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

feeling better, sewing little

I'm back to normal again (health-wise), but the hubby is still coughing a lot from the ick.  Based on his symptoms, he got something different than I did, but since I didn't get that also, maybe our bodies just reacted differently to the same germs?

Oh well.  Moving on.

I did very little sewing this past week.  I worked a lot of shifts, did a lot of family stuff (this is birthday season in the hubby's family - I think 6 birthdays this month and at least two next month!), and tried to get some sleep in there between things!

The quilt for my nephew made a little progress...

I got the second "sky" pieces sewn on and the chain of pieces cut apart, but have yet to get to pressing them.  One of these days...I still have a few more days in a row to work and chores take up too much of the rest of my days!

But I'm making progress and hoping the second set of geese - the ones that I can do the 4-at-a-time method - will go faster.  (Probably, though, I'm delusional.)

We celebrated Thanksgiving twice on Thursday.  First with my family (lunch) and then again with the hubby's family (dinner).  Both have things that are unique, both have things they do better, and we've learned to pace ourselves and not be so stuffed we can't move the next day.  And since I didn't have to be to work till later on Friday (a first - usually I'm the 5am shift for Black Friday), we didn't feel like we had to eat and run this year.

I did find time to read.  Of course.  That takes less prep than quilting and the kitties love to join me and they're much less disruptive to reading then sewing!

I mentioned last week that this went into the bag just on the author's name.  I know his books are geared at a younger audience, but his writing is wonderful and I enjoy it.

This book did not disappoint.

Though the underlying story is sad, I enjoyed the characters and their interactions.  It's set at a high school boarding school, but I felt that a lot of the shenanigans were similar to college dorm life, so not unfamiliar to me.

At times, the story did seem to drag a little, but since I was in the dark about the event that was defining the before and after (how the book is divided), I think I was just impatient to find out what it was and the rest of the story got in the way.  So that's a me problem.

I don't want to say too much more because I feel like I'll start giving away too many hints and then the story will be spoiled.  But it's good.  And I'd recommend it.

(Oh, look, it has a big stupid permanent award sticker on it and I liked it.  I guess sometimes the people giving the awards DO like the same books as me!)

I've started the next, of course.  It's kinda different, but I'll share about that next week.  Assuming I finish it before then.  (I still have three more days of work before I get any time off and I'm counting the hours!)

Not a very productive week, but a lot of excitement.  Hoping this week is a little less crazy, but overall it's crazy season - holidays, weather, family, etc. - so we'll see!

Happy quilting!

Katie

PS The hubby also got a new car.  The old one was 10 years old and starting to cost more to repair than was reasonable, so instead of sinking our money into a failing car, we traded it in and he got a new one.  It's nice.  Not what I would have picked, but I'm not the one driving it!

sewing and sickness

In my last post, I mentioned that I was excited to hopefully have five days in a row off work.  Of course, I had to toil away for five days in a row ON at work first, but I made it!

But.  Day #4 (of work) my throat was scratchy/dry.  Not sore, but also kinda weird.  But it's furnace-all-the-time season, so maybe it's just dry air because I haven't set up my humidifier yet?  Day #5 was the same.  As the day wore on, I was forced to have something to keep my throat soothed some (I ate what feels like a whole bag of peppermints!) to keep from having coughing fits, but still felt fairly okay.  Maybe a little tired, but here's to hoping that tomorrow - day one of the five in a row off - would find me healthy.

Oh how poorly that hope manifested.

I spent all of Thursday - day one of five off - in bed.  Napping, snuggling kitties, watching some Netflix and generally alternating between anger and pity at myself for getting sick.  But I knew staying in bed was my best choice for getting better faster.

The kitties loved it - everyone but Toby got a chance to join me.  Toby did not because he is the reason Gabby lives in my bedroom in the first place.  (Don't worry, he got snuggles, just not on Thursday.)

(I have this cat bed ON my bed and Finn loves to snuggle in it in the daytime.)

Friday dawned (I didn't sew any of the days between my last post and Friday because I was at work, or, as above, in bed) and I wondered how I would feel.  Cats needed to be fed, litterboxes scooped, so I got up, planning to do the minimum, but hoping for better.  You know, sometimes when you get up and moving, you do feel better.

