Signs of the Times

I listen to my Mum tell me about spring busting out all over in North Vancouver and, honestly, it seems as if she lives in an entirely different country.  The cherry blossoms are over, as are all the spring bulbs and the forsythia.  It’s the same in the south Okanagan:  the orchards are in full bloom, the magnolias are largely over.

Here in our frigid little frost pocket of a valley bottom, we have to look hard for signs of spring.  But they’re here.  Here, but subtle.

So subtle, in fact, that I had to rely on the macro settings on my camera to be able to show you many of them.  You won’t be able, I think, to identify many of these leaves and flowers at this stage in their emergence.  They are, in order, a Siberian cherry outside my studio, a young maple, lilac (that one was easy), mountain ash, crabapple, apple, and larch (maybe that one was easy too, since it’s the only evergreen that drops its foliage in the fall and grows new foliage in the spring).

I particularly love the larch needles, because the way they explode out of the tiny buds looks like a very slow-motion spray of water coming out of a faucet.  At this stage, the needles are a tender green, soft and pliable, feeling more like feathers than needles when brushed with a finger.  And the blossoms on the cherry and apple and crabapple trees are no more than quiet suggestions, the buds only about an eighth of an inch in diameter, with the merest hint of colour coming.  And isn’t it cool the way the newest, smallest leaves on the lilac are the same deep purple as the emerging buds?  And what’s with that hairy, downy outer coating that’s peeling back from the mountain ash leaves?  What purpose does that serve?

Despite the moments in which I envy the coast and the Okanagan for their riotous exuberance of spring in May, it’s times like these, when my camera leads me to lean in closely for a more intense look at the details, that I learn something new about the trees and flowers and shrubs that quietly go about their lives, largely ignored, as I rush about focussing on other things.

Other signs are easier to notice.

The horses are finding enough grass to make grazing worthwhile.  All of them are eating less hay and spending less time hanging around the mangers waiting for the next pitchforkfulls to appear.

The annual squabble over avian real estate is in full swing.  All of our bird boxes are receiving a lot of attention from the swallows, but this bluebird and his mate appear, today at least, to have consolidated their claim on this house near my studio.  This guy has expended a lot of energy this week in attacking his reflection in the side mirrors on my car, to the point where I had to cover the mirrors with plastic bags, partly to stop him from doing himself an injury and partly to keep as much of his guano off the car as possible.

We’re at the stage in the flood season where we’re just as happy not to live any closer to Boundary Creek than we do.  The creek is well out of its banks in many places in our little valley.  Lying in bed at night, with the windows open to the east, we can hear the roar of the creek a kilometre away and west of us.  

And further to the west, just above the hairpin bend leading west from Rock Creek on Highway 3, the highway has been undergoing some weird changes as the saturated ground above and beneath it moves.  I grabbed these photos from a posting on FB by Emcon, our local highways maintenance contractor.

One can only assume that the forest fire from 2016 that started right at over the barrier you see at the bend above stripped so much vegetation from the hillside above that there’s nothing left to slow the movement of water in the soil.  It’s been weird driving this stretch of highway in the ten days since the cracks and displacement first appeared, noticing significant changes every couple of days.  Emcon is on the spot today, trying to ditch the high side of the road, but whether this will help is anyone’s guess.  We’ll see.

In other timely news, we’re now only a few weeks away from a major event for me this year:  the National Juried Show of the Canadian Quilters’ Association.    (If you missed my giddy announcement of my acceptances, have a look at this post from early March.)  And if you happen to be in Vancouver during the show, which runs from May 31 to June 2, please consider coming to see it at the Vancouver Convention Centre.  There will be more than 400 quilts on display because the National Juried Show has some company in the form of other shows running at the same time at the same venue.

We are now in the window of time in which quilts should arrive for the show, so yesterday I packaged up my three and got them ready to go to the post office. That’s one sentence to describe what amounted to hours and hours of work yesterday.  Fortunately, I’d already located a great blog post from Amy Meissner that told me how to do pack my quilts properly.  

It went down something like a military campaign.

• All instructions about shipping quilts agree that they must not be folded.  A fold becomes a crease in transit and that crease is going to be difficult to remove and no one at the other end is going to want to try to remove it anyway.  These quilts are all large.  On the short side, one is 46 inches and the other two are 60 inches.   So I needed a shipping container at least 61 inches wide.  Do you have a handy container that size?  Me neither.  I went up to the attic, foraged for all the large boxes I could find, and came up with three that were nearly the same width.  I opened the ends of the middle one, and one end of each of the other two and slipped them into each other till I had a long box, retaining the ends to lie flat on the bottom of the box for extra strength.  With scant one-inch overlap, I had a 61 inch long box.  Enter the Tuck Tape (like packing tape but a long stronger and stickier and bright red).

