halfway!

Still no quilting, but the three bins of fabric I received for kitty sewing in May are halfway gone!  Though I don't have a photo of the first pile of covers that came from the stash, I do have the second pile:

This gives you a pretty good idea of how many are there, but not so much the fabrics, so let's try another angle?

There's really no good way to show all of the fabrics, but you get the idea.  There are a lot of covers here, but not quite enough to fill a box for my volunteer coordinator, so I'll keep sewing a bit longer before I contact her and turn them over.

There are so many different fabrics, though.  They span decades and some are cute and fun and pretty and others are not something I think I'd have bought even in their heyday, but someone obviously did.  And sometimes you just need that perfect color and you suffer through the less than ideal print.  I'm sure there are uggos in my stash, too, so I try to be kind to the woman who left these behind.

While I'm sewing, Lily, the goblin, gets into things.

She was squirreling around under my ironing board and I wasn't sure what she was doing, but glad she wasn't chewing on the cord for the iron (I've caught her and Salem and even Freddie doing that lately), so I thought all was well.  Then I noticed this bottle of distilled water was leaking...

She CHEWED THROUGH THE HANDLE!  (It's half empty here because I poured as much as I could into another jug before I realized what she had done.)  Yesterday, a few days after the incident, I also noticed there is a puncture in the cap.

Goblin for sure, but she caught me a mouse this morning, so I forgive her.

I made it to the new bookstore during their grand opening on Saturday and picked up a book I've been wanting, but patiently waiting for, hoping to find it at a used sale sooner or later.  I splurged for the hardcover because why not support a local business that does something I'm happy to have in my area!

I've enjoyed many books by Barbara Kingsolver, but so far my favorite is "The Poisonwood Bible."  I don't think I've read a book by her that I didn't like, so this has much promise.

And since one of my readers asked about the books I've purchased, I thought I'd share a little here about my recent read from the stash - I'll try to do a little blurb about each book, but am no literary critic, so please forgive anything strange.

My latest finish is "13 rue Thérèse" by Elena Mauli Shapiro.

It tells a story of a researcher who finds a mysterious box of objects on his desk when he arrives to a short-term posting in Paris.  The objects trigger stories and photos of many of them are included in the book, which is a nice touch, but the story itself jumped around a lot and I had a hard time following what time period I was in and who was narrating.  That might have been me, but much of the skipping around is resolved in the end and perhaps a second read would go better.  (But I'm not up for that.)  One other strange thing is the footnotes that are extensive and important to the story - usually they're just references to other documents or little tidbits and you can mostly ignore them, but these you had to read because they told a part of the story.

In all, it was interesting, and I gave it 3.25 stars (on the Storygraph app) because of the difficulty I had with the time periods jumping around so much and a feeling that at the end, though the jumping around part what somewhat resolved, it just ended.  A lot was left to imagine and while that is okay, I wanted a little more.

My newest purchase will be added to the cart-o-books and selected randomly, so maybe you'll get a review soon, maybe not.

Happy...um...quilting?

Katie

PS I'm still waiting for the next Bramble Blooms prompt, but Audrey, the gal hosting, is having quite the summer.  It's all good.  She never promised it would be fast paced or even scheduled regularly.  It gives us all plenty of time to get each step done without feeling we're pushing through just to be ready for the next prompt.  I suppose I could work on the cornerstone applique blocks for the first quilt top, but...