even less!

Last week saw little sewing.  This week saw none.

To be fair, I did hit the sewing room, looking for projects.  I'm going to a retreat in April (I think I've mentioned this) and am trying to decide what to take with me.  Since I don't have much for UFOs, that means I have to come up with something new.  And I'm struggling.

I've been through a number of my quilt books and nothing sparked interest.  I've been through a number of older magazines (I purged a lot a long time ago, keeping only those I thought had something I might make someday) and have found nearly nothing.  And those I've found seem dauntingly complicated.

UGH.

What to do?

Read.

Book number one for the week was a good read.

Set in about the 1970's, a young man (high school age) shoots two local hoodlums after they break into his house.  The trial isn't going well and he manages to break out of the small-town jail and takes off.

The story is mostly about the rest of his family, though.  His father, a local janitor who seems to perform miracle-like oddities, soon loses his job after the crime and the two younger siblings (a boy and a girl - the boy, Reuben, being the book's narrator, both pre-teens) struggle with returning to school.  (No mother.)

So the father packs them up in the newly-inherited (a whole other story) Airstream trailer and heads west (from Minnesota) in search of the fugitive son.

The sister is an aspiring writer, hyperfocused on American Westerns, and the book is peppered with her writings as she tries out stories on Reuben but the whole book seems to have a bit of a Western flavor.  The kids see it as an adventure more than anything, though there are moments when it gets real, too.

A lot of quirky characters pepper the story, perhaps more than other books, but it made it more enjoyable to read.  And my only complaint is that it got a little long about 3/4 of the way through.  I just wanted to see if the things I thought would happen would happen!  So I guess some of that is my impatience.

This book was one that, when I went through my bookshelves, I kept.  I thought I'd read it, but couldn't remember it from the blurb, so when I added books to my reading cart, this was one that made the transfer.  I read the whole thing and it never rang any bells (I kinda expected it to) and I'm very glad I didn't just add it to the donate pile.  It's there now - not quite good enough to earn a permanent spot back on the shelf, but definitely a good read.

And then I moved on:

This book is nearly 500 pages and I blew through it in 3 days.  It is that good.  The best I've read so far this year.  My only complaint is that parts of the story are retold by different narrators, but you always get more information with the additional narrator, so it wasn't a bad thing.

Set in the 1940's and 1950's in Barcelona (author is Spanish and the book has been translated), a boy is given a book that turns out to be both very good and very rare.  Word that he has this book spreads (his father is a bookseller) and offers to purchase it for ridiculous amounts of money are made.  The boy, sensing something is not what it seems, holds onto the book and decides to investigate.  He would like to read more by this author, but something also draws him to find out more about the author also.

Early on he learns that someone is acquiring every book by this author and burning them.  We don't know why, we don't know who.  But apparently a whole warehouse was set on fire years ago to help with this effort.

As the years go by, he has hidden the book in a safe space and goes on with his life, though this is always in the background.  Fast forward about 10 years and his search is truly renewed and takes him to strange places and he meets an odd variety of people, all with some knowledge, but all with some stock in the book or knowledge of the author, so you never know who is telling the truth and who is protecting it.

By the end, many of his questions are answered, but I'm still not sure WHY the books were being destroyed.  Maybe I was supposed to read between the lines (I have a theory)?

There are a few more books in this series and I may seek them out, but I'm almost afraid - will they be as good?  And this one, by itself, tells a whole story.  I feel like the characters are all left in a solid place and at an ending.  So we'll see.

I've started another book (as if you needed to question that!) and so far it's enjoyable.  Another that was on the bookshelf that I THOUGHT I'd read, but 50-some pages in and it's also not seeming familiar.

I promise I'll sew something soon.  The baby quilt is due in just under two weeks (not the baby - just the quilt for the shower) and the wedding quilt that I made and then stalled on may be needed sooner rather than later (family stuff, so they may just do a courthouse wedding).

