COVID-19 Life: TBR, Quilts, News

I finished my embroidered cat quilt by machine quilting it on my new Bernina 570 QE! I am working on some surprise projects next.

Meanwhile, I am waiting for batting to arrive so I can hand quilt my Great Gatsby quilt.

Almost all the fabrics have arrived for my Mountain Mist Water Lily quilt. I saw this image online and it's my color inspiration.

I have read 88 books this year!

New books on my TBR shelf include two Goodreads wins:

• The Great Indoors: The Surprising Science of How Buildings Shape Our Behavior, Health, and Happiness by Emily Anthes
• The Restaurant by Pamela M. Kelley, woman's fiction about sisters in Nantucket

And from NetGalley:

• Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars by Kate Greene about her experience in a Martian-like environment
• Nick in which Michael Farris Smith imagines Nick Carraway's war experience before going to NY and meeting Gatsby
• His Truth is Marching On by Jon Meacham about John Lewis

I had to share some great photos from family members.

Below is our grandpuppy Sunny in her backyard paradise. Melissa is using her furlough to spiff up the landscaping. 

Our niece's son's Bar Mitzvah was all virtual and shared online.

Our dear friend Shirley Williams passed away last week. Here she is as a young woman with her husband. She often told me about their meeting.

During WWII, Shirley was engaged when she went to a local dance and saw a dashing young pilot. She removed her engagement ring and announced, that is the man I am going to marry. He taught her how to fly and she also had a pilot's licence.

We will dearly miss Shirley.

The Clawson library staff is back from furlough and we are working on restarting the book club as a virtual meeting!

My brother is camping on Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula on Lake Superior, on the Sunset side, and has been sharing awesome photos!

We went to the local garden center. Everyone was wearing masks, even outside. We bought some basil and pots to repot some indoor plants and some gifts.

Otherwise, we are walking in the neighborhood early in the day and staying home.

Stay safe!

Covid19 Life: Week Six of Lockdown

When this photo showed up on my Facebook Memories I thought it was the perfect illustration for lockdown: it's a dangerous world out there. I don't even want to leave the house. Our two-square mile city of 11, 980 people has 54 known COVID-19 cases and 8 deaths.

So we have stayed at home. For six weeks. And we are to remain in social isolation into May.

Well, the battery lawn mower was broke and my husband had to arm himself with a mask and, in fear and trembling, enter the local ACE Hardware to bring home a new one.

We do take daily walks early in the day, 30-40 minutes.

I have been working on my Emily Dickinson quilt. I need to find more fabrics to add to the collages. Just before lockdown the quilters had planned a three stop quilt shop hop and I thought I would find what I wanted then. It didn't happen.

The idea behind the quilt is that Emily Dickinson has many faces.

The woman who avoided visitors and stayed at home and dressed in white.

 The poet who wrote about passionate and dark subjects.

The author of poems filled with images of flowers and bees and birds, the woman who loved to garden.

And the writer of valentine poems, love poetry and letters, a closet romantic. This is the block I most need to develop.

I also am working on embroidering a set of blocks I printed off some time ago featuring Brutus, the cat.

Book mail included Estelle by Linda Steward Henley. The story involves a woman who discovers forgotten history about the artist Edgar Degas.

I purchased Perfume River Nights by Michael P. Mauer set during the Vietnam War.

I am currently reading The Mountains Sing by Nguyen Phan Que Mai, a multigenerational story that takes us into 20th c Vietnamese history.

On the shelf to be read:

• In Search for Safety: Voices of Refugees by Susan Kuklin, a LibraryThing win 
• Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight against the Drug Companies That Delivered the Opioid Epidemic by Eric Eyre, a Goodreads win
• The Party Upstairs by Lee Conell is set in a NYC apartment house
• A Heart Lost in Wonder by Catharine Randil, a biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins
• Superman is Not Coming to Save You by Erin Brockovitch on water safety
• The Last American Aristocrat by David S. Brown, about Henry Adams
• Magic Lessons by Alice Hoffman, another Owens family prequel
• Pale Morning Light with Violet Swan by Deborah Reed, fiction about a painter
• The Brother Years by Shannon Burke, family drama set in 1970s Chicago
• How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue, set in Africa, by the author of Behold the Dreamers
• Vesper Flights by Helen MacDonald, essays on nature
• The Lost Pianos of Siberia by Sophy Roberts traces pianos from Siberia
• Bronte's Mistress by Fiona Austin imagines Bronson Bronte's love affair
• Chasing Chopin: A Musical Journey Across Three Centuries, Four Countries, and a Half-Dozen Revolutions by Annik LaFarge
• The Truth About Baked Beans: An Edible New England History by Meg Muckenhoupt

My brother continues to seek out the quiet places. These photos are from his early morning kayaking on the canal behind his home.

We had a social distancing visit with our son, his girl, and the grandpups and Hazel the cat.

Little Sunny wanted so bad to give us kisses! She is about full grown now.

And, I finally found a mask pattern to adapt my way that I can feel good about. I left some with our son and will take some to my brother. In a few weeks my brother will be recalled from working at home to working in Dearborn. 

We also drove to my brother's house and left him some masks and some homemade bread. We stood in the yard, ten feet apart, and caught up.

We watched Star Trek Picard on CBS All Access on a free month trial. And every day I was Sir Patrick Stewart read a Shakespeare sonnet. I enjoy the Detroit Symphony Orchestra's free streaming of past concerts. This month I have enjoyed poetry shared across social media. 

I keep awfully busy!

And of course, we are cooking up a storm.

We don't have many meals with whole chicken, but this version with a honey curry glaze is wonderful.

This French Bean Vegetable Stew from Moosewood is a favorite.

 A simple dinner is gnocchi with white beans, tomatoes and spinach. topped with parmesan cheese.

Chicken and noodles with dumplings is the perfect comfort food.

I hope you are staying home and staying safe.

The Words Between Us by Erin Bartels

Peter reaches out to new girl in town Robin by giving her his deceased mother's books. As repayment, she writes him a poem about the book. Robin slowly allows Peter into her heart.

How can a book lover not love a story about books bonding people? Erin Bartel's novel The Words Between Us is filled with books--titles and authors, well-read dusty tomes and mass-market paperbacks--and conversations about books.

But, for Robin, books became an escape from the ugly truths of life, building a wall between her and the world.

"The shelf is filled with all but one of the books Peter had given me when I was a girl, each one a bottle containing some intoxicating fictitious liquor that promises to take me away from this incomprehensible chaos of real life and into a carefully plotted story.[...] Isn't there some literary cocktail that will help me escape?"~from The Words Between Us by Erin Bartels

At once point in her young life, Robin went so far as to stop talking, further constructing a protective shell. What drove a teenager to such extremes?

Robin's parents are both in prison and she cannot forgive them for abandoning her and cannot tolerate their crimes. Uprooted from her Amherst, MA, home to live with a grandmother in Michigan, she tries to rewrite her past with a new name and identity, lies that don't hold up. She is chained to her parent's legacy of notoriety.

Told in two timelines, the adult Robin watching her bookstore slide into bankruptcy and her backstory as a teenager, the novel explores themes of anger and forgiveness. There is romance and drama and friendship and threat and a reversal of everything Robin thought was true. Robin's foil is Sarah, a large-hearted girl who carries secret guilt under her party-girl persona.

The novel is set in a fictional small town on the Saginaw River in Michigan divided by a river. There is a journey that touches on all the Great Lakes, starting at Niagara Falls and ending on the sand dunes of Grand Marias on Lake Superior. The story concludes on Isle Royale, a National Park in Lake Superior. I loved all the Michigan mentions, including the Grand Rapids Art Prize and the carousel in the Van Andel Public Museum.

Grand Marias, MI on Lake Superior

I picked up on nods to Jane Austen. Robin's imagination concocts a wild story about Peter's father who later sends her out of his home--shades of Northanger Abbey! And there is Persuasion's wish-fulfillment hope for second chances.

Some aspects of the plot feel improbable, but most readers will be too involved with Robin to mind. The faith talk addresses a universal truth, and the romance is chaste.

