What a week! Last week Tuesday and Wednesday it rained. And rained. AND RAINED!! Somewhere between 11" and 12". Our little town was flooded. The water was 5" deep on the lawn. The water seeped through the windows into the basement. Not a lot of water, it just trickled in and oozed across parts of the basement floor. Ours is not a finished basement so it just made a mess. I was at the camper and had to wait until the water went down enough (many roads were closed) to drive home. Ken and I did the "great fling". Ken hauled 35 large black garbage bags outside for garbage pickup. Nothing of any real value. A suitcase with very old photos (pre1940) got wet, I was able to spread them out and dry them. Only a couple photos were lost.
Much of this section of South Dakota is still flooded. The James River near Gayville SD has overflowed its banks 7 miles. South Dakota is flat, there are no places to drain the water. Many major roads are still closed, a part of I90 has one lane traffic through water.
My right arm is still giving me lots of pain. What's a girl to do when she can't sew? YOU SHOP!!! I bought a new sewing machine--
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| Brother RXR3240 |
Not an expensive machine, I ordered it through Amazon. I wanted a machine to do decorative stitches. This machine has 130 stitches and it sews a very accurate 1/4" stitch. Its lightweight, so I can pack it to travel with. I tried the first 99 stitches so far. What don't I like? Its noisy. I prefer a knee pedal but this is a portable machine so no knee pedal. The old Singers hum quietly when they run. Like many things in our lives this is a "throw away" item. Use it until it quits and if its out of warranty--toss it. I am hoping to use the decorative stitches to machine bind my donation quilts, hand binding might be something I simply cannot do anymore.
I wanted to try out the machine with some simple piecing. I had Uneven 9 patch blocks started using this method--Susies Scraps. So Wednesday I slowly worked on finishing the last seams (they had been pinned ready to sew for a couple months).
The book by Lynn Roddy Brown sparked this scrappy project--
The cover photo is my inspiration. The blocks reverse the dark/light sections. Set on point it makes a great scrappy quilt.
Its a beautiful day today, the sun is shining and there's a slight breeze. Time to enjoy the last days of summer.
~Lori1R in Nebraska~
3 comments:
It IS a beautiful day! I'm done canning tomatoes & juice so I can really enjoy it.
Wow, you had LOTS more rain than we did, and we thought we had plenty. At least enough to make the ripening tomatoes start splitting! Otherwise I'm sure the hubby would think I should keep on canning. Nope, I'm done. Our niece lives at Emery and her place has been surrounded by water since March. Like you said, no place for it to go. Lots of fields in that area never got planted this year. A tough year for farming for sure. Can you imagine the rain in Texas? Heading for 48" this week near Beaumont & Port Arthur from Imelda.
The cheap Brother machines are actually pretty good machines. My first one was the 6000i. Loved that machine & it was a little work horse and light weight. The plastic gears finally stripped so it got set out for the trash and I got another one, with way more stitches than I'll ever need. It does better zig-zag, blind hem and satin stitches than my Pfaff. That one tends to skip a stitch every so often when doing those.
Sorry to hear that your arm isn't getting any better. It's tough not to be able to sew much. My right foot & ankle bothered me for almost three years but I could still press that pedal and sew.
Bummer about your arm not feeling better! Must be so frustrating.
We had a little seepage in the basement, also probably from our egress window wells, but nothing was ruined luckily. And our street wasn't an area that flooded - unlike so many sections of town. We're counting our blessings! We saw one of my husband's high school classmates who was here visiting from Houston. He was showing photos of their current flooding. They lost everything in the flood there during Harvey and had to gut their home back to the studs to rebuild. This week the water was rising again but had just reached the backyard. He is here to seeing his mom and has other family keeping an eye on the property in Houston.
Love those uneven 9-patch blocks. They'll make a great quilt.
Boo on that right arm! I hope you can get it a little better healed soon.
I bought cheap Brothers until the last one broke after a month and the one I bought to replace has to be repaired because they failed to oil some critical part in the manufacturing process. Now I have a Juki, and it was worth the price (although I make sure to cover it when I’m not sewing so the little kids leave it alone!). Good luck with the machine binding.
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