And here's a photo of Freddie on the day we got him, a little over 7 years ago.  I think his head is bigger now than all of him was back then!

Happy quilting and reading!

Katie

as expected...

After a whirlwind week of sewing, it should be no surprise that I did next to no sewing this week.

What I did was hand-sewing.

Thanks to another blogger, I found a sew-along with weekly prompts to guide intuitive stitching and though I'm a few weeks behind, I think I'm going to have some fun...

Gone Rustic releases a video once a week with the prompt, thoughts about how to interpret it, but also just a general ramble about projects she is working on, highlights of previous prompts and such.  There is a Facebook group you can join, but it's not public.

So the first prompt - remember, I'm a little late - was "noble."

And I thought, being a science geek, it would be fun to try to interpret this in a sciencey way.  But I was struggling with ideas (someone else had already done noble gasses, so I didn't want to copy that!) and the interwebs led me to The Royal Society, a group of scientists that dates back to the 1600's, so I thought that was cool, but what else to do with that?

And I turned up a Wikipedia page with this crest:

That's pretty cool, but I can't stitch all that, can I?  I mean, in a reasonable time and I don't want to spend weeks on each weekly prompt.  I'm already behind!

And then I saw what those words at the bottom meant:

Do you see it?

"Take nobody's word for it."

SOLD!

So I screenshotted the crest and went looking for my printer-ready treated paper...

Yep, did that in 2018.  Let's see how it works?

Well, aside from my black ink cartridge dying, it's good!

So let's just work with the color the printer gave us.  This isn't meant to be an exercise in frustration, just fun stitching.

A little actual frustration later (I tried putting batting behind the crest and doing blanket stitches to hold it down and that got all wonky before I was even halfway around), I have the crest stitched to some tea dyed tea towel (hahahahahaha) fabric and a few question marks to represent that science asks questions and is not just a book of answers.

In fact, in my searches, the website Understanding Science, in a search summary (that I cannot find on their actual website), says this:

"Science is a collection of facts.  Correction: Science is both a body of knowledge and the process for building that knowledge."

I like this very much.

And it was at this point that I realized the word was "noble" not "royal."  I stomped out of my sewing room, mad at myself.  Not wanting to continue.  Debating just throwing this out and starting over.  Or quitting altogether.

I calmed down and decided it was fine.  It may be the wrong word, but there are no rules saying that I will be kicked out of the group for this error.  So I'm leaving it.

I haven't moved onto the next word (round) or the word after that (curve) and I think the next word after that is circle, but I haven't checked for sure yet.  Too many shifts at work this weekend.

But I'll get there.  Maybe.

(I do have the rest of that tea towel partly chopped up, so I guess I'd better do something with it!)

And that's it for sewing.

I did finish one book:

I've read at least one book by this author in the past and remembered enjoying it, so I snagged this one.  It's more historical fiction than I expected, but it wasn't bad.

Set in the first third of the 1800's, it follows the life of a real young woman (Sarah Grimke, and though it's based on her life, the actual events are mostly fiction) and a slave (Handful) on the plantation where she grew up.  Generally two separate stories, though they overlap in the first years quite a bit, as Handful is given to Sarah on her 12th birthday.

It works through how Sarah is opposed to owning people, how slavery has caused her to have a sometimes pronounced stutter, and her journey to become the abolitionist history knows her to be.  It was an interesting journey and not an easy one.

Also we see Handful grow up and struggle to be a person, not a thing.  While I think her owners were kinder to her than some, I absolutely don't agree that owning a person is acceptable.  And I was rooting for her every chance she got to rebel and grow.

It was a good book, but reading it in the world today was hard.  I see the videos and it scares me.  It scares me to speak out.  But it also scares me what I might lose, too.  And lately there have been a rash of people saying if you don't speak out against this, you're saying you agree by staying silent.  (I feel a little bullied by that, but....)  So in my little corner - I do not condone masked bullies shooting people in the streets, regardless of their so-called crimes.  I do not condone taking children.  I do not agree with a good portion of what my government is doing currently.

