Weekly update: three walks, two finishes, and two excellent books

 

Fall foliage is on display here in northeasternmost Illinois. We enjoyed walks to Illinois Beach State Park, Van Patten Woods Forest Preserve, and Pine Dunes Forest Preserve.

It's not as breathtaking as northern New England but it is pretty darned beautiful!

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Antipodes is the old-fashioned geographical term for places diametrically opposite. So, for the British, that was Australia and New Zealand.  Since I used Australian prints and batiks for this quilt it's now named Antipodes.  

The back uses two batiks.  The blue/purple on the right is from Barb M's estate sale.  

 I need a better name for this one than "slashed squares." Any suggestions?   UPDATE:   Trellis is the name. Thanks for the ideas, everyone. 

Slashed squares Trellis back.  The stripe is a thrift-store purchase. I sent some of it (18 yards @ 54"w goes a LONG way) to Cathy L. and Cynthia and you can see it in some of their recent projects.  

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I finished two wonderful books this week.  I commend both to you.  

Shortly after Appomattox John Chenneville, telegrapher for the Union Army, barely survived a brain injury suffered in an ammunition explosion in a Virginia military camp He returns home to the family estate north of St. Louis only to learn that his beloved sister, her husband, and young daughter have been brutally murdered. Chenneville makes inquiries -- his family has deep roots in the French community of eastern Missouri -- and learns that the killer goes by the name of A. J. Dodd and that he is headed for Texas. Chenneville has a mission: to recover from his injuries and go after Dodd.

"What was there, on to the west? What lay beyond? John Chenneville was in a strange land without a map...far from his youth when...otherr people had started the fires in the fireplace...made the dinners and set them out...But the war had taught him a great deal: that things of immense value were actually small and finite: dry socks, a night's rest without danger, a tin plate full of oatmeal with currants in it, a forgotten candle stub in his pocket." (p. 115)

The pace of the story is measured and deliberate, echoing Chenneville's methodical dermination. I enjoyed the historical details, particularly about telegraphy. (Decades before highways the telegraph lines linked towns, even those not on the railway.) The tale of Chenneville's travels through the Ozarks, into Indian Territory, and across the Red River into east Texas have suspense, tragedy, the hope for revenge and the promise of love.

P.S. Readers of Jiles' previous novels will remember that Simon Boudlin, the fiddler, made an appearance in News of the World (2017) and then had a book of his own, Simon the Fiddler (2020). There is a connection to Simon in Chenneville, as well.

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Material culture is perhaps my favorite kind of history and I was delighted to read this book.

British fashion historian Kate Strasdin took a lace-making class, partly from professional interest in women's home-work and handwork (before industrialization lace was made by hand, of course), but also because she enjoyed the other participants.  In 2016 an older woman in the class gave her an extraordinary gift:  Anne Sykes' scrapbook.   Anne's husband Adam gave it to her on their wedding day in 1838 and for more than 40 years Anne pasted scraps of fabric from women's dresses--hers and her friends and acquaintances, documenting each in a fine copperplate hand.  Strasdin spend the next six years finding out more about Anne and Adam, both of whom came from textile-manufacturing families in Lancashire.  They spent seven years in the British colony in Singapore and several in Shanghai before returning to England.  

Strasdin broadens the story immeasurably by putting the fabrics in Anne's record into their historical and social context.   She writes not only what women wore but how the garments came to be, from raw material (cotton, silk, wool, linen) to cloth manufacture to design and sewing.  Mechanization brought wealth brought more consumer goods.  Queen Victoria set precedents for white wedding gowns and later for mourning garb.  (I didn't know that genuine jet -- the black 'gem' for buttons and jewelry -- is fossilized monkey-puzzle wood.)  

Color plates provide a sample of the pages from the scrapbook. There is a QR code to the publisher's website with several more samples. 

"Lace is where Anne's story and my own became entwined. Were it not for that desire to learn a traditional technique...I would never have joined the lace group amongst whose members was the custodian of Anne's diary. In the years since, and along the path of discovering Anne's life, I realize that while our experiences of the world inevitably differ, there is that which connects us: female friendship and an appreciation for the threads of textiles women into our lives."  p. 73

"Anne's story is both remarkable and ordinary. She gave voice to the women in her world. She caught a tiny piece of them and protected their colourful variety in her most unusual of diaries. Not through her written word do we find these women and Anne Sykes herself but through these precious pieces of cloth." p. 268

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Linking up with Oh Scrap!  Design Wall Monday Sew and Tell