Quilts and Books

Wow! I haven't posted a quilting update in ages. I went back and looked and realized that I haven't finished a project since September. Me, being me of course, started a couple of new ones. And I did churn out a dozen Kindle covers for my ... ahem ... Etsy store  (Christine may now say "I told you so."). Remember the paint chip challenge? Here's the table runner I made (it's not quilted yet): Remember the Block of the Month? The project that will one day look like this: I've got 7 blocks done and a mile of sashing: Now, if you want to see some seriously beautiful little art quilts that are bright and funky, you MUST  follow this link . Frieda Anderson, a quilt artist & teacher came to town and I got to take a class from her a couple of weeks ago. The class project was the cone flowers quilt that's in the 3rd row of that link, 2nd from the left. Mine's only partway done, but here's a preview: So that's what I'm work...

In the United States it is Thanksgiving Day. A healthy percentage of us will spend the day with family and/or friends. We'll eat too much, watch some TV (football!), and hopefully even spend some time thinking of those things for which are thankful. In what has now become tradition, tomorrow, Friday, another healthy percentage of us will run out the door at some freakishly early hour to spend tons of money. Because despite how grateful we may be today, apparently we still don't have enough stuff. Since I hate crowds, odds are good I'll hibernate at home. But if you plan to do some shopping tomorrow, make sure you download this free app ! I think our society is very weird. Meanwhile, since I'm 53 years old, I decided to list 53 things for which I am grateful today. In the order in which they occur to me: My husband. My son. My parents, siblings, and their families. My in-laws, including my late mother-in-law. It's been 4 years since she passed and it surpr...

Some computer problems have kept me off other blogs as well as my own over the last couple of weeks. So I apologize that this is so late. I just hope I can remember enough about what I read back in October to make this coherent! The 5 books I've chosen for this list all have something in common--they have an uncommon twist in location (the historicals) and/or gender roles. It made for some rather fun reading last month and if you find yourself interested in any of these, I hope you, too, will appreciate what makes them different. 5. The Surrender of a Lady by Tiffany Clare . When I finished this book I was not at all certain that I would include it here.  Surrender is Clare's debut historical romance and while I thought that this highly sensual book was beautifully written, it wasn't terribly romantic. The book begins as Elena is sold by her husband into Constantinople's slave market in order to pay a debt. Her husband is weak and foolish and loses his own life. W...

Utopia  -- n  -- any real or imaginary society, place, state, etc., considered to be perfect or ideal. So tonight I finished Happy Ever After  by Nora Roberts . There's an excellent review of it here at AAR. I loved that the reviewer called the series "wedding porn." Yeah, it's definitely that. All-in-all this proved to be an enjoyable, lighthearted series that celebrates love and the best of our WASP-ish wedding traditions. The books are heavy on various elements of weddings and the wedding planners who make them happen. The level of romance varies, and I think HEA is the lightest when it comes to the romantic relationship--in this case between Parker & Malcolm. That's actually a tad disappointing, because after the 3 previous books, Parker had the biggest buildup to be heroine in her own story.  There's a sentence in that AAR review that got me to thinking: Add that to the fact that four best friends are living together in a mansion (weren’t you p...