Two Weeks Without Knitting

I cast on a new pair of socks before we left for the trip, expecting to have at least the first sock done before we got home. The toe went into my bag and never came out. Now my fingers seem to have forgotten how to move.




Cora Chevalier has been doing everything possible to make her new crafter's retreat a success. When fingerprints that seem to match her good friend Jane's are found at a murder scene, the attendees scheduled to attend her first retreat being to cancel and Cora begins to panic. Jane's fingerprints have been distorted by years of work as a potter, so the match isn't perfect and Cora is sure of her friend's innocence. Unfortunately, some of her new clients aren't.

Death Among the Doilies by Mollie Cox Bryan is the  first in a new cozy mystery series.  It took me some time to warm up to Cora. In the first few pages of the book, she's rushing to the police station to help one of her dearest friends and stops to admire her stained glass window.  Later in  the book, she pauses again to describe her love for the historic house she lives in and it feels much more genuine. With the wide variety of crafts practiced by her visitors and the focus on the healing potential of crafting, I think this is going to be an interesting series to follow.

Disclosure -- I was provided with an advance review copies by the publishers. All opinions are my own. This post is linked to Patchwork Times, Yarn Along.

{Thrift Store Temptations} A Bicentennial Lamp

My favorite thing about thrift store shopping is when you stumble across that thing you've never seen before and can't quite believe exists. Like this lamp. 

I don't understand. At all. But there's a part of me that can almost picture the room this thing would be at home in. 

I know about the bicentennial, but that doesn't explain why anyone would feel the need to print the Declaration of Independence on a lampshade. Or the combination of wood and fake hurricane lamps. I'm usually a fan of electrified hurricane lamps, but not this particular example.

And then there were these --

I can't tell you how much I wanted these. When Hubby and I were first married, we had a pair of spectacular old lamps that I think his sister had given him. They were huge and spectacularly ugly and I absolutely loved them - maybe more in hindsight. Imagine the pebbled glass globes from this pair, in red and two feet across! They broke when we were moving, which may or may not have been an accident. Or we made the decision to get rid of them. All I know is that we used to have them -- and the ugly but comfy couch that went with them -- and now we don't.

As much as I love the memory of those lamps, these are better! I've never seen anything like them and, unlike the lamp with the Declaration of Independence on the shade, I would love to have these in my house. I walked around the store three times convincing myself that there's no place in the house to display them and that they'd need to be rewired and that someone else would come along who would love them just as much as I do. Their five  dollar price tag made it hard.

I Think I Found the Perfect Fabric

When I admitted that the time might be  coming to retire my beloved Nancy Drew bag, I knew the hardest part would be finding the perfect fabric. It has to be something that I absolutely love, that I won't get tired of if I carry it around every day for a couple of years. Something that can compete with those book spines...

And it's got to be something from my existing stash.  I've got gorgeous fabric I still love years after purchasing it, but the ladies in vintage Barbie-style dresses are on a light background that would show dirt. The vintage school prints will scream "homeschool mom" just a little too loudly. The vintage circus posters (which get bonus points because they came from one of Grandma's thrift store bags) might be a little too adventurous for an everyday bag, but they reminded me of  this print....

I think I've got the basis for my new tote bag! There's only a fat quarter in my stash, but that's actually more than I had of the book spine print. And I've got red and black yardage that I bought when I thought this was going to be a wall quilt.

Weekly Stash Report

Fabric used this week: 0 yards
Fabric used year to date: 6 1/2 yards
Fabric added this week:  0 yards
Fabric added year  to date: 18 1/4 yards (+2 sheets)
Net added for 2016: 12 3/4 yards

Yarn used this Week: 0  yards
Yarn used year to Date: 4850 yards
Yarn added this Week: 0 yards
Yarn added Year to Date: 7366 yards
Net added for 2016: 2516 yards

This post is linked to Patchwork Times.

{I've Been Reading} The Fabled Oak

About fifteen years ago, I read some horror novels by Simon Clark and really enjoyed them. At the time, most of his books were only available overseas and the budget didn't stretch quite far enough for me to order them off of ebay, not without cutting back on the cross stitch supplies.  Now, I've got more of a book budget and some of those books have been made available on Kindle. (Did I mention how much I love these e-readers?)



