Teach Me to Machine Quilt from Pat Sloan

I knew the day would come.

In 1991 I learned the quilt stitch and for years enjoyed spending a few hours every evening hand quilting. Now twenty-six years later, instead of quilting a bed-sized quilt in two or four months it took me two winters. TWO WINTERS. In the meantime, I finished six or more quilt tops.

I hauled a pile of quilt tops to a machine quilter in January. It is now May and I have not got one back. And when I do, I know I had better have a wheelbarrow to carry what I am going to owe her.

The day has come...to learn how to machine quilt my quilt projects.

Luckily, the marvelous Pat Sloan has prepared a book for people like me, a step-by-step, illustrated, simplified, marvelous resource! She covers all the bases, including how to quilt with a walking foot and free motion quilting.

And if we still have reservations about tackling machine quilting, Pat includes multiple patterns for quilt projects and then walks us through machine quilting them.

Thank you, Pat! You have thought of everything.

Pat offers the above simple Strippy Table Runner, 16 1/2" x 36 1/2" to learn walking foot quilting. The instructions include hints like how to prevent bowing when joining long strips and using Jelly Rolls.

This adorable Mini Charm Star, 28 1/2" x 28 1/2",  is another walking foot project. Just think of the scraps you could use...the color variations...

I like applique', and am glad that Pat offers applique' projects, too. I know a lot of people who would love My Little Kitty, 12 1/2" x 15 1/2", which uses fusible applique, blanket stitching, and walking foot quilting. SO easy!

Another simple fusible applique project is Winter Bliss, 24 1/2" x 28 1/2", a sweet snowman hanging out with his friend. Pat guides readers in making the bias stems and the free motion quilting.

Larger projects include Cherry Pie, 65 1/2" x 81 1/2", which uses a combination of machine walking foot and free motion quilting. Michigan is known for its cherries and I am imagining a quilt with cherry print fabrics...yum!

Mexican Rose, 56 1/2" x 56 1/2", was inspired by a vintage quilt. I love floral applique quilts! The wide border is a chance to highlight an amazing fabric you can't bear to cut.

Blue Lagoon is a Rail Fence variation, 64 1/2" x 72 1/2". Pat quilted with free motion swirls to counterpoint the straight lines.

See more of the projects at That Patchwork Place here.

I am eager to try my hand at machine quilting again. I have done some projects but without Pat's knowledge under my belt, and I think I will be more pleased with the results after reading Teach Me To Machine Quilt!

I received a free ebook from the publisher through Edelweiss.

from the publisher's website:

Pat Sloan teaches everything a first-time quilter needs to know to machine quilt successfully, going step-by-step through walking foot and free-motion quilting techniques. 

Popular teacher, designer, and online radio host Pat Sloan teaches all you need to know to machine quilt successfully. In this third book of her beginner-friendly "Teach Me" series, Pat guides you step by step through walking-foot and free-motion quilting techniques. First-time quilters will be confidently quilting in no time, and experienced stitchers will discover the joy of finishing their quilts themselves. 

No-fear learning for quilting novices--Pat covers all the information you need to quilt from start to finish. 

Pat guides you through simple and fun practice projects, including a strip-pieced table runner and an easy applique design. 

Collect the entire skill-building library of Pat Sloan's popular "Teach Me" series of books.

That Time When The White House Was Condemned, Gutted, and Sold as Souviniers

The Hidden White House: Harry Truman and the Reconstruction of America’s Most Famous Residence by Robert Klara was is about the 1949-53 rebuilding of the president's mansion, revealing its secrets while offering an interesting view of President Truman's character.

It was fascinating to learn that the building was literally falling apart because earlier restorations had left original beams that had been burned in the 1812 fire! Over the years, modernization to add heating, gas, electric, and plumbing cut into beams and retaining walls. The original footing was never meant to hold the expanding house. The house, after all, was built in a swamp.

President Truman and his family moved into a haunted house, footsteps and noises heard at night. Actually, it was the wood expanding and contracting with temperature changes. And when the president moved his huge desk and books into his study, a few visitors more stressed the floor beams. Truman and his daughter Margaret had their pianos sitting side by side for family musicals. It was all too much for the old house to handle.

It was time to check things out, a fifty-year check up as it were since it was last remodeled under President Teddy Roosevelt.

The structure was found to be so bad that the building had to be gutted to the sandstone outer walls! And even they were falling apart in places.

Meantime, the economy was adjusting from WWII and the Korean conflict was beginning. Getting money out of Congress was a battle, and so was every decision down to the wallpaper. The original wood trim, windows, fireplaces, and wood panels were sent into storage but proved too costly to restore; it was cheaper to make new. Sovineer relics were sold to raise money. And tons of the house were repurposed at other federal buildings--and sent to the dump.

President Truman and his family were relegated to Blair House, which proved insecure when an assassination attempt caused the death of several guards. He drove the security people mad by insisting on walking to work every day.

The president pushed to get the work done quickly, hoping to live a year in the new house. But haste made waste--and mistakes. Three years and $5.8 million later, the house was finished. The sewing room lacked electric outlets. Only four rooms were refitted with their original interiors. Everyone was finding fault.
Eleanor Roosevelt pronounced that the house looked like a Sheridan hotel! The mass-produced furniture was all that could be afforded. No wonder Jackie Kennedy pressed to restore the decor to original pieces.

There is nothing worse than a job coming with a house. You never know what you are going to get. As a clergy wife, for me it was parsonages that flooded, had cockroaches and mice, rattling drafty windows, iced over closets in winter, water that turned whites orange, and an antique pink refrigerator.

For the Trumans, there were rats, worn out carpets and furniture and drapes, and a house in danger of collapse. Plus three years in temporary housing that was inadequate in every way. I had it better.

I enjoyed learning about the people involved and the history and process of the rebuilding. It was an enjoyable read.

I received an ebook as a gift.

https://www.whitehousehistory.org/the-hidden-white-house-the-truman-renovation-1948-1952

David Sederis Does It Again: Calypso

As the Detroit Symphony Orchestra concert was airing on Livestream I opened my ebook and began to read. I was soon laughing out loud. A few paragraphs later I laughed even longer and harder. I had to read out loud to my hubby. And then I knew. I could not read Calypso by David Sedaris while listening to the symphony.

I could not read it in bed. I would laugh my husband awake. When could I read it? During the day, with the windows open to let in the fresh spring air, so inviting after a very, very, long winter? What would the neighbors think?

Sedaris, Sedaris. You are such a problem, I thought.

Then I felt like I was on a roller coaster ride because the next story was about David's youngest sister's suicide. All of the siblings had pulled away from the family to "forge our own identities," he explained; except Tiffany stayed away. And later in the book, he remembers his mother's alcoholism and her early death, his father's eccentricities, living with a defunct stove so his kids could inherit more money.

You laugh, you shudder, you feel slightly ill, and you feel sad. Because Sedaris is ruthless enough to write about life, real life, his life in particular, and we all see our own families and own lives in his stories.

I loved Sedaris's chapter on the terrible tyranny of his Fitbit, and how he was adamant that he got to keep his fatty tumor to feed to a turtle. That crazy moment with his dad drove past a man exposing himself and then u-turned to take another look, his young daughter in the car.

Looking at family photos, Sedaris recalled "that moment in a family's life when everything is golden" and the future held promise. In middle age, looking forward ten years "you're more likely to see a bedpan than a Tony Award."

Ouch. Too close to home, David.

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

Calypso
by David Sedaris
Little, Brown and Company
Pub Date 29 May 2018
ISBN 9780316392389
PRICE $28.00 (USD)

Lighting the Fires of Freedom: African American Women in the Civil Rights Movement

Fifty years ago the Civil Rights Act of 1968 was signed into law.

Most know the name, legacy, and speeches of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King.

And most have heard of his wife Coretta Scott King and activist Rosa Parks. But what about the countless other women involved with the Civil Rights Movement? Those who did the grunt work, who put their lives on the line, who strove to achieve what the culture said they could not do?



Getting Personal

When I made my quilt I Will Lift My Voice Like a Trumpet I was inspired by the Abolitionists and Civil Rights who I encountered in reading Freedom's Daughters by Lynne Olson. My embroidered quilt includes an image and quote from women who made a difference but are not well known. The quilt appeared in several American Quilt Society juried shows.

