COVID-19 Life: Books & Quilts & More

I have now made four Cherish quilt blocks! Everyone says this strawberry themed block is their favorite so far. 

My husband ordered a signed copy of Stacy Abram's new novel While Justice Sleeps!

New on my NetGalley shelf is

• Still Life by Sarah Winman whose Tin Man I reviewed

Dad planted a spirea in the yard many years ago. This spring it is going to be magnificent!

The farm market has returned to our local park. This week I brought home rhubarb and made strawberry rhubarb short cake!

The fur grandkids are sun lovers. Lately, they have been gathering in the morning to enjoy the sunny spot in the living room. I love seeing these photos of them all together.

Ellie, Gus, and Sunny get along quite well, especially Gus and Sunny who are best buds.

Seen on my walks this week is a fairy garden with a flying pig...

and a naturalized front yard with gigantic Solomon's Seal.

Stay safe. Find your bliss.

Covid-19 Life: Quilts, Books, and Spring Flowers

Happy May Day!

The trees in the neighborhood are in full bloom.

Including the crab apple in our front yard.

I have completed the second block in Barbara Brackman's Ladies Aid Sampler Quilt, the cow under the tree. Which to me looked like Ferdinand the Bull so I gave him a flower to smell.

A friend shared some teapot embroidery patterns to add to the tea cups I embroidered.

And I showed the Water Lily quilt to the quilt group when we met at the park.

Water Lily quilt by Nancy A. Bekofske

I picked up a few books at the library (they are still closed to the public, they leave the books outside on a table.) Early Morning Riser by Katherine Heiny is set in Michigan's Up North town of Boyne City. It was a great read, warm and charming and funny. And The Chanel Sisters by Judith Little whose Wickwythe Hall I read last year.

New on my NetGalley shelf:

The Heron's Cry by Anne Cleeves, second in the Detective Venn series; read my review of The Long Call here

Talk to Me by T. C. Boyle in which a chimp has been taught to talk in sign language

My brother and his girlfriend are walking the North Country Trail across Michigan. Last weekend's threatening clouds produced some dramatic photographs as they crossed Kalamazoo County.

And Book Club Cook Book win book A Hundred Suns by Karin Tanabe arrived.

My quilt friend Theresa Nielson shared a 1925 baby book with me and I was able to track down the family on Ancestry, with help from Newspapers.com. The family is excited to be reunited with this terrific heirloom. It included photographs and hair snippets and newspaper articles.

The vintage art work was adorable.

My family and close friends have all received their second vaccination shots. It is a relief, especially as Michigan continues to have the highest case numbers. One in eleven people in our county have had the virus. Our small town of under 12,000 has had 747 cases and 23 deaths, a huge increase in cases this spring as it exploded in the schools.

The missed doctor appointments have been made up. And today my husband donned his mask and went grocery shopping. He missed it. I prefer Shipt!

This week saw the passing of astronaut Michael Collins, who was part of the Apollo 11 crew. Many years ago I made a quilt for the mission which I called When Dreams Came True. For as a girl, we all dreamed of going to outer space. The images were from NASA photos and created with fusible applique.

Michael Collins is on the left. detail from When Dreams Came True
by Nancy A. Bekofske

When Dreams Came True by Nancy A. Bekofske

Stay safe.

Find your bliss.

Covid-19 Life: A Quilt Finish, New Books, a Walk in the Woods, and The End of the Rainbow

I finished machine quilting the Water Lily quilt! I intend to wash it and the fabric and cotton batting will shrink some, giving it an antique look. I bought this Mountain Mist pattern early in my quilting life, almost thirty years ago. It was time I finally made it.

I hand appliqued it and machine quilted it. I should not have machine quilted it. It was a very bad idea. But, when I read that the quilting was to be echo quilting I did not want to do all that hand quilting. It is what it is.

Book mail from The Book Club Cookbook and St. Martin's Press included the paperback edition A Good Neighborhood by Therese Anne Fowler. 

I reviewed the galley when it came out. I wrote,

Foreshadowing began with the opening sentences, narrated in a voice that brought to mind Rod Serling introducing a Twilight Zone episode, setting up the story.

A girl sitting beside a swimming pool behind her newly built home. The neighbor boy welcoming her to the neighborhood. A typical day in a typical good neighborhood, upscale and friendly, a place where women gather for book clubs and teenagers can safely run in the local park.

But underneath the 'tenuous peace' simmers the possibility of fracture, the conflict of class and money and race and values. For some, conspicuous wealth is the goal. For another, environmental concerns are primary.

And probing deeper, there are secret desires and blooming love and the blindness we hold on to for self-protection.

Lives will be destroyed. A Good Neighborhood is a reflection of the social turmoil of our time.

New on my NetGalley shelf is

• Classical Crossroads by Leonard Slatkin, director laureate of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, on ideas for the classical music world to meet the challenges of the 21 st c. Slatkin blogged about these ideas over the pandemic as orchestra concerts were shut down. We had season tickets for concerts that never happened last year. But we did enjoy accessing online concerts!
• Zero Waste Gardening:Maximize Space and Taste with Minimal Waste by Ben Raskin. We took a class in organic gardening in 1973. I am interested to learn about new techniques that address zero food waste.

