Work in Progress & What I'm Reading Wednesday

Sorry. I forgot to mention that this is part of a group of posts. For the list, check Tami's blog.

I decided that I would catalog every single work in progress, but I chickened out. Here are the projects to which I will admit:

First up: I dyed this messenger bag back in, oh maybe April, and had every intention of decorating it. Pretty impressive decorations, huh?

I cut out these blouses back in May, thinking I'd have some nice summer blouses..... Maybe in time for next year!

I had some "flowers" left over from my Scraptastic quilts in mid summer and have every intention of making a pillow out of these.

As I organized the scraps back in the winter leading up to the Scraptastic projects, there were some scraps that were too big for those projects and too small to put back on the shelves. So, I decided I'd make a couple of quilts inspired by this book:

Aren't these pretty fabrics? I was petting them when I arranged them for this photo:

This past weekend was pretty busy (as will be the next couple of weekends as well), but I was able to get the pink blocks made for Peppermint Candy (these are stacks of blocks):

You can see where they'll fit in:

I have been knitting Abby for myself out of my first handspun yarn.

My next project involves hand-dyed black and red cotton yarn (yarn is on its way from Dharma Trading as we speak) and is for the cutest great nephew in the world, who'll turn one in January.

I finished Hutchinson's book about Thomas Cromwell. Hutchinson writes well, you get a very good sense of the people involved as well as the various issues confronting the country. There is one very tedious chapter where he goes into Cromwell's personal finances in an exhaustive way. Skip that chapter unless you're an accountant. If you are looking for a good introduction to the period, this would be a fine place to start.

Over the weekend, needing some "popcorn" reading, I read Lisa Scottoline's Look Again. This is a fast-paced novel with rounded characters, believable situations, and an intriguing story. I will confess that I figured out the resolution of the book about 50 pages before the end, but that was part of the fun - however will she get there, and how will the characters handle it?

I went to the used booksale run by the local chapter of the American Association of University Women this past weekend. I came home with a paper grocery bag full of books and will be talking about some of those as the weeks roll on.

Work in Progress & What I'm Reading Wednesday

I want to thank Tami at Tami's Amis and Other Crochet for sponsoring "Work in Progress Wednesday."

First off, I am happy to report that the Helix socks are no longer a work in progress! I finished them on Saturday!! Yay!! (follow the link for pictures)

Over the Labor Day weekend, I did some thinking about the other project I mention in that same posting, and I think I have some ideas. I think I'm going to slice those big hexagons in half, add in some other fabrics cut as trapezoids, and alternate those strips with the striped fabric that is at the far left of the "accompanying fabrics" picture. I have some tan and white striped fabric in my stash I could pull in as well. So, that's the plan I worked out while out walking in the overcast skies of Labor Day.

I spent Sunday and Monday afternoons making Peppermint Candy bigger. I started with making the green blocks:

and then I had to figure out how many yellow blocks to make. Don't laugh, but I have trouble counting. I get distracted part way through, etc. It's a real trial to me. Anyway, I came up with a number and then added a couple for insurance (because I have failed to make enough blocks in the past, hmm??). So, then, I had this set of fabric pieces:

I then chained the middle portion of the blocks:

I pressed those and added the green sides:

Then, I added the yellow sides and sorted into two sets so that both the green and the pink sides would have the same kinds of pale blocks:

I arranged the pale blocks on the green side, made an extra dark green block (I told you I can't count!), and here is where the project stands:

Next, I'll flip this around and start making the dark pink blocks for the other side. I know that a couple of my "pale" green pieces are not pale. I can see that. I may just run to a fabric store and get a quarter yard of whatever and fix that. grrrr

As to what I'm reading: I am deep in the middle of Robert Hutchinson's biography of Thomas Cromwell. I seriously had a nightmare this weekend related to this period. I think I need to step away from the Tudors for a while. I am at the part of the book where he is dismantling the monasteries and nunneries and grabbing all of the valuables for the king. Also, he is trying to find a fourth wife for the king.

