sewing quilty stuff!

I sewed some quilty stuff this week!!!!

It all started on Father's Day when my mother-in-law asked if I'd make a quilt for her long-time friend for Christmas this year.  Of course I said yes!  She wants butterflies on it.  Bright colors.

Let the search begin.  I made a separate board on Pinterest for ideas so I could keep them all together and then shared them with my hubby.  He narrowed it down to two.  One was a bunch of single blocks, in bright colors, arranged in a grid/row layout.  Rather basic and it felt juvenile.  But this one...this one was a favorite of all:

The photo quality isn't great (the larger it gets, the worse it gets), but there's a reason: it's a screenshot from nowhere.  The pattern is from Pam Bono, published in probably about 2012, to her newsletter subscribers only.  And I cannot find it ANYwhere.  Believe me, I've looked.  Ebay, Etsy, the google and beyond.

I'd love to actually pay for it, but since I can't seem to even locate a person who has made it and shared a photo in the last 10 years, I guess I'm gonna have to draft this for myself.

THAT was a whole other disaster.  It took a few tries - Ms. Bono is the queen of stitch-and-flip (lost corners), so though her patterns look simple, you have to assemble them log cabin style and lose corners as you go.  But I FINALLY figured it all out Saturday.

Yesterday I got up early, hurried through my regular chores and worked on a test block (well, half block) before I had to go to work.  I had a few errors in my pattern, so I was glad I used fabrics I'm not really in love with to test.

Lily helped in the most unhelpful way possible during all this:

Everything I tried to do, she tried to sit on.  Every space I emptied to use, she moved into.  My sewing room has limited space to start with.  Add in a determined 8-pound terror and you really can't do much without getting bit or at least growled at.  The only thing she respects is the Spicy Dragon (the iron that steams).

I had already been shopping for fabric - the hubby is having issues with his sciatic nerve and wanted to do some walking.  We went to my local quilt shop and he walked around downtown (old-style downtown with shops below and apartments above) and I wasn't quite satisfied, so we headed about 30 minutes south to another shop where he again walked around town while I shopped.

I may add a little more from my stash (or may need to shop a little more), but I think I've got the color scheme down!  I'm going to do two butterflies in each color and make the version of the quilt seen in the top left corner of the photo above.

The butterfly fabric, found in the sale section at my local quilt shop, will be the back.  It didn't guide my fabric colors, but still looks great.  (But if I could have, I would have chosen a more purpley purple, not this reddish one, but it seems true purples are nearly impossible to find.)

I haven't cut into these yet - lots of work shifts this week - but am hoping to dig in over the weekend, where I have three days off in a row!  (I requested the 4th off for family gathering and the infamous book sale, but got the 3rd and 5th off too.  Not sure what I did, but I'll take it!!!)

Of course, I have a fair amount of time to get this done, but new projects are always exciting!

There were also two false alarms for baby quilts since I last posted.  My nephew (the one who has the quilt that I haven't quilted yet...) and his wife were pregnant, but she lost the baby.  She wasn't far along, but they'd been to the doc and heard the heartbeat, so that's sad.  I know they want four kids (they have three), so they'll try again when they're ready.

The second was apparently a false rumor.  A cousin's son eloped and there was rumor that his new wife was pregnant.  I talked to the cousin on Saturday and she told me that was not true.  The pregnancy.  The marriage did happen.

And though it's sad to lose an opportunity to make a quilt, it may be for the better right now since I'm not doing too well in the arena of actually making and finishing quilts.  (Those two I quilted?  Still not bound.)

In other sewing news, I've made a few more carrier covers.  Those, too, have suffered some due to lots of shifts at work.  And the hubby not only being off work the past two weeks, but the second of those two weeks him being a gimpy old man.

Freddie wants you to see how good he is at putting extra love into the covers I've made and folded neatly:

Yep, he's a chonk.  A goofy, loving chonk.

And then there's the reading.  It's gonna look like less, but that will make sense as I get there.

Set at the end of WWII, a father injures his hand and can't work for a while.  His scheming stage-mother wife arranges for their daughters to perform a vaudeville tumbling act to earn money.  The daughters are all quite different and the story is told, alternately, through the eyes of two of them.  It was good, but a lot of it seemed sugar-coated and predictable.

And this photo, though it's just one, represents seven books.  The Chronicles of Narnia are well known and I've read the first (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) as a kid (though I remember little).  Somewhere along the line, I acquired this box set, published in 1974 or so, and had never read it.  When sorting my shelves last year, I added it to my cart, with a single number tab, deciding that when the number was pulled, I could either read one and put the number back for another draw later, or keep reading.  I enjoyed rereading the first, so I kept going.  I read them all.  In chronological order.  Some people say you need to read them in a different order.  I don't think it made any difference except reading the first one first.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was the best and we all know this is about four children finding their way to the world of Narnia through a wardrobe.  They help set the world to rights after an evil queen has turned it to winter.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair were my next favorites, as they also take the children (well, some of them) on epic journeys to meet people and save the world and whatnot.

Prince Caspian and The Horse and his Boy were next as far as my liking them.  Prince Caspian is a long adventure into battle and it gets tedious.  The Horse and his Boy is another adventure of two children, but just wasn't as engaging as other stories.  Maybe I was getting worn out by book 5?

The Magician's Nephew is the story of the creation of Narnia and was interesting, but got long and felt like an alternate Bible story.  (I know, I know.)  And my least favorite was The Last Battle, which is essentially a war story throughout.  It tidies up the world of Narnia at the end, though, and makes it hard for further books to be written.  (I won't spoil it any further than that.)

In all, they were good books and I enjoyed them.  Most of them I read in 24 hours or less.  They're short and they don't use fancy language, but I also didn't feel like things were dumbed down for the sake of kids.  I liked that.

But...there are seven books, so even at one a day, it was a week of reading!

Science nerdy as this one could have been, it was actually interesting.  A few parts got a little tedious, but in general the stories of the two men who invented the Haber-Bosch process of extracting nitrogen from the air to convert into fertilizer or explosives (Haber and Bosch) moved along nicely.  It felt less like non-fiction that I expected.

I'm not entirely sure why I picked this one up, but maybe to change up my usual genre?  Dinah of the Bible is (according to the blurb) mentioned little in that book, but this author has taken what she could find and extrapolated that into a whole life story of this woman, from birth to death.  Set before Christianity, she is the only daughter of her father (who has four wives, none who bear living daughters except her) and a pet of her four "mothers."  She learns to be a midwife from her elders as well as a local woman and that serves her well in the life she leads.  It was interesting and didn't feel like a religious story at all, despite its subject.  Except when they started with the family lineages like the Bible does, then my eyes glazed over and I may have missed something.  (Good thing for the family tree at the beginning!)

I'm working on the next book, about halfway through.  That will make book #41 for this year!  And the book sale is Saturday.  I can't wait!  My book cart is in a sort of shambles for all the books I've removed and I'm forcing myself to let it be messy because the joy of tidying it up and adding more on the 4th is worth it!

Of course, there will also be family stuff on the 4th.  We all gather at my parents every year (assuming they're not off camping somewhere) to celebrate both the nation's birthday and my dad's - his is on the 6th.  It's as good an excuse as any to get together - probably better, actually.

And with that, it's lunchtime, the banana bread is out of the oven and I need to get going.  Working tonight, so I need to make the best use of my time this morning!

Happy quilting and reading,
Katie