Let's Make Baby Quilts! {7/21/17}

Let's Make Baby Quilts Linky Party Rules: 
Link directly to your post or specific Flickr photo. Your post can be about a baby quilt that's finished, or in progress, or you can be writing about what you have planned,  as long as it's about baby quilts. You're welcome to link to baby quilt posts that aren't brand new, but please don't submit the same post or picture more than once. I'd love it if you linked back to my site, either with a text link or the Let's Make Baby Quilts! button.

{Junk Store Temptations} Where My Husband is Likely to Stop

My husband isn't  big fan of thrift shops. Junk stores are more his style. Especially if it's a place like this one... 

That's only half of the front. When I pulled up, they were adding a still to the collection of stuff. That was priced, but not much else is. Plates, furniture, appliances...all sitting out in the elements with a few tarps thrown over it all when it rains.

There are even a couple of sewing machines buried in that mess...

Inside, there's slightly more method to the madness. This was my first visit in years and it definitely smelled better than it did last time.  I've been down these aisles with toddlers in tow, but I don't recommend it.

One electric mixer and dozens and dozens of sets of beaters...

And lots and lots of tools...

Honestly, I don't think I'd buy anything from this store that I couldn't bleach. But I've found a couple of treasures over the years and there's a food chopper I'm going to take my husband back to look at. It's not exactly the one he's after, but it might be close enough.

{I've Been Reading} Watch Me Disappear

Watch Me Disappear by Janelle Brown

Billie Flanagan never returned from her solo hiking trip. Search parties found her shattered phone and one hiking boot, but no one knows exactly what happened to her out on the isolated trail.  Her husband is writing a memoir of life with his wife, trying to deal with his grief and keep afloat until Billie is officially declared dead and he can collect on her life insurance policy. Their teenage daughter has started having visions of her missing mother. Those could be symptoms of a concussion. Or it could be that Billie wants to be found. This book had me literally holding my breath through the entire last chapter.



Girl Last Seen by Nina Laurin

When she was ten years old, Ella was abducted and held for three years. She escaped, but her captor was never found. For a decade, she's lived under a new identity and watched reports of missing girls, wondering who took her place in that basement.  Now Olivia Shaw has vanished. Ella (who now calls herself Lainey) can barely take care of herself. My heart was absolutely breaking for Lainey. The book doesn't reveal many details about her captivity. Her current life is frightening enough. She's hanging by a thread  even before she's dragged into the investigation of Olivia's disappearance. No one seems to understand that she can't help the missing girl, or herself.



Each Little Lie by Tom Bale

Maybe I should stop reading books that are described as having a "heart-stopping twist," because I'm not sure which revelation the cover copy is describing. There are twists here, some of them unexpected, but none was that dramatic. Jen Cornish is a single mom who does "an impulsive good deed" to help a neighbor...and that's where she lost me. What she saw as a helpful act, I saw as something else. Watching her fall down a rabbit hole of consequences was intriguing, but not nearly as suspenseful as the cover copy promises.

Disclosure -- I was provided with advance review copies by the publishers. All opinions are my own. This post is linked to Crazy Mom Quilts , Wrap up Friday iknead2knit, and  Frontier Dreams  

The Shoes

You know how Pinterest is filled with cute pictures of everyone's shoes all lined up by size? That's not how it works at my house. Our current situation looks more like this: 

Four pairs are the same brand because when you need sandals for everyone in a hurry, that's what happens. And because Costco doesn't carry women's shoes in size 11. Two pairs, mine and my husband's, are exactly the same size. Heath's are a size larger and Quinn's are a bit smaller...but not enough that I didn't try to stick my own foot in them once or twice.

I needed an easy way for everyone to pick out their own shoes that wouldn't be painfully obvious to the rest of the world and would be either semi-permanent or easy to replace as needed.

So I grabbed my embroidery floss and tied a double loop around the tab at the back of each sandal. Except for Hubby's. And Leif's, which  are both small enough and different enough to stand out from the bunch.

For the most part, it's worked. My husband and have I switched shoes once or twice, but the boys have kept theirs straight and the floss has stayed on.