Yikes! It's December already! That happened fast!
Last time I posted, it was about to be Thanksgiving, and I was excitedly looking forward to the set-up of my longarm machine.
Well, life happens. Turns out that there was a Covid outbreak among the Bernina tech team, so no longarm installation. I had SO been looking forward to having that long weekend to reacquaint myself with my machine. And it's not that I don't have a ton of other things to do -- but I was seriously thrown by the change in plans. I recovered by a whole lot of reading, plus some sewing with holiday movies playing to lift my spirits.
That barely made a dent in the scrap bin. How does that happen? I swear, they multiply. So, this was quilt top number 2. I made this by roughly following a photo off of Pinterest. It is mostly 4.5 inch squares mixed with a few half square triangles to form the diagonal lines. So, another top for the pile.
And still the bin is full. A mystery.
Meanwhile, we had an actual SNOW DAY! It started snowing one evening and continued a bit into the next day. I have so missed living in snow since my New Hampshire days. Maybe it's that I grew up in California and didn't encounter snow until I was in my mid-20's, but I love it and can never have enough of it. It wasn't much, compared to other places, but I'm told Whidbey Island doesn't typically get that much snow. By morning there was about an inch and a half on the ground. Enough to make me very happy.
Do you know the Gilmore Girls, and how Lorelai can smell snow, and gets excited because good things happen when it snows? That was me. Smelling snow and throwing tiny snowballs for the dogs and just being happy.
Look at my little balcony! Snow!
Meanwhile, I realized something was a big odd when I was cooking the little turkey I made for Thanksgiving dinner. The gas oven kept making this repeating "pfffft" sound -- heat kept heating, turkey kept cooking, but that sound was odd. I called for repair the next day, and learned that it was probably related to the gas igniter thingy starting to fail, so it was best not to use the oven. I will skip over the next few days during which I kept thinking I was smelling the faint smell of propane gas, and called for various inspections and repairs. Cut to a Friday night -- still smelling gas despite not using the thing and following all expert advice -- the emergency people advised me to pull out the range and turn off the gas line running to it. I appealed for help to my very very very nice neighbors, for whom I will bake a batch of thank you cookies WHEN I HAVE A WORKING OVEN, and so we were to pull the range away from the wall and turn the gas off with only minimal swearing and a lot of laughing. We have been fine, albeit stovetop and oven free since then. I will also spare you the repair efforts, except to say that it does not inspire confidence when you enter the kitchen to find the repair guy watching a Youtube video on how to take the back of the range off.
Ahem. Well, repair is in process, ordered parts are arriving, and by December 21 (yes. That far away.) I should have a working oven and cook top.
In the meantime, Miss C and I have gotten creative with the microwave, toaster oven (luckily we have a large one), and various electric appliances such as the Instant Pot and the slow cooker. That chicken is an egg poacher (that works quite well, actually) and yes, we had poached eggs on toast for dinner one night.
I won't bore you with food photos, but I do need to share last night's dinner, fresh from the Instant Pot. I used this recipe for Pork Potsticker Bowls, using ground pork and veggies I had on hand, and it turned out quite well. (If you make it, I would advise cutting soy sauce in half and adding a bit more water to replace it.) And -- one pot! No cooktop!
I decided to get the Christmas decorations up, at least the easily-findable ones.
So Christmas tree is up. Family room mantle is decorated. (Sorry, Jane Ann, the mercury glass pieces will stay packed up for another year.)
And, perhaps most importantly, Bing, Danny and Rosemary are hanging out with me again. They live next door to Ruth but she doesn't seem to mind their singing and tap dancing.
And then! I got the call and Longarm Day was back on the calendar! The Bernina technicians from Quality Sewing and Vacuum arrived and got my system up and running again. I will add that I have been very impressed by this dealer, and these technicians were amazing. Pleasant, thorough -- got everything up and running, oiled the parts that required oil, checked that all was level and smooth, and even set up a test quilt to make sure that everything was sewing properly. (Nary a Youtube video needed by them, I might add.)
Oh right, it's BIG. It always looks bigger than I expect. In fact, it pretty much fills up the living room. But now I can figure out what to do with the loveseat and random chair and how to make it be functional and look decent.
I immediately loaded up some practice fabric and played a bit on that, and then did some really basic quilting on a small charity quilt from the quilt guild to get me going again. It did strike me as funny that they'd given me a brown quilt. I never sew brown quilts.
But three passes and it was done -- so on to another very very old quilt top from my very very old quilt top pile, for more practice.
This is just big nine-patches alternating with big squares -- from an old Kaffe Fassett book I think. I'd made a quilt like this for my sister years ago, which turned out to be like a quilted indoor garden of green. And, eventually, I got around to using the leftovers from her quilt to make another top. This will probably be a charity quilt too. Anyway, I'll work on that a bit later today. Yay! Fun quilting ahead!
This is what Starlie and Rosie do while I'm quilting, by the way. Guess I'd better keep the loveseat in there.
Oh, one more WI adventure to report. Three good friends from my college days in Southern California now live in Port Townsend, which is just a ferry ride away. A fourth was visiting, so I walked on to the Coupeville ferry and went over to meet them for dinner one evening. Coupeville is about 30 minutes from my house, maybe, sort of in the center of the island, and the Coupville ferry goes straight west and lands in downtown Port Townsend.
This is what it looked like while I was waiting for the 2:45 ferry from Coupeville. So that's the Olympic peninsula and a bit of PT way across the water.
I walked on, hung out in the lounge area, and voila - 30 minutes later I was in Port Townsend where my friends picked me up.
Port Townsend is a Victorian seaport town, with a lot of historical flavor and charm. It reminds me a lot of the old town part of Portland, Maine, actually. We ate at the lounge at the Manresa Castle, which was a comfortable, quirky place with very yummy food. The whole thing was a very fun time with very old -- wait, make that long-time -- friends, and I was so pleased that the excursion was so easy. I will be ferrying over again soon.
And by the way, I've been reading a memoir called House Lessons: Renovating a Life, by Erica Baumeister. It is the story about a woman (a fiction author whose novels are quite charming) who, with her husband and family, buys a very old house in Port Townsend and starts renovating it. It has a lot of reflection of what home means, how moving and adapting to a new place brings up a lot of thoughts and feelings -- plus interesting info about PT and old houses. It fits where I am right now on a lot of levels.
One more new WI life lesson. Apparently one needs to cover one's hose outlets to prevent freezing. I only rented when I lived in NH, so I was not aware of this little winterization job. They make insulated hose bib covers, which were handily right by the front door at my local hardware store. Who knew?!
While there, I bought myself a snow shovel. A SNOW SHOVEL! Because I need one now!
Life is good here on Whidbey Island. What is making your life good these days?
