Several more inches of snow last night

How much has it snowed?

For want of room to put it,

snow is being trucked out of town.

These are not last year's icicles.

Last year, far more sunshine.

Even the icicles have icicles.

A day in the life of a shirt with no buttons or buttonholes

Yesterday I took off the "hawthorn" (more about that later), fulled the fabric and cut out a shirt in readiness to sew this morning.

You know who on his way to the towel covered mound in the window.

Right there behind the iron.

After which I took the protective towel from the pieces I cut last night.

Cats are just addicted to soft.

Toby enthroned on the pile of uncut fabric,

protected by a towel.

So, on to construction. Shirt back:

Shirt front, shoulders matched.

Shoulders sewn, over to the old sewing machine to stay stitch the neck to protect it until I get that far.

Serging around all other unprotected edges of the shirt body.

Ready to set sleeves. The sleeve is folded both to determine its center and identify front and back. The back is bigger that the front. As it's tough to see, I stuck the ruler in to help make the distinction.

Sleeve pinned at the shoulder seam and the leading edges matched for sewing.

The sleeve is set.

The side and underarm seams are done. 

Here is the shirt, still right sides together, wrong side out.

A part I don't like. Making a long enough strip of bias for the neck facing.

I cut the bias from the extra from the sleeve, otherwise, I would need another length of fabric, which I wove by hand.  Too much waste. So, I sew two strips for my length.

Perfect.

Bias serged to neck opening. Turn off serger, turn to sewing machine for finish sewing.

Hemming around the neck bias.

Hemming around the rest of the shirt.

The side vent.

Done, and over to Helen. Looks just like a pullover shirt.

 But wait. It's a little shirt/jacket/front button blouse.

With three quarter sleeves that will take a nice roll.

Because the color I read as "Hawthorn" looked like no hawthorn I know, I asked my sister her opinion of the color. My sister deals with color.

Her appraisal: Victorian rose.

I went back to the waste basket for the empty cone. Well I'll be--"hawthrose."

Google yielded nothing.  Victorian rose it is.

But, how does it button you ask.

We'll see.

When we did this for a living I had a beautiful Husquevarna dedicated totally to button holes.

I was the Queen of Buttonholes.

I made hundreds and hundreds and hundreds in twenty years.

But, it's gone.

My sister mentioned those button hole makers like our mothers had. Before zig-zag sewing machines, when a little attachment made buttonholes by moving the fabric from side to side, not the needle.

Her sewing friends endorsed the one in the green rubber box, and yes, they are plentiful on EBay.

I bought this one, delivery guaranteed soon from Iowa.

As my photography professor used to say, everything you do in developing the picture is one more opportunity to ruin your work.

Same principal applies to sewing.

However, I will become as expert with this little fellow as I was with my zig-zag. 

And although I could have sewn up another Victorian rose shirt in another size,

I decided to spend the afternoon weaving bluebell yardage for more shirts with buttonholes.

Hammered

When I took Emily to work at 7:30 yesterday morning the snow was falling.

It still is drifting down in a desultory way, because it can.

I was thankful for so little traffic, especially the place in the village

where the road drops straight down from a glacially induced ridge,

to Slippery Run, over the culvert and climbs as dramatically.

That tiny piece of road also has S curves,descending and ascending.

Because I was the only car I could drive the straight line through the many inches of snow,

and not hold my breath negotiating the curves.

When I picked her up at 3:30 I waited an hour in the parking lot, my texts unanswered.

Although all the morning shift but two drove through unplowed snow to man the ski resort and give the skiers a good day, half the second shift called off.

Superbowl, no doubt.

More than an hour until they found someone to relieve Emily at the lifts.

School was cancelled today. Mercifully, the call came at ten last night.

The weather maps showed us in the nine to fifteen inch band of projected snowfall.

I'd say that was about right.

What I did today

I woke up to the six a.m.,  two hour delay phone call, then the eight a.m. deteriorating weather conditions, school is cancelled call.

At nine, with no breakfast, with the Siruba in the front seat, I set out on the twenty minute trip to the Geo. E. Johnson Company, the only industrial sewing machine company for six states around. Deteriorating weather conditions be damned.