I don't have all the facts.  I'll never have all the facts.  But I want to feel safe in my country and right now, even just typing this worries me.  Will they come for me, too?

So with that, I'm going to go find myself some lunch and head to work.

Happy quilting,

Katie

PS  No one I've linked to should be assumed agrees with anything I've said.  This is all me.

PPS  We had super cold weather here and my washing machine water lines froze.  Thankfully no burst pipes, but we had an interesting setup to try to slowly unfreeze them.  Ugh.  Winter can see itself out now!

two tops!

One would think with that title for a post I sewed a ton this week, but really, I got most of it done in two days.  I mean, I guess they were long stretches of sewing, but still...

After posting last week, I headed up to the sewing room to make some hearts for the baby quilt for my niece - something to make it taller.

I finished them, but you wouldn't know because did I take a photo?  Nope!

And then Monday, I didn't have to be to work till later in the day (shorter shifts lately due to a reduced staffing budget due to slower sales this time of year), and at first I told myself I'd just get the hearts sewn into rows.

And then I decided to just get the monsters into a row.

And then I decided to just go ahead and sew the heart rows to the monster rows.  I'd decide borders later.

And then I sewed one of the sashings for between the monsters and hearts to the wrong side of the hearts, so it became an outside border.  So I decided to add all the borders (though they might have been a little wider top and bottom had I not made the error).

The floral looks a little muddy when you see it from more of a distance, but the colors are looking fairly true here.  It's around 45" square.  It still feels like it's wider than it is tall, but the photo doesn't lie!

And then I stalled out for a good part of the week.  Read.  Napped.  Worked.  Spent too much time scrolling on my phone.

And then yesterday, I decided it was TIME to do something productive, so I made myself go into the sewing room and piece the back for this quilt.

ALL the cats wanted to help.  I had to move them a number of times and offended Freddie because I touched his paw (he was sunning himself) with the fabric as I tried to work around him.  He can be very prissy that way sometimes.

I had a fair amount of the floral, so that is in the center of the back and then I bordered it top and bottom with the black.  I was going to cut binding first, but I think I want to use the black (not enough of the floral left) and will need the parts cut off from the back after quilting, so that will have to wait.

And then, I was on a roll, so let's start putting those 36 blocks together for the quilt for my nephew!

16 inch blocks start out big and just get worse when you have multiples under the needle.  And there were a number of points to match in each block, so when I got to the LOOOOONG seams, it took a lot of pins.

But I got to the point where I knew I had just five long seams to go and I powered through.  (The hubby was patiently waiting for me to finish so we could go get dinner - I cooked every night this week and he wanted "real food" - cue the eyeroll!)

Around 5pm, I had a top!

I have no place to lay this out to get a good photo - even the clothesline (if it wasn't -200 degrees outside) isn't tall enough.  This is a large queen/small king size quilt, but since he has a queen bed and I wanted it to be useable with no fighting for a fair share, I erred on the side of bigger.

But honestly, as I was sewing and sewing and sewing all those geese, I kept wondering if I had miscalculated and actually sewed TWO quilts.  I'm glad I hadn't, but had a plan for the extra one if it happened.

I need to get a back for this, so I'll see what my local quilt shop has for wide backs so I can be lazy and not piece it.  But we'll see.  Usually those are kinda boring and I tend towards wilder backs.  Tomorrow.

So today my sewing room is empty of ongoing projects.  Or at least if I ignore a few older UFOs it is.  So we're ignoring them.

I have a quilt retreat coming up in April, so it's time now to shift gears and figure out what I'll be taking for that.  Probably at least one new project, but hopefully from the stash, so that will require some work.  I'd like to take the project(s) with pieces already cut, so that's where the real work comes in.

And then there's the books!

This is the one I referred to last week as "...good..." because it's just a little different, but in a good way.

It feels very much like an autobiography, but it is not.  I had to keep telling myself that this is not the story of the author but one from his mind.

