Quilts and Books

5.  Crossing Oceans  by Gina Holmes. This was available as a free Kindle download back in November and I decided to give it a try. This is not a romance (although there is a bittersweet romantic element). Holmes is a Christian inspirational novelist, and Crossing Oceans  was her debut in 2010. It's the story of Jenny, a single mother to a 5-year old girl. Jenny has learned that she has incurable cancer, so she takes her daughter and moves back to her father's to find a new home for little Isabella. She has two choices--her own father, from whom she has been estranged since she became pregnant; or David, her daughter's father who never knew anything about Isabella. Jenny has some fences to mend. Jenny is not always likable, but I think that made her human and realistic. She's dying, doesn't always feel well, and has a lot of ground to make up in the short time left to her. I enjoyed this book that was well outside what I normally read these days. 4.  Kill Shot ...

This month's theme is "new to me author" and Marie Force came immediately to mind when I was deciding what to read. One of the best things about TBR Day is that it forces me to read things that have been on the back burner waaaayyyy too long. Really. I should have read this (and the rest in the series) back when I got them last summer. I was the winning bidder for Force's "Fatal" series in the 2011 Brenda Novak auction and if I enjoy the rest of them as much as I liked the first, I'm in for a treat. I had seen Marie Force's name mentioned several times on Twitter and elsewhere as an author to check out. That's how I ended up bidding on these books. The "Fatal" series is similar to JD Robb's "In Death" series in that it follows the same couple throughout. And while heroine Sam Holland is a police detective like Eve Dallas, the similarities pretty much stop there. Fatal Affair is book #1 and it's where we mee...

Last summer I got to spend half an hour in a lovely little quilt shop, People, Places & Quilts in the heart of old Charleston, SC. An employee was doing a demo of the "Lil' Twister," a plastic template tool made by the Country Schoolhouse to help you make easy pinwheel quilts. Naturally, I had to have one. At my quilting retreat last month I pulled out a stack of purple batik or hand-dyed fabrics and started cutting them into squares. When I was finished, I laid them out rather randomly, just trying to make sure there was some contrast between a block and all of its neighbors. This was about as far as I got before the retreat ended. Last Saturday, International Quilting Day, I pulled those squares out and set to work again. After all of the blocks were sewn together and a border added to the outside, I was able to use the tool to cut new blocks that were centered on the intersection of 4 blocks. Here's an idea of what the process looked like: Next...

This month's theme is "series catch-up" and Fallen is book 2 in a trilogy by Emma Jensen (no website found) that also includes the titles Entwined and Moonlit . Ironically, Entwined was my June 2010 TBR read . The heroes of these 3 books were spies together during the Peninsular wars and carry various physical and emotional scars from their time there. Fallen takes place almost entirely on the island of Skye in 1812. Our hero, Gabriel, the Earl of Rievaulx, has been asked by his friend Nathan (and hero of Entwined ) to go to Skye and track down an elusive traitor. A SIDE NOTE: I think the fact that an Earl was running around Spain spying on French troops and is now free to go to Scotland to find a traitor causes this book to meet the definition of a "mistorical." I try not to get caught up in the finer points of what constitutes a mistorical because I am no expert. But Gabriel's "profession" did not ring true and in the end did a lot to d...

I'm sitting here watching a little March Madness, anxious to get back to some sewing. I just agreed to make a t-shirt quilt for the son of one of my best friends. He'll be a freshman at Loyola Chicago in the fall, so I can't procrastinate. These days I feel as if my UFO (Un-Finished Object) pile is as bad as my TBR pile. If I'm not careful I'll get behind on my blogging, too! 5.  The Bentleys Buy a Buick by Pamela Morsi . Morsi's latest book isn't really a romance, although there are romantic elements. Tom and Erica are a happily married couple with a young child. After being a stay-at-home mom for 5 years, Erica has resumed her career as a medical coder. Tom is working hard to grow his business which is an auto repair shop that focuses on classic cars. Tom gets an opportunity to do some work on an old Buick in nearly mint condition. His obsession with the car leads to time away from home causing Erica to wonder if he's having an affair. Her insecurit...

Two weeks ago at this time I was safely settled in my room in a beautiful state park lodge, just a few miles north of the Ohio River. My guild's annual sewing retreat was to begin the next morning at 8 am. We spent the weekend at a new location and had an amazing time. Our group has gotten smaller in recent years and because there were fewer of us I think we were able to get to know one another a little better. It also meant that we were able to spread out more in the ballroom--more sewing space for each of us. Here are a few photos of the weekend: Sunrise the first morning. This was the view from my room. Here's a view of the ballroom set up. I took the spot down the room on the far right. Near the window! And here's the ballroom just a few hours later, full of quilters working away. My sister-in-law had asked me to make something out of this pre-printed wolf panel. Here are a couple of shots of my work. Now I just need to quilt it! On Saturday we took a...

Hard to believe, but the 2012 Brenda Novak Auction for the Cure of Diabetes is right around the corner, little more than 2 months away. Since my Teen has this disease, I've been contributing a quilted project for several years now. This year, I'm offering something a little different that I hope will appeal to authors, but perhaps readers might like this, too. I am offering to make a "book cover wall hanging"--that is I will design and make a wall hanging that includes the images of up to 4 book covers. High-resolution files, submitted by the winning bidder, will be printed onto fabric and sewn into a quilt that will probably measure around 24" x 18", depending on how many book covers are used. To illustrate what I'm thinking of, I made up a prototype for Brenda as a thank you for all she's done to make the auction happen. I chose to work with Brenda's latest series and started with these three book covers: I need to pause a momen...