The Fabled Oak is apparently part of a series. Ghost hunter Byron Makangelo and his team have been summoned to a high-tech hippy commune to investigate "Tree Face" a menacing apparition that terrifies the group's children. I've been unable to find a list of the books in the series, but this definitely wasn't the first. It felt like I'd started watching a random episode of an established television series. Although I had to figure out who was who, the ancient oak with its centuries of offerings was interesting enough to pull me in. And the story behind the tree was truly haunting.

I can't recommend On Deadly Ground. It's one of the books I was trying to find a decade ago, so I was looking forward to reading it. The book is long, almost seven hundred pages, and I found myself skimming over pages and pages of graphic gore and sex that did nothing to advance the plot. The whole thing is told from the point of a nineteen year old boy and it takes forever for him to figure out and explain why the world is ending. All we know is that the ground has become hot and the members of humanity who aren't dead yet have been reduced to cannibalistic savages. The apocalypse does start to get interesting near the end, but for me it was too little too late.

So I'd recommend one book but not the other.  I'll definitely be downloading some of the other titles I missed when they were first published.

Disclosure -- the publisher provided me with ARCs. 

Let's Make Baby Quils! {8/26/16}

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.

Another Towel That Can't Run Away

Having a kitchen towel that's stuck to the stove makes life in the kitchen much easier, especially now that I've learned the trick to making one that doesn't rely on velcro or buttons. 

The other night, I went through eight towels while making dinner. I can't explain how that happened, but it did.  Every time I reached for it, my towel was gone. I need more towels with big buttonholes in them. They're not a fool-proof system, but at least it's a bit of a hint that I AM STILL USING THIS AND DO NOT WANT YOU TO WALK OFF WITH IT...

After a trip to Hobby Lobby and a trip to Joann's, I used a coupon and bought myself a flour sack towel. Then I found another one at MECCA  for fifty cents.  When I got home and unrolled that one from its tightly taped little bundle I  found someone else's partially finished embroidery on one corner. Dang!

It was a free-hand embroidered circle with flowers. Definitely not my style and I couldn't have finished it if I wanted to, so I lopped off the stitched corner and did my own embroidery on the opposite end.

The iron-on transfer slipped and gave the spoon double lines. It doesn't show up as badly now that it's finished, but it sure was hard on my eyes while I doing the stitching.

Now I'm eyeballing my other store-bought towel and wondering if I'd rather gamble that my hand will stay steady while I trace a design or that my vintage iron-ons will do what they should.

Edited to add -- in a Facebook discussion that had nothing at all to do with embroidery, someone said that Target sold flour sack towels for a buck a piece. I got this four-pack for $3.57. They're not as huge as the ones I've bought in the past, but they're big enough to do the job. I'll let you know how they hold up.

And what I decide to stitch on them.

Using the Pretty Ones

I've been using the doily/dishrag. As I type this, it's tumbling around in the washer with a bunch of towels and socks. From my point of view, there's no reason not to use the pretty ones.

This was up in the sewing room. I'm guessing it's one of mine since the ends were never woven in, but I have no memory of knitting it. With all of the other lace I've knit over the years I don't think I need to preserve the dishcloths.




Anne and Marco Conti leave their six month old daughter sleeping peacefully in her crib while they have dinner with the neighbors. The two houses share a wall. They're only a few feet away -- and they have the baby monitor with them. Even with its video screen broken, they would hear if anything happened to their baby...

Except they didn't hear a sound when Cora was taken from her crib.  The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapena kept me guessing and wondering which little details were important clues, but I never did care much about the couple or what happened to them. And that shocking ending that the cover copy promises? I found it more puzzling than shocking.




I expected What Was Mine by Helen Klein Ross to be a thriller. There's that empty swing on the cover and I guess when I reserved the book through the online card catalog I only read the first few lines of the description -- baby stolen from a shopping cart...secret kept for decades... It wasn't at all what I expected it to be, but I really got myself tangled up in the lives of the characters and cared what happened to them.



