Friday check in: stash report, a finish, and OMG

 

A blue-eyed bunny for the September Rabbit Rabbit good luck charm.  (I do remember to say it first thing on the first of the month.)

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Stash report:

August fabric in: 99 yards, $15 (I got some great gifts)

August fabric out:  26-1/4

YTD fabric in: 1520-5/8, $8.70.  That's $1.86/yard.  (Imagine if I'd paid today's going price (say, $13/yd) -- $19,760!)   Remember, I've gotten several destashes in 2022.

YTF fabric out: 146.   

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It's nice to begin the month with a finish.  Here is It's Not Ohio Star. 

The back uses a lovely floral print that I got at an estate sale in 2021. Just fifty cents for four yards!  (I often note the acquisition and price for backing-length pieces.)

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The Magpies are making quilts in memory of Sarah Curry who passed away earlier this summer. Quilts, plural, for her twin sons.  Sarah's favorite block was Variable Star. She loved bright colors. She detested brown, saying that she got enough of that in the arid New Mexico landscape where she lived.   I volunteered to set the blocks.  So far I've sorted them in one box for Mark and one box for Gregg.  My One Monthly Goal for September is to get the two flimsies assembled and send them to Carolyn for quilting.

Linking up with Alycia and friends at  Finished or Not Friday  as well as Elm Street Quilts.

P.S.  On Tuesday Stevens and I went to McDonald Woods where I enjoyed a walk with Nancy. She and I met on the Women of Road Scholar FB group. We live 15 miles apart and had never met in person. 

P.S. 2  The rest of the week has been too hot for afternoon hiking but I've gotten so that I need to stretch my legs!  I snapped this sunset photo on a neighborhood (1-mile) walk yesterday evening.  

  

BOTW: catching up on August

This Books of the Week post should more appropriately be Books of the Month.  I will get back to more frequent book reviews in September.  

It's been a long time since the last Merry Folger mystery and this new entry in the series is most welcome.   The setting is current: November, 2021, when Nantucket brings back its traditional Winter Stroll to usher in the holidays -- with Covid masks on. Merry, now police chief (after her father) deals with two murders. One is a woman photographer living in a ramshackle cottage owned by her long-ex-husband. The woman recently reconnected with her now mid-20's son (whom the ex raised). The other is a lecherous old Hollywood talent agent traveling in the entourage of a film crew that includes an over-the-hill leading man, an unconfident female star, and the talent agent's wife (who is the director). Are the murders connected? Merry and her officers are determined to find out!

This was the perfect book to keep me occupied during a trip that involved long airline flights. I understand why everyone has praised it. It's a truly wonderful story!

In the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution Count Alexander Ilych Rostov is sentenced to lifetime house arrest and confined to quarters at the Metropol Hotel in the center of Moscow. He was brought up to be the consummate gentleman, elegant, sophisticated, but always understated. He made the best of a terrible situation from his quarters in the hotel attic (where servants once lived) to actually getting a job as the headwaiter in the hotel dining room (using his impeccable ability to know who to sit in proximity to whom, and his knowledge of fine cuisine). He befriended a young girl (daughter of a Bolshevik party leader) and years later he became guardian to her own daughter. The decades roll on, the Soviet Union becomes a world power, and the Count sees it all from the Metropol.

I was put off this book because it had a science fiction sticker. SciFi is not a genre I particularly enjoy.  It's the September selection for our AAUW book group so I had to check it out. Once I got into it I kept going!

"Stranger, whoever you are, open this to learn what will amaze you." This sentence from an ancient comical (parody?) is one of the threads that links the five storylines in this adventurous novel.

It took a while for me to get into the rhythm of the shifting points of view from the Diogenes story to Constantinopole/Greece in the fifteenth century, the two Idaho storylines (the old man Zeno and the boy Seymour) from 1950 to 2020, and on into the future with Konstance hurtling through space to a new planet.

Words and stories have power that transcend centuries and connect generations.

Not one but two unreliable narrators -- the fictional Freddie who herself was a creation of the fictional Hannah. It was hard to figure out what was happening to whom. No one was particularly likeable.

Weekly update: explorations and homespun stars

 Our field trips this week included three forest preserves and a state park. We hadn't been to Marl Flat  or  Chain o' Lakes before.   I've done seven out of the fourteen sites for the 2022 Hike Lake County challenge. (It began August 15 and goes through November.)

