Gotta love when the shit hits the fan at work, in the middle of summer, when things are supposed to be chill. Oh well. Looking at this photo will help:

The farm is my happy place. There is a certain change of pace that happens the moment I arrive there. And then there are the occasional treats like the glorious sunset we had on Friday night. Preparing to leave turns me into a whiny little kid, “but I don’t want to gooooooo!” Because I have to come back to the city. To problems like the one that arose today. I love my job…I love my job…I love my job…

So, to detract from the work life insanity, I’m making pickles. My hair is a all skewed in a humidity frizz at the moment, and the house smells like vinegar.  But I love it. A pickle post is coming soon.

I finished this little baby quilt several weeks ago. It was gifted to our friend Bronwyn, who is expecting her first baby boy in the next few weeks. I think this one turned out much better than the first one I made, if only for the colour and fabric choices. I’m by now pretty determined to learn how to quilt properly. I’m in the process of finding a class that suits my schedule and will cover the techniques I want to learn.

I applied the quilt backing to this one differently. With the baby girl quilt, I assembled it kind of like a pillow case, sewing it together inside out and then turning it around and then quilting. This time I quilted before sewing the binding, which was sort of more successful. I hit a speed bump when I could not for the life of me figure out what had gone wrong with my machine’s tension. The thread in the tensioner was bouncing all over the place, and I was having problems with jamming, like I’d had for probably decades before I took the machine in for some TLC.

Then I discovered that after having wound a new bobbin, I’d missed a key step in re-threading the machine. Which then lead me to think perhaps that had been my problem all along, for years… for all the years I’d been thinking that machine was fubar. Which makes me feel like an idiot…because I have the original instruction manual and all the parts for this 1960’s era machine, which had been my mother’s. I’ll just blame the manual’s rather stylized illustrations for the mistake. Yes. That’s it. It’s the manual’s fault.