Quilts, TBR, News

I am busy working on quilts and reading my review books--but not preparing for Thanksgiving because our son and his girlfriend are hosting their families! 

Here is my quilt April Showers Brings May Flowers at my quilt group show and tell.

After six years, all my Wizard of Oz blocks are designed, embroidered, and set in a quilt top! I worked hard on the first designs, sketching, and resketching Dorothy and her friends and the witches. Then we moved, Seeing the Riley Blake Dorothy's Journey fabric spurred me to come up with some more blocks and finish this top! 

I have my Hospital Sketches blocks sewn together and am working on a border.

I made grand-pup Ellie a wardrobe of scarfs that slip over her collar. Also a fleece coat. We had an early snow before Halloween that lasted a week. Ellie loved it! Now we are scrambling to clean the gutters and mulch the leaves.

Ellie with her collar scarf in the October snow

We went to Orchestra Hall to hear a concert with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Maestro Leonard Slatkin directed Pictures At An Exhibition and a piece commissioned for his 75th birthday, Another Time composed by Mohammed Fairouz, based on poems by W. H. Auden and sung by Miles Mykkanen. We heard Fairouz's  Cello Concerto Desert Sorrows when it premiered with the DSO several years ago. The concert began with Rossini's Roman Carnival Overture and an encore of a Russian sailor's dance started and ended the concert.

We also bought tickets to see the Swingel Singers in a Christmas Concert.

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I was thrilled to notice that I am now an Amazon Top 1000 Reviewer! Whoo-hoo!

I found a note written to me by my grandfather dated right after I started college. "Write Write Write!" he advised.

I have been listening to the upcoming audiobook of Romalyn Tighlman's novel To The Stars Through Difficulties, which I reviewed here. I am so enjoying the audiobook and revisiting Romayln's wonderful story.

Several more egalleys have been added to my virtual shelf:

• Fannie Lou Hamer by Maegan Parker Brooks, a biography of the Civil Rights heroine
• The Cadottes: A Fur Trade Family on Lake Superior by Robert Silbernagel
• The Girl in White Gloves by Keri Maher, historical fiction about Grace Kelley
• Frida in America by Celia Stahr about Frida Kahol
• The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner
• Miss Austen by Gil Hornby

Still to be read are

• The Great Unknown by Peg Kingman
• A Good Neighborhood by Theresa Ann Fowler

Next up on my reading list is ARC

• Eden Mine by S. M. Hulse

Also coming is ARC

• Rachel Maddow: A Biography by Lisa Rogak

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Today begins a week of work in the house--we are replacing forty-year-old vinyl flooring in the entryways with porcelain tile and then installing new carpet!

Before grouting...

The carpet is fifteen years old--and maroon! We will replace it with a lighter, neutral "sand" color, as seen in the computer-generated visualizer pic below.

There will be a lot of rearranging of furniture to come. I already moved the piano from the living room into my office.