Overall, I enjoyed reading The Words Between Us. It will appeal to a wide audience of readers: those who like appealing characters struggling with difficulties, young adult fiction readers, women's fiction, Christian fiction, and who love the current trend of bookish characters.

Sunset on Lake Superior

The Words Between us is Erin Bartels sophomore book; her first book was We Hope For Better Things; read my review here.

"I know why some books live on forever while others struggle for breath, forgotten on shelves and in basements...they might have told rollicking good tales and sketched out characters who were fun to follow for four hundred pages, but they hadn't bled. They hadn't cut themselves open and given up a part of themselves...they hadn't lost anything in the writing."~from The Words Between Us by Erin Bartels

I received access to a free egalley by the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Find a reading group guide at
 http://bakerpublishinggroup.com/books/the-words-between-us/391430

The Words Between Us
by Erin Bartels
Revell
Available Now/Sept 2019
Paperback ISBN9780800734923
E-Book ISBN9781493419302
$15.99

Late Summer in Michigan, Quilts, and Books

My 1857 Album quilt is finally complete! In 2016 Gay Bomers of Sentimental Stitches shared her patterns based on a historical quilt. I finished the top in 2017. A few months ago I took the top to a local machine quilter, Maggie Smith. She did a wonderful job!

I bought the green, red, and orange fabrics online. I found they frayed too easily for applique. That will teach me to buy online! Applique requires a tight weave.

The one things I would recommend is to wait until the top is done before adding the corner petal units. Mine came out wonky. I should have removed them and restitched them. But I didn't. Because I am complacent and lazy, lol.

 I substituted some of the original patterns and made up my own, like adding the printed portraits of 1957 presidents.

I made a Halloween table runner. I created the applique in the center based on the print. 

After a long stretch of 90+ degree heat it cooled down a bit and two weeks ago we went to the Stage Nature Center in Troy, MI for our walk. 

The Rouge River flows through the park.

The meadow flowers were blooming.

 The last time we visited we saw close to 20 deer, but this day we only saw one.

Our Rutgers tomatoes and apple trees are coming into peak season!

After my brother returned from backpack hiking into the Porcupine Mountains in the Upper Penninsula of Michigan he invited us to his place for a corn roast and for my birthday presents--Charlie Harper coloring books and The Man Who Planted Trees with woodcut illustrations.

Two weeks ago on my Sunday walk I came across a neighbor's garage sale and picked up a book by Pat Cox.

 I am quite charmed by Millie's Quilt.

 What a great scrap quilt this would be!

 Also pictured is this Single Wedding Ring quilt circa 1915.

I caught my interest because I have an heirloom quilt from my husband's great-great-grandmother that is a Turkey red and white Single Wedding Ring and I had thought it dated about 1915.

Harriet is pictured below on the left with her mother Margaret Scovil Nelson and holding her daughter Grace.

We went on a trip to Port Huron, Michigan. We donated Harriet's New Testament to the Port Huron Historical Museum for a long-term loan. The book is said to have belonged to John Riley, an Objibway chief, and son of an early Michigan trader. Riley was a translator for The Treaty of Saginaw. He and his brothers James and Philip are mentioned in history books with Louis Cass, fighting for the Americans.

I just hung this handkerchief quilt wall hanging which I made some years back. The Japanese contemporary handkerchief is beautiful! I added three borders extending the motifs.

I was recently contacted by a man who saw my review of Simply Austen. He noted I had studied with Prof. Toby Olshin at Temple and was excited to find someone else who remembered and revered her.

As if I didn't have enough books to read...I jumped on the bandwagon to join The Goldfinch readathon sponsored by Little, Brown on social media. It was on my TBR shelf and it was a good excuse to pick it up. I am so glad, too--it's wonderful!

The Goldfinch 

Our local library is having a book sale. I picked up some vintage books.

 The Sunbonnet Babies are adorable.

 I can't resist this pattern with the baby reading a book.

 A cat lover has joined our family. Perhaps these patterns will be of interest to her.

I love Rumor Godden's fiction and memoirs about living in India. She also wrote books for children, like The Mousewife.

What have you been doing this summer?