RSC Orange and an update

Haven't been up to much lately

We took a vacation to visit family for the first time since the plague.

A cross country road trip from Washington to Colorado to LaCrosse and wandered slowly back, through S.Dakta and Montana looking at stuff we usually would have blown past going home.

Gotta say, I'm loving the Hyundai Ionic hybrid we bought back in January of '19. It handled hills, and 106* heat in South Dakota & Montana, like a champ! Paying $340 in gas for the entire round trip

doesn't suck either!

Home is always good to get back to.

Augusts RSC color was orange I got a lot done before we left 

I wasn't able to post them before we left 

After we got back there is the inevitable post-trip tidying that needs to be done

But here we are finally back to a semblance of normal before 

Family stuff takes over between now and October

I got nothing done for September so 

maybe I'll get a double helping done but later

I need to get some chores done first.

I found pictures of this poor old thing when it was new

I really need to make a new one! 

That said this one has had 12 years of hard use.

It's crossed the continent more than once and gone international as well so  

It may be lumpy and worn

and not the best construction but

Boy! Has it held up!

Some day my stove will come

** Rant Alert *** Rant Alert **

 So my hypothetical stove,

That we bought July 14th

Has a new delivery date 

Which has been moved back,

 Again

From the original of August 14th, 

Which is why we bought the stupid thing in the first place!   It's availability.  In august.

 to August 28th,

 September 11

(I know, great date huh, what could go wrong?)

 and to now September 28th.

Now, I was willing, to buy a stove I knew they didn't have until late august, that seemed understandable, given the supply line issues the country is experiencing.

But this is getting ridiculous

It begs the question; Why are stores selling vaporware?

Why are they allowed to sell and promise items, in their stores, that they clearly don't have on hand?

Why are we, as consumers, letting the big corporations get away with this shit, with nary a whimper?

 frankly folks, I am desperate for some over easy eggs,

That I don't have to go outside and make on a camp stove, is that really too much to ask?

Fooling around with watercolors

there is a lot of doodling one must do 

with watercolor paints to get them to work right

There is also a lot of brushwork 

and water distribution

It's that last part that has been giving me the most trouble

to little and the paint skitters over the paper

 leaving skid marks and empty spots

To much and it leaves puddles of color in odd places

that pool and dry with hard edges

to much water will also thin out the pigment 

to almost invisibility 

in an already transparent medium

Then there is the paper itself to worry about

mixed media paper is good to practice brush strokes

and color mixology, which is completely different than color theory 

and your initial water retention on

 

but not good enough for actual pictures

because the paper will suck the water right out of your brush  till it gets pilly and weird

and any attempt at finesse will go right out the window

the leaning curve between too much water and not enough is

proving difficult 

But rewarding

and it tickles my colorbone

I will leave you with a cat 

or two

Kitchen katastrophy a saga in several parts

 So around july 1st-ish My 30 year old gas stove top decided it was time to unalive itself. 

 After a couple months lighting it with matches, because it's first symptom, was the automatic spark stopped working. Needless to say, we needed a new one for a while. We were just avoiding the inevitable.

Yes, it had symptoms, multiple. Over several months.

We thought, as you do, If this is the worst that happens we can live with it....

It wasn't 

Every once in a while you would get a whiff of gas and go make sure all the burners were off and the furnace and water heater were ok, 'cause they're gas too. It would go away and everything would be fine for a while.

Until it wasn't 

We were smelling more gas, more often and then the gas bill came. It was twice as high as it usually was. sooooo, this needed better investigating shoes. 

So I did what you do, I took everything apart washed it all good, because it may be last time I did this, I didn't connect something right, put it back together again, making sure everything was connected right, turned it on and it worked just fine, for a few days, starter and all........OK, then....

A few days later, the starters stopped and a few days after that, we smelled the wafting, again. *sigh*

So that wasn't it.

We took it apart more, switching the burners around and, again a few days of works just fine, followed by the same deterioration. Ungh!

FINE! 

During this time I had not been idyll, I had been researching new stoves , wow are they expensive! And on what planet, do they need to be connected to the internet?