I can't rave enough about The Dollhouse by Fiona Barton. It's set in New York at the Barbizon Hotel, in both 1952 and 2016.  In the present, journalist Rose Lewen is obsessing over an old scandal, trying to get long term residents of the building to open up to her and reveal what happened to leave one young woman dead and another tragically scarred. In 1952, Darby McLaughlin had just arrived at the hotel and is in over her head, intimidated by the glamorous models who share her floor and trying to keep up with her secretarial classes because that's the only hope she has for her future. Even though I knew that tragedy was going to strike and had a good idea of how it was going to happen, the book kept me wondering and guessing until the very end. If I have any complaint it's that the present day situation was tied up very neatly, maybe too neatly, over the last few pages.


Disclosure -- I was provided with an advance review copy by the publisher. All opinions are my own. This post is linked to Patchwork Times, Yarn Along, Crazy Mom Quilts , Wrap up Friday  

A Little Mystery Solved

When Moda came out with the Nancy Drew fabric a couple of years back, I wondered why some of the books had red spines. My collection was full of yellow spined books and blue tweed (my favorite) and I'd seen the white dust jackets....but red? Was that a real thing?

A recent trip to the thrift shop solved the mystery --

It's a library binding and that's got to be one of the ugliest book covers I've ever seen. But it is red. I always thought one of the best parts of the series, along with the titles, was the cover art.

The thing I do love about this book is that it's the original text from 1941 instead of the revised edition. The Mystery at the Moss-Covered Mansion is one of the books where they completely changed the plot when they updated it -- this time from a missing heiress to something about exploding oranges being smuggled into the Kennedy Space Center. I'm happy to have the original to read, even if the book itself is ugly as sin.

The Next Baby Quilt Tutorial -- Rosy

It's got a lot of half square triangles, but I think it's going to be worth it. There's a plan for the free motion quilting.  For now, I'm happy to see that there's enough variety and that all of the pinks contrast with the white background fabric.

This post is linked to Patchwork Times. 

Sharp Blades at My House

Hubby got a new knife sharpener for Christmas. He's had different knife sharpeners before -- lots of them -- but this is supposed to be the ultimate knife sharpener and do everything up to and including the blades for the lawn mower.

Lawn mower blades don't make my priority list. Kitchen knives make the list if I'm making dinner and having trouble cutting something.  What I've been wondering about is these --

Remember the scissors I let my husband use to trim the floor mats for his new truck? The plan was always to see if he could sharpen them for me. After meeting up with his new toy, they're sharp enough to cut fabric again.

I'd been wondering about that for a while. When I first started quilting, I read the advice to get cheap sewing shears with a coupon and replace them whenever they get too dull. That's what I've been doing for the past decade -- including some scissors that got switched over to paper duty a little too early and some that I tried to cut fabric with for way too long.

Now I want to find every pair of scissors in the house and have them ready and waiting for the next time Hubby pulls out his new toy.

Maybe it's time to start thinking about finding a nice pair.

Weekly Stash Report

Fabric used this week: 0 yards
Fabric used year to date: 6 1/2 yards
Fabric added this week:  0 yards
Fabric added year  to date: 18 1/4 yards (+2 sheets)
Net added for 2016: 12 3/4 yards

Yarn used this Week: 0  yards
Yarn used year to Date: 4850 yards
Yarn added this Week: 0 yards
Yarn added Year to Date: 7366 yards
Net added for 2016: 2516 yards

This post is linked to Patchwork Times.

My Little Striped Tiger

I worried about the color choices for this one. Tigers have to have black stripes, and a pink tongue, and white-ish whiskers....but I fussed about the orange. He had to be orange enough to look like a tiger, but not like a construction cone. While I was looking for scraps to use  for his whiskers and tongue, I pulled out a skein that looked like it might work.  The picture makes it look darker than it is. In real life, it's a more of a  peachy shade.

Let's Make Baby Quilts! {8/19/16}

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.

Old Scissors

We bought these at an estate sale because they were cheap and looked like something Hubby could practice sharpening. That's the kind of logic that we use at estate sales.

They're also kind of neat looking, but I couldn't figure out why the blades didn't come together when the handles did...or why the blades are a completely different metal than the handles.

Google explained it. These are Lambert interchangable blade barber scissors. The barber would unscrew the scissors and send in the dull blades for sharpening while using the handles with a different pair of blades.

Hubby made them sharp and now I'm using them for snipping yarn and embroidery floss. Teenage Son says he's going to take them apart and put them together the right way.

