Weekly update: goings-on and a new flimsy

 

On Thursday food historian Catherine Lambrecht was the guest speaker at the Clara Cummings Book Club luncheon. I first heard Cathy when she gave the program for the Zion Woman's Club (in March, 2022).  This time she talked about the traditions of pie. 

Illinois grows and processes more pie pumpkins than any other state.  The variety shown in the photo is the hybrid most used. It is a cross between the Tennessee field pumpkin and butternut squash.   The array of apples are those grown in a heritage orchard here in Winthrop Harbor.  (It's not open to the public.)

On Friday evening the Zion Woman's Club held our annual ladies' night bunco party.  It was great fun!  75 women attended. We had a new venue (the Moose lodge) , served only dessert (delicious bars and cookies from a local bakery), and had only four raffles (a 50/50 cash drawing, a gift card tree, a basket with fall decor, and a quilt).   Gross receipts were just shy of $1800 which was the best ever.  

Upper right:  I cut FQs of Halloween fabric to use in the table centerpieces.  

"These are my colors!" said Reggie, who won the quilt.

Saturday evening was the Lake County Symphony Orchestra's gala banquet and concert at Glen Flora Country Club in Waukegan.    We sat with our friends Marilyn and Mike at the same table with the orchestra's CEO and conductor and his wife (the principal violinist), their son, and a friend of theirs. 

Interesting conversation, a good meal, and excellent music.  Since the venue is a dining room only half the regular orchestra performs--very intimate--and we had front-table seats.

I contributed a quilt to the silent auction but forbore to bid on anything (sports memorabilia and wine are not our thing). 

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So, two quilts have left the house!  But a new quilt is in progress.  

I saw a photo of a quilt and made a slightly different version of the block. Once I figured it out I just kept going! 

The blocks are 9-1/2 x 13.

Fabric A:  2-1/2" x WOF and 3-1/2" x 7-1/2".

Fabric B:  1-1/2" x WOF.

Cut 2 units 10-1/2"  and 2 units 6-1/2". 

Assembly has an easy partial seam.

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The ALA Retired Members Round Table Fifth Sunday book discussion met by Zoom this afternoon.  We use prompts rather than reading one book. This time the topic was "something spooky."  As always there was a variety from Neal Gaiman to Preston & Childs to Lucy Foley.  My selection was The October Country, a short story collection by Ray Bradbury.  It was originally published in 1955; I checked out a 1999 reissue with a new intro by Bradbury.  Such terrific writing -- and truly spooky (psychologically disturbing).

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

P.S.  Cosmos growing behind a garden shop, taken on Thursday.  There's frost in the forecast this week.  

Wild turkeys strolled down the block this week.

So pretty!

Midweek: sunny day and a finish

 Yesterday was unseasonably warm -- 80 degrees -- and sunny.   Perfect for a long walk in the state park.  

Top: coneflower, toadflax, goldenrod.  Middle: artemisia/mugwort (looks like an aerial view of a pine forest), evening primrose, liatris. Bottom: sumac, aster, Queen Anne's lace.  The late-blooming flowers are getting the last of the pollinators.

A cold front came through overnight and we'll have rain today through the weekend. 

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It's finished!   I made the flimsy in September. The pattern is Happy Endings by Lesley Chiasson.  I'm naming it Parquet because  . . .

. . . . I'm pretty sure I bought the fabric when it first came out.  17 years = time to use it! 

I was a little apprehensive about how to quilt the big open spaces. In the end I outlined the flying geese and quilted swirls in the background. 

The 58" w print was just right for the back. 

Linking up with Wednesday Wait Loss

Quilt Fabrication  TGIFF

Thanks for the shout out, Jennifer!  (You can see that quilt, finished, on Monday's post.)

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.

& & & & & 

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

Another quilt show!

 The Village Quilters held their biennial show at the College of Lake County this weekend. Irene and I went on Friday morning. 

