Reading Roundup

I think I last wrote about books in April?! Oh, my. When I was in college, one of my professors talked about his goal of reading a book a week. I have probably averaged something close to that over my life - but that includes a lot of junk reading. Rather than talk about all of the books I've read over the last few months, I'll mention the ones that I really want to recommend.

First up is Pat Conroy's South of Broad. I would say this about the guy: you either love his books or you hate them, but either way you're passionate about them. Conroy writes about violence - physical, emotional, verbal - and he writes about it from the perspective of someone who has survived a lot of it. I remember reading The Prince of Tides and thinking that I would never have to write about my father because Conroy already had. Let me clarify that: my father was not as violent or as deeply contorted as the father in that novel, but so much of the basic bent of the father was familiar to me, and the ways in which the various characters in the novel responded to the father showed me different ways of moving forward in my life. Each time I read a Conroy novel, I encounter a different way of coping and understand more about how adults keep from giving in to the darkness within.

South of Broad is very much about adults trying to live integrated lives despite difficult beginnings and tough times. I read the novel in a long caffeine-fueled weekend, and then kept going back to various sections and re-reading for the sheer pleasure of it all. The scene depicting the conclusion of the high school championship game contains one of the most beautifully written paragraphs I have ever read in my life. When my book club got together, I insisted on reading that paragraph out loud just to hear the melodious language. Sigh!!

My parish started a book club this summer, and the first book up was Henri Nouwen's The Return of the Prodigal Son, a meditation on Rembrandt's painting and the biblical parable. This is a little short book that looks as though it would be a quick read. There is so much deep thought on each page that it took me a week to get through its 140 pages. I kept stopping, walking around, and thinking through what I had read. If your spiritual life needs a bump-up, this would not be a bad place to start.

The next book on the parish's book club list is Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain. I read this book the first time in my mid-20s, and it was one of the things that pushed me into really looking into religious life. At our discussion the other evening about the first half of the book (we're reading the second half for the end of October), the discussion leader told us that this book, published in the late 1940s, propelled thousands of young Catholics into seminaries, convents, and monasteries. It is the story of a young man born to a pair of artists, who both died young. He grew up on Long Island, in the south of France, and in England. He was mentored by various relatives and family friends. One is struck by how very ordinary he is, despite the extraordinary circumstances of his life. I am looking forward to reading the rest of this book.

In between these various books, I read Karen Armstrong's A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. A good friend has been urging me for several years to read this book, and, oh, my gosh! What a great book this is! This is not a casual read, even though I ended up putting myself on a 40-page-a-day schedule for 10 days. I decided to treat it as assigned reading for a class. This may have been a mistake, but I'm a pretty monogamous reader - one book at a time - so I dangled a Ruth Rendell mystery novel on a stick at the back of the Armstrong book and kept working toward my reward.

Armstrong's 400-page book is well written, densely packed with information, explanations, and cross-references, and has a powerful narrative structure that sweeps the reader along. She shows us what is going on in the Fertile Crescent, pulling in concurrent events in the Indian subcontinent as appropriate, moving the centers of the various dramas to the north and west as the story goes along. The book is structured along a pretty rigid historical timeline - that is, she treats the issues of the seventh century CE in each of the major traditions within a chapter or two of each other, with none of the three main story lines getting too far ahead.

As far as I can tell, she is scrupulously fair to the traditions and the issues raised. I've done a fair amount of reading and study elsewhere around the issues related to the church councils of Nicaea, Ephesus, and Chalcedon; her descriptions of those issues, setting of the historical framework, and demonstrations of the consequences of the various actions rang true with what I have learned elsewhere. This helped me trust the rest of her narrative. The book has been out for nearly 20 years, but it feels fresh and relevant in setting the various traditions within their cultural and historical contexts.

