sewing and sewing and sewing (and reading)

Three days in a row off and I took advantage!

First, I pressed all the "hard" geese.  Maybe it's difficult to see, but that stack is 5 inches tall!  Lots and lots of geese!

Then I moved on to cutting pieces for the "easy" geese.

I stalled out here a bit because the hubby was around (he worked third shift last week) and he wanted to spend one of my days off Christmas shopping.  It needed to be done, but it got a lot of eyerolls, too!

I picked up again the next day and got all the first seams on the 4-at-a-time geese in before it was time to do other things.

You can see it was getting late - the fabrics read much darker without daylight helping my photos!

In addition to this quilty sewing, I patched a hole on my favorite sheets:

There is a small L-shaped tear in this bottom, fitted sheet, and if I make the bed correctly, it is down by the foot of the bed on the side the cats use.  If I'm not careful, it ends up about where my shoulder is on the side of the bed the cats let me use.  Hopefully this will help extend the life of the sheets - they're so expensive!

And I made the pillowcases!

I actually abandoned the quilt for my nephew to get these done - they need to be done for Christmas and while I'd like the quilt to also be done, I'm not holding my breath (maybe if I wasn't working, but even then it's getting close!) and these are definitely do-able in time.  Obviously.

I also ran out and got more fabric, realizing that the great nephews would probably also like to join in the tradition, so the two on the bottom are the same fabric, just different cuffs.  I hope this cuts down on any sibling rivalries!

Lily would like you to see her Spiderman abilities to get into bags hanging from hooks on doors...

It's quite goofy looking if you click on it to make it bigger, but since I was sitting across the room when she did it, I had to zoom.  She also Spidermanned her way back out.  She's a goof.

I finished two books this week, but first a nerdy graph.  The Storygraph, the app I prefer when tracking my reading, has nerdy graphs I've shared before.  Recently, the graph that plots publication year versus reading year was updated.  Many people were excited, so I thought I'd go see what mine looks like...

Well...if your oldest book was published in 1592, apparently things remain squished.  (It's cool because you can hover over/click on a dot and see what book it is.  The next oldest is Huck Finn.)

Oh well.  It's still a cool graph to have.

(Also, I didn't start tracking books till 2013 because before that I was either better able to remember what I'd already read, or wasn't reading much.  Or both.  This app didn't come out that long ago, but I imported old data - yay!)

Okay, onto the actual books:

This one was interesting.

Originally published in Japan (in Japanese), this is a translation, but I don't believe that translations take much away from the books, so that's not a complaint.

It was just different.  I've never read Japanese literature before, so maybe that's part of it.  But it was good, also.

The Great Passage is the name of a dictionary that the characters are working on.  It is going to be the most epic dictionary ever.  Every publishing house creates a dictionary - it's their one staple that is used as a benchmark, I guess - and this group really wants to knock it out of the park.

A younger-ish man is the main character and is recruited at the beginning by two older guys who start the project.  He works on it for about 15 years before they are able to publish it, but it gets put aside for other projects many times over all these years, but also making sure every relevant, important, used word is included is hard.  You need to make sure old words are decommissioned, but not at the expense of other words referring to them in their definitions.  You need to make sure new words are added as they pop up.  And definitions cannot be circular.  And on and on...

It really made me appreciate my dictionary!

But the main character has a romance (which is oddly clinical-feeling - this may be Japanese literature?) and a few other characters come and go as more focal parts of the story and they also have some side stories that feel more like random details to flesh out a page rather than a character.

Or maybe the strangeness was just because of the real focus of the book being the dictionary itself?

It makes me want to seek out more Japanese literature and see how things are done.

And on to book two:

Set in a not-so-great-but-not-awful part of Detroit in the near past, a number of teenage boys (and girls, I guess, but the focus is on three guys who are friends, one in particular tells the story) who lose their fathers when they wander off in a fairly short period of time.

One says he's going to the moon, and the phrase sticks.

From the perspective of the narrator, the fathers don't seem to have an awful life that they're leaving behind or anything, just the normal troubles of being adults with kids and jobs, but too many of them leave at once (and don't keep in touch or come back) for it to be entirely a coincidence.

So the young men (high school) step into the roles of the fathers, going as far as drinking at the local bar evenings after school.  They get jobs, defend their mothers and younger siblings, and do minor repairs around the house.  But they never seem to see that's what they're doing.  The narrator kinda hints at it, but no one seems to outwardly comment on it.

And the young men grow up.  Some go to college, some get dead-end jobs, some get married, but they all step into actual adult-hood.   But in the backs of their minds, they worry that whatever pulled their fathers away will pull them away as well.

It was a quick read and pretty good.  I wish we'd learned where the fathers went, but (spoiler alert!) they never did come home.  (I thought maybe they would come back based on the title - I figured once the kids had moved on they had no use for the disappeared men, but nope.)

I've moved on to another book, but this one seems like it might be slow going.  Maybe it will pick up (I'm only about 25 pages in), but only time will tell!

Happy quilting and reading!
Katie