Yesterday, my day started with picking up 40 lbs. of beautiful Roma tomatoes from our CSA farmers. If you're wondering what 40 lbs. of tomatoes looks like, know that it will fill two paper shopping bags.
And now that you know that, you can easily impress your friends and relatives by saying something like this: "I just happen to know that 40 lbs. of Roma tomatoes will fit into two paper shopping bags." And then, watch them fall on their knees before you, awestruck at your wisdom. Of course, if you're living in a country where the metric system is in use, you'll have to convert that to 18.1437 kg. Yeah...I knew that right off the top of my head. Impressive, no?
You can see in that image above that some still could use a few days to ripen. Also, I have a few harvested from our own plants. This morning, I picked out two batches of ten pounds each (4.53592 kg) for today's canning escapades, and that's next on my agenda.
My jars and lids are ready and willing. The spirit is catching up.
Also yesterday, I drove some quilts down to Salem to the Oregon State Fairgrounds. It's always hard to let them go. There are remote pick-up and drop-off locations in Portland, but I'd just as soon skip the many middlemen involved in that process. It's a little less scary to drop them off and pick them up myself. Besides, from where I live, it's hardly any farther to drive to Salem than it is to drive into Portland or Hillsboro and fight the traffic. The back roads to Salem make for a nice drive.
When I dropped those off, I headed straight for one of my favorite quilt shops, Greenbaum's Quilted Forest. I was on the hunt for a fabric to put with the backing/border fabric for the Quilted Snowladies. I have some ideas jelling in my head for how to set the snowladies, and I have some other fabrics I want to use as block borders. I have in mind to use these along with the tea-dyed muslin that was used in the background
to do the block borders something like these were done for the Vintage Miniature Sewing Machines.
Also, I can use one of these two fabrics, but I don't have it solidified in my mind yet. I'm going to use the one on the right for the back, borders, and sashings. Yesterday, I picked up the one on the left. I'm going to use it for cornerstones and for a stop border. I'll probably use it for the binding too.
Also, I have this set of snowflake cookie cutters that I'm going to use as templates to quilt a snowflake into each cornerstone using pearlescent or silver metallic thread.
Obviously, I have a lot of ideas for the Quilting Snowladies. Hopefully, I'll get to them before not too long.
Also yesterday I sought out and captured the 97D foot (on the right) for my sewing machine. You can see that it looks quite a bit different from the 37D on the left. Just FYI, the feet with the "D" designation are designed to be used with the machine's dual feed mechanism. They have a notch at the back where the top feed mechanism fits. They also have a sensor at the top that tells the machine what foot is attached. That way the machine knows that it can or cannot do certain stitches. You need to know this for no reason whatsoever, but it gave me something to do when I edited that picture.
The 97D also comes with this handy attachable guide. You can run your fabric along the edge of the guide for extra quarter-inch measurement...or whatever measurement you're shooting for since it's adjustable. I haven't had a chance to play with the new foot yet, and so I have no idea if my money was well spent or not.
Several of you wrote and let me know you thought I should take this up with Bernina, and to you I gave my standard excuse for putting up with outrage...I'm too lazy to fight about it. Maybe in another life, but not the one I'm currently living.
This morning, I took time to do some embroidery. The left side of the church and its landscaping are stitched now.
I think my favorite part of working on this piece is this sparkly floss. This is the gold sparkle, and there's a silver variety too. They are impossibly hard to thread through the needle since the metallic parts are wound around an inner shaft. The whole thing wants to untwist whenever I try threading the needle. I've found that if I'm careful to go with the correct end of the floss (and, thus, the "grain"), it works much better. Anyway...it's pretty and adds just a nice little bit of whimsy to the piece.
So, time to get going on the tomatoes. They're not going to blanch, peel, chop, boil, fill, and process themselves. Ungrateful buggers.
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