Flashback Friday

I was sorting through some old photos this week and came across a picture of Robert at a wedding in the early 1980s, and then I found a picture of  Victor Thresh (our grandson) wearing a tux for his high school Senior Prom last year. I was struck by the resemblance. Two handsome guys.

Decorating finished

 I was a little late this year but I managed to finish my Christmas decorating. Whew!
This year the log cabin tree has ornaments! I designed this in 2009. If you want to whip one up before tomorrow, click HERE for the pattern.

My sons and grandsons visited me this week so I am feeling content and cozy. Now that I have the decorating done I can sit back and read with my new Kindle.

I'm also weaving a collar for a sweater to use in the forthcoming Knitters' Weaving Projects book.

Fathers Day 2013

My father, J. Davis Romine, always wore a white dress shirt, even on the weekends. He unbuttoned the collar and took off his tie for a casual look. Despite this, he was a fun guy and his dry humor made me laugh.

He had an adventure on a train when he was a young man. He met Al Capone. Read about it here.

Good

 A bowl of cherries (nectarines and grapes) was my side dish for dinner tonight. My son and grandson came over this afternoon and brought me cherries and squash from a local produce stand. Life is good.


Bad

For the last two months I have not been able to stay awake all day. I’d get up at 6:30, get sleepy and go back to bed at 10:30 in the morning. I’d be awake for a couple more hours and then take another little nap. I’d have dinner and go to bed early. It was disconcerting. Finally it dawned on me that perhaps I was experiencing side effects from Simvastatin (a cholesterol lowering medication).

I’m sure you don’t want to or need to know all the details, but some of the effects were peculiar. I ached all over, the skin on my feet began peeling off (in 1/4 inch chunks), and my vision was blurry. At last, I figured out that it must be an iatrogenic (eye-at-ruh-JEN-ik) illness. Meaning: caused inadvertently by medical treatment.

It has taken three week for the effects to wear off. I feel perfectly normal now. I can stay awake and enjoy my days. Whew.

I remember Mama

Fiber fondling

I’ve been working on a reprint edition of my old spinning booklet, Spinning with a Drop Spindle. It will be the 40th anniversary of its original publication in 1972. I can hardly believe it has been such a long time. I dug out some old spinning projects. My grandson, Victor, took some photos for me. I think they look better today in his photos than they do in real life. The bottom photo is one of mine from an old dyeing book.

I also found an old manuscript called “The Knitters’ Weaving Book.” After I’ve re-published the spinning booklet, I’ll see what I can do with it. Years ago, when I submitted it to a publisher I was told there was no interest in such a limited subject. However, there has been a resurgence of knitting and yarn spinning.

Gone but not forgotten

 The five Featherweights are heading for their new home in a north coast state. A mother-daughter quilting team wanted to take the machines under their wings. (See March 21st post.) An intricate traveling schedule involving grandsons, sons, and a sister going on vacation facilitated their journey.

I won’t forget the machines because I’m quilting a Featherweight wallhanging to put up in my sewing room. It has been a PhD (Project half done) and now it will soon be finished. It's being quilted on one of the Featherweight's big sisters -- a Singer 301.

Ready for a new home

 Not me! I’m staying here. I have five (5) Singer Featherweight sewing machines. That’s five too many for one person. I sew on my trusty Singer 301s.

I posted on Yahoo’s Featherweight Group:
“I have a batch (5) of Five Featherweight sewing machines, including a white one. My husband and I bought them over the years. We joked about them being for our retirement. Well, he died a year and a half ago and I am running out of money to pay my taxes. So, I’d like to sell the batch as a bunch.
I don’t want to pack them individually. I live in the California Delta which is 60 miles east of San Francisco.
The machines were all running when I put them away in a closet. I think Featherweights are going for around $250 nowadays, so I’d like to sell the batch for $1,250 as are, where are."

I’ve had e-mail inquiries asking “Where will you ship them?” “Can I pick up one and take it to a sewing machine shop to be checked out?” “What are the serial numbers?” “Please send pictures.”

I don’t want to ship them. But I did take some photos and turned the machines upside down to find their numbers.

