Quilts and Books

1 Wedding.
1 Minor Fender Bender.

1 Lunch with a Super Librarian.Pie was included. What a treat to meet Wendy and I thank her for taking her lunch hour to make time for me.
2 National Parks. The Grand Canyon and Mesa Verde.


7 States slept in. Indiana, Missouri, Texas, Arizona, California, Arizona (again), Colorado, New Mexico.

7 Quilt Shops visited. My personal attempt to aid the economy.
8 hot air balloons sighted in the cool morning air over Albuquerque as I rode to the airport on Saturday. Practice for the annual balloon fiesta?
11 books read. Several candidates for my monthly Phaves list.
11.5 yards of fabric purchased. Plus one kit and 2 notions. If you look closely at the picture you'll see some fabric with the Route 66 logo. Since we were on or parallel to Rt. 66 from St. Louis to LA it seemed appropriate to buy some Rt. 66 fabric. I also got some Southwest Indian-style fabric and have a great idea to make a quilt with it. Then just some general yardage that struck my fancy.

26 degr…

I'm on vacation and reading up a storm. But intermittent access to a computer and the internet mean no TBR posting this month. I'll be back soon!

June 2009 was probably my lightest reading month since I began this blog. I read 11 books. Normally I read at least 20. I just ended up getting busy with stuff, not to mention I had to finish a quilt for the wedding I'm attending tomorrow. (Picture to come.) As I look at the list of what I read, I will say that I enjoyed them all, but really, only 3 deserve the status of "phave." They are:

3. Gotcha! by Christie Craig. I continue to thoroughly enjoy these funny books with their witty dialogue by Ms. Craig. Can I call them light-hearted romantic suspense? That seems an oxymoron. There's definitely tension as the heroine is being stalked by a seriously bad dude. But her attitude, her relationship with the hero, as well as her relationships with her family members are wonderfully depicted. The secondary characters are lively, not dull wallpaper background for the hero/heroine. There's snappy pacing and it was truly hard to put this one down.

2. Don't Tell by Kare…

We're headed out west in a few hours. Driving cross country to my niece's wedding. With DH doing the driving I should get lots and lots of reading done. No blogging though. I owe a 5 phaves for June. Sigh. Happy 4th everyone!
When I get back, pictures of the quilt I made for a wedding gift. Simple, but striking.

Our retreat this year featured an opportunity to make a mystery quilt (instructions are passed out in phases--you bring the required fabric, but have no idea what you'll end up with). I had cheated by finding the pattern online. I decided the project would be a great way to use up some of my green fabric and make my first monochromatic quilt. Here's the quilt top that I finished the other day:
As I selected the fabrics for this I first aimed for some true green in the 3 required values of light, medium, and dark. To add interest, I chose greens that were on the yellow side of the color wheel and on the blue side of the color wheel.

Now that I study the completed top, I see that I should have worked harder to incorporate the blue/green. Only one blue/green fabric stands out, but you can see quite a bit of yellow/green. When I picked these fabrics, I really liked how they looked together. Indeed, I still do. But after making Springing Up Fun and my Flower Pots, this quilt seems k…

This month's TBR theme is "tortured hero or heroine" and I think Clay Montgomery from Brenda Novak's Stillwater trilogy fits the bill.

I was the winning bidder last year at Brenda's auction for an autographed set of this trilogy. I finally got around to reading the first book back in December. I liked it very much and really meant to read the next two sooner than this. But conveniently for me, when I needed a tortured hero I knew just what to read.

This romantic suspense trilogy tells the story of the Barker/Montgomery family who is deeply affected by the mysterious disappearance of their father/step-father, the Rev. Lee Barker, some 19 years before the books begin. The Rev. Barker was a beloved figure in tiny little Stillwater, Miss. and despite a total lack of evidence, step-son Clay Montgomery was presumed guilty of murder. With no body, Clay was never charged, but he is largely shunned and left friendless over the years by a community convinced he is to blame …

Mary Balogh’s last series of connected books, her “Simply” books, were released 1 per year from 2005-2008. As I understand it, she actually wrote much faster than that. Her publisher saved up her most recent books in order to release them at a rate of 1 per month from February through May of this year. And now we’ll wait another year for the next new book which will conclude this latest series.

1. First Comes Marriage. Feb. 2009
2. Then Comes Seduction. March 2009
3. At Last Comes Love. April 2009
4. Seducing an Angel. May 2009

It’s a strange move by the publisher on a number of levels. And I’m not entirely certain that I liked it. And I'm a huge fan--it was certainly nice to get some new books by her more often than once a year. But once a month? Obviously, it’s a blatant ploy to generate so much interest that those of us who bought books 1-3 (issued as MM paperbacks) would then happily plunk down the big bucks for the hardback. Phooey. I bought 1-3 and then put my name on the library…