Works in Progress: Quilts, Books, and More

I am slowly finishing Row By Row kits and patterns which I obtained two summers ago. This kit featuring goldfish is so pretty, complete with crystal air bubbles. 

 The quilt was made with fusible applique and machine quilting.

I am also getting back to making blocks for my Great Gatsby quilt. Here is Jordan, Daisy's friend the tennis star. The design is based on a fashion illustration circa 1924.

I still have embroidery to do on this block showing Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway. The design is based on a fashion illustration circa 1924.

I have started the Peter Pan Story Book Quilt blocks, designed by Marion Cheever Whiteside Newton. I found a copy of the pattern on Etsy.

 Tink needs hair still.

 One mermaid's tail still needs appliqueing.

On my reading list right now:

• Only Child is an e-galley from First to Read and concerns a family in crisis after a school shooting.
• I just completed The Winter Station, based on a real plague in 1910 Manchuria.
• Starlings is a book of short stories.
• Self-Portrait with Boy was given high praise from a Goodreads friend.
• As Bright as Heaven is historical fiction about the 1918 Spanish Influenza, set in Philadelphia.
• I finished The Immortalists, in which children who learn the day of their death must decide how to live their lives.
• Poetry for Kids Robert Frost is part of a series of books I have enjoyed reviewing.
• West is a novel that intrigued me when I saw it on Edelweiss, as did The Which Way Tree which I saw on NetGalley.

Not yet downloaded from NetGalley are First Ladies of the Republic by Jeanne Abrams, Gateway to the Moon by Mary Morris, and Lear by Harold Bloom.

I am still reading giveaway wins Debriefing by Susan Sontag and Winter by Karl Ove Knausggard.

W.W. Norton shipped me this slender book. I am saving it for when I have a full afternoon free to read it in one sitting.

 And also still to be read is this LibraryThing book.

We have new siding and gutters! We changed where the gutters were, added rain barrels, and put gutters on the garage.

When my husband saw this Gum Drop tree in a catalog he remembered how his grandmother always had one. So we bought one!

It was so cool to see this Tammis Keefe linen towel ad in a 1958 magazine! I purchased reproductions several years ago and use them in my decorating. You can see one under the Gum Drop tree above.

My hubby has been making cookies! I went on a butter run today. He is enjoying making bread and baking and cooking now the yard and garden work is over. That gives me more time for reading!

The 1958 magazine had some cute illustrations of Christmas shopping. Don't you love how the lady is shopping in heels?

She changed her scarf color and how is wearing boots with the kids. Balloons in winter--that is novel.

I don't have much Christmas shopping to do and the big gifts are taken care of. For our gift to ourselves we bought tickets to the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. We will take our son to two concerts at Orchestra Hall, and we bought tickets to the Neighborhood concert series.

What are you working on? How is your shopping and decorating going?

Works in Progress, TBR Books, Sad News

Sunset from late October

Frost and cold arrived late this year in my part of Michigan. In October we watched people walking dogs in shorts and flip flops and then temps dipped into the twenties. This past week we had an Arctic Blast!

This week's last roses of summer--or rather, autumn

There are still green leaves on the apple trees, now curled and frost-bitten. We are waiting for the maple leaves to fall.

Now that summer's heat is over I am back to hand quilting my Austen Family Album quilt. I sure hope to finish it this year!

I made a lap quilt top to go into our living room, a pattern I previous made in a little larger size. In January I plan have my projects machine quilted. I can't keep up with quilting any more!

I picked the colors to match my newly upholstered 1930 club chair. A quilt friend made me matching pillows for my settees.

My grandfather Milo bought this chair in 1930

fabrics from Connecting Threads

Matching pillows

I found such lovely fabric called Neverland and was thrilled to find an Etsy shop with Marian Cheever Whiteside Newton's Story Book quilt pattern for Peter Pan! I plan to make some, not all, of the applique blocks and set them with pieced blocks made with the Neverland fabrics.