The serial numbers (starting at the bottom step) are:
AL193324
AM175588
AF484822
EV006700
AF077172
Even though these are “featherweight” it was a big job for me to haul them out and set them up for their photo session today. I sure hope someone in the Bay Area wants a flock of Featherweights.

Granddad's chickens

 This bird does not look like one of today’s chickens and yet she was a top prizewinner in the early 20th century. Duchess had her portrait drawn by F.L. Temple in 1904. She is standing on a packing crate.

My granddad, Fremont Chapin, was a gentleman farmer and called his place ChapinDale in Oneida, New York. He traveled the world seeking out fine chickens. He would get on a steamer and sail to Europe to choose chickens to be brought home to ChapinDale. He raised prize specimens and showed them at exhibitions. Madison Square Garden II held huge poultry shows.

 He won several blue and red ribbons at the Garden events in 1899 and 1901. They have been kept in a box ever since then. There was also a medal for a Challenge Cup in 1899. There were two ribbons from the Adirondack Poultry & Pet Stock Club in Johnstown, N.Y. from 1898.

Fremont was in his 40s when he did his. A New York Times article from 1909 describes the Madison Square Garden event: “Chickens Coming to Roost. . . .Years of service and popularity have given to the show a hold upon the public favor. … [T]here is a representative in every class that shows what the American poultry-raiser can do and what, also, has been done in the adoption of foreign birds and their betterment by American treatment.”
I wrote about my granddad in 2009 here.

A new spin

photo by Susan Wood

 My head has been spinning lately and I think I’ve come up with a plan. In the early 1970s I was a yarn spinner and Robert and I published a little booklet called Spinning with a Drop Spindle. It was the beginning of our fiber arts press, Thresh Publications. We expanded and published books by other fiber artists. Here is a link to one of them.
Used copies of our little Spinning with a Drop Spindle are still selling today on Amazon. Some of the copies go for pretty high prices. I am surprised.

 I decided I could reprint the booklet and sell it myself. I’ve been very busy. I re-typeset the text and pulled out all the illustrations and cleaned them up. I assigned the reprint a new ISBN number. I put the book together in Microsoft Publisher and ran off a dummy copy yesterday. I began looking around for some cover paper stock but I can’t find the old curry color we used for the original booklet. We printed thousands and thousands of them. I've got some new swatches.

 I can’t quite decide what color the new reprint should be.

I went searching for an old photo of me spinning on our porch in Santa Rosa. That involved digging through the hundreds of photos I have stashed away. A dear kind person gave me a gift box for ScanCafe last year and I had put off gathering photos to fill the box. I was on a roll and I finally sorted out a lot of old photos to send off for scanning.

 I learned something that everyone needs to know. If you have any of your pictures in those albums with striped wax strips to hold them in place, pull them out NOW. Those albums ruin photographs. Here are some photos that would not peel off the waxy backing – they tore and are ruined. I’m sick about it.

Waiting for my muse

This new year is off to a slow start. I keep thinking, “Any minute now I’m going to get inspired and get busy.” I’ve just been mucking around and I don’t have much to blog about. I’ve been reading. I read my old journals from 1979 through 1999.

 Talk about a story with no plot! I have a complete log of the weather, details of house cleaning, gardening, and good meals that Robert cooked. There were some highlights, of course, but they are not for publication. If my children ever read them they might be surprised. The journals start with our arrival on the island and starting the Bethel Island Beacon weekly newspaper. They skip six years (because you don’t need a journal when you have a newspaper) and start up again in 1990 when we sold the newspaper and opened our bookstore, the Island Book Galley. After that, they cover my years at the island levee district and my excitement discovering quilting – page after page after page about quilting. They stop abruptly in March, 1999. It was really strange to read the journals all in one sitting.

I’ve also read some books: Blood, Bones & Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton, Threadbare by Monica Ferris, Alpine Vengeance and Alpine Winter by Mary Daheim, The Table Comes First by Adam Gopnik. I’m reading The Obamas by Jodi Kantor right now (about 1/3 of the way through and nothing exciting so far).

 I’ve cooked some delicious things.

