October 29, 2023
A Rainbow is Coming
Dear Friends,
The first wave of cold has hit, with 47 degrees being the high today. Dressed as warm as I could for taking Sandy out, but felt like I should have had a snow suit on. And mukluks.
And over the past week, it’s been raining. Our property has become like Minnesota . . . . Land of a Thousand Lakes. The best part of this is that the rain washes all the pollen and all the dust out of the air. It totally, although temporarily, eliminates all particulate air pollution. With luck, that will eliminate allergies, something we’ve all had to prior to now. Of course if you keep an animal in the house, they can be another allergy risk. A victim of pollen pollution with complications, Penny was out more that a week earlier this month. Kim was out all week this past week and hopes to be back tomorrow. She mentioned that she now has a lake front property because of the rain.
We need the rain, of course, to try to get over the effects of the drought. Biggest issue with the droughts is agriculture, i.e., America’s ability to produce sufficient food for people and for livestock.
The bad issues connected with this rain are (1) Mud (2) Driving hazards (3) Getting drenched hazards. For a quilt shop like ours, such heavy continuous rain ends up seriously decreasing the number of people coming into our shop, and traffic cuts it down to a trickle. When weather nasties up, people tend to lose some of the enthusiasm they normally have for getting out. Clearly, most of you are home using the time to work on making quilts or doing other types of sewing.
A few thousand years ago, when Noah was 600 years old, it started raining, and it took a large arc (boat) to ride it out safely. Rained for forty days. At the end of the event, God stated he wouldn’t drown all of humanity again, and as a sign of his promise, he set the rainbow in the sky. So I’ve been watching for a rainbow the past several days. It hasn’t appeared yet.
As a matter of interest, you should realize common physics that creates rainbows was not suddenly altered by God. What did apparently changed was that the heavy mist that formerly covered Earth preventing rainbows from occurring, was now gone, and had been part of the source of the rain. Afterwards, there could be both raining and non-raining areas at the same time, enabling the atmospheric circumstances to be of such that rainbows could form. So rainbows were new, and should remind us of the promise.
Oh, another great point of all the current rain is that the cracks in the ground have now pretty well closed up. Biggest I saw this summer was about six inches wide. The things can be real ankle twisters if you aren’t careful when you walk around outside. Whenever I went out to feed our two outside dogs (a shepherd and a golden doodle), I always had to take care not to break my ankles off, but fortunately made it through the entire summer without hitting a crevice or crevasse (a crevasse is a huge crevice, like a glacier has).
Relative to the shop, want to mention only one thing this time. One of the products well sell is a BabyLock sewing machine called the “Sashiko.” It’s very much a specialty machine because it makes stitches that look like hand stitching. The stitches can be adjusted to different length and the space between stitches can be adjusted. Makes for some amazing sewing. Donna just showed me a beautiful pillow she made using the Sashiko. Take a look at our web site or FaceBook page, and you’ll see what I mean. Donna has been prepping to teach a project-based class with it.
BabyLock is the only sewing machine company that makes such a machine. Bernina makes a machine that claims to make Sashiko-like stitches, but it doesn’t. Instead it uses clear monofilament thread in it’s bobbin which it lays out between spaced-out normal stitches, giving a deceitful appearance of Sashiko stitches. Our advice here is, “Don’t be fooled by expensive imitations!”
Chip