One more attempt to take it apart fiddle with the electrical connectors. This is in the DDH's wheelhouse, My electrical expertise is limited to rewiring lamps and dusting the insides of the sewing machines,  so I sat and watched. This where we discovered there was a limit to the amount of apart we could take the stove. the top and bottom are riveted closed, how annoying!

Anyhow, we put it all back together again, AGAIN, aaaannd you guessed it, same glide path of worksjustfine followed by badness. Well Poo! 

With one BIG exception, One fine morning, I went to boil water for coffee and flames started shooting out of, not just the burner, but the knobs too. EEP! O.O!!

Quick as a bunny, I turned the gas off at the main connector under the stove........... HONEY!!!!

After testing this experience for himself, we finally decided it was dead. I had decided this at chapter FINE! but, well, you know. Anyway, a complete disconnecting and dismantle later we discovered the body of the stove, you know that riveted closed part we couldn't get to?, was full of water !!!!! (insert Flora looses her shit here) WTAF!. Which then proceeded to bleed all over the kitchen floor, Lovely.  -.-

*Grumble Grumble* 

One has now to assume the trouble with the stove started here, with the rusted out bits in the part of the stove that was inaccessible, and nOt where we were trying to fix it. 

*Fuss fuss fuss*

So we have this hole in the counter,where the stove is, now, not. and are waiting for it's replacement. With baited breath.

August 15th. This was the soonest we could get ANYTHING close to what we wanted,as  everything else was October.....November..... when hell freezes over..... this all happened around july 1st, so -.-

14 more days. 

I bought an electric kettle to boil water for coffee......

RSC Purple birds and geese

2 " Hst

I make my baby HST's with the left over  corners of the larger HST's from  the Birds 

as you can see there are a lot of them

I have found the easiest way to get them is 

after you sew the seam for the birds down the center of your square is to take another seam 1/4" toward one corner to get the smaller HST

All the bird hst squares end up being 2" 

from an original square of 2 1/2"

and the leftover hst's are 1 1/2" or so

sizes will vary depending on your level of OCD ;)

And here are some gees to round off what I have so far in the purples spools are to come later today maybe, I was busy the first half of this month with some friends in town visiting, doing the tourist guide thing and so forth

I will get back to stitching again 

eventually
 

A sad day in Woodinville.  Our best Quilt store is closing.

She managed to stay open in the middle of Woodenville Wine country when all around her were being pushed away in favor of more tasting rooms. She survived and thrived moving to a smaller store. 

Her heroic efforts to stay open and useful in the community, during covid, should have gotten her a medal for community service! She organized a fearful bunch of nattering sewers, to make hundreds of thousands of masks. When no one could find them for love or money, She coordinated us and made sure we knew how to make them so they were sturdy and filtered, then donated them all to local elderly shelters, hospitals and first responders, so no one would go "Naked" in the crisis. This is how you "grass roots" the heck out of a horrible situation!

Here is where I found my tribe in Washington and spent may hours learning creating, teaching and laughing with friends. When I absolutely could not "people" She understood. I could go there and still feel wanted and needed for my skills. She encouraged me to teach when I didn't think I could and encouraged me to join the local guild, where I could be useful to that community also. If it weren't for her delicate size 8's in my posterior, I would not have published 3 magazine articles or stood up before the entire guild to share my passion for Crazy Quilting or give a speech. 

 Susan has been a cornerstone of our quilting community, a bulwark in tough times and a encouraging person who is generous to a fault. Her store was our beacon, a haven of pretty fabric, new ideas and cheerful discourse. She had the best taste in color and fabric and her hand on the pulse of our community, where we were all welcome and inspired to bigger better things.

She brought us all together, when times were bleak and the rest of us didn't know what to do, but she did.

She will be missed by all of us.

RSC Bird beaks

 So anyone making these birds who wants to put beaks on 

I suggest you do it as you go because 

Hand embroidering Beaks and eyes on 5 to 10 of them at a time is much easier than  letting them pile up for half a year 

And having to do all 60 at once.

Beaks are buttonhole stitch, eyes are cast on in variegated vidani thread so there is a bit of variation to them