One New Mini Pumpkin

 

I had enough time today to sew together exactly one mini pumpkin block. 

The block went together very easily.

Sewing slowly its the main thing.

That and remembering how to use the Quick Curve Mini Ruler to trim the block down.

And the power went back on just in time to be able to give this a quick ironing

Lights On

 

Hooray, Hurrah! The power is back on as of this morning. I knew PG&E wasn't going to make their deadline of last night at 11:10 pm. I have a very long chain of texts of them declaring "progress" and that our new estimated restoration time was going to be yet another day. Sigh, I wish I knew where to even complain to make things change for the better. Monopolies just really really suck. Note: these first two pictures were taken the night before the power went out. This is how it was supposed to look around here the last week. Cheery and warm and festive.

We now have ALL of the appliances going at once, dishwasher, laundry, we're making toast we don't even want to eat and microwaving water just because. I might even wash my hair and blow dry it and curl it just for fun. 

And best of all, the Christmas tree gets to be back on. And it is blessedly quiet without the racket of the generator, so I'm a happy camper.

Time for me to go iron something! And now I can work on assembling Patchwork Palooza. I put it off because it was going to take so much ironing and I first needed to rearrange the blocks with all the lights on. No excuses now.

Clue One Sewn

 
Because I'd gotten the remaining hourglass block units cut and ready yesterday, all I had to do was to get the extension cord hookup to our generator to power up my sewing machine. Yes, power is still out, not much solar input today as it was still stormy today. 

All sewn up, and pressed open, now together into the hourglass block unit.All done except the trimming.

I think this is my favorite fabric combination. I'll be so glad to get these trimmed and then finally move onto another clue.

Design Wall Destruction

I went into my workroom yesterday and was greeted with this design wall destruction. At first I didn't know what I was looking at. The studio assistant pushed it a little too far on the climbing wall activities I guess. Nothing is broken or truly damaged. And thankfully I didn't have a project up there that had taken a lot of time to arrange and wasn't pinned up.

The storm was absolutely raging, but my DH went into Mr. Fix-It mode (just to have something to do I think) and headed out to the hardware store. Luckily he made it back just before the highway was closed down due to an enormous tree plus power lines coming down. He purchased a pine molding in an L-shape and showed me how it was going to be installed. He offered to stain/varnish one side and paint one side white (the part up against the white felt, but I thought both sides varnished would be fine. The quick-dry varnish actually dried so he was able to install it 

As neither of the panels is affixed to the wall at all, they are both just propped up within this frame that is attached. This solution was to screw the molding into the side frame pieces, flush on top of the felt-wrapped panels. So now they're pretty snug and held in tight, at least along those edges.

He's also going to put in a piece up along the top, but it has a different sized (and bigger) space between the panel and the frame trim. So that will require some wood-working power equipment to trim the piece of wood he bought down to the right size and shape to fit in the space. 

Here's how it looks, not at all distracting to my eye which is the main thing. There really isn't a way to attach the panels to the wall, so hopefully these two side pieces will help keep it all a little bit more stable for now. I don't want to have to forbid Korben free access to my workroom, but that may end up being the solution. 

Our power has now been out since yesterday afternoon so who knows how much more you'll hear from me over the next few days. Depends on when the internet goes down. We had one 22 mph wind gust yesterday afternoon, this is measured at the ground level, not up at the tree tops, more open spaces in Boulder Creek got up to 50mph! The amount of rain was a lot, 12" since 1/31, so that's some saturated ground at this point. No trees fell down this time, but a lot of big branches did. That's what I'm cleaning up today while the rain hopefully takes a break.

Iron Generation

 I finally got to try out some ironing powered by the generator. My DH asked me to tell him when I turned on the iron, he wanted to see how much it would affect the generator we have powering the house. It really dipped down to accommodate the sudden surge, then evened out, every time the iron needed to re-heat itself, another surge, but it held up and didn't poop out on us. Irons really take a lot of power. We don't usually think about it, except maybe at retreats when a bunch of irons and machines are plugged in and breakers are tripped.

I finished sewing another Clover block and now there were 3 that needed pressing so that I can sew them together for 4 finished blocks.

I finally got to try out my new wool pressing mat (Oliso Felt Pro-Press Link) and it worked really well. Here's the before, a big wrinkly mess that I didn't want to try sewing together with the other 3/4 blocks.

Nice and flat! And not wet wool smelling at all (phew).

Here they all are, nice and ironed, but only one of the Clover blocks is sewn together so far.

As seen from the side angle. That's the "please photograph me" pile of quilts in the center. And my studio assistant on the red fabric.

Nicely ironed fabric is of course, a great place to take a bath.

Powered Up

In completely non-high-fiber-content news, Tuesday was a big day around here. After months and months of being on the waiting list, our Tesla Powerwall install-day arrived. With all the power issues lately it seemed like a good idea. Hopefully it will be worth the money and we'll be able to not replace our refrigerator every couple years. 

Here are the two Powerwall units in the back of the install van, in the two gray boxes. According to the labels they were made at the new facility in Sparks, NV that has the sort of hilarious name The Gigafactory. And of course the address is Electric Avenue. The second Gigafactory is up and running in Buffalo, NY.

The original solar panels that we had installed in 2014 are going to be rewired along with the Powerwalls into a system that will result in us almost entirely running our house on solar power. Up until now, it only worked during the day as we had no storage capacity for the power produced that we didn't use.

It only took the team a few hours to relocate our electrical panel inside the garage. This is officially the nicest, most expensive thing in our house now. Picture credit to my DH for this one. The glass surface of the power controller seems a bit over the top to me, and likely functionally necessary, but it is beautifully designed. Hopefully this glass is stronger than the armor glass in the Tesla truck. And yes, our walls in the garage are strange colors, it's all re-used paint from other parts of the house. The green is from DS's room, and the yellow door is the color that our kitchen used to be.

Here's what the Powerwall units look like on the side of the house next to our original solar power unit. There's some of that plastic sticky shrink wrap stuff still to pull off. My DH's plan is to construct some sort of a canopy over this area to protect it all from the elements although that isn't strictly necessary. On the black sides of the Powerwalls, it glows green which looks pretty eerie and cool at night.

But this is us right now, not drawing any energy at all from the grid, pretty wild, huh? We'll see how much net energy we produce and sell back to PG&E, mwahahaha. 

If you want to look into getting solar, use my Tesla referral link and we'll both get some $$ back.
 

Power's Out--Again

 We had a big wind event last night and into this morning, 68 mph gusts, so of course our power is out. We have almost no cell service, and internet until the Comcast batteries last on their towers. 

We have the generator going, and are hoping that our brand-new refrigerator doesn't mind the power outage too much. We sure don't want to lose yet another fridge worth of food.

Most of the roads are blocked, and there are at least 10 fires started from the downed power lines, some in the areas that already burned last year. For some reason PG&E didn't turn off the power preemptively like they did several times over the summer. So of course stuff is burning, it's been very dry so far this winter, and very warm this past week. Not a good combo, we're hoping the wind lets up asap.

I'm off to try sewing with my machine plugged into an extension cord that leads to the generator, wish me luck. I've got a project to finish!

And I'm checking the Tesla website to see when the heck they're going to install our power wall.

Meanwhile, if you have power and bandwidth go watch this awesome NPR Tiny Desk concert from Tank and the Bangas. Tank was singing one of the songs in a movie we watched last night, One Night in Miami (very awesome) and I loved her voice so much, I looked her up and found this. What a presence, what joy and emotion!: