Weekly update: a flimsy, scrappy backgrounds, an unexpected finish, and reading

 

Red Baskets is a flimsy!  

I thought I'd counted out 800 HSTs for the sashes but I had to make more, and more again.  

I purchased a "retro" print for the border (Lori Holt) but it didn't work. I searched my stash and, voila -- a contemporary print that has just the right amount of white and red to be compatible with the 30's prints.  

6-1/2 yards by weight.  82 x 82.

I liked the effect of the crumb background for the Modern Mini (see last week) so much that I pieced two similar panels.  They'll be ready when the Applique Fairy comes to visit.  

Left:  gray 1-1/2" strips left over from last summer's wedding quilt  

I put both on dark fabric so you can see them.

Right:  a lot of neutrals. 

Both of these efforts helped me consolidate scraps. 

Last spring our guild hosted a Zoom workshop with Eleanor Levie.  She taught us how to weave a quilt .  I finished the weaving and put the sample aside.  Now it's a tote bag.   I will add books to the bag and donate it to an upcoming fundraiser.  

The back of the bag is similar-but-different since it's the other half of the woven panel.

My tote bags always turn out higher and narrower than I'd like. I must figure that out....

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(Nancy Pearl, reader's advisor extraordinaire, recommended this. I'm SO glad I took her up on it.)

Laird Hunt's crystalline prose is perfect -- not too much, not too little, precisely enough. I wanted to read fast to find out what would happen but I wanted to pull back to savor every single word. I was reminded of Wendell Berry, Elizabeth Strout, and Marilynne Robinson.

Zorrie Underwood was an extraordinarily ordinary woman and that is the heart of this story.

She was born in 1909 in a small town in Indiana, orphaned young, and raised by a strict and unyielding older aunt. When her aunt died and left nothing she found a job at the Radium Dial Co. in Ottawa, Illinois, where she made friends and unwittingly exposed herself to carcinogens. "Back home in Indiana" was a stronger pull and she returned. She married a local man and kept up their farm after his death in WWII. She befriended her neighbors and their emotionally damaged son. Months turned into years and years turned into decades. "You have to come to terms with things, but not by carrying them out to the field and burying them under the beans" (53). That practical attitude did not preclude imagination or emotion; rather, it centered Zorrie and allowed her to carry on with some regrets, small delights, and love on many levels.

How many of us have our own versions of Zorrie's story?

^^^^^^^^^^^

This is the February selection for the P.E.O. online book club. They've arranged for the author to visit. 

1950's, northern India. Lakshmi escapes from an abusive marriage to seek an independent life in the metropolis of Jaipur. Over ten years she grows her business painting henna designs and providing herbal remedies, especially to enhance fertility. Her hidden business is providing herbal abortifacients. Lakshmi's success for all of these endeavors depends on word of mouth endorsements by her affluent women clients. Her hard-won success takes a sharp turn when her teenaged sister Radha arrives. The two have a difficult adjustment. Bad judgment and gossip compromise Lakshmi's business and her very independence. There are more sharp turns but Lakshmi is resilient. The proverbial closed door leads to wide-open windows with new possibilities.

The sequel, The Secret Keeper of Jaipur, was published last summer.  I'll pick it up at the library today.

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Linking up with Design Wall Monday  Monday Making  

Weekly update: red baskets, red spinners, and beautiful blues + reading

 

(Note: see the next post for the wonderful Quiltfolk workshop with Kaffe Fassett!)

I sewed and I sewed until I'd made 41 four-patch basket blocks.  I used up ALL of the red 30's print.   I had a 3" x WOF piece of red that I cut in half and sewed back together along the long edge. That gave me enough for three large triangles and the rest of the small triangles to get the count to 41 and achieve a symmetrical layout.

I put the blocks away for the time being as I attend to other projects.

I'm making spinner blocks for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge this year.  I'm going to try for 20 in the monthly color plus neutral (here, gray).  The blocks are 6.5" unfinished.

