Quilts and Books

My last finished quilt of the year is a twin-sized quilt that's my version of this quilt  by Melissa Corry found on the Moda Bake Shop site . I even used the same fabric, Sphere by Zen Chic . The fun thing about this particular pattern is that the maker needs to put the strips together randomly making it highly unlikely that there are two identical quilts made from this pattern. But since I used the same fabric, mine looks very much like the one Melissa made. I like the name, "Mister DJ," because it does remind me of the indicators on a music board. It's a very clever design. This pattern uses two rolls of pre-cut strips. I had to separate the strips into high-volume, low-volume piles and then cut them into sets of varying lengths. The cut sections were then paired and sewn together with a small strip of the green. I wound up with 210 strips. In a pile they looked like this: They had to be pieced together randomly, so in order to ensure that, I jumbled t...

May your heart be filled with love.

To Scotland with Love  is Patience Griffin's debut book. And it's the first book in her "Kilts and Quilts" series. Quilts! Quilts! ..... Oh, what's that? The theme this month is the holidays? Never fear! While the grass is green on the cover, the first two-thirds of the book take place in the days and weeks leading up to Christmas and it ends a few weeks after Easter. Lots of holiday stuff within. And quilts. Cait Macleod moved to Chicago from Scotland with her parents when she was 13. A short time after that, Cait's mother died of cancer. Cait grew up, began a career as an investigative journalist, but gave it up to marry her husband, Tom. He turns out to be a serial cheater and dies in the middle of sex with another woman. I assume Cait's father is also dead because Cait decides to sell everything she owns and move back to her home town in Scotland where her only remaining relative lives, her maternal grandmother, Deydie. Cait and Deydie haven'...

Judy Niemeyer is a quilt teacher, pattern designer, fabric designer, and all-around very creative person. She and her family run a company called Quiltworx.com  and I highly suggest you click on that link, go to the Products tab and select Patterns to see the wide range of exquisite quilts she has designed. Her stuff has become very popular of late. Her patterns use a unique paper piecing technique that is remarkable for the way it helps you organize all of the pieces you need to make her designs. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, so I took a class in November from my local quilt shop using one of their most basic patterns, called One . It is a long curved leaf sewn to a two-color background. It makes a nice table runner or a nifty wall-hanging. Here is half of my leaf before it has been trimmed: Here are both halves of my leaf, trimmed, but not sewn together: Here are a bunch of leaves held by some of my classmates: Here's my leaf, all finished and quilted...

In November my re-reading continued via audiobooks, most notably Joanna Bourne's The Spymaster's Lady  and My Lord and Spymaster . Her newest book, Rogue Spy  was released this month and when I heard that it overlaps some of her earlier books, I decided to re-read them all. And this time to try the audio versions. I like the way narrator Kirsten Potter reads these books and I'm looking forward to listening to Black Hawk  next. A comment by Emily Jane on Twitter reminded me that Bring on the Blessings  by Beverly Jenkins has been in the TBR for a few years now, so I moved it to the top of the list and I'm glad I did. This novel is not a romance, although it has some romantic elements. It's a fascinating story that was touching, funny, and thought-provoking. Set somewhere in modern-day, rural Kansas, it uses as its backdrop the history of freed slaves who migrated west after the civil war and founded towns that thrived for generations. Today, only Nicodemus, Kans...