I Will Lift My Voice Like a Trumpet at the Grand Rapids AQS show

When I saw Lighting the Fires of Freedom: African American Women and the Civil Rights Movement by Janet Dewart Bell on NetGalley I quickly requested it. I was interested in meeting more of these courageous, but lesser-known women.

Going Deeper

The author interviewed and collected oral histories of nine women for this book:

• Leah Chase, whose restaurant was a meeting place for organizers, was a collector of African American art and was commemorated by Pope Benedict XVI for her service.
• Dr. June Jackson Christmas broke race barriers to gain admittance to Vassar, spoke out against the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, was the only black female student in her medical school class, and fought housing discrimination to change New York City Law. 
• Aileen Hernandez became an activist at Howard University in the 1940s, was the first female and black to serve on the EEOC in 1964, and was the first African American president of NOW.
• Diane Nash chaired the Nashville Sit-In Movement and coordinated important Freedom Rides. 
• Judy Richardson joined the Students for a Democratic Society at Swarthmore College before leaving to join SNCC. She founded a bookstore and press for publishing and promoting black literature and was an associate producer for the acclaimed PBS series Eyes on the Prize.
• Kathleen Cleaver was active in SNCC, the Black Power Movement, the Black Panthers, and the Revolutionary People's Communication Network.
• Gay McDougall was the first to integrate Agnes Scott College; she worked for international human rights and was recognized with a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.
• Gloria Richardson was an older adult during the movement, with a militant edge; Ebony magazine called her the Lady General of Civil Rights.
• Myrlie Evers's husband Medgar was the first NAACP field secretary in Mississippi. She was officially a secretary, but she 'did everything' and later championed gender equality.

Diane Nash. "Problems lie not as much in our action as in our inaction."

I was familiar with Diane Nash, who appears on my quilt. I only knew Myrlie Evers-Williams by association to her martyred husband Medgar.

For me, Evers' statement was most moving, revealing more about her emotional life and feelings. Her husband Medgar, a war veteran, was the first African American to apply to Ole Miss when he was recruited to work for the NAACP.

Myrlie organized events, researched for speeches, and even wrote some speeches while raising their family and welcoming visitors such as Thurgood Marshall to her home for dinner. It was a lot for a young woman. She is quoted as saying,
"It was an exciting but frightening time, because you stared at death every day...But there was always hope, and there were always people who surrounded you to give you a sense of purpose."

Medgar knew he was a target and encouraged her to believe in her strength.

After her husband was murdered in front of their own home, the NAACP would call on her to rally support and raise money, with no compensation. Meanwhile, she felt anger and outrage at what had happened. Medgar had dreamt about relocating to California some day, so Myrlie and her children moved.

Thinking back on the movement, Myrlie recognizes the struggle women had to be recognized for their work. And she bristles at being pigeonholed as Medgar's widow instead of being recognized for her accomplishments. It is wonderful that Myrlie was asked to deliver the prayer before President Obama's inaugural address.

Faith and trust and believe she ends, possibilities await. Be open. Be adventurous. Have a little fun.

That is good advice to us all. But coming from a woman whose husband made the ultimate sacrifice, it is an affirmation of great importance.

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

Lighting the Fires of Freedom: African American Women in the Civil Rights Movement
by Janet Dewart Bell
The New Press
Pub Date 08 May 2018
ISBN 9781620973356
PRICE $33.99 (CAD)

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

"In 1945 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals." Warlight

From the opening line, I fell into under the spell of Nathaniel's story about how he and his sister Rachel were abandoned at ages fourteen and sixteen to the care of relative strangers, their third-floor lodger, whom they called The Moth, and the Pimlico Dancer.

After their father departed, going to Asia for his work, never to be seen again, their mother stayed with them for two more weeks, sharing bits of her history, enough to lure them into understanding there was much more to her than they knew. Then suddenly she left them, too.

The Moth welcomes shady company into their home. The Darter brings a string of women, none of whom last long. The teens are left alone, sometimes for days.

Nathaniel discovers their mother's trunk is in the house. She had not left to join her husband. And The Moth wasn't talking. "He was brilliant," The Moth says of their father, "but he was not stable." Both parents are strangers to the teens.

Over the next years, Nathaniel lives in a complicated and uncertain world, accompanying The Darter on nighttime trips that are perhaps criminal activities, and working odd jobs during the day. He has a secret liaison with a girl in empty houses.

