Quilts and Books

Tonight I finished my happy rainbow quilt and emailed a picture to Brenda Novak to list on the auction site . Hopefully it'll appear there within a day or so. Meanwhile, here are some fun facts about this quilt: 1. This quilt is a traditional 9-patch design. The layout, though, is a modification of a design by Jean Nolte that appeared in the 2010 March/April issue of Fons & Porter Love of Quilting magazine. That quilt, "Dream in Color" emphasized value placement. I decided to play with color placement. 2. This quilt is made entirely from my stash (see picture in the sidebar). I have been quilting for over 25 years and collecting fabric for most of that time. I found one fabric with a copyright date of 1989 in the selvage. Another fabric I remember purchasing last summer while on vacation . I am certain several other fabrics are at least 15 years old. 3. There are 1,053 individual 1.5" squares in the finished top. It measures 54" x 40.5". 4. I began t...

Despite the quilt and the kid's track meet, I managed to finish my TBR read! (There's a fair bit of down time during a track meet.) But I have no time to write a review. Not that it matters. This is a much-loved book and now I know why. I loved it. Wonderful. Engrossing. There was no excuse for letting it sit on the TBR pile so long. I think I forgot it was there. My copy, which I bought off Amazon Marketplace, is a castoff from the Dallas Public Library. How about that? I must now pass it along to the QBFFs and a few others to read. And now, back to finishing that pesky Happy Quilt .

I'm working hard to get this finished so I can get it bound and a decent picture taken to send to Brenda for the auction . My goal is to be done by Monday. Tonight I finished the quilting. No TBR book this month.

Almost exactly a year ago, I read Miranda Neville's first book, Never Resist Temptation . It was an April 2009 Phave . At the time I remarked how surprised I was at how much I liked it, because, frankly, I expected another wallpaper historical. That is not what I got then, and that is most definitely what I did not get with Neville's latest, The Wild Marquis . Sadly, the title does lend itself to thinking "Wallpaper, ahoy!" but honestly, just like with a Harlequin Presents, you cannot judge a book by its title. And while we're at it, don't judge this book by its cover either. TWM is Neville's second book and I found myself liking this one even more than her first. It is not connected to NRT. This book is about Juliana Merton, a widowed bookseller who is barely able to make ends meet. Despite her extensive knowledge of books and the book trade, book collectors, who were mostly men, were unwilling to trust her abilities or hire her to act as their agent dur...

I realized recently that I have a tendency to do everything I can think of to postpone the moment when I will finally put the first quilting stitch into a finished quilt top. After all, I've worked so hard to get the right combination of colors together and done my best to see to it that all the seams align as well as they can. Then I lay it out with a backing and batting and I have my quilt "sandwich" all ready to be quilted. Like this: Sometimes it can take me weeks, and yes, years, to get around to finally quilting a top. Because figuring out how to quilt it and which thread to use can be very intimidating. It's a good thing I am on a deadline with this one, or I think I would not have started. I have been calling this My Happy Quilt . Flowers also make me happy. So I decided to free-motion quilt flowers. And while at the retreat 10 days ago, as a friend helped me pin the layers together, she also gave me some wonderful advice about which thread to use. And she was...

I have to look back and thank March 2010 for being an unusually pleasant month. Normally, March is anything but pleasant around here. It's usually cold and damp and busy. Yet after our record-breaking snows of February, spring burst upon us. We had quite a bit of sun. I had ample time to read. I even liked most of what I read. And then I made a happy quilt for the Brenda Novak auction . Really, I do hate to see April arrive. Because there's that little matter of my taxes... Before I list my top 5, I have to give an honorable mention to The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie , a re-read that I liked just as much this time as I did the first time around. Another book that almost made the cut was Karen Ranney's A Promise of Love . This is one of her earlier books. Twice widowed, Judith is a woman who has suffered terrible abuse at the hands of her second husband. She is unwanted by her family, so her father sends her off to Scotland to a man who survived Culloden and has watch...