I am stuck on the border for the mini quilt. 

I've done nothing on Rhododendron Trail!

This fabric (32 yards by weight) arrived on Thursday.   It's a legacy from Celia, our beloved Magpie friend who passed away in 2020.  Her daughter is slowly cleaning out the house and has gotten to the stash.  Such a beautiful array of blues, none of which I have (or have had).

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Reading/listening to this book was like going through an old photo album and remembering past days. 

This is the 18th in the long-running Cork O'Connor series but it is the first in chronological order. (So is it #19 or #0?)  Set in the early 1960's, the summer Cork was 11, the story provides insight into how Cork becomes the man (sheriff, detective, husband, father) that we have come to know so well.

The conflicts are familiar --white people in town (wealthy mine owner, abused wife, various everyday locals) and the Ojibway on the reservation. (Compare that to the books set in the 90's and 2000's -- has very much changed?) The setting is familiar -- the house on Gooseberry Lane, the Pineview Broiler, Sam's Place, St. Agnes Church. The characters are old friends -- Cork of course.  His father Liam, former Chicago cop, now sheriff of Tamarack County. His half-Irish, half Ojibway mother.  His grandmother Dilcey, Ojibway schoolteacher. The house on Gooseberry Lane. Cork's mentors Sam Winter Moon and the mide (wise man/healer) Henry Meloux.

(Note: I listened to the audio version narrated by David Chandler. I know that if I ever meet Mr. Krueger in person I will expect him to sound like Chandler.)

Wow. Wow. Wow.  This is an important book.  Read it!

Elizabeth Packard was an exemplary wife and mother. She was also intelligent and articulate -- and because she disagreed with her preacher husband on the tenets of Presbyterianism he had her committed to the Illinois State Hospital for the Insane. That was 1860 when a husband had that kind of power over a wife.

Elizabeth lived at the Hospital for three years. Instead of settling down on the quiet ward with women like her (they did a lot of needlework and reading) she began to investigate conditions at the hospital. She was assigned to another ward with women who had pronounced mental illness. She kept investigating. She wrote down all her experiences (on scraps of paper, on the pages of a Bible) and concealed the pages (in her bonnet, behind the mirror in her room). She wrote of patient abuse by hospital staff (the installation of bathtubs seemed like a good thing but only led to waterboarding). Her nemesis was Dr. Andrew McFarland, the hospital administrator. Politics kept him in power with little regard for medicine and none at all for patients' rights. Her friends and allies persisted on her behalf and in 1863 she went on trial -- and the jury declared she was SANE.

Elizabeth spent the next 30 years as a tireless advocate for the right of women's self-determination, for mothers to have custody of their children, and for the conditions at insane asylums. This was decades before women had the right to vote. She had to convince male legislators to sponsor her bills -- and in state after state they did.

Strong. Courageous. Determined. Pioneering. Indomitable. All of these apply to Elizabeth Parsons Ward Packard. Her name should be on every list of notable women in American history.

Kudos to Kate Moore (author of Radium Girls) for bringing Elizabeth's story to a wide audience.

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Next post:   the lime in the g & t!

Weekly update: not quite ready for Broadway, the mystery, unexpected baskets, and reading

"Lovebirds" (c) Phyllis Cullen 

In the past our winter guild meetings often had to be cancelled at the last minute due to severe weather (snow or cold).  We meet at night and members live as far as 25 miles away.    Adding to that the uncertainty of pandemic restrictions, the board decided that the January and February meetings will be by Zoom.  This week though the skies were clear it was quite cold.  Our speaker was art quilter Phyllis Cullen coming to us from tropical Hawaii!  She told us how she creates portrait quilts.  