Years later, Nathaniel is approached to work in a government position that allows him access to files which he plumbs for information about his mother's war-related work. He visits people from his past. He pieces together who his mother truly was, the life she kept secret, the fear she lived with, and the lover who brought her into a world of danger.

Warlight is about a man's search for his mother, the story of the deeply etched marks left by a lost childhood, and an exploration of the stories we weave together just to survive.

I received a free ebook from First to Read.

Warlight
by Michael Ondaatje
Hardcover $26.95
Published by Knopf
May 08, 2018
ISBN 9780525521198

Winston Graham's Disturbing Suspense Novel Marnie

A few years ago we went to see Alfred Hitchcock's movie Marnie at the Redford Theater, a historic theater with an organ that shows classic movies. The theater is located in Detroit draws hundreds out for every show.

We went partly because Tippi Hedron was appearing in person, with talks before the movie and during intermission and autographing photos and posters. And we went because when I was ten years old I saw Marnie from the back seat of our family car at the local drive-in movie theater. I was supposed to be asleep. Just like when I was supposed to be asleep during The Birds and The Incredible Shrinking Man. Each movie left me with bad dreams, but it was Marnie that left me struggling to understand it.

So when at a local book sale I saw a battered paperback of Winston Graham's novel Marnie, released in conjunction with Hitchcock's movie, I spent my quarter and picked it up. Perhaps the book would help me to peg down the story.

Graham is best known for the Poldark series which inspired the Masterpiece Theater series of that name, which my husband has been reading. Marnie is set in England not long after WWII, and is told in the first person. We learn that Marnie grew up in a tough neighborhood with a dad lost in the war and a strict but distant mother. Marnie gets into fights and steals and lies. Her mother insists her daughter avoid men.

When Marnie buys a horse she must find a way to support him, and being a smart gal, she plans and executes a series of thefts, assuming false identities to obtain jobs where she can get her hands on money. She is twenty-three when she has finished another heist and her employer Mark Rutland tracks her down.

Mark has fallen in love with the beautiful Marnie. She warns him that she is a liar and thief, but Mark insists he can't control his heart. He offers her an ultimatum: he can turn her in and she will be imprisoned for her crimes, or she can marry him and he will cover for her.

Marnie can't stand to be close to anyone, is unable to love, and hates the thought of men and sex. Her horse is the only creature in the world she cares for. Forced to marry Mark, she won't submit to him as a wife should. Frustrated, he forces himself on her once, then they learn to live together in distant animosity and distrust.

Mark forces Marnie into counseling, but she is too clever for even the psychologist, continuing her habit of lies and false stories. Over time, men recognize Marnie from her past lives. And at the death of her mother, Marnie learns her mother's secret history and double life.

Different from Hitchcock's version, Graham's version of the mother's crisis is not of Marnie's doing. And Graham includes a co-worker of Mark's who tries to cozy up to Marnie, and ends up betraying her.

Marnie is one messed up girl, but Mark is perhaps even sicker. He marries Marnie for her physical beauty in spite of her inability to feel emotion that allows her to plot crimes without a sense of wrongdoing. He entraps Marnie and even rapes her when she is not complicit. He is willing to cover up her crimes and endeavors to even enlist the help of a retired judge to figure out how Marnie can avoid the consequences of her crimes.

Marnie returns to her mother's house to discover she has died.  She finds a newspaper clipping telling that her mother had murdered her newborn baby, which had been kept from Marnie.

Graham offers a moment of hope for Marnie near the end of the book. At a fox hunt, she feels revulsion of the cruelty of those around her, questioning why their killing for pleasure was legal when her crimes would merit jail. She turns from the death scene of the fox, allowing her horse his head, Mark chasing after her. Unfamiliar with the landscape, her horse jumps over a hedge and onto a riverbank, suffering a fatal injury. Marnie also falls, and so does Mark, his face in the mud. Marnie leaves her suffering horse to save Mark, lifting him from the mud and wiping it from his nose. There is a glimmer of morality and compassion in her choice.

She later meets a bereft boy who has lost his mother and she holds him.

"I thought, that's right, be a mother for a change. Bite on somebody else's grief instead of your own. Stop being to heartbroken for yourself and take a look round. Because maybe everybody's griefs arent'that much different after all. I thought, there's only one loneliness, and that's the loneliness of all the world."