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking about the book with one of the priests at my parish and I told him, "There's no way I could have handled this book in my 30s. I needed to get the perspective of my 40s in order to see the broader picture." This is the man to whom I went a year ago in the summer and said, "I'm not sure how much longer I can remain a Catholic." His response was that I should continue to move in the directions that give me life and perhaps give myself some space in which to not know the answers. As I read this book I realized that every question I've had about various doctrines and every odd idea I've ever had has been asked or spoken aloud by other people. Armstrong dissects the various arguments within the traditions, shows the positions held by folks on each side, and shows how the issues played out over time. When I reached the end of the book, I understood that my own tradition is based on a whole series of consensus positions around which people have coalesced. I have long appreciated the fact that in Catholicism there are few black-white / right-wrong positions. There's an endless series of "you may be right" statements. Armstrong's book very much reflects this understanding.

If you are looking for a quick and easy read espousing a particular view of the three great monotheistic traditions, this is not the book for you. If you are looking for a deeply researched, carefully nuanced, well analyzed description of the major movements, thinkers, and doctrines within the traditions, get this book and read it thoroughly.

And, now, the cutie picture of the posting - Hubby Dearest wearing his new scarf - he selected the length, approved the yarn and the pattern, and cheered on the making.

Wallhanging Redo

For the past three weekends, I've been bogged down in a project that had one problem after another. If I weren't so stubborn, I think I would have given up on it. In mid-August, I "finished" this project:

Every time I looked at it, though, I hated it more. So while trying to figure out what to do, I stumbled across these leftovers:

These should look familiar - see the quilt at the top of the blog. I had always figured I'd find a way to work these leftovers into another project. I started out by slicing the screen print pieces away from each other. Then, I proceeded to quilt the dickens out of each piece. Then, I added a layer of batting and the green backing to the hunk of yellow leftover. Here's a side view of the resulting strips.

I then got to pick out the stitches that were in the way, carefully stitch the top layer of the strips to the top layer of the blocks, giving me this on the back:

I trimmed away excess batting, folded over edges, put thread in the bobbin that would match the front of the piece, and prayed, begged, and cursed my way to this:

Yeah, I see the flecks of batting, but you know, they're going to be against the wall of my office! I added outside borders using the same technique, secured any remote seams and then stepped back and looked at it. The center was sort of odd looking, and, frankly, I was concerned about angle of the blocks. I needed to put something in the middle, and while I was pawing through various odds and ends, a holiday card from 2005 sent by my friend Rita Stark fell off the bulletin board. I took the card apart, added some ribbon trim under the edges of the piece to stabilize it and to help it stand out from the background.

And, here is the final piece. I am pleased with it. It's fun, it's a little wonky, and, best of all, it's done.

(It does have a top corner, unfortunately, I didn't notice the photography error until I was pulling it off the camera.) Now, here's some kitty loving - Baby Boy getting snuggles from his da-da -

I have been doing a lot of reading, and I plan to do a post really soon catching up on that front. The scarf for Hubby is closing in on done, and I am thinking about Christmas knitting. I have this wildly outrageous idea of trying to complete four cowls / neckwarmers between now and Christmas for my nieces. I looked up some patterns yesterday afternoon, and I don't think this is outside the realm of possibility. It'll let me use leftover yarn from other projects and give me an excuse to buy more.

I hope to be back here later this week. Take care.

Cone Nebula - Ready for the Quilter

After a nearly three-month delay (since piecing the last block), I finally got around to the final steps of the Cone Nebula journey. I started the day by stabilizing the edges with bias tape. I have never seen this described anywhere, but I had been wondering about all of those little seams at the edges of the top. Last May, the quilt guild hosted Betty Ekern Suiter, whose quilts are utterly amazing. She explained her process and talked about how after the top is done she applies cotton twill tape to the edge of her top to stabilize the edges, and a light went on in my head. So, I bought a bunch of the sort of bias tape I use on dress hems, measured the vertical and horizontal dimensions of the quilt through the center, cut pieces of tape to those measurements, and pinned and sewed the tape to the underside of the top.

While I was sewing, though, I had some trouble moving the top around the way I wanted to. Can anyone figure out why the top seemed extra heavy?

(Come on! I am nothing if not consistent, and a picture of the Brat Cat is almost expected here, right?)