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My attempts at art quilting are far more modest.  My Modern Mini is underway. I chose an applique design by Piece o' Cake. Their technique and hence their instructions are for hand applique, not fusible, so their patterns are right-side up.  To reverse them I took a piece of pattern tracing stuff, traced the design, then flipped it over. (The lines are visible on the reverse.)  I used that tracing to trace the shapes onto fusible web. Then I tried out fabrics, fused the shapes, and cut them out.  Now I'm auditioning placement on the original pattern.   When I'm pleased with all of that I will have a rehearsal (to continue the theater analogy) on the crumb-pieced background.  

Gotta work on the color balance some more . . . specifically, the middle flower on the left. (That's a fussy cut. Yellow, maybe?) 

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While all that is taking up space on my cutting table, I finished the 20 blocks of Step 7 of Rhododendron Trail.  It's not at all what I expected.   (It's a traditional block called Clown's Choice. Last week's block is  Christmas Star.  Both Barbara Brackman and Maggie Malone list them under those names.)

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The 30's bin stubbornly refused to go back on the shelf after I finished the shoofly flimsy.  Look what happened!   

I used up all the 2.5" HSTs in the box and made some more.  (Bonnie H's Essential Triangle Tool is put to good use.)  I have four blocks yet to assemble and about 1/4 yd of the red fabric left.  

I'm grateful to Cathy for introducing me to Four Patch Baskets.  

Here's a pre-assembled block so you can see the "four patch" -- upper left, four HSTs; upper right, 2 HSTs + rectangle; lower left, 2 HSTs + rectangle; lower right, big HST. 

I used this block in another colorway for our guild BOM this. fall.  (That reminds me that several of you wanted to see all the basket BOMs we're doing. I'll present them in another post soon.)

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The detecting odd couple returns with another intriguing story. A divorce attorney is murdered when someone bashes him repeatedly with a wine bottle. (Clue: it's a very, very expensive bottle of wine.) The perpetrator could be any one of at least six people. Former police detective Hawthorne is called to find who did it. He pulls Anthony Horowitz off the set of Foyle's War (which the real-life Horowitz wrote) and together they find clues, disprove clues, and uncover that a long-ago caving accident was only somewhat accidental. Horowitz thinks he's got it (several times) but Hawthorne is (as usual) three steps ahead of him.

"You know how death is. Your body goes, but your ideas don't. Your impact lingers on, even when it's poisonous. Some bodies get put into the ground and daisies bloom. Others encourage the sprouting of weeds, weeds that work to strangle whatever's living and growing around them." (p. 38 after the death of Cotton Mather

I would not have read this book had I not been invited to participate in discussion about it with other community leaders and students at our local high school. (The discussion is this coming Thursday.) It was very interesting -- "not a history book," the authors kept saying -- but I remember the old saw, "the reason history repeats itself is that not enough people pay attention the first time." Now's the time to pay attention!

Linking up with  Monday Making    Oh Scrap!  Design Wall Monday

Midweek: Shoo-fly border

 

I got two blocks down the street on my errands yesterday and saw this red-tailed hawk having a squirrel for lunch. When I got out of the car to try to snap an even closer photo he lifted off, his meal firmly gripped in his talons.  

(BTW, that's the hood of my car in the photo. I picked it up from the body shop where it's been for three weeks. (We've been using Stevens' car in the meantime.)  Someone sideswiped the car when it was parked (photo here). Repair entailed replacing the rear side panel and the rear bumper. No clue who did it, but that vehicle would have sustained considerable damage, too.)

 

My dwindling 30's stash included a box of 2.5" (unf) HSTs.  I used most of them for the shoofly border.  The inner/outer borders used up nearly all of the 30's blue/blue print (Aunt Grace 20th Anniversary, per the selvage).  

The flimsy uses 6-1/8 yards by weight. 

Linking up with Midweek Makers.

P.S. I snapped this photo just before sunset last evening.  It's so cold and windy today that we're staying inside. 

Weekly update: a good start to the year

 

I made a few extra units of each step of the mystery just in case.  I didn't count the  HSTs, which became HSTs with wing triangles, which became corner units -- all sets of 4.  

It turned out that I made *16* extra sets.  I went ahead and made them into blocks (setting aside three sets of four -- one per Bonnie's instructions and the others just in case!). 