Just before the twisted ending, Marnie, feeling all 'emotional and female and hopeless,' wonders if she was in love with Mark.

Marnie is the story of trauma, mental illness, crime, deception, and a man's sick obsession with a woman.

It is little wonder that I have been disturbed by this story for about fifty years. And it is little wonder that the twisted Hitchcock wanted to film it. Poor Tippi-- Hitchcock derailed her career when she rebuffed his sexual advances. Her studio contract gave her no options, including legal ones.

Fifty years later, Tippi at age 87 cheered the actresses standing up against the abuse suffered under Harvey Weinstein, as seen in her Tweet of October 2017:

Now I am filled with compassion and respect for Tippi's standing up to power, speaking out her truth, and for introducing a film that was at once her triumph and secret tragedy.

Pauli Murray: Poet, Protester, Priest

I first read about Pauli Murray while researching women abolitionists and Civil Rights leaders for my quilt I Will Lift My Voice Like A Trumpet. I was pleased to be granted access to the e-galley of Pauli's memoir, first published in 1987, now available in a new edition. The forward is by Patricia Bell-Scott, author of The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Justice.

Pauli was born in 1910 and was raised by her school teacher aunt. Pauli was a gifted student who attended Hunter College in New York City. During the Depression, she found employment with the WPA as a teacher and began to publish her poetry and a novel. She found a mentor in Stephen Vincent Benet.

During the war years and early 1950s Pauli became involved with Civil Rights, challenging segregation, and formed a relationship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. In 1941 she began her law studies at Howard University and helped to form CORE and the development of passive resistance.

Harvard law school would not accept Pauli based on her sex. She attended the University of California Boalt School of Law. Her thesis was on equal opportunity in employment. With her color and sex against her, Pauli had trouble making a living practicing law.

In 1956 she published a book on her family history, Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family. She taught law in Ghana for several years. Back in the US she resumed work in Civil Rights and became active as a feminist and was an organizer for NOW.

In her later life, Pauli worked for equal opportunity for women as church leaders. She became the first African American woman ordained to the Episcopal priesthood.

Pauli saw huge changes in her lifetime. At her birth, she was labeled colored but chose to use the designation Negro. During the rise of black power movements, she resisted the term black, resenting its lowercase nomenclature. She was a pacifist and anti-segregationist who had trouble with the rise of Black Power movements and the younger generation's demands for separate campus organizations. Early she was attracted to Socialism and spent her last years as in the priesthood.

The memoir is filled with details about the work for Civil Rights prior to the more known stories of Rosa Park and Martin Luther King, Jr. There are vivid descriptions of traveling in the Jim Crow south, the closed doors to her race and her sex, the poverty she and her educated family endured.

Pauli's voice is direct and open. She admits to her ignorance and mistakes, her learning curves and limitations. Her accomplishments speak for her determination and courage.

It was wonderful to hear, in her own voice, Pauli's amazing life.

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

Pauli Murray on my quilt I Will Lift My Voice Like a Trumpet

I Will Lift My Voice Like a Trumpet by Nancy A. Bekofske

From the publisher:

Poet, memoirist, labor organizer, and Episcopal priest, Pauli Murray helped transform the law of the land. Arrested in 1940 for sitting in the whites-only section of a Virginia bus, Murray propelled that life-defining event into a Howard law degree and a fight against “Jane Crow” sexism. Her legal brilliance was pivotal to the overturning of Plessy v. Ferguson, the success of Brown v. Board of Education, and the Supreme Court’s recognition that the equal protection clause applies to women; it also connected her with such progressive leaders as Eleanor Roosevelt, Thurgood Marshall, Betty Friedan, and Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Now Murray is finally getting long-deserved recognition: the first African American woman to receive a doctorate of law at Yale, her name graces one of the university’s new colleges. Handsomely republished with a new introduction, Murray’s remarkable memoir takes its rightful place among the great civil rights autobiographies of the twentieth century.

Learn more about Murray at The Pauli Murray Project at the Duke Human Rights Center.

Song in a Weary Throat: Memoir of an American Pilgrimage
Pauli Murray, Patricia Bell-Scott (Introduction by)
Liveright/W. W. Norton
On Sale Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 9781631494581, 1631494589
Paperback $22.95