When I was a freshman in high school, taking a course in Western Civilization, I realized that for me history was a big scroll with drawings on it. There are parts of history that have the thinnest, most cursory lines - I'm afraid that for me China has a few lines of migration pencilled in, with sketches from the Boxer Rebellion, a water color of the Rape of Nanjing, some drawings of The Long March, and then some detailed paintings of modern-day China where the people actually move around (it helps that I work with so many Chinese, and they have helped fill out the picture of modern China). In other words, though, the more I know about a period, the richer the pictures are on my scroll. Over the course of my life, I've been adding to my knowledge base so that much of 16th- and 17th- century Europe is at least water colors, sometimes oil paintings, and some sections having moving figures. US history between 1770 and 1820 is also that way. Anyway, when I am wondering which part of history to read next, I consult my scroll and try to fill out some of the sketchier areas. I have a book on my stack about European colonialism in Africa in the 1800s. I think it's time that book rose in the queue.

However, my next book will be a book I plucked off the bargain table at Border's. More next week.

Women's Suffrage and Leaf Quilt

I decided early on to not talk about politics on this blog. We are in an election year, however, and I have my opinions. In my life, I have voted for the Republican for governor four times and the Democrat four times. This year, I'll be voting for the Republican. For Congress, I'll either vote for the Green party candidate or I'll write in the name of the person who I think should hold the seat. My problem is that my local congressman has held the seat since the mid-1950s, and he got it from his daddy, who held it for 20 years before that. I have never voted for a Republican for President, but I didn't vote for the Democrat in 2000 (I am proud to have voted for the Green Party candidate that year).

 (I got the photo from the Library of Congress website. To see more photos, please go to that site.)

One hundred years ago, a woman my age would not have been able to make the kinds of statements I just made. There was a long, hard battle to win women the right to vote in this country, and if you are not familiar with that history, I suggest you check this website as a good starting point. For ninety years, women all across this country have had the right to vote in every election. With the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, this franchise was emphatically extended for all women. This summer, we've had primaries across this country in which the turnout has been around 20-30 percent. The primaries are where the parties sort out their contenders and pick those who will be on the November ballot. These small turnouts don't make sense to me and have never made sense to me. So many of our ancestors longed to have the right to choose their leaders; we have that right, and we don't always exercise it. Whatever your political persuasion, please learn about the candidates in your area and get out and vote. If you think I'm wrong, vote against me. That's what it means to be an adult in a democracy. So there.

On the general theme of women's roles in the world, you really must read The Yarn Harlot's posting of August 25. She's talking about getting our priorities and our language straight, both in the home and in the world.

Now, for some craft news. Sarah had asked if the leaf quilt were appliqué, and it is. We were experimenting with different stitches and different settings of those stitches on our machines. By the way, this was in a class taught by the wonderful Jane Sassaman, who got stuck with a student like me who doesn't like to follow directions. Here is a close-up of the quilt where you can see the stitch variations on the leaves, sort of.

Have a nice weekend, everyone!

Peppermint Candy

I went into the sewing room on Saturday with no particular project in mind other than trying to bring order out of chaos; since early May, I've had multiple projects going on with attendant deadlines, and messes had gotten out of hand. I made some serious headway in rearranging piles and doing some serious thinking about projects. Wanting to do something fun, I pulled out a bag of scraps from the bureau. This bag was given me back at the March quilt guild meeting by a friend I will simply call "Enabler." Enabler is the person currently in charge of trying to get people to take piles of donated fabrics home and bring back at least finished quilt tops, if not completely done quilts. Well, at the meeting in question, Enabler came up to me with a grin on her face. "I have some scraps that are right up your alley, Liz! They're leftovers from a project I just got done. I KNOW you can do something with these." Here they are:

Okay. I was sunk. I took them home and put them in the aforementioned drawer. It seems that there were several blocks in this bag; blocks that looked like these:

There was also one that looked like this:

When I got this one on the wall and measured it against the other blocks, I added that last round - the one with the ferny fabric on one side and the deep magenta on the other side. After moving the blocks around a bit, I hit on this general plan:

I didn't take pictures of the yellow/green blocks, but there were also several blocks with white centers and yellow/green surrounds. When I got this up, I realized that I had a really fun layout, and I also realized that I needed to make a lot more blocks. I started ransacking the stash for super-pale yellows and greens so that I could make more of those blocks. I also made up a bunch more green and pink blocks. Here is the current layout:

I really like the way this looks. I'm going to have to trim a half inch off each side of the log cabin block in order to make it fit right. By my math, once I sew these blocks together, I'll have a top that is roughly 40" x 50". I may have to dye up some super pale greenish yellow fabric in order to make more rows or I could just use the pale olive green with some pale yellow I have in the "to-be-dyed" pile. I want to think about this a bit more.

