Weekly update: glorious days, caught up already!, twenty blocks + recent reading

 

Sunshine, sunshine, sunshine!  

Swans at Hastings Lake on Saturday.

Herons at Nippersink on Sunday.

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Natalie Doan of Missouri Star was the guest speaker at the guild meeting Wednesday.  I didn't get any good pictures!   It was fun to hear her side of the family business.  

This is the final month for the guild round robin.  I got right to work and added borders to CB's quilt.  I can't show you the entire flimsy until next month's reveal, but you can see one of the Tula Pink owls that AK added.  

We got the pattern for block #3 of the BOM.  It's the one at the bottom, shown with the previous blocks. 

BTW, this is the quilt for which I bought the background fabric. It was a BOM maybe 20 years ago.  I quilted it some time later and donated it. 

I finished 20 Aunt Vina's Favorite blocks.  They are 12-1/2" unfinished.   The inspiration photo (Jean Wells, Patchwork Made Easy) has 30 blocks set edge to edge like these. I'm going to audition sashing.   

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And on to the reading report.   I took four paperbacks on the trip.  I finished one the first day and gave it to my hostess (who rescued me during the flight delay).   I left two behind, unread (they were advance reader copies) in the London hotel room because I knew I wouldn't get to them.  In the midst of the trip I only read a few pages before turning out the light.  Of course I took a look at the books at the newsstand at DeGaulle airport -- shelves of English as well as French books -- and bought one!  That kept me going on the long flight home.  

A man confronts his grief and loss and learns to trust in love again. A tender story.   

It took a while for me to get into the rhythm of the story but once I did I kept on going.   There was a lot of foreshadowing that made me feel that something unimaginably terrible would happen.   From our 21st century viewpoint the terrible part was the smug superiority that the English colonists felt over the indigenous people.  Narrator Bethia also had to deal with men's domination (again, outrageous to us now).  But I think that Brooks describes how things most likely did happen without overlaying "we know better now."

A richly-imagined, suspenseful story about Lucrezia di Cosimo di Medici. The portrait commissioned by her husband Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara, is likely the model for Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess."

Linking up with other bloggers at Oh Scrap! and Design Wall Monday.

P. S.  We do not recall that we have ever eaten pawpaws. A customer gave a basket of them to the proprietor of the produce stand we patronize (see the apples in Friday's post).  She was giving the pawpaws away and I took six.   They're not bad but they're not something we will make a point of seeking out.