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My One Monthly Goal for January is to complete the Modern Quilt Guild mini swap.  I showed photos of the initial fabric pull last week.  

Well, all those batiks have gone back into their bins. A design by Jen Kingwell gave me another idea.   Here's the background.  It's a big crumb/slab block about 26" square.  The swap size is 24" square and this allows for trimming.  I'm still deciding exactly what I'll applique.

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Way back in 2014 I set out to bust my stash of 1930's repro fabric.  I've made several quilts (there are 12 posts with 30's Bin Bust labels) but This Is The Year to use 'em or ship 'em out.   

I made these shoofly blocks (6") this week. 

I'm  working out the border.  

Here's what's left.  A bin with chunks (less than FQs) and three small boxes with HSTs and squares.  

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This week's reading:

Last week I reviewed A Line to Kill, the third Hawthorne/Horowitz mystery.  The Word Is Murder is the first.  It's a very Christie-like plot:  a woman goes to a funeral home to pre-plan her funeral and hours later she's found dead.  A decade earlier she was the driver of the car that hit twin brothers that killed one and permanently disabled the other.  The judge ruled it an accident and she went free.  Did the boys' parents' resentment lead to her murder? If not, who did it, and why?  The suspects are interconnected and the end is a surprise.   I really liked this one!

(I listened to the audio edition narrated by Joan Allen.)

This political thriller is full of veiled but au courant references. The former POTUS left a pile of diplomatic turmoil that the new POTUS and his Secretary of State (the protagonist) must deal with, not the least of which is a nuclear bomb threat. Who is the High Level Informant and will they get to him in time? Three Pines and Inspector Gamache make only a cameo appearance (though the SOS quotes Ruth Zardo!). The Clinton/Penny collaboration is a nice gimmick but it doesn't add much dimension to a rather predictable Good Americans vs. Bad Iraqis/Iranians story.

Once I figured out that the setting is an alternate Old West I could adjust my mindset and enjoy the story. It's 1894. Ada lives in a small town somewhere west of here and east of there. She married young, as girls in the town do, but when she doesn't get pregnant right away, nor in the next year, she's considered a dangerous threat. Maybe even a witch (since her mother is a midwife/healer and knows about medicine). Ada escapes to a convent, but not for long. She's sent to an outpost high in the hills called the Hole in the Wall where The Kid is the ringleader of a very improbable (and thus completely believable, as far as this story goes) gang of bank robbers. Early reviewers said this is mashup of The Crucible and True Grit. I'd add The Handmaid's Tale. The ending is unexpected but completely right for this great fantasy.

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Weekly update: I surprised myself

Today is our 40th wedding anniversary.  We are still smiling. :)  I made a quiche for a celebratory breakfast.    

I

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'Taint perfect but 'tis finished!  I can't believe it, either.  I kept going and going -- no fussing, no fretting.  I think I'll call it Spontaneous Spiderweb.   

The back used up some of the larger pieces of 30's fabrics that I still had. 

Here's what's left. 

And here's what I *need* to work on:  the mini quilt for the teal swap.  The required fabric is the 10" teal square.   You get just a hint of the pattern because this is a surprise for my assigned swap partner.

This week's reading was mixed.  I didn't like The Last Tourist by Olen Steinhauer at all. I kept reading because I thought it would get better. It didn't. It's a cat-and-mouse spy thriller with too many characters to keep track of. (And not very pleasant characters at that.)

