Weekly update: parties and scraps + reading

 

Friday evening:  the 151st annual Carthage College Christmas Festival.  The college chapel is a beautiful setting for the splendid music.  

Rotary friends and family had dinner at a Kenosha restaurant beforehand.   

Kaylynn, whose family is in the top photo, is a freshman at Carthage this year and in the orchestra.  Donna and I (lower photo) have known her since she was born. 

   

Saturday began with the funeral for our Rotary friend Nate at a church in Waukegan.  It was a chilly service because the church furnace was on the blink.  (Ironically Nate was a long-time trustee so just a few years ago he'd have been the one fussing over the troubleshooting and arranging for the repair.) 

Nate, Phil, and Stevens at the Rotary Golf Outing in 2024.  (Phil is still alive and kicking!)

I had to leave the funeral early to get to the Lake County Women's Coalition luncheon.  Another Festive Food exchange and a nice time had by everyone.  

Rosemary's 80th birthday celebration was early Friday evening.  The restaurant was full with family and so many friends.  

(She's the one for whom I made the 8-candle mug rug that you saw a week or so ago.)

Among the ZB library folks. 

 Rosemary was a social worker for many years. She moonlighted at the library when I started there.  A couple of years later I hired her as the circulation/tech services department head. An excellent decision!  And she and Stevens got along wonderfully.

Entertainment!  Rosemary's nephew is a performer (he once rode around inside the library on a unicycle).  He juggled balls inside and fire outside.  

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Snow fell overnight -- 6"!  Neighbors Mike and Jen are out of town but the young man on the their other side snowblowed what I didn't shovel.  I was grateful!  

A clear driveway meant that I could go to church, a good thing since I was liturgist.  Once I got back home I stayed inside.   I moderated the ALA Retired Members Round Table book group on Zoom.  We used prompts rather than specific books. This time we shared "traveler's tales."  Good recommendations from everyone.

Yes, I did get time to sew.  I'm saving the clues for the Quiltville mystery. Not rushing to keep up has been very liberating.  

I had parts already prepped for five daisy mug rugs.  The daisy appliques are the most time-consuming to fuse (two layers of WOW), trace, and cut.  The mug rugs are offered to P.E.O. chapters who order the yearbook covers that are my chapter's fundraising project. 

The 100 framed four-patch blocks for the Many Hands, Many Hearts drive generated a lot of black and white scraps.  Here's what some of those scraps have become.  

Blocks are 6.5" unfinished.

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  Carly Anne York's book was already in preparation before the cuts to federal funding for scientific research were announced.  The "silly science" she writes about is precisely why that funding is important.   Some topics we know about--using snake venom to produce anti-venom, and from snakes to frog venom and leech secretions to create anticoagulants and other drugs.    Cockroaches are able to flatten their bodies and squeeze into teeny crevices because their carapaces are plates that collapse into one another.  That inspired robots that can squeeze flat with splayed legs to go into the rubble of collapsed buildings to search for survivors. The levitating frog demonstrates the power of electromagnetism.  The salmon cannon gets them up and over dams so they can spawn and can also keep invasive species (like Asian carp) from invading.   

Fascinating and accessibly-written.  This would be a good Christmas gift for teens to adults.

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