The main character is an upper-middle-class man in his mid 40's who loses his parents in a horrible car crash.  He lives somewhere near the east coast (I can't remember) and they live in Montana.  He needs to go out to settle the estate - sell the farm and all that - and plans to drive out with his sister who will not fly.

When he arrives at his sister's house, she convinces him to take her guru with him instead - she is into all that spiritual stuff and he is very much not.  She would like to give her portion of the estate to this guru to set up a spiritual center there and so he agrees to take him.

The road trip that ensues is a bit comical, as the guru seems to have little knowledge of the country and the main character feels it his obligation to teach him.  But it seems the guru always has the last laugh - a lesson in the dangers of assuming things, I guess.

But along the way, the main character, who claims he has always felt a little on the edge of figuring out what his sister feels with her meditations and whatnot, manages to actually learn something about it and experience it as the guru challenges him back.

In that way it was a feel-good book.  You saw the main character grow a bit and learn about himself and become a more patient man.  Or at least he was trying to and able to maintain it somewhat around this strange man his sister sent him with.

And then I got to the last quarter of the book and got mad.  There are spoilers coming, so if you don't want to know, scroll down until you see the photo of the next book.

They arrive in Montana to find his sister there.  She flew.  She overcame her fear.

She is pregnant.  With the guru's baby.  They want to keep the parents home and live there and create the spiritual center on the land and raise their child there.

And it all felt like a forced road trip to make the main character get to know his future brother-in-law (I'm not sure they'll marry, but you get the gist) before the niece is born.  It was all a trick.  And that made me mad.  The book wasn't about what I thought it was about at all.

Or maybe it was.  But the revelation ruined it.  It lost like a whole star in my rating scale.

Anyways, I'm trying to focus on the better parts.  And then I read another book.

I bought this one with gift money a year ago and it finally came up in the random selection, so I was excited to read it.  Someone had recommended it somewhere online, so it was a better bet than the random selection at used book sales, right?

The blurb on the back is fairly cryptic.  Something happens and lives are changed forever.  That could describe a lot of books, right?  I found a blurb inside, as well, prefacing the readers guide discussion questions (that I detest - stop wasting paper) that was more descriptive and would have been a better sell for the back of the book.

But anyways, this one also kinda made me mad.

Set in the 60's in the Netherlands, after losing both of their parents in years past, three siblings are trying to get along and stay in touch and one brings his new girlfriend to lunch.  She seems like a flake and when said brother needs to travel for work, he asks if girlfriend can stay with sister in their childhood home, where she currently lives.  Reluctantly she agrees.

They don't get along.  Sister is uptight and afraid, girlfriend is more fly-by-the-seat-of-her-pants and of course that makes for some tense moments.  In another book, they'd be funny, but told from the perspective of sister, they are not.  You feel her struggle and frustration.

And then comes the [more spoilers ahead] romance.  Between sister and girlfriend.  I'm not opposed to the fact of the romance, I'm opposed to a book that was shortlisted for a huge prize like The Booker Award to spend so many pages on sex scenes.  (I read up on the award to make sure I wasn't missing something and it's a literary award to be sure, so I'm still baffled.)

And then the inevitable truth that we, as readers, suspected, about the true relationship of girlfriend to the home.  That may spoil it, too, but I had a feeling about it from early on in the book, so you probably will too...

The story (minus the romance) was interesting - something I'd not thought about regarding houses during world war two.  And I suppose I learned something there.

But again with the books nominated for awards, this further cemented my theory that they are not for me.  Reading sex scenes, regardless of their participants, is not my jam.  And though I'm sure that's not what earned the nomination, it's what ruined the book for me.

Onward.  Started a new one last night.  Familiar author and so far (about 50 pages in) good.

