Weekly update: pie for Pi Day, square dancing, elephants, and reading

 March 14 (3.14) is the day for Pi, Pie, and Puns. I made cherry pie for the occasion.   

# # # # # # # # # 

In the studio:  I have finished 20 Nine Patch Square Dance blocks.  I found the perfect fabric for the sashing in my stash -- a Hoffman floral.  The colors are right (not too yellow, not too green, a little pink, a little orange).  The flowers are realistic, not stylized, which go with the realistic flowers in the centers of the blocks.   I need 1 yard.   I have 15 inches. Okay, what can I use instead?  I searched high and low -- in the yellows, the greens, the multis, the moderns, the vintage.  I searched all the other colors and genres just in case.  Nothing.   I don't want to buy fabric during Lent but I drove to Joann's to see if I could find something comparable to that Hoffman floral.  I hadn't been to Joann's for months. Lots of interesting new prints!  But I stuck to my resolve (yay, me).  I returned empty-handed.  

I will put the blocks away.  

I will go fabric shopping after Easter.  

Here is a closeup of the sashing fabric, just in case you might have some . . .

This week I'll work on my One Monthly Goal. I'm making four elephant placemats, a gift for friends who collect elephants.  

I think I'll go with brightly-colored elephants rather than the brown one. And I think I prefer right-pointing rather than left-pointing.  

# # # # # # # # #

I have mixed reactions to short stories. Sometimes they end just when I'm warming up to the characters and the plot. I want to know more.  But in other cases they end perfectly, like a light bulb being switched off:  click!  The stories in Kevin Barry's That Old Country Music are in the second category. They are all set in contemporary western Ireland -- not the sentimental Ould Sod of expatriates but hard-edged, gritty, with love, sex, drugs, hard living--and thin rays of sunshine. 

Miss Benson's Beetle was such a delight!  It's another unlikely-friendship-adventure story.   In 1950 Margery Benson decided to quit her dead-end teaching job (she wasn't very good at it) to fulfill her lifelong dream of discovering the Golden Beetle of New Caledonia.  Three people responded to her advertisement for an assistant.  She hired the least-bad of the lot, Miss Enid Pretty.   Both the stolid, determined Margery and the bleached-blonde, ditsy Enid had literal baggage -- a Gladstone bag with insect-collecting equipment for Margery and a mysterious red valise that Enid would not let out of her sight -- and a lot more metaphorical baggage -- Margery's father's suicide in 1916 and Enid's past life including her now-dead husband.  During their long journey from London to Brisbane by ship; from Brisbane to Noumea (capital of New Caledonia) by airplane; from Nouema to the northern tip of the island, the two women adjusted to one another's quirks, protected one another's secrets, and forged an abiding friendship.  (Did Margery succeed in her quest for the beetle?  You will have to read the book.) 

Linking up with Design Wall Monday  Oh Scrap! Monday Making