Guess what?  I did feel better!  And by the time I'd done chores and showered, I felt about 75% myself again!  Hooray!

Off to the sewing room!

I decided to put the baby quilt on hold, as I won't need it until February, and work on the quilt for my nephew that my hubby would *like* to have done for Christmas.  (His contribution is to ignore me while I sew, so...)

I used this pattern as a jumping off point, but in an effort to not have to make 300000 blocks, I made the blocks bigger.  (I still have to make about 200000 of them, but don't remind me, okay?)  Which lead to some math.  Math mistakes.  I bought about a yard less than I needed of both the greys.

Okay, but first, let's cut just a few pieces and make sure the NEW math is correct.  Before I cut it all.  Before I go buy more.

Woo hoo!  It works!

I then cut the remainder of the pieces and figured out how much more I would need.

That trip happened yesterday, Saturday.  I wore my mask to my local quilt shop because, though I'm feeling better, the hubby has the plague now, and maybe I'm not contagious, but maybe he has something else and I'm brewing that now too?  Also, just, you know, being courteous so no one has to miss Thanksgiving because of me.

I got my fabrics (whew - that lighter grey had gone into the clearance room in the week between my purchases, so thankfully it was still around!) and headed home to wash them and sew.

Here's the start.  It took HOURS.  Literally.  I washed and dried the fabrics (in with some other stuff so as to not waste waster) and was STILL sewing after they were done!  (Wash and dry take about an hour each around here.)

But, I got half the sky pieces on the geese bodies yesterday.  (Thankfully I only ran out of the darker grey - I need the lighter grey for the other parts, so I robbed Peter to pay Paul and then had to go shopping to pay them back!)

And I got them pressed.

And I got the new fabrics pressed.

And I got the remaining dark geese cut and ready to sew today!

These are the "hard" geese.  They can't be done using the 4-at-a-time method.  The other geese can.  Maybe that will go faster, maybe not.

Salem wants you to see how seriously she took her role as supervisor yesterday.  I can't believe we brought her home two years ago already.  She's such a sweetheart and still has the biggest purr and is so kind and patient.  And soft.

I finished just one book this week.  Between work and feeling poorly, it wasn't a great reading week.  I keep looking at my stash of books and am inspired, but it comes to actually reading them, I get too easily distracted.  Maybe acknowledging that will help me be better about it?

Anyways...

I barely started reading the blurb on the back and this went into my bag.

It's the story of Mr. March - the father of the girls in the book Little Women.  His life as a young man and rise into wealth, his fall into not-quite-poverty, how he came to be a chaplain in the Civil War, how he met his wife, all in as much of a jumbled order as my list above.

I listened to Little Women on the CraftLit podcast (link here is to website, as it's easier to search and link from there) a few years ago while sewing for the kitties and enjoyed it way more than I anticipated.  Which is why this book, written many years later by (obviously) a different author, was so quick to enter my bag of goodies.

I was excited to read this, but it was kinda hard to read.  He sees some terrible things in his time with the army - not only slavery bad stuff, but army and humans in general being awful.  He is confronted with the reality of the continuation as well as the ending of slavery and how naive he was about it all when he joined the army.  In the end, he comes home a changed man and we see clearly why.

It seems like reading this just shortly after reading James was good.  They both had a more detailed story of history than the sanitized version I'd been taught in school about the Civil War and slavery all things surrounding it.

I'm glad I read it.  Difficult or not, I feel like I understand things a little better now.

And it was a good book.  Yes, the topics were difficult, but the book itself was good and I wanted to keep reading.

If you want to read it, I think you'd probably be in the best position if you read Little Women first, though.  There are many references to the girls and other characters and situations in the book that are helpful to have a familiarity with it.  (And the podcast/audiobook I've linked above is a great one if you want to listen - at the start of each episode, the host does chat about crafty and personal stuff, but she also can delve into vocabulary or period-relevant topics that helps with understanding the book.)

I'll start the next book tonight - it's another that hit the bag with just the authors name on it, so hoping for a good read.  I mean, it has another of those permanent award stickers on the cover, so it's supposed to be good, right?!

