Alterations, Mending, a Visit and Some Pie

My friend Twila, who is a manager at a retail clothing store in downtown Kalispell, brought a sweater from the store to church on Sunday and asked if I could repair it. The side seam had come apart. I brought the sweater home and fixed it Sunday afternoon, and yesterday morning, I dropped it off at the store. She said to me that if I wanted to do alterations, they could keep me plenty busy.

[Everyone could keep me plenty busy, I think, if I let them, LOL.]

I also hemmed two pairs of jeans for Elysian. That’s another job I only do for people I like. She had come over on Saturday so I could mark them. WS brought me the requested Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup as payment for sewing his Halloween costume.

I took the second Harper Cardigan to the quilt store north of town. They have a huge wall in the classroom where they display class samples, and they will hang it there with a sign with the class information on it.

I ran the rest of my errands yesterday morning, came home and put away the groceries, then headed over to my friend Sarah’s for lunch. Rainy, cold, and blustery weather has blown in. I was thinking on the way over how a bowl of hot soup would be so welcome. When I got there, I discovered that Sarah had made tomato soup from tomatoes she grew this year. It was delicious!

She also made pie for dessert. Sarah and Susan did a pie-baking class in August at the Community Center. Sarah makes delicious gluten-free crusts and she likes to experiment with different fruit combos for the filling. Our dessert was Italian plum/tomatillo/candied ginger with fresh whipped cream on top. After lunch, we toured her garden and then compared notes on our favorite YouTube channels. Such nerds.

Sarah thoughtfully sent home a tart-sized version of the pie for the husband, which he hoovered down after dinner.

I did no sewing yesterday. I have to make half a dozen bowl cozies today; we will be using them as table decorations for next week’s gift festival at our church and I offered to help Ginger get them finished. She cut the batting and fabric and I just need to quilt and assemble them.

I’ll be making pies for the gift festival, too—I’m going to do shoo-fly pie and butterscotch pie. Other people who are better pie-bakers than I am will be making fruit pies. Also, it’s nice to have a variety of different kinds.

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It appears that Walmart is trying to give Amazon a run for the money. Walmart is now offering fulfillment services from other, smaller retailers. I noticed this when I did a search for fabric on the Walmart.com website and Girl Charlee and Stylish Fabrics, both of which are online fabric stores, popped up as suppliers. I haven’t made a habit of shopping Walmart for fabric until recently, so perhaps this isn’t a new feature. The search engine leaves much to be desired, however.

And I see that Hobby Lobby has listed a couple of the new Essex Linen colors on its website. They weren’t there last week when I checked.

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Winter is not messing around this year, it appears. The high tomorrow will be 35 degrees with snow. (I do have to go to town for rehearsal, but not until later afternoon. Hopefully everyone who is going to drive stupidly does it in the morning.) I’m going to make one last pass through the garden today and make sure everything that needs to come in is in.

I’ve been watching the forecast models out of Seattle, too, and a couple of them are forecasting a fairly large snow event for the middle of the month for western Washington. (I like the Cliff Mass weather blog.) That’s too far out to be dependable, but the fact that it is even a possibility bears watching. I think I will go ahead and make an appointment to get my new snow tires put on before Thanksgiving so I’ll be ready to drive to Seattle. It’s time to go through the winter car supplies, as well, and restock anything I might have used. ‘Tis the season.

I just want to get through this month, which is looking more and more like a marathon.