Distinctive Dresdens by Katja Marek

When I saw the cover to Distinctive Dresdens it knocked my socks off and I had to find out more. I learned that Katja Marek is an amazing designer of English Paper Piecing Hexagon quilts and that one of my weekly quilt group friends is in a group making her Millefleur Quilt Along, using patterns from her book The New Hexagon.

Marek has now created twenty-six amazing Dresden Plate variations.

Marek's Dresden Plate variations

The blocks include the traditional wedge shaped pieces and center applique of the Dresden Plate block. But Marek includes a folded insert piece and changes the shape of the center applique. The blocks are of increasing complexity ranging from two to six facets with mixed sized blades.

The book offers six projects including the Paper Lanterns Wall Quilt, seen below. The quilt includes 3-, 4-, 5-, and 6-faceted Distinctive Dresden blocks.

Clamoring for More, seen below, uses 5- and 6-faceted Distinctive Dresden blocks.

Other patterns include placemats, a Christmas tree skirt, a table runner, and cushions.

The blocks are complicated with lots of pieces and loads of personality. But don't be intimidated. Marek has provided everything you need for success.

Tools and equipment, from pattern paper and marking tools to needles and thread, are thoroughly discussed. The techniques used in construction are covered in step-by-step instructions with lots of photos and illustrations. For those new to paper piecing, don't despair, because Marek has that covered, too, with photographs to show how to sew the wedges and inserts together by hand and machine. Once the Plates are completed, she shows you how to remove the pattern papers.

Each block has its own full page, color photograph with templates needed and illustrations showing its construction and completion.

The blocks can be used in many ways, including in the projects she offers, each as carefully presented with instructions, illustrations, and photographs.

A note on the e-book version: If you are worried about buying an e-book of quilt patterns, be assured that they are quite wonderful. Links are inserted into the instructions that take you to proper pages for basic instructions and specific patterns, and you can access pattern pages for printing through a link to the Martingale website. Need resources? Links to the websites make finding the right supplies a click away.

I tried my hand at several blocks. This first one has three wedges (the piano keys). It went together very smoothly.

Distinctive Dresden block by me

This second one has four wedges (the music fabric) and the piano key fabric is the piece added for the 3-d effect. I was not as successful with this one.

But not too shabby for a newbie at English paper piecing.

Learn more about Katka Marek at http://www.katjasquiltshoppe.com/

I received a free ebook from the publisher through Edelweiss in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Distinctive Dresdens
Katja Marek
Martingale
Publication Date: September 6th, 2017
$26.99 paperback
ISBN: 9781604688528

Amusing Classic Crime Story For Grim Times

When George Ballairs penned his Inspector Thomas Littlejohn stories their humor appealed to war-weary British readers in need of a little light escapism. His third novel Death of a Busybody was published in 1942.

I have long wanted to read some of Poisoned Pen Press's British Library Crime Classics. The cover art of the series is gorgeous. And I am glad I requested this little gem, as it provided a bit of fun and relief I needed in these contemporary grim times.

The Rev. Ethelred Claplady of Hilary Magna and its smaller satellite sister city Hilary Parva is returning to the vicarage after pastoral visitations when he discovers Miss Tither laying face down in his cesspool.

The deceased had her nose into everybody's business, especially calling out the foibles and failings of her neighbors and pressing them to turn from their sinful ways. In her quest for the Christian improvement of humanity, she supports charities that carry on such good works as reclaiming fallen women. Miss Tither has made numerous enemies, all with a motive to do her in.

The murder depresses the Rev. Claplady who feels that all his efforts have fallen on 'stony ground.' (Sounds like a pretty accurate view of basic humanity!)

The murder 'has come at a most awkward time' and local authorities agree to call in Scotland Yard, bringing Inspector Littlejohn to investigate.

We meet colorful local villagers and become privy to the equally colorful rumors and gossip. It turns out that Hilary Magna is rife with sin.

I loved the humor. The gardener digging potatoes has "a huge backside protruding like some monstrous, black toadstool." Miss Tither's tongue was a weapon "which she used like a pair of bellows, fanning a spark of a whisper into a consuming fire of chatter, a holocaust of pursuing flame." I loved the rumor network reporting Miss Tither's death, with the story changing until it is reported that the "vicar's done it."

With another death, things get even more complicated, eventually revealing a charity fraud. "What a queer, even grotesque crime it is," said Sir Francis when the complicated relationships and animosities are revealed.

Death of a Busybody was a light fun read with a satisfying twist and wonderful characters. And to think, Bellairs wrote over fifty Littlejohn novels! That's a whole year of reading!

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Death of a Busybody
George Bellairs
Poisoned Pen Press
Publication Date Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 9781464207365
paperback $12.95

Quilts Old and New and Other News

It has been a very busy summer. I have been reading up a storm, trying to get in some quilt projects, and mothering our dear senior doggie.

