All My WIPs: Quilts, Books, Kitchen...

I can read a book in two or three days but hand quilting a bed sized quilt....takes me a lot longer! I am finally on the border of my Charles Dickens quilt. 

 

 

I usually work on it every Tuesday with the Clawson quilters and evenings at home.

I forgot about this Redwork project! It was hiding in a dough boy end table! The free designs from Mirkwood Designs were based on the original illustrations.

 

 I added a little more to Vintage Rose, but she is finished.

I found a fabric butterfly pin at a craft fair and bought it for my wall hanging I made a little while back. So perfect!

As you can see from the photo below that pin was really necessary. If only she had two in that color!

Every now and then I get out Love Entwined to work on the fourth border...

I also joined TWO local book clubs! For next week I have reread Jane Austen's Persuasion. For next month I will read Girl on a Train by Paula Hawkins and Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.

On my NetGalley shelf I have:

Daisy Turner's Kin: An African American Family Saga by Jane C. Beck
Wings in the Dark  a retro style mystery involving Amelia Earhart by Michael Murphy
Circling the Sun, a novel about Beryl Markham by Paula McLain
The Marriage of Opposites, a novel about the mother of Impressionist artist Camille Pissarro, by Alice Hoffman
Joy: Poet, Seeker, and the Woman who Captivated C. S. Lewis by Abigail Santamaria
Song of My Life: A Biography of Marilyn Walker Carolyn Brown (author of the novel Jubilee) by Caroline Brown.

Forthcoming book reviews include:
House of Hawthorne, a novel about Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife, by Erika Robuck
The Great Detective about Sherlock Holmes by Zach Dundas
Exit the Actress about Restoration actress and mistress of Charles II Nell Gwynn, written by Priya Parmar whose Vanessa and Her Sister I reviewed last year
Donna Bell's Bake Shop, a cook book and story behind the store by Pauley Perrette and friends
Shoot the Conductor: Too Close to Monteux, Szell and Ormandy, a memoir by violinist and conductor Anshel Brusilow
Worthy by Catherine Hyde Ryan whose Language of Hoofbeats I reviewed last year
The Truth According to Us by Annie Barrows who wrote the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
Language Arts by Stephanie Kallos who wrote Broken For You which I had enjoyed

Today we bought a lovely yellow rose and some herbs to plant this week. I am preparing sleeves for the quilts that will be in my guild's show June 5 & 6. And that kitchen remodel? We decided on a cork floor, the back splash for over the stove and behind the hood, and bought a hood.  (Jen said she bought one after she saw the great price!) Jen has bought my sink and has ordered the cabinets. The Wilson Art Betty laminate is available! Time to pack up the kitchen!

Dickens Quilting Progressing; Upcoming Book Reviews

I am trying to work more on hand quilting my Charles Dickens quilt. I have been taking it to my Tuesday quilters gathering.

In the next month many book reviews will be shared:

Songs of Sorrow by Samuel Charters, about Lucy McKim Garrison, early collector of Slave Songs

Abe & Fido by Mathew Algeo about Lincoln's relationship to animals, especially his dog

Romantic Outlaws by Charlotte Gordon about Mary Wollestonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley

The Children's Crusade by Anne Packer, a highly anticipated family drama

Children of the Stone by Sandy Tolan, how music changed the life of Ramallah refugees

The Last Bookaneer by Matthew Pearl, fiction about book thieves planning to steal a manuscript from Robert Louis Stevenson at his tropical island home

Recycled Hexi Quilts by Mary Kerr, using vintage quilts in making new quilts

Green Heroes Completed. Finally.

I finally completed my quilt on ecologists, naturalists, nature activists, writers, legislators, and other "green" heroes. I started it in 2012. I embroidered the portraits and names on green and set the blocks with a green leaf print on black.

Aldo Leopold, "A Sand County Almanac" author

I wanted to try something new. I decided to quilt images representing the different 'heroes' achievements. I don't think it is really successful. There is too much unquilted space.

I found the dark border fabric very hard to quilt. I used a green thread darker than the block fabrics. I quilted around the leaf shapes in the inner border and did a Methodist (sometimes called Baptist) fan in the outer border.

I hated doing the quilting, every one-and-a half spools of thread of it. Partly because the dark fabric made it hard to see the quilting, but also because I was so unsatisfied with the quilting...perhaps because I could not see it! I started it on my quilt frame, but found it was hard on my back and switched to a hoop.

The quilting took all winter and all summer and into the fall. It was packed up for three months or more because of moving. I lived in three addresses while I worked on it.

To illustrate how I did the quilting design, here is John James Audubon.

I chose his turkey illustration for the left side area behind his head.

Here is what the quilting looks like; I turned the photo into black and white so that the stitching shows up better.

Lois Gibbs, the grass roots organizer of Love Canal, has the danger sign on the left and a house and swing set on the right. I wrote a blog post about her on Nov. 5, 2012 found here: http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2012/11/my-green-heroes-quilt-lois-gibbs.html

It is one of my posts with the most traffic.

For Pete Seeger, the Clearwater sloop is in the background to represent his work with the Hudson River "Clearwater" Revival. 

And of course his banjo with it's famous saying also appears in the quilting.

I finished the binding today while watching Ken Burn's series The Roosevelts on TiVo. Teddy died in the episode I was watching. Of course he is on my quilt because of his work creating the national park system. 

Only a few of the drawing used for the embroidery were created by me. The rest were drawings from Better World Heroes "Eco Heroes," There are twenty "heroes" on the quilt.

Audubon

Rachel Carson

Wendell Berry