not much sewing again

I promise there has been SOME sewing going on around here, but it's stuff I can't share.  Holidays and all that.

But also, there just hasn't been that much these past two weeks.  Work plus about 400 birthdays this month take up a lot of time.  (Okay, okay, not 400.  Truthfully six birthdays - five of them on the hubby's side - still a lot.  And we're not done.)

What I have gotten done that I can show are the pillowcases for the nieces on my side of the family.  Plus the one nephew-in-law.

All folded up, they don't look like much, but you can see the dinosaurs wearing Santa hats and Santa floating in a pool...

Anyways, they're made.  I always dread them, but once I get going, they whip up fast.  Particularly since I've been doing this for years and years and only have to consult the pattern to make sure I'm doing it right.

So that's it for what I can show.

I also finished only one book, and that was last week also!

This one had a lot of pages and it took a while.  You can see how it says "A novel of the Vanderbilts" on the front, but this book is 95% about Alva Vanderbilt - a woman who married into the family in the late 1800's.  Which I guess the title might give you a hint.

I know little of the family, other than they were wealthy around the turn of the century.  So I thought this book, though fiction, is based on the lives of real people, would be interesting to learn more about them.

Well.

It started on her life around 16 years old, in a family that had lost their wealth due to the Civil War and her desperate need to find a wealthy husband to rescue her family and herself.  A Vanderbilt seemed an excellent choice.  And while I understand that at the time love matches weren't as common and I understand that wealthy people like their children to marry other wealthy people that they approve of, it seemed like it could have gone wrong.

Of course it did.  If you read up on her life anywhere, you know it ended.  But she hung in there a long while.  Which, again, for this time period, is not surprising.  It's more surprising that she left him.

Anyways, it goes through their marriage and having children and raising children and she is not very interesting.  She sees poor people and walks by.  She realizes that women are treated poorly and ignores it.

Until her second husband dies.  A few pages later the book ends.

So I went looking.  (yay internet!)  Apparently the little bit at the end of the book where she is attending a rally about women's rights was the start of her activism.

I'm glad she did what she did.  A famous-for-being-rich person used their fame to help a cause.  Great.  I would have liked to know more about what she did IN THE BOOK.  I guess the author assumed we already knew that part, so she'd focus on the getting there?

I kept expecting things to get interesting.  It never really did.

Oh well.  They can't all be amazing, right?

I've started reading another book, but it is a SLOG.  I'd read another book by this author and it was also a slog.  I have no idea what prompted me to pick up a second one by him.  But I'm halfway through and invested enough that I want to see what happens.

So no new book for this week.  Hopefully I'll get through it for next week, but we'll see.  Holiday stuff, in addition to birthdays, is getting close enough that my last-minute finishing is needing to kick into a higher gear.  Maybe I'll have some sewing stuff to share?

And since you've made it this far, here's an old photo of Lily helping me do laundry.

Happy quilting!

Katie