Coneflower, compass plant, lobelia.

Sumac, wild cucumber, gray dogwood.

Common reed, elderberry "lace" (after the birds have eaten the berries), ragweed. 

 My Friday morning shift at the church rummage sale wasn't terribly busy. The event chair said they had good traffic Thursday evening and made $698.  As a volunteer my purchases were 50% off.  I got a yard of woven plaid (no wonder my homespun stash doesn't seem diminished), a 64 x 82 tablecloth of quilt-weight cotton just right for a back, and a couple of other goodies for $3.75. 

Yesterday I enjoyed  Sunday brunch with a long-time friend. We had not visited in person for several years.  No photos!  We talked the whole time  On my way home I observed the Crane family doing a Seurat . Grande Jatte impression. 

In the studio:   It's Not Ohio Star is assembled.  I may or may not add a narrow border.  The units are 3" finished.  63 x 69.

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I have been reading! I will have a BOTW (Books of the Week, or in this case Books of the WeekS) in a day or two.

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Linking up with Oh Scrap!  Monday Making  Design Wall Monday

P.S. A perfect web shines in the forest-filtered sunlight at Chain O' Lakes State Park. 

Friday check in: it's not Ohio star

 After the four-patch homespuns (see Wednesday's post) I still had a box of 4.5" homespun squares. I also had a heap of homespun scraps.  I found several yards of cream muslin.   I used the homespun and the muslin to make a bunch of 3.5" hourglass units. 

 Sure, I could put them in a box to stew for a while. Maybe a long, long while.  Instead I recalled a magazine pattern from years ago called "It's Not Ohio Star!"  

 This is the initial layout.  (I thought about using 3.5" nine-patches instead of the 3.5" squares but the effect was too busy.) 

Rather than assemble the units row by row, or column by column, I realized that they ARE Ohio stars with sashing.  

Here are two star blocks and one vertical sashing unit.

Stay tuned!

Linking up with Finished or Not Friday

. . .  and now I'm off to work the first shift at the church rummage sale.

Midweek: finish!

 

Happy 42nd anniversary to us! (8/23/80).

My big non-quilting project this week is to compose the 2022-23 Zion Woman's Club yearbook.  It's done! (MS Word's "booklet" format makes it so much easier to set up.) The draft has been sent to the club board members for their okay.  Because August has five weeks (that is, a fifth M,T,W next week) I feel that I've been given a gift of more time.  The first club meeting is September 6.

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In the studio:  it's a finish!   

 

I used the walking foot and the serpentine stitch to quilt diagonally through the squares.  

The back uses a faux-batik and a faux-woodblock print.   I learned the "zipper" insert from Mary Ellen Hopkins and I use it often.  

Linking up with Midweek Makers  

Weekly update: homespun lemonade

(See the previous post for the explanation of "lemonade.")    

If only we could bottle the weather!  80 degrees, low humidity, breeze from the northeast, and abundant sunshine.   

Ethel's Woods/Raven Glen is (are) the fourth for our Hike Lake County 2022 challenge. 

(Ethel Untermeyer spearheaded the legislation to create the forest preserve district in the 1950's.)

Though we're out and about during the day we are at home in the evening -- sewing and TV time.   Here's what' I've accomplished. 

The monkey wrench project is a flimsy. The blocks are 5" finished so this is 65 x 75.  (Since I took this photo I replaced the square in row 2, column 1, with a lighter square.)   

I tried to use scraps for this project but I managed to generate more. Lots more.  When I tidied up I found two ziploc bags with 4-1/2" homespun squares. They became a flimsy which is, ta-da, now under the needle.  Hopefully I'll have a finished quilt to show you very soon. 

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Home renovations are ongoing. The living room replastering is still curing but at least we have chairs to sit in.  We're eating on a card table set up at one end of the living room.  The white paneled doors (upper right) are replacing the 1972 brown wood doors (lower right).  

Linking up with Monday Making Design Wall Monday

P.S. Though our visit to Sitka was short I did find the quilt shop.  These are FQs of Alaska-themed batiks.    

Lemonade Week

 Our long-anticipated Alaska trip did not turn out as we planned. The outbound travel (O'Hare to Sitka by way of Seattle) was very disorienting for my husband.  Fortunately we could get flights home that evening/night, including a nonstop overnight flight from Anchorge to O'Hare.   I'm calmer now as I type this but you can well imagine that at the time I was *beyond* upset.   On the positive side, once we got home his mood stabilized.  

