Weekly update: two finishes + reading

 

Two walks at Illinois Beach State Park this weekend were good for my body and my spirit.  

Woodland violet, field horsetail, wild strawberry, hoary puccoon, prickly pear, serviceberry, false Solomon's seal.

If you look at the horizon you can see the Chicago skyline, 40 miles away.

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In the studio:  two finishes!  

The flimsy was in my post last week.  Now it's quilted and bound.    One of my Rainbow Scrap Challenge projects this year is to make a wheelchair-sized quilt (approx. 40 x 50) out of Ohio Stars in the monthly color.

I signed up for the guild mystery quilt and made all the blocks.  I had fabric left from the "dust off a book" blog hop earlier in the year and used it with lavender that I had in quantity from an estate sale.   I chose this setting from the many that were suggested.  

The backing is all-one-piece from a wide back (thrift shop purchase).  

Blocks are 10" and the quilt is 60" x 80". 

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The poet and essayist Donald Hall was one of Stevens' favorite writers.  Last month I finally read String Too Short to Be Saved (review here).  

I read Without: Poems while sitting with Stevens in the hospital.   This slim volume is an elegy to Hall's wife, poet Jane Kenyon, from her cancer diagnosis through treatment, death, and the year afterward.  It is sad, fierce, and loving -- a tribute to Jane's life and work and to their marriage.  (She died in 1995 and the poems were published in 1998.)

"Always the weather / writing its book of the world / returns you to me . . . Your presence in this house / is almost as enormous / and painful as your absence . . ."  (p. 51)

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Then I turned to Life Work, an earlier collection of essays (1993).  A cancer diagnosis and subsequent successful surgery gave him pause.  In that pause he reflected on his career as a poet, writer, and intellectual. That life was in sharp contrast to his maternal grandparents, in whose farmhouse he lived (see String Too Short to Be saved) and his paternal grandfather and his father who owned a very successful dairy in Connecticut.  Hall respects the choices of his forebears and understands how that influenced what he became.  

There are more of Hall's books on Stevens' bookshelf and I look forward to reading them.  

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