Beans and Bear Paws

I’ve cleared a pile of stuff off my desk this week and that feels so good. The taxes are all done and filed, both construction company and personal. I am caught up on website work for the homestead foundation. All of my class ideas for the summer have been submitted. I did a big Costco run yesterday. The farm store did not have chicks on Monday but I am going to try again today. If dealing with excess roosters weren’t such a hassle—I suspect Dave would go on a murdering rampage and pick them off one by one—I’d pop two dozen eggs into the incubator and hatch chicks out here.

I canned up 19 pints of white beans yesterday afternoon:

They started out as a five-pound bag of dry beans from Azure Standard. My All-American canner holds 19 pints, so this amount works out perfectly. Beans need 90 minutes of processing at 15 pounds pressure here. I need to can up some batches of red beans and black beans, too. If I do them this week and next, we should have enough beans for a couple of months.

I tore down and washed all the jars from the indoor lettuce-growing operation. I’ll plant one more run of lettuce and that should keep us supplied until it’s warm enough to grow some out in the greenhouse or in the garden.

While the beans were processing, I worked on another Bear Paw Baby quilt.

These are fun to quilt. The light beige section has some free motion swirls. Everything else is done with rulers. I’ve got a little bit more quilting to finish up and then I can attach the binding. I’ve got two more waiting to be quilted.

I want to spend some time over the next couple of days cutting out patterns. I have three or four new ones that need muslins. I struggle with what appears on the surface to be excess clothing production—I don’t need twenty tops and fifteen pairs of pants—but I have to remember that I am teaching myself fitting and sewing techniques and in order to do that, I have to make clothing. I do finish as many of my muslins as I can. If I don’t wear them, I put them in the pile to donate.

In particular, I want to compare my bodice sloper to some of the blouse patterns I’ve earmarked. I think I know what adjustments I need to make and I’d like to have a few more patterns for wovens. Sewing with knits would be the easy way out, because they require a lot less fitting, but nice rayon challis and rayon batik fabrics are seductive.

[I watch a YouTuber who insists on pronouncing “challis” as chalice rather than shallee and it drives me absolutely up a wall.]

As I suspected might happen, more warm-weather fabrics are beginning to show up on the Walmart mystery remnant rack. I picked up three yards of a white rayon woven with a surface texture of white thread yesterday. I don’t normally wear a lot of white—it doesn’t stay white around here for very long—but I bought that one because I liked the fabric so much. It’s going to be one of my muslins, I think.

We’re supposed to have weather in the 40s for the next couple of days. Things are beginning to melt, albeit slowly. I am going to be optimistic and plan to start seeds in the greenhouse next week.