I declared it Lemonade Week, as in "when life gives you lemons...."   We had several enjoyable day trips during a week of lovely summer weather.

On Monday we headed west to  White Pines Forest State Park in Mt. Morris and to Lowden State Park in Oregon (the name of the town).   I remember going to White Pines when I was a child and staying in the rustic cabins.  60+ years later it was not impressive.  It looked to me as though it is ready for some large-scale maintenance. I walked along a somewhat-marked and cleared trail.   We had lunch in downtown Oregon and then went to Lowden.  

The Blackhawk statue by sculptor Lorado Taft is the dominant feature.

At Lowden:

Upper right: if you go down the steps then you have to come back up.  

Lower right:  the river from the base of the steps . . .

Left:  and I got back up!

Tuesday:  I began the travel insurance claim process but got stuck.  We went to Lakewood, one of the forest preserves on this year's Hike Lake County Challenge

Upper left: fungus at the base of an oak tree, Stevens' view while I hiked.

Center: nodding onion, martin house.

Lower: woodland sunflower, a lovely pond, bellflower.

Wednesday:   Horicon Marsh is about 125 miles from home.  We were there last summer on a 90-plus degree day. This week was about 10 degrees cooler with a nice breeze.  Stevens sat in the state visitors' center while I hiked the 2.3 mile trail.   

I walked behind two cranes for a while. 

I saw a pair of swans. 

Swamp milkweed, nodding onion, false sunflower (also "rough oxeye" and "sweet smooth oxeye"--an oxymoron, LOL).  Blazing star/liatris, rattlesnake master, arrowroot, wild cucumber. 

I did not touch the wild parsnip!

Two old guys at the entrance to the visitor's center. 

On our way home we stopped in Theresa, WI, and bought some cheese at Widmer's. 

 We went to the Rotary breakfast meeting on Thursday and then went to the Illinois Railway Museum in Union, IL.  Unfortunately they do not provide guest wheelchairs and the place is ALL walking.  I quickly implemented a Plan B and we revisited Moraine Hills State Park on the outskirts of McHenry.  I hiked the entire 3.2 mile trail!  

On Friday we drove down to Westmont (about 65 miles) to take our dear friend Pat out for lunch.  (She's my long-time ALA roommate, now living in a retirement home and no longer driving.)  Though we chat on the phone frequently it was SO good to see her in person again. 

The (metaphorical) lemonade was sweet enough to take away much of the disappointment.

Next post:  quilting progress! 

Friday check in: five columns and a stack of blocks

 I made 98 homespun monkey wrench blocks.  The inspiration was a FB photo (I didn't get the maker's name) that alternated the pieced blocks with an assortment of squares. 
 

On point? Hmm.

Controlled selection?  But I'd need at least 2 yards if I used just one fabric for the squares.

I asked a half-dozen other quilters who thought the inspiration photo was the best.  Thank you all!  I got to cutting and then to piecing.  

As of 9:15 Thursday evening I had five columns with a stack of wrenches and squares to go. 

And "go" is the important term right now because tomorrow morning we're going on our long-awaited Road Scholar trip to Alaska.

See you later!

Linking up (early Friday a.m.) at Finished or Not Friday

 

BOTW: two for fall

 Two more ARCs (advance reading copies) from the ALA Annual Conference in June. These will be published in October.

The Wilfs have lived on Division Street in suburban Avalon since the late 1960's.   Ben is a family physician, Mimi is a community volunteer. Sarah and Theo are typical suburban teens. On a summer night in 1985 their universe shifts when Sarah and Theo Wilf cause a deadly car accident. They survive but they never forget. Nor does their Ben whose effort to save the victim is unsuccessful. 

Fourteen years later, on the eve of the new century, Ben again is at the scene of a medical emergency. Alice Shenkman, the across-the-street neighbor, goes into labor. Ben gets there before the EMTs and successfully delivers Waldo Shenkman. Waldo has a tough childhood as a social misfit obsessed with astronomy, completely misunderstood by his hard-driving business exec father. Waldo finds a friend in Ben and, as Ben was present at Waldo's birth, Waldo is in turn present at Mimi's death.