And I’m finally binding the little quilt pad. My daughter-in-law Toni quilted the hearts way back in October. I’m feeling a little guilty.

This looks beautiful (to me)

 It may not look beautiful to you, but it means I’ll be snug as a bug in a rug this winter. This is the new insulation under my house. It went in yesterday and tonight my feet are warm. I’m fortunate to have two thoughtful sons. My youngest son and his boys brought the rigid insulation boards and did some preliminary work at the end of October (click here). It was pretty complicated work going around all the ducting and pipes under the house so we decided a carpenter was necessary for the job.

My older son, Rob (click here) had a job assignment near my home this week. He has a good friend, Richard, in the area who is a skilled carpenter. Rob had him come out to my house and look at the work to be done. Richard arrived early yesterday morning and worked until after dark to put up the insulation. I am so pleased. Rob cleaned up the debris under the house last night. I took a photo, but you’ll have to look very hard to see him under there.


I am a lucky mom.

Fall – on the farm and at home

Our little St. Alban’s Episcopal church held a big annual fund raiser called Fall on the Farm in October. The congregation is small but the event attracted lots of visitors from all over the east county area.

Friends greeted friends.

 The cakewalk was a very popular attraction.

 My friend Sidney did a good job of guarding the cakes.

 The silent auction was a big success because the offerings were really nice. We sat a long tables and enjoyed a delicious dinner too.

 Back on the homefront I was preparing for winter with the help of my son and his boys. They arrived full of enthusiasm to insulate the underside of my house.

 Davis went to Home Depot and bought enough rigid foam insulation sheets to cover the area. He had store cut them in half so they would all fit in his SUV. They are bulky so he had to make two trips. The family crew worked pretty hard trimming and placing a couple of the sheets. They stacked them up and we all decided to find a skilled carpenter to complete the job.

My trip to PIQF 2011

I rode in style to the Pacific International Quilt Festival at the Santa Clara Convention Center last Friday.

My local quilt store, Queen B’s Quilt Shop in Antioch, chartered a big bus to take 56 of us there.

 The upholstery in the bus was interesting – not the usual industrial blue-gray.

 Del Thomas came up from Southern California for the Festival. I had hoped to meet her there, but she attended on Thursday and Saturday. We were ships passing in the night (really daytime). She took really good pictures of several of the quilts I liked best. So, go to Del’s Blog and see them. It was funny, we didn’t have any communication about the quilts and yet when I looked at her blog she had picked the same ones I had taken pictures of. Her photos are much better than mine.


I’ll just show three quilts that caught my eye. One was funny, another was puzzling, and the third one was special to me.

Linda Laird’s quilt made me laugh out loud. It’s called “My Mom Wasn’t Much of a Cook.” She is from San Diego, CA.

 The sign said:

“Many people have fond memories of their mother’s home-cooking. Well, what if your mother wasn’t much of a cook? Not poisonous or revolting meals, just not very daring or imaginative. This piece uses photos from 1950s – 1960s women’s magazines to show the “alternatives” available to mothers who didn’t quite measure up to the culinary ideals of the times.”
The sayings were fun to read. Click on the photo below to see them larger.

 The puzzling quilt was called “My Hard Life” by Felicia Horowitz.

 It was an ambitious piece. I kept looking at the gauzy bra-like thing and wondering what it was doing there. I called my cousin Sylvia over to see it. I said, “I wonder if it was put on to cover something.” Sylvia looked closely. We couldn’t touch the quilt. It was sewn on, but not with the tiny stitches that were used all over the rest of the quilt.

 I searched for a white-glove lady and had her come over and show me the back of the quilt. Sure enough the stitches holding the gauzy stuff were much larger and did not seem to be part of the original concept. I guess I’ll never know exactly what the intention was.


The third quilt is really lovely. It was made by Tanya Brown and is called “Siesta.”

 You really should click on the close-up photo to see the stitches. Amazing.

 My quilting daughter-in-law, Toni, lives in San Jose and she had gone to the Festival on the opening day – Thursday. Toni planned to go Friday too because you really can’t take in such a large show in one day. Our quilting cousin, Sylvia, drove down from Oakland. Toni brought her friend Carol and we all toured around together.