Time to go throw the hubby's new pants in the dryer (he finally talked himself into buying more - I think the outing with other managers last week where he realized he had exactly ONE pair of pants that didn't have holes worn/burned into them or bleach stains covering them was the breaking point).  Of course, they all need washed before he wears them, so I guess I'll be thankful that I don't have to do it by hand.

Happy quilting and reading!
Katie

blocks!

I sewed a lot this week!

I went from individual geese to double geese - the big stack you see here.

Pressing took forever on each step, but I got it done.

(Sewing also seemed to take forever...)

And then the double geese were sewn into half-blocks.

And then...

Whole blocks!

36 of them!

They're quite large, but if you want a queen-sized quilt, you need a lot of blocks or large blocks (or, what it seems here, both).

I may put this one on hold for a bit and get the baby quilt done first.  The shower is about a month away, so I need to make sure it's done in time and right now I just have three individual monsters.

We'll see where the day takes me.

I had a couple of days off this week (which lead to the sewing marathons), but one of them started out with a little headache that, by the end of the day, was a big headache.

Toby to the rescue!  He's so funny that he starts out a little wary of his surroundings (who might pounce him - when no one is likely to pounce him) and eventually relaxes and turns himself half upside down like this and purrs himself silly.

The headache took a few more days to finally be gone, which is odd for me, but I'm glad it's gone.  They're probably only second to sore throats for pains I detest.

I finished one two books - I've been trying to be more mindful and reading instead of scrolling, but some days it goes better than others...

The second book (I published this and then went WAIT):

To be honest, when this one was chosen by the random number jar, I was skeptical.  Somehow it just seemed like it wasn't going to be good.  I can't really explain why - just looking at it?  Maybe it was the blurb?

And then I saw that it was from a publisher that generally has a religious spin somewhere in the book.  Not an overbearing theme (from past books I've read), but enough.  (I need to be better about checking publishers, I guess?)

So that didn't help.

But I'll give it a go.  I'm nothing if not stubborn.

And I got about 200 pages in (it's 350 pages) before it hit.  I thought I'd escaped it, but nope.  It went on for a bit and I was getting to a point where I might give it up (because if I wanted a religious preachy book, I'd read that instead of a novel), and it quit.  Yay!

So the story...

Actually, two stories.

First, there are the pirates in the 1600's, in the Caribbean, doing their pirate things.  Oh, wait, they're PRIVATEERS.  Sure, sure.

The captain takes a ship full of people headed to slavery and somehow one young man (about 15) ends up staying on with him to also be a pirate...ahem...privateer.

Second, there are the treasure hunters in modern day Key West, looking for a ship that said captain sailed.  Of course they find a ship (not a spoiler because seriously what else would the book be about then?).

Both stories have younger men dealing with father relationship issues and that's where the religious part comes in.  Both fathers have careers that keep them church-adjacent.  I could have done without all that part, but the pirate stories were interesting and the treasure hunting part was informative (lots of info about diving and careful grid surveys and whatnot).

So in all, it was a decent book.

The first book (yes, out of order, but as noted above, I realized after hitting publish that I had another book to share, so we're gonna roll with it):

This one was much better, though it also flips between two stories.  Sort of.

Story one is present day - a recent college grad is chasing an obituary for an old eccentric man who passed away in his home.  The elderly man was a professor at the college he attended, so he starts there.  And it just gets weirder and weirder.  Unfriendly "acquaintances," mob-style threats and pleas from others to just let it go.  Of course he doesn't.  His curiosity goes way beyond writing the obit, but that's what makes the story.

Story two is actually a bunch of stories...  There are a number of objects, I think that were owned by the recently deceased professor, that have some magical life-extending properties - alchemy they call it.  And these are the stories of the objects, or maybe just descriptions of them, where they came from and where they were last known to reside.

Through the book you learn more of the professor, slowly, and finally at the end it all sort of comes together.  Some is still left for the reader to ponder, but there is a sense of closure.

I enjoyed it.

And I started another last night and it's...good...

Time to go figure out what the day holds!  No work today at least!

Happy quilting and reading!
Katie