After I got the bias tape on, I pulled out the 90"-wide batting, carefully measured and cut a piece 10" longer than the top (the top is 124" x 109"). When I measured the batting I saw that it was really 94" wide. Cool. I needed to make it 10" wider than the quilt. 119" - 94" = 15" No problem. I chopped off a piece that I could cut into six pieces each 15" wide, I sewed them together and then sewed them to one side of the batting. When I measured, I started screeching. Aaaaa!!!! 119" - 94" = 25" Any blithering stupid dunderhead idiot child would have figured that out!! Aaaaa!!!! So, I got to make a second long strip for the other side.

I lightly lapped the pieces of batting and used the broken zig-zag stitch so that there are a lot of small stitches that just sink into the batting and hold it tightly.

With the second strip done, I set everything aside. I have e-mailed the quilter, and we have made arrangements to get together for the hand-off. I have never before sent a personal quilt to a quilter (I've sent a couple of raffle quilts off), so this is an adventure.

When I got downstairs, there was a mop of white fur on the end of the dining room table.

I started taking pictures, hoping to get something cute. I was rewarded.

Isn't she darling? Speaking of darling, I have to show you what I picked up from the school supplies area of my local big box retailer. I have now bought nine of these darlings and have my threads all organized by color family. It is so exciting. (And I only spent 59 cents on each of these!)

Finally, on the theme of darling, a dear friend of mine gave me a sweater's worth of Tahki Donegal Tweed yarn at the beginning of the summer. Hubby dearest had been asking for a new winter scarf. When I finished the Every Way Wrap, I pulled out the tweed yarn and looked for a suitable pattern. I am working off the chart for the center back of the Lough Corrib sweater from the November 2008-January 2009 issue of Cast On magazine. In the pictures below, the blue shows up well in one picture and the cables show up well in the other. The scarf is about half done at this point.

I'm pleased with the scarf, and so is Hubby. The next knitting project will be a pair of socks from the hand-painted yarn I bought last winter.

Thank you for stopping by!

Cone Nebula Quilt - Editing

When I had the Cone Nebula quilt laid out on the grass last June, I saw this weird polygon:

Today, I put on the ironing board and started auditioning fixes. Here's a close-up of the problem:

Here are several different auditions of possible fixes:

I ended up redoing two blocks and not swapping in the pink/orange piece at the lower right. Here is the final view of the polygon:

I think it looks softer, more organic, and less angular.

Speaking of softer, when I overdyed the backing for the quilt last weekend, I also dyed a jersey dress in the leftover dye. This was a prepared-for-dyeing dress I purchased from Dharma Trading this summer. I spent all week looking at this dress, trying to decide if I liked it:

I had a friend stop over on Saturday, and she talked about how good the color looked with my hair, etc. She did suggest that I dress it up a bit, and after auditioning several different neck treatments, I ended up with this:

Here's a close-up:

I had a piece of pink silk cording that I threaded into a piece of lace. I opened the shoulder seams of the dress and sewed the threaded lace into the seams. I then sewed the lace on to the neckline, right next to the binding. I'm looking forward to wearing this dress.

Finally, the requisite picture of the Brat Cat, this one of her looking cute while requesting cuddles:

This is a creature who would never draw blood from a dearly loved human.... yeah, until the day after this picture got taken!

Cone Nebula Quilt - Back

A month ago on the big summer dyeing day, I dyed the backing fabric for the Cone Nebula quilt. It came out very bright:

I did a lot of thought experiments, consulted with a friend who is an experienced dyer, and then poked around on a couple of websites before deciding that overdyeing it with a basic blue would fix the brightness without muddying the results too much. My friend suggested Prochem's Mixing Blue, which I did not have on hand. I had Dharma Trading's Strong Navy and Royal Blue on hand. I mixed about a two-to-one ratio of the dyes and diluted quite a bit. Once I poured the dye mixture on, I was terrified it was too dark, but I was too nervous to do anything about it.

Today, I washed out the back, ran it through the dryer, and Hubby and I laid it out on the roof of the shed, and then we both said, "Oh, yeah. That's what we want." Here are a couple of beauty shots:

This toned down the glaring colors, deepened the darker areas, and left a great many bright areas. It is much more in keeping with the front of the Cone Nebula quilt.

Also, today, I cut apart my favorite screenprinting project, auditioned fabrics for the sashing, and put together a small wall hanging for my office.