There's no big artistic statement here, but it sure felt good to be moving blocks around on a wall again.

Finally, there's some nonsense going on in my world right now, and I've been reciting portions of this piece to myself over and over as a way of keeping sane.  I first discovered this when I was a teenager and remember using a long bus ride as an opportunity to memorize it. It has been a comfort and aid to me in a great many circumstances.

What I'm Reading Wednesday

I am still working my way through Alison Weir's The Wars of the Roses. I am up to 1461 or so, and I have developed an intense loathing for Margaret of Anjou. I am deliberately not reading ahead or checking Wikipedia or anything, but I hope she comes to a horrible end. I don't often feel this way about characters in books or historical figures, but that woman has really gotten my goat.

I have also been following the blog of a friend of mine who moved to Duluth, Minnesota, some years ago and joined a Benedictine (women's) monastery. She has been with a group traveling in Rome since late May, and her experiences and commentary are well worth the read. Sister Edith is a sociologist by training and has a good eye for detail.

Next up, I am plowing through the stacks of magazines and newspapers in this house, and this past weekend, I read this piece by Joan Chittister, a Benedictine sister out of Erie, Pennsylvania. She has been a strong, prophetic voice in Roman Catholicism and the world for three decades. In her piece she argues for an end to polarization and a recognition that what we have in common is so much greater than what separates us.

Speaking of in common, this great guy actually married me 14 years ago today. He's letting me pick the restaurant for dinner. Of course, I've picked about five places, and he's at the point of saying, "Just let me know the final decision." (The picture is from our visit to the battleship "North Carolina" last summer. There is a picture from the 1960s of him standing next to the same cannon and barely being able to see over the top of it; so, we HAD to take this picture.)

I have set myself up - I have a quilt that HAS to be done by the end of July. I promise to post pictures of my progress this weekend. The Flower Power quilt top is nearly done. My friend and I got the last of the flowers sewn together, and she is putting a border around it now.

What I'm Reading

This was supposed to be a "What I'm Reading Wednesday," but it's suddenly Thursday. This past week I started reading a new-to-me book, The Wars of the Roses by Alison Weir. This concerns, amazingly enough, the Wars of the Roses in the fifteenth century. This book was lent to me by the same friend who led our book club into reading David Starkey's biography, Elizabeth: The Struggle for the Throne, which I mentioned here a few weeks ago. As I read the Starkey book, I started seeing all sorts of gaps in my knowledge, and my dear friend happened to mention that she had just read Weir's book and was willing to lend it. So, here I am happily trying to keep track of all of these vaguely familiar names. I'm about 100 pages in, and I can hardly WAIT to see what happens next. As a college student studying modern European history, I think I treated the period up to 1500 as just so much prologue to the really interesting stuff - you know, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the Invincible Armada, etc.

Similarly, my husband has on his shelves a book about King Philip's War, about some pretty serious issues that arose between the colonialists and the native Americans in the 17th century. I think we in the US tend to discount the 17th century as mere prologue, but there was lots of stuff going on that helped shape the country we would become. Similarly, this morning on my walk, I was listening to a couple of podcasts from the history part of "How Stuff Works" about the bombardment of Baltimore and about the great warrior, Tecumseh. Both ended up being about the relations between Canada and the US in the early part of the 19th century. We here in the US tend to focus on "the longest undefended border in the world," but we forget that this was a hard-won peace that we need to keep tending carefully.

Anyway, after all of that deep thinking, how about some pictures? Last week, as part of my vacation, a friend came over and helped me organize the blocks for our guild's 2011 quilt raffle. These were the blocks that came from members of the guild in response to a request for help with this quilt. We are building the quilt in such a way that it'll be right side up from either end. (I have a rather narrow design wall, so we got the middle set, and then I pinned the middle together so that I could work on the outer edges.) This will be a queen-sized quilt when it's done.

Can you see the wonderful variety? I gave people a size, a basic picture, and some rules about relative values. I have been SO thrilled at these blocks.

Here are a couple that I made that will be on the upper/lower rows:

The pink one was the one I used as my example back in the winter to get people thinking. The blue one I made this past Sunday.

Finally, I have to draw your attention to the June 15 post here: http://charmingbodicea.blogspot.com/ - about girls and their body images - she's making some really important points.