The story skips adroitly from decade to decade and back again.  [Including 2020: pandemic (see Delphi, below).]  The younger generation find their places in the firmament -- Sarah as a Hollywood producer, Theo as a renowned chef, and Waldo as an astrophysicist. A wise, compassionate, and thoroughly absorbing story.

The never-named narrator is a British academic with a Classics specialty. She views her personal pandemic experience through the lens of prophesy in the tradition of the Oracle of Delphi. Each short chapter refers to a different divination -- tea leaves, entrails, animal behaviour, guttural sounds. Her experiences are so typical of families trying to adjust to pandemic-caused upheaval. She teaches on Zoom. Her husband works on Zoom. Their ten-year-old son doesn't adapt to at-home onscreen learning. She cannot easily go to visit her elderly mother. There are shortages of all kinds of products as well as a shortage of patience. And in the end, a faint glimmer of the bottom of Pandora's box: hope.

I've observed before that contemporary literature has a new demarcation: set before or during the pandemic. (We can look forward to those that are set firmly after. Soon?)  

Weekly update: stash enhancement and more homespuns

Some of the wildflowers on this week's walks:

Broadleaf Arrowhead in bloom, bumblebee on purple prairie clover, prickly pear cactus (it grows in the sandy soil at Illinois Beach State Park), bull thistle, compass plant, prairie pinnate coneflower.

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Woo-hoo!   My entry in the Wisconsin Quilt Show was accepted!   

The quilt is Crown of Thorns. I made it in 2019 in response to the fire that destroyed Notre Dame cathedral in Paris.  They saved a relic purported to be a piece of the Biblical Crown of Thorns.  (And that day's daily quilt block in the perpetual calendar in my studio was Crown of Thorns.  Perfect.) 

 

In lieu of a walk on Tuesday we met Paula and her husband in the parking lot of Old Orchard Shopping Center.  Two years ago Paula downsized her stash and gave a lot of it to me.  She still had some more and her sister-in-law contributed.  Fabric and books!  I was able to give some of it away at Wednesday's guild meeting.  

The guild program was about Project Linus, presented by two members who are very involved in it.  Their presentation made me reconsider the contents of the box in the upper photo -- Paula had a lot of circus-themed fabric that I was going to give away.,  Now I'm considering using some of it for Linus quilts. That will compensate for some more new fabric on the left side of the box in the lower photo--Linus giveaways.  I'm going through the books, many of which I have, or once had.  

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 We are having significant work done on our house while we are away (August 12-21). The living room will be replastered and painted, the bedrooms will be repainted, the doors and baseboards will be replaced, and the flooring will be replaced (new carpet in living room and hall, vinyl in the bedrooms).  That requires moving EVERYTHING off shelves and walls.   Our housecleaner was able to help me.--it took us 8 hours.   (It's easier to box up stuff when it is someone else's. If it's yours you think about what you're packing up.)    

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And, finally, on the design wall:  5-1/2" scrappy homespun monkey wrench blocks.  I'm planning to have plain blocks in between.  I'm aiming for 98 blocks.

Linking up with 

Oh Scrap!

 Monday Making

 Design Wall Monday

BOTW: the book of the summer

 

Every summer deserves a book like this. It is a deliciously long 576 pages. Do I read fast to find out what happens, or do I slow down to savor every scene, every utterance, to catch every clue? The setting is achingly beautiful. The characters, primary and secondary, are memorable.

Agnes Lee and Polly Wister have known one another since birth. Their great-grandfathers, Philadelphia Quakers, built the rambling shingle "cottages" at Fellowship Point on the Maine coast (near Sorrento, I figured out). They have spent every summer of their lives on the Point. "They knew each other so well that their speech was as vertical in nature as a good poem." (p. 81).  Agnes became a famous author of best-selling children's books featuring an intrepid girl adventurer named Nan. Polly married a college professor, had four children, and poured all her energy into her family.

In 2000 the women are 80. Agnes has been diagnosed with cancer. Polly's husband dies. There is talk among the other Fellowship Point residents and heirs about selling out to developers. And Agnes gets a new editor, an ambitious young woman who wants Agnes to write her autobiography. Secrets hidden for decades are revealed. There are misunderstandings and fallings-out. But in the end true, lifelong friendship prevails.

Every summer deserves a book like this, but not every summer gets one. We are fortunate that 2022 is one of those years.