The Ruby Anniversary display of red and white quilts commemorated the guild's 40th anniversary.  

There was a wonderful variety in the rest of the show, too.  

Charley Harper prints + pieced birds 

African prints (I'm going to remember this design)

Right photo shows the detail

Front and back. The fig leaf is a separate attachment. LOL!

Midweek: cultural fusion in progress

 Some quilts practically throw themselves together.   I'm having such fun!

I was inspired by Wanda whose recent work includes pairing Australian prints with batiks and by Cathy who introduced me to this 12-patch variation.  The units are 2.5" x 3.5" so the blocks will finish at 8"x9".  

Linking up with Midweek Makers

Wednesday Wait Loss

.....and now I must mow the lawn!

Weekly update: two concerts, two estate sales, and a start that's finished

 

The weekend began and ended with concerts.   The Box Band played a lively set of bluegrass, folk, and country at our church on Friday evening.  The Kontras Quartet performed Haydn and Prokofieff at the season opening of the Lake County Community Concert Assn.  on Sunday afternoon.

A friend tipped me off to an estate sale on the west side of town (a street I didn't know existed).  She said there was a lot of sewing stuff.   I went mid-morning Saturday when everything was half off.  I bypassed the upstairs and garage and went to the finished basement which had been the craft room.  The fabric was marked "large $6, medium $3, small $2" meaning marked down to $3, $2.50, $1.00.   I filled two sacks.  I took them upstairs and the woman at checkout said, "How about $40 for all of it?" That was fine with me. 

"All of it" meant these extra items (at half the marked price, $10 total).

Photo shows one side and then the other side of this Aunt Martha's pre-cut kit.  Poly-cotton, it turns out.  Early 90's, I'd say, based on the colors.  

The hard part of this UFO is completed.  The paper-pieced bird blocks are 6".  Sashing fabric included.

But back to the fabric --  by weight, 83 yards.   I paid $30 so that's .36 per yard.

There's a 6-yard Jinny Beyer print and a 3-yard RJR Smithsonian 1990's CW repro in the lot.

Yesterday I went to the second installment of Barb M's estate sale.  Barb was a long-time member of my guild. She passed away about five years ago.  Her fabric stash is gradually being sold with proceeds to charitable causes.  Last month's sale netted $2000 for ovarian cancer research.  This sale will benefit Alzheimer's research.   Paula, who is overseeing the sale, said there are two rooms in Mr. M's house filled with fabric. She predicts two if not three more sales.  

They relocated this sale from Paula's garage to a hotel meeting room.  There were bins of fabric along the walls as well as all this laid out on tables.  All the plastic boxes were Barb's.   2-yard (min.) bundles $5.00.  1-yd+ $2.50.  FQ+ 15 for $5.00.   

The right column = all batiks.

Here's what I bought.  By weight 192 yards, $260.00.  That's $1.35 per yard.

A bonus -- Paula and her group washed ALL of the fabric. 

If I can't NOT buy fabric then I'd darn well better get bargains!  

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But I did USE some fabric.  

From start to finish in three days.  4 yards.

9" blocks = 45 x 54.

The back.  

The pattern is "On the Up and Up" from American Patchwork and Quilting.  You can get it here.

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

P.S. Across the road at the Saturday estate sale.  

Midweek: the corollary

 McDonald Woods on Tuesday afternoon.  Not much fall color yet. 

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You are well aware of the saying "measure twice, cut once."  The corollary is "design twice, sew once."  

I was reminded of the corollary as I ripped out a half-dozen blocks and replaced them. I did fuss with the block arrangement before I sewed the rows and I did look to see if the adjacencies worked once the rows were sewn -- but when it came to sewing the rows together I saw too-much-of this or too-much-of-that.   Now I feel better!   Blocks are 6" finished so this is 60 x 72.  4-1/2 yards used.  

Linking up with Midweek Makers and Wednesday Wait Loss       

Thanks for the shout-out, Jennifer!