Several days ago I effected a trade with my weaver friend Linda for the old Siruba serger. The industrial machine we used to sew thousands of garments from hand woven cotton fabric. We also serged off the ends of thousands of hand woven rugs, prior to sewing down the bound edge and putting them up for sale at a show. When we retired I sold the Siruba to Linda to bind off the edges of all the bags she made, and the occasional bound rug. She had an old Jukki at the time she could not get to working well. If your eyes are glazed over, these are just big sewing machines for a more professional job. Faster, too, but I could never get beyond first gear, which is fine for me.

They don't authorize this stuff with me, first!

I traded Linda our old, four thread Bernina  home serger for the Siruba. The operative word is old; more than twenty years old. Heavy. Sturdy. Another little work horse. Except, it was not making the bottom loop properly, so I took it to our industrial sewing machine fellows, Alex and Jerry, before I turned it over. Alex is eighty something, suffering more and more from dementia, but knows how sewing machines sew. He put the home serger on the bench, began testing the threads, then delivered me quite the lecture on not having the lower looper thread completely between the tension plates, which solved the problem. He doesn't remember who I am or that I have been a customer for more than twenty years, but sewing machines don’t fool him.

Appears to be leaving again!

When the Siruba, which weighs eighty or so pounds, compared to the fifteen pound home serger, was set up, one looper thread was jamming and breaking. We checked all the thread paths, cleaned the moving parts to within an inch of their being, changed the needles—nothing. The lower looper thread jammed and broke on every seam attempted. So, as mentioned a couple paragraphs ago, I set out with the Siruba on the front seat, for the Geo. E. Johnson Company.

The school report was absolutely correct; deteriorating weather conditions. The northbound trip took me more than an hour. But of course I got there. I was on a mission. Jerry put the machine on the bench, checked all the thread paths, then the threads. Once more the lecture, be sure all the threads are securely in their tension plates. The lower looper thread was not! Home again, home again, by eleven. Southbound traffic moved just fine.

Back and ready to rock and roll.

The mission was to use the Siruba for a marathon sewing weekend AND to be home in time for my appointment for the B/L MBB at 1 pm, arrive thirty minutes prior. That’s short for bilateral medial branch block.

Eventually I was face down on a table. The nurse put a drop of happy juice in the IV; I felt the doctor insert a total of eight needles that, I was told, were also full of happy juice. There is still more protocol, but we certainly are down the yellow brick road now. I must keep track of how long the block lasts, where it gives up, and so forth. There will be another procedure based on that for the purpose of squirting stuff that will just shut up those squealing vertebrae for perhaps a year. Take that. And that. And that! POW!

It's what she calls "weaving."

Then I tied the new threading on my loom to the apron, threw the waste yarn and the header thread, and wove a bobbin of a one pound cone of a color called hawthorn. Rather pretty. A sort of bricky red, not the red red I've always thought of as the color of hawthorns. About four yards in a pound of thread, another three or four shirts. Limited edition, as they say. But, the hawthorn is a little down the road, after red shirts and bluebell this weekend.

"Hawthorn." See how the natural web cuts the color about fifty percent.

But now I’m going to bed. Reveille tomorrow is seven, for the ski run trip.

Hoovering Europe

No good deed goes unpunished, it is said. Sometimes neither does a bad deed.

This is another story about my corporate days, when I was the controller, etc. The corporation was Maytag, and way down at my end, the subsidiary was the company that manufactured bill accepting machines found round the world, dispensing everything from soft drinks to laundromat soap. We called them dollar bill acceptors, but they recognized close to a hundred different currencies.

The company was not too old when I was hired, nor too big, and manufactured those little bill recognition systems for vending machines everywhere; soft drinks are ubiquitous. About the time we were acquired the first time, by a vending machine company, our marketing team had the product pretty heavily into gaming machines and fuel dispensing, too.

Remember Pac-Man and other such games of skill in restaurants and bars? Our Japanese distributor was the manufacturer. All this work predated credit card recognition systems, for gasoline, for instance. The units were commonly used in Europe for gasoline. They could not be used in this country because unattended stations were illegal in most states. The days of self service had begun, but we went into the station and said “Ten dollars on pump two.” Remember?

