Quilts and Books

It's series catch-up month for the TBR Challenge and this month it was a pretty easy choice. I have several books from this series that I've been wanting to read, so it was time to get back to them.

Badlands by Jill Sorenson is the 3rd book in her romantic suspense series named after the first book, Aftershock. I loved Aftershock and I also enjoyed the first book in her MC series, Riding Dirty. This book picks up with two of the characters from Aftershock and uses some of the same settings in Riding Dirty, around the Salton Sea of southern California.

Penny and Owen were trapped with several others in the earthquake described in Aftershock. In Badlands it's now five years later. Thanks to his heroics in the aftermath of the earthquake, Owen, an ex-con, is now working as a bodyguard for Penny's father, a presidential candidate. For years the two of them have kept their feelings for one another to themselves. Penny is a single mother devoted to raising her son, Cruz, and…

To those of you who offered me your condolences on the passing of my sister, I want to say thank you again for your kind words. It meant so much to me. It has really helped to finally talk about it.

So now I want to brag on my sister just a little bit. She really was exceptionally creative with her quilting; she put a lot of thought into the quilting of the quilt. Rather than try to tell you about it in my words, I'll just let these pictures of her quilts speak about it.

First up this is a little baby quilt. If you click to enlarge you'll see the pattern of flowers, leaves, and stems quilted in red and green.

Here's the quilt she did for the QBFF paint chip challenge back in 2011.

I currently have this one hanging in my kitchen nook. I love looking at it.
The small sections quilted with the rainbow variegated thread are a great touch.
The center section is quilted with metallic thread. This is not easy to do. It requires the right needle in your machine and adjustments to …

57 years.
3 months.
15 days.

That's how old my sister was when she died on December 30, 2015.

Char spent four and a half years in a tug of war with cancer. For a while there she seemed to be in total control. But that insidious disease came back and this time would not let up. Here's the kicker. She had uterine cancer, just like me. Only hers was Stage 4 when they found it. Mine barely qualified as Stage 1. Life is often unfair, but that seemed the cruelest irony of all. As I wept that she was dying, she wept because I was not.

It's taken me a long time to process this and to be willing to talk openly about it. Some of you reading this have been very open with your own struggles with health, grief, death, and dying. I've wanted to be, but I think I needed for the worst of it to be over first. Every time I tried to write about it, I'd sit paralyzed at the keyboard. I just wasn't ready I guess.

Char decided to suspend further treatment last August. It was making …

This book by Farrah Rochon has one of the best opening pages I've ever read. Seriously. You can go read it here at Amazon. It totally made me laugh. As did a few other parts of Deliver Me. I needed something that wasn't too serious and I lucked out.

Here's the blurb:

After being dumped by her boyfriend and passed over for yet another promotion, Monica Gardner moves to New Orleans, determined to make a name for herself as the new attending ER physician at Methodist Memorial Hospital. As for men--she's through with them. But when given the chance to chair the hospital's annual charity banquet, Monica must elicit the help of gorgeous Ob-gyn Elijah Holmes. 

Eli will do anything to thwart his matchmaking Mama's plan to reunite him with his high school girlfriend. So, when the sexy new ER doc asks for his help in planning this year's charity banquet, Eli devises the perfect scheme: He'll help put on the best banquet the hospital has ever seen, if Monica poses …

I haven't posted anything quilt-related in ages. Of course, I haven't published much of anything here since August, so I guess that's no surprise. This will be a quickie because I have to go and finish reading my TBR book.

So, back when I had my surgery, I had a nice 6-week staycation. I did a fair bit of sewing on a variety of projects which is another way of saying I finished almost nothing. Here's one thing I did finish in November, just before I went back to work.
The leaf blocks are small so the whole thing is about 9" x 14". The blocks were from a little kit I purchased. The pattern is by Designers Workshop. I took a class once from the owner, Eileen Sullivan, a long, long time ago. She taught me more about color than anyone else ever has--in just one six-hour lesson. I have several of her patterns. The kit included just the fabric for the leaves. I raided my stash for the rest of it.

At Thanksgiving my sister gave me a bunch of her Christmas fabric. I …

Like many of my fellow TBR bloggers, I have a large collection of holiday romances. I searched my Kindle for books with the word "Christmas" in the title and came up with at least a dozen titles. I remember this one by Beth Barany, an author I've not read before. I was intrigued by the cute premise of one of Santa's elves falling in love with a human. Plus it was only $0.99. I'm a sucker for those.

Dahlia, a Santa’s Elf, has 21 days left before Christmas to create the best toy in the world without using magic or revealing her true identity. Stuck on how to complete the prototype, and working as a temp in San Francisco’s financial district with no time for love, will her innocent Christmas fling get her unstuck, or will she turn her back on her beloved career for her heart? Liam, an up-and-coming financial analyst, swore off women after getting dumped by the love of his life. He just found out his ex is going to the company Christmas party with his rival Michael He…

So in my previous post I reported that I'd be having a hysterectomy because I had an early form of uterine cancer. I'm now home recovering, doing very well, and grateful for a pathology report that said the cancer was contained and further treatment isn't necessary. Just regular screenings.
I didn't think I'd get a TBR post done because I wasn't paying close attention to the calendar and thought it'd be too soon after surgery. But I got it done! It's short, but it's done. Yay me.

It's paranormal/romantic suspense month in Ye Olde TBR Challenge and I chose this military suspense novel that's been languishing on my Kindle for way too long. This is Book 1 in Kaylea Cross's Bagram Special Ops series. The series involves American military personnel stationed at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.
Deadly Descent is the story of Devon Crawford, an officer and Black Hawk pilot, who is fighting her attraction to Cam Munro an enlisted Pararescueman. C…