Happy quilting and reading!

Katie

PS  And this morning, as I was elbow deep in the process of swampifying my kitchen in order to clean the fridge (it needed it!), the boss called, asking if I could come in to work.  Well...sorry, but I've got this fridge half torn apart and my kitchen now also needs cleaning and I haven't showered yet because who showers before cleaning out a fridge...  So, nope.  Not this time.

quilting!

Quilt piecing, that is!

I had a few days off last week and having finally finished the sewing for the cat rescue (this round at least), I was able to dig into the monsters!

The first one was rough.  The pattern is labelled as intermediate skill level, and the sewing itself wasn't difficult.  The pattern writing, however, is hot-flash-inducing difficult.  Lots of pieces labelled in non-sequential letters (and double letters and capital letters and small letters and all variations of that), plus not every step laid out in diagrams made for some errors.  Survivable, but this pattern could probably have benefitted from double the pages, instructions and diagrams.

But...

Monster #1 finally emerged!

With multiple fabrics cluttering up my ironing board, I decided to get out a project bin after all.  (I should have and eventually planned to, but for whatever reason, I was in a rush and didn't do it before I started.)

I set it down on the ottoman part of the chair in my sewing room and before I could turn around to collect the fabric, Lily jumped in.  She has a bit of RBF, but she also might not have been happy that I was telling her that this was NOT FOR HER.  (She thinks all the things are for her.  She is wrong.)

Anyways, I got the fabric in the bin and the following day whipped out monster #2!

I've had to do a bit of adjusting to get the colors right, so the pink is close to correct, but the floral is a little more orange than it really is.  (Same trouble with the blue above.  How I can hold my phone above the blocks and see two different colors between the phone and my actual eyeball is baffling, but true.)

As I was sewing #2, I had #1 on the floor for comparison or inspiration or whatever.  Apparently Freddie thought it was for him to un-alive it?

Good boy Freddie!  (He's such a goofball.  Still acts like a kitten every so often, even though he's about 7.)

A few days later, I managed to get back to the sewing room (work and such happened) and then there were three!

The pink is probably most accurate here.  Eventually I hope to have a photo of the fabrics with their REAL colors.  (Cell phone manufacturers - WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM?)

And this is where we are now.  I plan to add sashings and probably something to make the quilt taller than it is wide, or at least square, but that's a problem for another day.

In addition to this quilt, I made a run to my local quilt shop and got fabrics for my nephew's quilt:

(Colors are almost okay here, so apparently I have to take photos on my washing machine?)

I'll get to this next, but I'm excited because the monsters are nearly done and, if all goes right, I'll have five days off in a row here soon - including the weekend!  (And two of them, the hubby will be working second shift, so I can sew late into the night and not have to worry about making him dinner!)

And, while I was there, I selected some fabrics for the annual Christmas pillowcase tradition for my three nieces and the husband of the eldest niece:

All of this new fabric has been washed, but it's sitting in a semi-tidily folded pile, awaiting my iron.

I also finished a single book:

The random number selection system gave me this after having read another by this author just a few weeks ago, but that's okay.  I like this guy - that's why I have a number of his books in my stash!

Set in Butte, Montana, during copper mining days, the story of Morrie Morrigan (introduced to us in previous books - ones I've read) continues.  He's an interesting, intelligent man who has been a teacher in previous books, but in this one turns up looking for an accounting position, thinking the mining company might need him.  Turns out, the mining company is enemy #1 of just about everyone in town (they work for them, but the workers aren't treated well, so...) and he ends up working for the local library, under an equally interesting character, and secretly helping the miners.

Though I enjoyed the book, either it wasn't as good as previous parts of this man's story, or I was expecting more.  Maybe the editor got to it and cut too much out?  Maybe he was trying to cover too many characters and it was just too much?

Whatever the case, it wasn't enough to put me off this author.

But of course I've moved on to the next book.  It's a short one, but there's a lot to be done around here, so we'll see how long it takes.

Off to do some stuff with the hubby before I have to be at work later today.

Happy quilting!

Katie