 

• That done, I switched my attention to the quilts.  I knew that cat hair and lint were there.  I could see them.  I couldn’t find my lint roller, but I did have a nearly-full replacement roll, so I used that.  It’s actually fairly difficult to run one of those rolls across a quilt with the palm of one's hand rather than the roller the roll is meant to sit in.  And I had a lot of territory to cover (46x59, 60x66, and 60x82).  I laid each quilt down in turn on a clean sheet on the living room floor, did the back, and then the front, then flipped it back till it was front up again.

• I brought my pool noodles into play.  A pool noodle is a quilt’s best friend, allowing the quilt to be rolled without creases and without collapsing (a collapsed tube becomes a rectangle and that means folds and creases).  My dear husband saw me struggling to get the first quilt rolled properly onto its noodle and gave me a hand.  Then we covered the rolled quilt and its noodle in bubble wrap, and gently taped it in place with painter’s tape (using something really sticky at this stage invites the person unwrapping it to use a box cutter to open the roll.  Think about it: box cutter/quilt.  Not a good combo.)  Then dh left to do some work on the woodlot and I was on my own again.
• I went back to the box.  My box was now the right length but far too tall (at 12 inches) for the three quilts lying side by side.  They fit handily in the 16 inch width across the box, so my box needed to be only 5 or 6 inches high.  I cut off all the flaps.  And immediately realized I’d cut off too much and didn’t have enough left to create new flaps across the top of the box.  Never mind.  I’d deal with that later.
• At this stage, it occurred to me that Canada Post might have restrictions on sizes they’d be willing to accept as parcels.  Sure enough, the handy CP website told me that my parcel had to be under 2 metres long.  Good.  I was at 157 cm.  Oh, and then it went on to say that the length AND GIRTH together couldn’t be more than 3 m.  Oh.  I measured.  I did the math.  And came up with 299 cm on the INSIDE of the box.  I froze.  I didn’t even want to know what it might be on the outside of the box.  I knew it would be too much.  I sat and breathed and folded my hands in my lap and allowed my mind to drift.  Then I remeasured.  Then I redid the math.  And realized that I’d doubled one measurement twice.  My actual length + girth measurement was 260 cm.  Yay!
• Now, you’d think I was nearly done with the cardboard, right?  But no, because Amy Meissner said that to avoid having one’s quilt sliced by someone with a box cutter and not much brain matter, every bit of the box—sides, top, and bottom—needed to be two layers thick.  My box bottom was fine, already two layers because of the ends I’d folded down flat.  But I had to cut all new sides, slightly less than 6 inches high.  I didn’t realize about the “slightly less” part until I’d cut half of them.  Have you ever had to cut 1/4 of an inch of a piece of cardboard a couple of feet long?  It’s not pretty.  But I got it done and taped into place.  

• I gently scored a line on the outside of the boxes to establish a fold line and made sure that all my flaps would close properly over the inner lining.  (You can see the score line in the bottom right of the photo above).
• And went back to the quilts.  I got quilt number 2 delinted and as I began to roll it up remembered the instruction to roll the quilts face out, so that they wouldn’t get creased and wrinkled.  I did that, by myself, with this quilt.  And then realized that dh and I had rolled the first one with face in.  So I took that one apart and re-rolled it face out.  And did quilt number 3.  All of this on my aching knees on the floor, trying to keep the edges even because I knew I had no wiggle room with the length of the roll.
• I went back to the box.  I used nearly all of the Tuck Tape I had left to reinforce all the weak points and seams and wound a long bandage-like piece twice around the lengthwise circumference of the box for good measure.
• I put all three quilts into one plastic bag (essential to guard against moisture damage).  Or rather into two bags, one on each end, overlapping in the middle and taped securely in place.
• I remembered that I had to include signed forms identifying myself as the maker of the quilts.  And I remembered that I had to put in a note asking for the form that will allow me to pick up my quilts in person at the end of the show.  I popped in a copy of the mailing label just in case something happens to the one that would go on the outside of the box.
• I taped all that to the bag containing the quilts.  I covered the bag with more bubble wrap.  I laid a long strip of cardboard over the bubble wrap and taped the two ends of the flaps that didn’t quite meet in the middle to that strip.  Then I laid ANOTHER long strip of cardboard OVER the flaps and taped it down too.
• And I remembered that I had to print the mailing label on COLOURED paper as stipulated in the show requirements.  I taped the label to the top of the box. I taped on a label with my return address.
• I stepped back.  
• DONE!

Now I just need to get the box to the post office.  I thought I had another obstacle when I took the box out to the car this morning.  As you can see, the box is wider than the car.  

In the end, I pushed the passenger seat all the way back and the seat back all the way down and now it looks like it’ll have a nice nap reclining beside me while I drive it to the post office.

And then I’ll need a nice nap myself.