Hi Alex, "I didn't know that about State Fair being triploid." State Fair is tetraploid. If you cross a tetraploid with a diploid, you get a triploid. Triploids are sterile. A good example of triploids is bananas. All of the bananas in the store are triploids and in effect seedless. Those tiny brown dots would have been seed embryos if one parent had not been a tetraploid while the other was diploid. Banana breeders breed a lot of different diploid bananas and a lot of different tetraploid bananas, and their bananas have fertile seeds. So they grow bananas from seeds in order to get new varieties of bananas. They produce many amazing forms of bananas that never get grown commercially for one reason or another. Many years ago a banana company (I think it was Dole) ran a full page magazine add showing an assortment of their experimental bananas. One of them was round like a grapefruit. But I digress. "I now have Kaspersky for my security system. He promises to keep me safe - eh, comrade?" Let us know how Kapersky works. I have never tried that one. "And the good news... I have gathered some nice plump seeds from Alpha - yay! So, all is going well." Are you going to dry them for planting next Spring? I have a few green seeds that are nearly ready to pull, but I will be putting mine in a pre-germ Ziploc. I hope to have a second generation growing by Christmas. "... Bummer. I do still have the RAW files, I think, saved elsewhere, ..." I know you are not a fan of the user interface, but DxO Optics Pro 10 is now available for a free 30-day fully functional trial, and it could convert those raw files to a form that your Photoshop Elements 12 could process. Incidentally, DxO Optic's user interface has "improved" (changed) a little, and you might hate it less. It does allow you to create your own Presets, which makes it easy to repeat a previous choice of settings. DxO Optic's Prime option for Denoising is computation intensive, but very possibly the best available. Topaz's DeNoise plug-in is nearly as capable. I have both, but primarily use DxO's Prime Denoising, because it is spooky good. (Topaz's DeNoise is also spooky good.) "Other pics I can pick up from here and Photobucket. But it's going to take time." But the pics here and in Photobucket don't have nearly as much detail as your original Raw files. Incidentally, do you have a Nikon program called ViewNX 2? It can show you thumbnail pictures of NEF (RAW) files and you can double-click those thumbnails to get a full screen view of your RAW file. More later. More indoor gardening to do. ZM (not associated with any product or vendor mentioned or linked)

Any method I know would entail soaking.....and I worry the black will run. Best suggestion...Orvis available at quilting shops with distilled water and soak for several days....lift it carefully squeeze out and lay flat on a lot of towels and direct a fan on it to dry. If it's really rust and not just arg yellowing....the method is not so gentle....you get oxalic acid at a drug store and make a strong solution and dab it on the spot while the cloth is wet....rinse as soon as the spot disappears! Linda C

Nothing wrong with the smell of bacon IMO! I could handle bacon cologne & perfume. Far better than that jug perfume in which old women insist on marinating themselves. Guess they're trying to cover up the "old people" smell. I have avoided scented detergents for a long time and haven't used fabric softener for 10 years or more. I don't like my clothes to smell. When they smell, it tells me to wash them. And the detergent aisles make me cough. AFAIC they should have the detergent and sell the little bottles of stench you can add to it. But if you've ever been around old people, there's a lot of them who can't have a sense of smell. And IMO lilacs should be outlawed as a noxious weed. It's certainly an obnoxious weed. That is probably the worst stench there is.

Carole, fabrics will fade differently, so test swatches and write notes. And, I don't see why you couldn't replace the binding with a pastel solid, because you will never "match" the muslin with new. Scrappy quilts are much easier to "repair" because they are busy and harder to see the new pieces. Once you have the appropriate fabrics ready, lay them down and look from a distance to see the effect. (You will see what I mean by that when you view my pics.) So, as promised, here are pics of a repair I did on a 1940's era scrappy quilt. Several pieces had oil stains, and someone evidently tried to get the stains out, so there were lighter areas too; very distracting -- made it look dirty even though it was freshly washed. Fortunately, the backing was not affected. First look at the full view and it will be hard to find the new fabrics. There are 3 yellow pieces and one blue piece replaced. Then look at the other pics, and they should be easy to find once you know where they are. I guess I could have faded the yellow more, but its still much better than it was. The blue piece is applied upside down for best color. After replacing the pieces, I had to hand quilt as they were before, catching only the top and batting. Bluebars