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."

Life is a Journey by Betty Chan Tells Her Family Story

Life is a Journey by Betty Chan

I met Betty Chan at the Threads quilt show at the Troy Historical Center earlier this month. Her quilt Life is a Journey was on exhibit. The quilt tells the story of her parents' immigration to America. The back of the quilt is her genealogy.

I asked if we could met so I could learn more about her quilt and the story it told. She kindly lent me a book she self-published which explains the images on her quilt and details her family tree and history.

Betty's parents, going to America

Betty Eng's parents

Genealogy on the back of Betty Chan's quilts Life is a Journey

Life is a Journey tells the story of her parents Din Lee Eng and You Ying Eng, born in Toishan, Canton, China. Betty started the quilt in 2012 while taking a Story Book workshop with Mary Lou Weidman. In 2013 she returned to the workshop to continue working on the quilt. The quilt was finished in 2014. (Learn about Weidman's Story Book Workshop at https://www.marylouquiltdesigns.com/class-detail.php?ID=12)

The central figures represent Betty’s parents.

Betty's great-grandparents who first came to America

Pictured on her quilt to the left of her parents is a Water Buffalo surrounded by Bamboo to represent her parent’s village. 

Betty traveled to China to see her ancestral home, symbolized by the water buffalo and bamboo.

Betty's ancestral village in China

Three red fish represent the three generations which came to America, starting with her great-grandfather on the bottom. He was one of the Chinese laborers who built on the Transcontinental Railroad. He hoped to find wealth in house building, and was well liked by his employer, a prominent citizen near Seattle, WA. His investment in a hotel brought in regular money. He returned to China with gifts, and his fish holds a coin representing wealth.

Red fish with a coin, lower left, is Betty's great grandfather who brought home
wealth. Two more fish represent her grandfather and father who later came to the USA.

The other two fish represent Betty’s grandfather and father who lived in New York City.

Betty’s father came to America as a ‘paper son.”  In 1882 the Federal Government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act banning the immigration of Chinese. They were stereotyped and deemed unable to assimilate, but in truth they were competition for jobs, willing to work hard for low wages. Chinese already living in America would claim they had sons in China for which they obtained immigration papers. The papers were sold to Chinese men so they could come to America. As a ‘paper son’, Betty’s father had taken the surname Lee of his fake father, his real name being Eng.

Betty's father's fish  near the American President Line boat that brought him to America.

After 1943 Chinese living in America were able to become citizens but only 105 Chinese immigrants a year were allowed entrance.

Betty's father as a US serviceman

He joined the US Army during WWII. After his time in the army he returned to China to marry Betty's mother, a ‘war bride’.  Betty’s mother was very beautiful and always elegantly dressed, and Betty made sure her figure on the quilt had a hat.

Betty's beautiful mother

Betty’s father’s portrait on the quilt wears a blue Chinese jacket like he wore in China. In the 1960s amnesty was offered for those who arrive in America with false papers. Then Betty’s father and his family could legally take their rightful name of Eng. In his pocket is his business card for Eng’s Kitchen in Merrick, NY and his Army dog tags are in another pocket.

Betty's father with the tickets, a subway map, dog tags and restaurant business card

From Betty's book, her parents' ticket and pass

The two chicks near the central figure’s feet represent Betty's sister and brother. The chicks chase after their parents because they were left behind in China with their grandmother and did not see their parents again for ten years. They were only six and eight years old at the time.

Betty's mother's suitcase with photos of her husband and family,
the chicks representing the children they left behind in China

The New York City Subway map in her father’s hand shows where they lived in a house above his Canton restaurant. The New York City skyline and Statue of Liberty appear just left of his head, symbols of their adopted city and the welcoming symbol to immigrants.

The Statue of Liberty, NYC skyline, and the World Trade Center Twin towers which
Betty's parents saw fall while going to work on 9-11.

Betty grew up near Times Square and Rockefeller Center where she learned to ice skate. Her parents were on their way to Chinatown on 9-11 and they saw the towers go down, so the ‘brown chopstick buildings’ represent the World Trade Center buildings.

A large red house represents the house they grew up in, with Betty and her brother peeking from behind the bush in front of the house. Betty always had a ponytail like the girl on the quilt. An American flag pin from her father’s collection is in front of the house.

Betty and her brother peek from behind a push in front of their childhood home

Flowers on the quilt represent her mother’s love of flowers. She made shrimp dumplings and sewed clothing for Betty.

Her dad was a wonderful cook, played the Chinese banjo, and he loved the Yankees.

Betty's father at his restaurant

The family Chinese restaurant in NYC

It was a happy day when Betty finally met her older siblings. 

Betty with her family

The border blocks on the quilt are in colors of the US and China. The heart blocks represents “East Meets West.”

Betty working on Life is a Journey

Betty and her husband have lived in Metro Detroit for 40 years. When they arrived her community was very rural. It was quite a culture shock after living in New York City! They had to travel to Windsor, Canada to find a Chinese grocery. Now it is a thriving multicultural city. She is a retired math teacher.

Victoria & Abdul: A True Story That's Stranger than Fiction

Queen Victoria was quite taken by her title of Empress of India. She was unable to visit India, so she brought India to England.

For her Golden Jubilee, several men from India were assigned to be her personal servants, including the twenty-four-year-old Abdul.

The lonely queen had lost her beloved Albert and her loyal servant John Brown. Queen Victoria fell in love with Abdul's stories about his exotic homeland of India. She formed a motherly attachment to Abdul, promoting him to her teacher.

During Queen Victoria's last ten years she studied Urdu under Abdul's guidance, becoming quite proficient. The Queen's dependence on her Munshi led to friction with her government and her family. Every power was pushing the Queen to abandon her interest in Abdul. Abdul was spied upon and defamed, but the Queen defended him and showered titles and gifts upon Abdul and his family.

Victoria & Abdul  is an enlightening biography of Queen Victoria between her Golden and Diamond Jubilees. It tells of the human side of the queen and of her profound attachment to those she loved. It is the story of a humble man who rose to become a queen's most trusted friend, only to be vilified and his history erased after her death. And it is the story of racism and religious prejudice in Victorian England.

Detail of handkerchief celebrating Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee

The information is detailed and I felt I knew and understood Victoria and Abdul. There are wonderful photographs included.

This book is the basis for the upcoming movie Victoria & Abdul starring Judy Dench. I can't wait to see it!

View the trailer at https://youtu.be/3xo-EP_O5pQ

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

Victoria & Abdul (Movie Tie-in)
The True Story of the Queen's Closest Confidant
by Shrabani Basu
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Paperback $16.00
ISBN 9780525434412