I picked the dark green (which was one of the fabrics I was given on my retreat in Ohio in June!) after consulting with Hubby. I then did a really crappy job of the quilting, trimming, and binding. Oh well.

Maybe people will be so dazzled by the pretty screenprints, no one will notice the weird edges. If anyone asks, they're artistic touches!

CORRECTION: In the cold light of morning, I came to my senses and realized that I need to take the binding off, fix the weird trimming by adding another border, and otherwise fixing this up. I do like the piece, but it needs some work.

Projects Moving Forward

In my last post I mentioned that I really enjoyed my three-day weekend of workshops last week. In previous years, I have come home from that weekend with several projects half started. This year, I took a techniques class called Spontaneous Screenprinting. It was taught by Debra Gash, a truly dedicated teacher who puts in many hours of preparation prior to each class. I walked out of the class with color on just four pieces of fabric but a head stuffed with a great deal of information for future projects. Here are some pictures.

The upper picture is fabric paint pushed through a lacy fabric. The lower picture uses thickened dyes and a piece of linoleum pressed onto the same tableau as that used for the next print:

In other words, I made the blue prints, then put a bunch of yellow dye onto a piece of linoleum and pressed it onto the same pieces of foam, etc. I really want to turn those four blue/green screens into a wallhanging, and I'll probably incorporate those three yellow polygons as well.

Before I digressed into pictures, I was going to tell you that my Saturday class, "Design for Me," was also taught by Debra Gash. There were six students, and the seven of us sat around a table and worked through various exercises together looking at lines, shapes, symmetry, colors, values, tones, etc. We looked at what we like, what we don't like, what we'd like to work on. Our homework for the class had been very interesting in that we were supposed to find pictures of quilts we love, quilts we loathe, and quilts we've made. We sat together as a class at lunch and had some wonderful conversation. By the end of the day, when we started pulling out our groups of pictures, we had established a great deal of trust, and we'd learned each other's preferences so well that if we'd had to, I think we could each have picked out the makers of the various quilts. Two of the classmates are good friends of mine, one classmate talked about how I had given her a pep talk a couple of years ago, and I do plan to follow up with yet another classmate who I think will become a friend. You might check in on Ginia's blog in the next few days for other reflections on this class.

The third day of workshops had actual projects involved. I finished the basic project in the fabric collage postcards class and mentioned this last week. In the afternoon class, I got this far on the tablerunner:

See that cool bias strip doing curlicues in the middle of the piece? Deb Grifka showed us a couple of neato shortcuts for that. Her model tablerunner had some basic shapes appliqued to the runner, but I'm not inspired by stars and triangles, so here is what I did this afternoon:

Yeah, what can I say? I'm a hearts and flowers and butterflies kind of gal. I had a flower stamp and a heart stamp that I used all over, and then I filled out the runner with fused-on shapes that I cut free form. (If you cut two hearts freeform and cut them kind of short and then you put the pointy ends together, you get butterflies. I know. Every eight-year-old girl knows this, but I had forgotten.)

The sewing room redo continues apace. This weekend I made new curtains for it and got my rulers up on the wall. I arranged them so that the rulers I use most often are in the handiest position.

The cats have been exploring the space, and I want to apologize for not getting the picture that presented itself just 10 seconds earlier than this one; all I could see of the Brat Cat was her increasingly wide rear end, but I couldn't grab the camera in time. Here she is on the new fabric hutch.

Another new space is the now-mobile table that is sometimes folded up and sometimes out. The Princess is clearly wondering about the monster kitty.

Completed Projects!!

I just checked on Ravelry, and I cast on the Every Way Wrap on December 31. Last evening, August 2, I put in the final stitch. Here it is:

I took lots of pictures where I was wearing it, but the flash overwhelmed them. I am very pleased with this project. It seemed as though it would take forever, but I stuck to it. I still have to put buttons on, but pish-tosh!

I had some very good workshops during the recent weekend. If you would like to see pictures of actual sewing projects I accomplished, please see Kat's blog (my postcards are the bottom photo) and Deb's blog. It was a long weekend, and I was doing a lot of stuff besides being in classes.

I'll have pictures from the screenprinting class later in the week.