I got out my 2015 Row By Row kits to complete. I machine sewed around all the fusible applique pieces. I decided to make several rows into small wall hangings or table toppers.

The quilt below was from A Little Quilt Shop in Waterford, MI, an area full of small inland lakes used for boating and sport. Techniques include fusible applique, machine sewing, and machine quilting. The kit included two sea gull buttons.

My brother lives on Cass Lake in Waterford and we have many pleasant memories of evening boat rides on the lake.

Our dad on my brother's boat on Cass Lake, Oakland County, MI

Setting sun over Cass Lake, Oakland County, MI

Waterlilies on canal access to Cass Lake

There are lilies on the canal that leads to the lake from my brother's back yard. This row from The Pincushion in Imlay City, MI, was one of my favorites from 2015. The kit came with pre-fused pink circles and the fabrics and pattern. To ensure placement of the applique pieces I traced the pattern on clear plastic, which could be laid over top the pieces before ironing down. Techniques include fusible applique and machine quilting.

I am still working the modern wall hanging Seed Collectors.

bottom portion of my wall hanging

Completed flowers of my wall hanging

The original quilt in the book

A Christmas block of the week is available from I Wish You A Merry Christmas on Facebook.  This lovely star pattern I just had to try. I'd like to make it again. This was hand appliqued.

Christmas block of the month

I love this block of vintage Christmas tree ornaments! I want to make it again and again with different fabrics!

I am trying my hand at several Distinctive Dresden blocks. My review of this new book is coming soon!

My Tuesday quilt group friend Theresa Nielson brought in quilts belonging to a client. I was amazed to see a Marie Webster French Basket kit quilt!

This pattern can be found in  Joy Forever: Marie Webster's Quilt Patterns, which can still be found for sale online.

 These are photos from the book.

 The original quilt kit fabrics are seen below and it appears that Theresa's client has the same fabrics!

Theresa is completing her client's English Basket quilt. The solid fabrics were in luscious Nile Green and a soft lavender.

Theresa Nielson and the English Garden quilt top

 The flowers are from a variety of 20s-30s era prints.

This pattern was shared as an heirloom pattern in Quiltmaker magazine in the March/April 1994 issue.

And, Theresa is washing this Grandmother Flower Garden for the same client.

Our Kamikaze's health has been precarious and several times in August we thought we had come to the big decision. Thankfully, we have worked with the veterinarian and Kaze is doing better, acting more like her old self. She has an enlarged heart and the medications that are keeping her alive gives her tummy issues and depresses her appetite. We lost our dear Suki a few months ago.

I had a sudden insight that I had better buy several books before they are no longer available in hard cover! Last year I had read library copies of The Nix by Nathan Hill and A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles. They were two of my most favorite 2016 books, so with my new Barnes and Noble membership discount I ordered copies for my library.

J. J. Abrams is bringing The Nix to television with Meryl Streep as the mother! And I am thrilled that Towles' book is on the best seller list!

 Our big Zinnias have attracted bees and lots of butterflies this summer.

We let part of the herb garden go to flower, and bees of all sizes and kinds flock to the flowering oregano!

I discovered that Goldfinch love to eat the Zinnia seeds!

We have a farmers market a few blocks away in the local city park. There has been a booth selling crafts to raise money for Alzheimer's disease research. I picked up some cute Altoids tins decorated with paper, paint, buttons, and other embellishments. I put in a small magnate and use them for my needles and pins. I keep my projects in plastic boxes, the kinds used for scrapbooking and available at craft shops. In each project box I have all the supplies I need--needles, threads, scissors, pins--for easy grab and go.

Last of all I want to share some of the lovely quilts that were in our city's  library in August. 

The Perils of Sudden Wealth: The Windfall by Diksha Basu

I love a good comedy of manners. A little social satire mixed with a light romantic comedy is the perfect pick-me-up between more weighty tomes. And I loved Diksha Basu's first novel The Windfall. It was a delightful read that had me laughing out loud, calling out, "listen to this one!"

Mr. Jha has sold his website for an $20 million and after two years has decided it was time to be "movin' on up" to a modern home in a posh upscale neighborhood.

For twenty-five years The Jha family has lived in an apartment building with the same neighbors with whom they have their little tiffs and warm friendships. But why wash in a bucket with a cup when they can have walk-in showers? It is time to buy toilet paper and install squirting water guns near the toilet. Mr. Jha has caught the conspicuous wealth bug, buying a Mercedes and ordering a Swarovski-studded couch. He wants to live according to their income.