I also want to draw attention to this post: http://tenured-radical.blogspot.com/2010/06/sunday-radical-roundup-fathers-day.html about a piece that was in the New York Times magazine this past week. I, too, read the article on Sunday and came close to tears. Let it be known that I want NO extraordinary measures at the end of my life. If you are about to put a battery in my body and the battery has a longer life expectancy than I do, STOP. Spend that money on educating poor children, on building houses for the homeless, on making vaccines for the ill - don't spend it on a dying woman.

UFO No More!!

I am SO thrilled. I first got the idea for this finished object almost four years ago when I snapped this picture:

Yes, the Brat Cat claimed the rose trellis as her turf (we were still living in the house), and I said, "Oh, that is darling!" and took lots of pictures. Then, last summer I took a workshop in turning a photo into abstract art. I worked with this photo and with a shot of the Burnside Bridge at the Antietam battlefield. (I still want to create a quilt from that photo. That's a story for another day, though.)

Anyway, here is the quilt. It's about 18" x 30".

Pardon me, but I totally LOVE this quilt. It has been so much fun to work with. Let me show you my favorite parts (as I type this, the subject of the quilt is draped across the top of my chair, purring):

I was cutting out the flattened circle for the face when I realized that if I positioned the pattern piece right, I could get flowers in the right places.... Isn't that cool? The final embellishment I put on this quilt were the whiskers. I found some sparkly acrylic thread at the store, it was then a question of figuring out HOW to do the whiskers. I got the idea to knot the thread about two inches in, put the needle in at one side of the nose, pull it out the other side, and then knot there. Those are not beads you're seeing at the nose, but knots. For the eye whiskers, the knots are all between the layers.

Those little ribbon roses? Well, six years after my mother's death, I was finally clearing the last of her sewing stuff I would never use when I came across these roses.... hmmmm..... So, it's a little bit of three-dimensional fun in an unexpected place. Also, in these pictures, you can see the several weeks' worth of handstitching to get some subtle color into the blue background.

Anyone who has ever come to my home in the last few years has met the Brat Cat - she is very sociable and very definitely a "self." Her tail is very expressive, and getting that curve right consumed an hour one afternoon.

So, this quilt shows perseverance, attention to detail, found objects, a tangible memory of our house, a tribute to my mother, and a representation of the personality of the alpha creature in our house. Hubby Dearest likes it so much that he's already hung it up where he can see it from his favorite chair - the ultimate compliment.

What I've Been Reading, #1

I just got through reading a really good book that I want to recommend. Now, I do not have any connection to the author, and I'll confess that I borrowed the book from a friend. It's just that this is one of those books where you want to go and grab everyone you know and say, "Read this book!!!"

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen is the story of a young man who ran off and joined a traveling circus during the Depression. He is a trained veterinarian and a sensitive, caring young man with a strong survival instinct. By the end of the first two chapters, the reader has been so deeply immersed in two very different worlds that s/he can practically smell what the narrator is smelling. The book carries the reader deep into the desperation felt by those on the edges of society during the Great Depression as well as the social problems faced by the elderly of our modern day. I kept stealing time for this book from other tasks because the worlds it describes were so fully fleshed out and compelling.

I have also just finished reading another very good book - although not as riveting as WFE. The Lady and the Unicorn by Tracy Chevalier is also a historical novel. It is about the creation of one of the masterworks of the late Middle Ages, a set of six tapestries woven, probably in Brussels in the 1490s. The story is told in a variety of voices, with each chapter being narrated by a different character (although some characters get two chapters, each at a different point in the story). I love books by this author, and I think the main reason is that she loves her characters, and she has clearly done her research so that the historical details ring true. This is a short book, and I was stunned at how quickly I sped through it. I kept going back and re-reading chapters, just to prolong the delicious experience.

Now, I promised actual craft content, so here is a shot of one of my current projects - a whole lot of handquilting. Those pink diamonds are maybe a third of an inch wide. The stitching is designed to "hammer" down the background of a quilt destined for my guild's show this summer.

Also, I HAVE to share this picture of the cutest guy in the house. (Hubby Dearest has long said he could get more respect if he dyed his hair orange....) This is our 15-year-old Big Guy who went missing for two weeks in mid-winter and came home down a quarter of his weight and with a little frostbite. He's as cuddly as he looks.