shelving unit. It fits nicely into the same spot as the old one.

I moved the old shelf into the yarn room for more storage. The whole basement needs to be cleaned and a load of stuff donated to one of the thrift stores.

Those two totes on the top shelf were part of the original lettuce system. I had to cut the lettuce again because the totes didn’t fit under the lights otherwise. I am not sure how many cuttings one can get from each batch—theoretically, it should be several as long as the roots are growing in the medium, but I did have to empty and clean those totes yesterday because there was salt buildup from the growing medium as well as some algae growing in it. I filled the totes with fresh growing medium. We’ll probably get another cutting of lettuce in a week or so.

I need to start lettuce seeds in the rooting plugs today so they are ready to go when the trays get here. I’ll take a picture and explain that setup in more detail in a future blog post.