Mrs. Jha is content with their old life. She enjoyed her job seeking our craftpersons and promoting their traditional hand crafted items. She sees no need to put aside her bucket and cup or to wear flashy diamonds. She is glad their son Rupak in America is studying for an MBA; she wants him to be a self-made man like his father. His family does not know that Rupak is failing his classes and is conflicted over having an American girlfriend, believing his parents would disapprove.

When Mr. Jha meets their new neighbor Mr. Chopka it sets off a war of who has the best toys. Mr. Jha is driven to assume the lifestyle of the wealthy, and Mr. Chopka needs to keep proving he is on the top rung of the ladder.

At first Mr. Chopka assumes Mrs. Jha is the maid, and later when the Jhas are at the Chopka home the maid appears dressed similar to Mrs. Jha! Mrs. Chopka is addicted to her iPad and Angry Birds, and thinks nothing of loosing a diamond earring.

I loved the characters. And I especially loved Mr. Jha's inner dialogs. He ponders the summer Delhi heat and wonders, "what was the point of all this new money if he couldn't escape the blistering midday temperatures? It should be possible, Mr. Jha thought, to have a small portable air conditioned Plexiglas cubical built to walk around in." He imagines a portable cooled environment, "perhaps with wheels. But then that would be a car."

The Jha's old neighbor Mrs. Ray meets Mr. Chopka's brother. The Jha's old neighbors the Guptas are pushing their niece, also studying in America, to meet up with Rupak. Mrs. Ray and Rupak struggle with convention, expectation, and love as they weigh their choices.

Through the Jha family I learned about modern India, the old and the new, the class struggle, and the battle between the West and traditional for the souls of its youth. It is a very funny novel about issues that are universal, while also allowing Westerners to appreciate and better understand Modern India.

I received a free book through Blogging for Books in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Windfall
By Diksha Basu
Crown
$26 hardcover
ISBN: 978-0-451-49891-5

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

I first read Dandelion Wine in my teens, back in the late 1960s. I had read through all of Bradbury's books, and a few years later when my younger brother needed a boost in his interest in reading I gave him my collection. It revitalized his interest. And my son has also read this novel, and most of Bradbury as well.

Because it had been so many years since I had read this book, when a local book club chose it for their monthly read I knew I had to fit it into my heavy reading schedule.

Reading Dandelion Wine in my mid-sixties was very different from reading it as a teenager. I read it in small bites, drawing it out over several weeks. I would pick it up and read a few paragraphs, or pages, or a scene, and my heart would hurt and my mind would thrill and I had to let the feeling just be for a while.

The nostalgia overwhelmed me. I was not alive in 1928, the year in which the book is set, and I never lived in this small Indiana town with the trolley and front porches with swinging chairs on creaking chains. Two Black Crow records and stereoscoptic viewers are antiques to me. But I felt the perfect beauty and preciousness of the time and place, of which the protaganist, Doug, finds himself suddenly aware.

Doug is a boy who is on the cusp of growing up, and has just discovered he "is alive." The other side of that knowledge also comes to him over the summer, for all that he wants to deny such knowledge: all that is alive will die, and all that is changes and passes.

"...does everyone in the world..know he's alive?...I hope they do," whispered Douglas. "Oh, I sure hope they know." 

Douglas takes a notebook and makes lists about life: Rites and Ceremonies, the cycle of known things, and Discoveries and Revelations/Illuminations/Intuitions, what he is just learning about life.

The passage that most hurt with bittersweet truth was when Douglas's friend John notices the colored glass in the attic window of a house. "I never saw them before today," John marvels. "Doug, what was I doing all these years I didn't see them?" "You had other things to do," Douglas responds. John is upset, "It's just, if I didn't see these windows until today, what else did I miss?" And since John is moving, it upsets him all the more, and he makes Douglas promise to never forget him.

I set my tablet down and looked around me. It is the end of August and the days are growing shorter. I felt the urge to go out, do something, see something new. Life is passing by, and here I am caught in the web of 'something else' and missing the colored glass in a window I pass every day. There are so few years left me, so few years of health and ability, and what am I missing? What have I not noticed?

In the forward, Bradbury writes, "I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiement and was statles when truths leaped out of bushes like quail before gunshot. I blustered into creativity as blindly as any child learning to walk and see. I learned to let my senses and my Past tell me all that was somehow true."

He uses the wine metaphor as a way of fathering "images of all my life, storing them away, and forgetting them." He plunged his memories and they bloomed into flowers that were captured in this rare vintage of Bradbury wine. I am so glad to have sipped it again.

"Here is my celebration then, of death as well as life, dark as well as light, old as well as young, smart and dumb combined, sheer joy as well as complete terror, written by a boy who once hung upside down in trees, dressed in his cat costume with candy fangs in his mouth, who finally fell out of the trees when he was twelve and went and found a toy-dial typewriter and wrote his first "novel."