From Goodreads giveaways is coming 

• The Ground Breaking: An American City and its Search for Justice, about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre by Scott Ellsworth. I have read books that reference massacre, now I will learn more about this tragedy. 

And from The Book Club Cook Book I won

• A Hundred Suns by Karin Tanabe, historical fiction set in 1930s Colonial Vietnam

A snow was followed by temps into the high 20s, but our flowering fruit trees seem to have survived! I am thrilled since this is the year for a high apple yield from the Northern Spy trees. It is filled with buds ready to bloom.

I brought in the tulips. They were closed but opened with the warmth indoors.

April 22 was Earth Day. I was still in high school that first Earth Day. Students from a university had tables set up in the hall to educate us. I bought a pinback button still in my collect. Give Earth a Chance. Fifty-one years later,we still are hoping for changes that will protect our one and only home.

On Friday we went to Tenhave Woods in Royal Oak, Michigan to see the early spring wildflowers. The woods is next to the high school I attended and my biology teacher was instrumental in preserving them. 

Trillium are beginning to bloom, trout lily predominated in a yellow cloud, and we saw spring beauty and wild geranium. The may apples were budding. And we spooked a garter snake sunning himself.

We have visited the dentist and eye doctors, appointments we skipped last spring.  Last week we made some shopping trips into several local specialty stores, but are still using Shipt and pick up and social isolating. After all, these amazing vaccines are not 100% effective and we don't want to be the 5% who contract covid or pass it on.

I purchased masks with filters from Vera Bradley last summer and have been very pleased with them, plus they are pretty! I love the adjustable ear straps. They are now only $5.

Here are my obligatory fur grandkid pics. First up, Gus the kitten.

Sunny and Ellie go to Dogtopia where this  cute photo was taken. Apparently, the idea of a picnic did not appeal to the pups.

My brother and his girlfriend have been walking the North Country Trail across Michigan. Last weekend as they drove home, Martha caught this rainbow coming out of my brother's truck! 

Tom noted he was at the end of the rainbow, so perhaps was Martha's "pot of gold," but I suggested he also might be her leprechaun. 

Stay safe. And here's to finding the rainbow's end!

Covid-19 Life: Gardening, New Books, Quilts

Spring has come. Daffodils and hyacinth are in bloom, as is the pear tree. The robins are splashing in the bird bath, the sparrows have a family in the bird house, and the mason bees are finding nooks in the bricks.

About one year ago we went to the local gardening center to buy herbs. It is mostly outdoors, and even indoors, the building is open and has high ceilings. Last year we only had a mask for protection; this year we had our vaccinations, too.

We bought parsley and dill and Nasturtium seeds and some tools and things.

A dozen years ago we pulled the English ivy up from under the apple trees and I put down stones. This spring, we took up the stone and are planting companion plants for fruit trees. Our oregano patch had become huge, so we divided it up and took most to plant under the trees. I sowed Nasturtium in the sunnier parts. In the fall we will transplant our bulbs under the trees. Next spring, we will see the daffodils and hyacinths from the family room patio door!

The stones are now along the house and driveway where we put the Stella d'Oro lilies when the front yard was landscaped three years ago. They have done wonderful there!

It is to rain tomorrow and I can return to machine quilting my Water Lily quilt. It is a lot of work! But it would be even more had I hand quilted it. My other projects are backing up, waiting for me to finish this quilting. But I did the first month block for Barbara Brackman's new quilt along project, Ladies Aid New York Sampler. Being from New York, I 'had' to participate! 

I am not using reproduction fabrics for this quilt. I have loads of that background fabric and need to use it. Truthfully, the fabric was once bedroom curtains in a house we lived in for 17 months! I kept it figuring I would use it some day.

A few more books have been added to my shelf.

• The Writer's Crusade: Kurt Vonnegut and the Many Lives of Slaughterhouse-Five by Tom Roston
• Among the Beautiful Beasts by Lori McMullen, the story of the early life of Marjory Stoneman Douglas, known in her later years as a tireless activist for the Florida Everglades
• Beautiful Country: A Memoir by Qian Julie Wang, about her undocumented Chinese immigrant family

I won A Good Neighborhood by Theresa Anne Fowler from the Book Club Cookbook.

And I purchased some poetry books for National Poetry Month. First to arrive are two books by Joseph Fasano, whose The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing I reviewed here.

Fasano shares his poetry online, as well as his music, and I have greatly enjoyed both.

We are watching Ken Burn's Hemingway on PBS. I have my grandfather's For Whom the Bell Tolls, printed in 1943, and two 1970 books I bought as a high school senior, and the short stories we bought for our son to read in school.

Here are the grandpuppies at doggy day care, looking very springy.

The quilters are meeting in the park. Most now are fully vaccinated. Years ago, I donated fan blocks I had made to the 'free table' and Bev Olson has been embellishing them with her wonderful embroidery and beading. She has created an amazing quilt from them!

And another friend dove into her fabric scraps to make a double sided quilt; Roman Coins on one side, and on the back is this very cool assemblage.(Sorry, the quilt is sideways!)

We are excited that our son and his girlfriend both received their first covid-19 vaccination this week at Ford Field! The virus is wrecking havoc in Michigan, even in our small town. We have scheduled doctor appointments over the next few weeks, but otherwise are continuing to social isolate.

But, hopefully, in a month we will be able to have a family gathering again.

Stay safe. Find your bliss.