After the sharpener was put away and Hubby had moved on to other things, I found these in a plastic pencil box...

They came from Grandma's house and I have no idea if they were hers or if they came from an auction or estate sale. I just know that now I can tuck a different pair in every project bag. I love the pair with the fancy handles and holes for hanging from a chain, but I'd probably wind up stabbing myself in the chest if I tried wearing them. 

Taffy Socks

I wish that Sock-Ease came in more colors. Now that this pair is done, I've only got one more skein of this stuff left in my stash to play with. I coveted this yarn and saved it in my stash for years and I should feel glad that I've used it all up for its intended purpose, but part of me (the part that isn't happy with pretty comfy socks) is sad that it's over and done with.



Ever since I finished reading The Crepes of Wrath, the first in the new Pancake House mystery series by Sarah Fox, I've been dying to make some of the recipes that were included. Churro Waffles and Bacon Cheddar Waffle just sound soooo good! Although the main character was sometimes too indecisive for my taste, I'd like to visit the Flip Side Pancake House again in future books.



Seven Skeletons by Lydia Pyne introduces the reader to seven celebrity fossils. Some -- like Lucy and Piltdown Man -- I already knew by name, and others I sort of vaguely remembered hearing about. I was curious to learn more about the subject and hoping that it wouldn't be too dry a read -- instead it's filled with endless fascinating details. The man who discovered the Taung Child sharpened a pair of his wife's knitting needles and used them to careful remove the material that filled the skull. (Later, she left the skull and its protective box in a London taxi.)  The seven skeletons of the title are covered in chronological order and explain how the methods of sharing information between museums have evolved from stereoscopic slides to modern scanning methods -- and how museum displays and public awareness has changed over the centuries.



Toto's Tale and True Chronicle of Oz by Sylvia Patience tells the original story from the dog's point of view. It's been years since I read the book (the last time was as a read-aloud on a long road trip when my oldest was a toddler), but from what I can remember this book follows the plot and style of the original writing pretty closely. My favorite part was the beginning, which tells the story of how Toto became Dorothy's dog. If I have any complaint about this one, it's that I wanted more previously untold details from Toto. (And I might not have needed to know that he peed on the witch!)

Disclosure -- I was provided with an advance review copy by the publisher. All opinions are my own. This post is linked to Patchwork Times, Yarn Along, Crazy Mom Quilts , Wrap up Friday  Keep Calm Craft On

Another Sweet Little Couple

I love these two! I think it's the way they're turned to face each other that makes me like this little block so much. There are lots of images with two smiling pieces of fruit side by side, or one chasing the other....but these little  cherries are just so sweet looking the way they're looking into each other's eyes and smiling.

It's a small image, which should help fill in space between the larger ones, and it's got more color than the endless black pieces I've been stitching. Did I mention that I love these two?

This post is linked to Vintage Embroidery Monday.

Pink HSTs

Seventy-five or so pink and white half square triangles waiting to be pressed and trimmed. 

I'll need a hundred and twenty-eight to make the rest of the blocks for this baby quilt in progress.

This post is linked to Patchwork Times.

More Row by Row Happiness

I'm a little giddy about this. As we've been traveling from shop to shop picking up this year's patterns I've been falling in love with last year's quilts and wishing I'd known about the Row by Row Experience then.

It turns out that a bunch of shops are offering their 2015 and/or 2014 patterns as free downloads -- and Marian at Seams to Be Sew has compiled a list of links to those websites. I would have printed a bunch more, but the printer needs ink.

Weekly Stash Report

Fabric used this week: 1 yards
Fabric used year to date: 6 1/2 yards
Fabric added this week: 0 yards
Fabric added year to date: 18 1/4 yards (+2 sheets)
Net added for 2016: 12 3/4 yards

Yarn used this Week: 0 yards
Yarn used year to Date: 4850 yards
Yarn added this Week: 0 yards
Yarn added Year to Date: 7366 yards
Net added for 2016: 2516 yards

This post is linked to Patchwork Times.

Found Your Park Yet?