My last ten years were a whirlwind of acquisitions and divestitures. I outlasted three division presidents, but not the fourth. His fall occurred after I was gone, but friends filled me in. My little company of fewer than one hundred people was acquired by a soft drink manufacturing company that also was a division of Magic Chef. It made sense for them to own the company that supplied their dollar bill acceptors. And so life went on for several years.

Then Magic Chef was acquired by Maytag. Why? Maytag wanted to build refrigerators, but didn’t want to start from scratch. “Let’s buy a company that builds refrigerators!” Magic Chef manufactured Admiral, and hey presto, the deal was done. Sadly, it was the beginning of the end for Magic Chef, as all its subsidiaries were spun off, and then Magic Chef itself. No more stoves.

Back at my plant, life was not going on so well. Maytag was not interested in my company’s note recognition machines, but in its pc board ability, and especially the very automated and skilled production lines we had built. Maytag products were transitioning from analog to digital, running on printed circuit boards. The once friendly factory floor became quiet and tense, wary of the “new bosses.”

Lots of changes were occurring in the office, too. Old faces gone, new faces appearing. New lines of command. One day I no longer reported to my boss, but to a division president. The one who outlasted me. I recall walking into the usual Monday staff meeting and being greeted by a roar of “Traitor!” as a joke.

It came off totally wrong; I turned on my heel, went to the ladies room, sat in a closed stall and tried to think it through. Eventually everyone came in and pounded on my door to come out, they were sorry. Someone crawled under the stall door and opened it; we all had a good laugh. Probably the last one we had together, ten men and women crowded into the tiny ladies room.

We were becoming so unhappy with the sinister transformation of the happy little company everyone one of us in the “front offices” were getting fat; our desk drawers were stuffed with candy bars. Everyone was outgrowing suits and falling back on slacks and shirts. I've written about wheeling around a corner, shirt tails flying, and walking smack into the head of HR, straight from Newton, Ioway, Maytag’s headquarters. Did you know why that beagle in the Maytag commercials was named Newton?

HR looked me up then down, and the next morning there was a dress code directive from Newton. I felt awful about that; the women in my department didn't make a lot and supported families, and now were being told they must wear skirts, blouses, jackets, stockings and appropriate shoes to work. That was the bad deed that did not go unpunished, but not until two or three years later, when I was long gone.

Maytag was acquiring Hoover as I was leaving. Hoover employed hundreds and hundreds in a town near me. All gone now. Did Maytag want to add vacuums to its line? Of course not. They wanted Hoover’s European distribution system, which was sizable and stable. And that HR fellow who caused the dress code became president of Maytag International, headquartered in England. He took with him a sizable chunk of Maytag that had made our lives unpleasant, I heard. I was gone by then.

A couple of years on the new president in England decided to boost weak sales of Hoovers in Britain and on the continent. He had a brilliant idea. He would give away an airline voucher with the purchase of every Hoover.

The scheme progressed beautifully for the better part of a year; his division’s sales led every other Maytag division sales. Until toward year end, when folks with vouchers began cashing them in, intent on holiday travel.  Sitting at my own kitchen table one morning, two or three years into my weaving career, I spit coffee all over the business section of the morning paper. 

There were not enough airplanes, there were not enough airplane hours, pilots, staff, airports to accommodate all those vouchers. A lot of unhappy people, including Maytag, which had to buy back the vouchers to keep them off the market.

It seems people all over Britain and Europe had Hoovers in attics, Hoovers in basements, Hoovers in closets and dark corners. The value of the vouchers far exceed the cost of a new Hoover. The whole contingent who dreamed up the scheme, led by my HR nemesis, was fired.

I wonder who the mergers and acquisitions do benefit. My little note acceptor company had grown to four hundred employees when I left, well over three hundred of them on the factory floor, making pc boards. Eventually Maytag outsourced the manufacture overseas and sold what remained of the little company to our chief competitor, Mars. The candy bar company, privately held. 

One day the new bosses walked into the plant, ordered all lockers and desks emptied, everyone was fired. Good deeds and bad deeds don’t amount to much then. Maytag overextended itself and was swallowed up by Whirlpool. I felt worst for all who lost their jobs. My little company, as well as Newton, Iowa.

Probably a bag of candy on the desk.

Probably the very shirt I wore the day I crashed into the future president of Maytag, International.