Peter Pan Story Book quilt pattern

Fewer books are published in these last months of the year. Look for my upcoming review on Elizabeth Berg's heart warming novel The Story of Arthur Truluv, and a sweet tale from Australia, A Hundred Small Lessons by Ashley Hay.

I am trying very hard not to put in too many requests for upcoming books. I have already read 158 books this year!

ARC from W W Norton: The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve

On my TBR shelf:

• Starlings by Jo Walton
• The Boat People by Sharon Bala
• Daphne by Will Boast
• As Bright as Heaven by Susan Meissner
• Gateway to the Moon by Mary Morris
• Lear by Harold Bloom
• Debriefing by Susan Sontag
• The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve by Stephen Greenblatt

Books I won and am expecting:

• An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
• Endurance by Scott Kelly
• Winter by Karl Ove Knausgard
• The Book of Joe by Joe Biden and Jeff Wilser
• The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin

ARC from W W Norton, The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah

Reading now:

• To Lay Rest Our Ghosts by Caitlin Hamilton Summie (purchased book!)
• A State of Freedom by Meel Mukhejee
• Building the Great Society by Joshua Zeitz

I am also going to reread Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro this month for one of my book clubs.Book club selections coming up that I am looking forward to next year include Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, plus rereading Gilead by Marilynne Robinson and Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. Books to be discussed which I have already read include Hag Seed by Margaret Atwood, The Gap of Time by Jeanette Winterson, and Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue--which my library club read last month! I likely won't need to reread those last three.

Bookish ARC win; review soon to come!

All the ebook reading has wrecked havoc on my eyes! I am glad to have 'real' books to read from Blogging for Books, giveaway wins, ARCs from publishers, and Bookish. It's easier on my eyes.

I also bought some great used books at the library book sale! I enjoyed Hannah Kent's The Good People, and I hear that her Burial Rites was even better--which must mean it is magnificent. I also snagged Zadie Smith's Swing Time!

My book sale finds

 My husband won a book club pack and we can't wait to use it! The author will Skype with the club! Hubby is in a mystery book club and also we will use it with the library book club.

Book Club pack win for Girl Waits with Gun

We are now without our two dear doggies. They both had cognitive dysfunction and were blind. After we had to let go of Suki, whose quality of life was no longer good, Kamikaze went downhill fast. They did everything together, helping each other remember to drink water, find their way around the yard, and they comforted each other when we were gone from the house.

Our dear Kamikaze, one of our last photos. She did not show her age.

Over Kaze's last months she became confused, slept all the time, and was restless at night. She had always slept very well before we lost Suki. Kaze was getting lost in the house and in the yard. I had to rescue her from under bushes and lead her home when she was waiting at the gate thinking it was the door to the house. Whenever we were out, and we only went away for an hour or so at a time, she waiting at the window, watching for our return.

We miss our girls so much!

We have had a pet for 44 years: a liter box trained bunny, two dachshunds, and four Shiba Inus. It is truly an 'empty nest' feeling we are experiencing.

our girls one year ago

Handkerchief Fashions,Story Book Quilts, and Patchwork story from 1964

Woman's Day magazine from June 1964 had an article about using handkerchiefs to make dresses! The overblouse seen in the photo above was made from five 14" linen handkerchiefs. The hand rolled white edges are seen.

 Above left party dress with a halter top and full skirt was made with fourteen 18" cotton handkerchiefs, plus satin ribbon for the straps and waistband.

The red and white cap sleeve blouse was made from two 23" cotton handkerchiefs with mitered and side slits at the bottom.

The sun dress, 'a flattering compromise between a muu muu and a shift" used fourteen 14" handkerchiefs. Two were folded over to make the yoke, with the others joined and fathered into the yoke.

Designed by Theresa Capuana these quilts had mail order patterns in crib and twin sizes, for the cost of $1.00 each.

 The story in this issue was Patchwork by Sharon Quigley McCann and illustrated by Ted Coconis.