The Lady of Sing Sing by Idanna Pucci was interesting. In 1895 Maria Barbella, an Italian immigrant in New York, killed her two-timing lover. She was jailed in The Tombs (Manhattan). The trial was a shambles--she didn't speak English, the interpreters were inept, the public defenders were not helpful. She was convicted, sentenced to death, and sent to Sing Sing.  Cora Slocomb, the New Orleans-born wife of Italian count Detalmo Brazza, took up Maria's cause. She joined forces with the women's prison matron at The Tombs and the Sing Sing adminstrator's wife. They successfully advocated for a retrial.  It was determined that Maria was in the throes of an epileptic fit when she slashed her lover's throat (and that he was indeed unfaithful and did not intend to marry her). She was acquitted --and disappeared, or so it seemed. Idanna Pucci is Cora Slocomb's great-granddaughter.  This book was first published in 1995. The new edition includes an very interesting update about the discovery of Maria's descendants, thanks to the internet.  

 Linking up with Oh Scrap!

 Design Wall Monday

Monday Making

Friday report: string spiderweb is a flimsy

 

It's a flimsy!  5-3/4 yards.

The blue wedges are two different 30's prints. I didn't have enough of either for the borders but, hooray, I had a newer Aunt Grace repro (an estate sale purchase, as I recall) that worked just fine. 

The week's been busy. Outpatient elective surgery for my husband on Wednesday required us to be at the hospital at 6 a.m. and thus up and at 'em earlier than that.  (The procedure was successful and we were home by 10 a.m.) We watched the Democratic National Convention which ended at 10:30 p.m. Central each evening. 

I had two in-person (masked and distanced) meetings, a Zoom meeting, and a Zoom webinar (two 90-minute sessions).  I'm skipping Zooming today but will be back at the screen for two meetings tomorrow.  Too much to do!

Linking up at Finished or Not Friday and  Can I Get a Whoop Whoop? 

Weekly update: spiderwebs and nearly-a-finish

 

Wildflowers at Camp Logan, Illinois Beach State Park.  

Left top: liatris (blazing star).  Left bottom: ?  Center top: storksbille. Center: lythrum (purple loosestrife) -- an aggressive invader though eradication efforts have reduced its spread. Center bottom:  SEDGE*  Right top: Joe Pye weed.  Right center: Two-flowered Cynthia (krigia bflora). Right bottom: either water hemlock (poisonous!) or cow parsnip.  

*thanks to those who identified this mystery

In the studio:   I'm up to 23 out of 30 spiderweb blocks.  I know, I know: I said this project didn't need to be hurried. But once I get going it's hard to stop. 

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Shelter in Place is quilted!  I sewed the first half of the binding this evening (Sunday). I machine-sew the back of the binding, too, but I'll deal with that in the next day or so.

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I finished two books this week.  The Coyotes of Carthage was published this spring.  It's about a political consultant who's assigned to run a "dark money" operation. The takeaways:  anything can be spun (publicity-wise),  politics are not pretty, and "to thine own self be true" isn't easy.  It's especially interesting in light of the current campaign season.

Clean: the New Science of Skin is both about our largest organ and about the ways we have come up with to care for it -- soap is only one of them. Hamblin punctures the notion that high-priced scrubs and other salon treatments do any good. In fact, exfoliating and over-cleansing make our bodies produce more oil. Basically, lather/rinse/repeat is more than we need. 

Linking up with Oh Scrap!, Monday Making, Design Wall Monday  

P.S. I make this tart a couple of times every summer.  ("Rustic" means one-crust.) 

 

Midweek: two finishes and a start

 

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Tuesday afternoon:   This dragonfly stayed in place on the ornamental plum tree long enough for me to take a photo.  I love the way the leaves look bronze when the sunlight filters through them.   (I also got two feet from a hummingbird that was feasting on phlox nectar, but I didn't have my phone at hand.)   

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 In the studio:  I finished the wall hangings which means that two-thirds of my August OMG are completed.   They used three yards in all. 

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The new project:   when I reorganized the file of Quiltville patterns I came across Bonnie's String Spiderweb  I'm using duplicate of some of those Quiltville printouts for the foundation.  I've been trying (admittedly, not very hard) to use up all of the 30's stash.  This is what's left and I hope that a lot of it will got into the spiderwebs.

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Add me to the list of those who can't figure out the new Blogger.  Gotta keep practicing! 

Linking up with Midweek Makers