"The tiny bag of minute triangles which had been, to say the least, a strange wedding gift had not entered Christine's mind since the occasion of her wedding shower until one evening about four months after she and Joe were married. She needed something worthwhile to absorb her time while Joe studied...the patches and her Aunt Amanda's desire that she make a quilt came as her salvation.

"She wants me to make a quilt. She gave me the first pieces for my wedding shower: a hundred at least. But there's a catch. The quilt must be entirely hand-sewn, and...after I put the first pieces together I can work on the quilt only when I feel unhappy.

"When it's finished, it will teach me a lesson about life, according to Amanda. She says it's a very important lesson.

"Four years, a pair of healthy twin sons, one law degree, and one dream home later, Christine decided, on Jennie's first day of school, to finish the quilt.

"Perhaps, she thought, she should give the quilt to Jennie on her wedding day, telling her of the events that each section's construction recalled to her mother. Perhaps by giving her the comfort that she had lived through these turmoils, she could cushion the blows that her daughter would inevitably feel.

"Putting the center piece in position, she attached the edges. Yes, that's what she should do: give the ugly thing to Jennie, as a sort of warning.

"She spread the quilt on the living-room floor and went to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee...as she walked into the living room and saw the quilt lying as she had carefully placed it, it seemed to assume and entirely different appearance from that it had had five minutes before.

"How could it seem, now, not to be homely? It looked, in fact, with its character of completeness, like a work of art? ...Why, it was actually beautiful!

"Now, now, is the lesson mine to learn. After so wrongly regarding it for all these years as the fruit of the worst hours of her married life, she knew now--ah, and this was the lesson she had never guessed in all the times she had tried! The quilt now, in its truth, in its oneness, in its deep beauty drawn from each of the episodes it recalled to its creator, declared it had been made lovingly, when she, girl-turning-woman, was at her best.'

Pride and Prejudice story book quilt

My first semester at Temple University I took a course on literary criticism. The professor told the class we should be sure to take three courses. Each was an honors course: John Milton, James Joyce's Ulysses, and a year-long, two semester course on Jane Austen. I took them all before my graduation in 1978. 

Joyce was not my favorite course. I was the only female in the class. The guys all liked to puzzle out Joyce. The professor was a Freudian. Still, I managed to get an A based on my 50 page paper on Bloom in Nighttown, with a Jungian interpretation. 

I came to really enjoy John Milton. I think I bored many a person with my yammering on about him. 

But Jane Austen I loved. I have read all of her books, complete or not, many times since then. And it is great that she has become so well known thanks to the many movies and television mini-series on her books.


                                                          Little Women quilt

After I made Marian Cheever Newton Whiteside's 1952 Storybook pattern of Little Women I was inspired to try my own Storybook quilt. I chose Pride and Prejudice. I researched images for inspiration: art, fashion plates, dance instruction books, and 19th c book illustrations. I turned the images into line drawings to base my patterns on. 

Each block shows an important scene from the novel. The sisters Jane and Lizzie; Darcy telling Bingly that 'she's tolerable enough' as Lizzie overhears; Rev Collins brashly introducing himself to Darcy; Lizzie visiting Charlotte Collins; Darcy's cousin telling Lizzie how Darcy saved Bingly from an unhappy marriage; Darcy rushing off to intervene between Willoughby and Lydia; Darcy handing Lizzie his letter of explanation that reveals how Willoughby seduced his sister Gerogiana; Lizzie realizing she loved Darcy and would never see him again; a triumphant married Lydia returns home; Darcy's aunt confronting Lizzie about being engaged to Darcy; and Darcy proposing to Lizzie.

I was uncertain if I liked the pink background and blue border on this quilt. So I did another version, all in Redwork!

Here is Lydia with Willoughby and another soldier.

And here is Darcy flanked by Bingly and Bingly's sister.

Some day I hope to make another Storybook quilt. I have Pinocchio and two other Whiteside patterns. Or I may make my own favorite book again!

Update: Patterns for the Pride and Prejudice quilts are now available at my etsy store Rosemont Needle Arts found here.