I keep seeing that pubic service announcement that urges you to "Find Your Park." I don't think I'd ever be able to settle on one favorite. Years ago, I'd have said that my favorite was Yellowstone. These days, it's still a tie between Moab or Sedona. Or maybe Carlsbad Caverns. As many times as we've been through the cavern, I'm always anxious to go back. (If you haven't gone for the Bat Flight ranger program to watch the bats leave the cave at dusk, you're missing out!) 

Every year we buy an America the Beautiful - the National Parks and Federal Recreational Lands Pass.  The name of the pass has changed a few times since we started buying them twenty-some years ago, but the purpose is the same. The eighty-dollar pass covers admission to national parks and monuments. 

When we first started buying the pass, we'd add up the admission fees for the parks and monuments we planned to visit to see if it made sense. It always did, especially since we have a habit of  spotting a sign for a National Monument and making a spur of the moment detour. That's how we wound up at the Golden Spike National Historic site one year just in time to see the reenactmet of the driving of the last spike. And at Fort Laramie. 

So far the pass we bought last summer has taken us to: 

Grand Canyon  

Oak Creek Canyon (not a National Park, but they accept the pass)

Montezuma Well  

Montezuma Castle  

V Bar V Heritage Site 

Tuzigoot  

Lava Cast Forest 

Big Obsidian Flow

Yellowstone

Rocky Mountain 

Yaquina Head (not a National Park but they accept the pass) 

And we're not done yet!  

Where are you going to go to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the National Parks? Cotopaxi, a company based on doing good and the outdoors, created this National Park infographic to share where the parks are in your state. There are so many different places all over the country!

Edited to add -- I finally found the rules for the Every Kid in a Park passes! They're here and the whole process is amazingly easy. The only piece of personal information they ask for is your zip code. If you have a fourth-grader in your life, you can get a  free parks pass. 

Let's Make Baby Quilts! {8/12/16}

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.

Dragonfly Pouch

Do you autopsy projects that didn't turn out quite right? I've been wanting to try the Fully Open Bucket Pouch since I started playing with zippers. The directions over at Ikat Bag call for a rounded bottom so I took my measurements from another site and followed Lier's directions for the zipper. 

I was confused. Very confused. It probably didn't help that my recycled zipper has metal teeth. 

My bag opens wide, which is good. But I should have added some batting or interfacing to give it more body.

It'll work for my socks-in-progress, but I wish I'd made it larger. I was too distracted by zipper logistics to remember how much length boxing the corners eats up.

Next step -- a lined bag that opens wide, has batting to give it some structure, and doesn't have boxed corners! Or maybe has less boxed corners. I'm not sure yet.

Much Happier

Now that I've got the first sock almost finished, I'm finally enjoying my Arne and Carlos splurge. Without any fussing with the gauge, I'm getting results like the pretty pictures that made me love this yarn in the first place. The yarn does its thing and I happily watch the colors change.

The comments over on Ravelry are mixed, with some knitters reporting knots that disrupt the pattern repeat. I rewound both of my skeins and didn't find a single trouble spot.




I love books like Behind Closed Doors by B. A. Paris. Let's start with the publisher's description.

Everyone knows a couple like Jack and Grace. He has looks and wealth, she has charm and elegance. You might not want to like them, but you do.

You’d like to get to know Grace better. But it’s difficult, because you realise Jack and Grace are never apart.

Some might call this true love. Others might ask why Grace never answers the phone. Or how she can never meet for coffee, even though she doesn’t work. How she can cook such elaborate meals but remain so slim. And why there are bars on one of the bedroom windows. 

You know those times when you pick up a book thinking you know exactly what you're going to get and it turns out to be something just different enough to make it better? This was one of those reads. I'm not sure that the relationship between Jack and Grace was plausible, but it was intriguing enough that I kept reading to see what was going to happen between the two of them. The last page gave me an actual, physical chill. I'm not sure that's ever happened before.

If you like domestic thrillers and don't demand that they be something that's likely to happen in real life, I highly recommend this one.



Have any of you read I'm Thinking of Ending Things by Ian Reid?  The cover copy promises that you'll be scared but you don't know why.... and the twist at the end left me feeling like I'd just wasted a couple of hours watching a really badly written streaming horror movie on Netflix. The reviews on Amazon are about evenly split between one star and five star ratings, with the positive reviews explaining that you have to read the book twice to fully understand it. Once was enough for me.

Disclosure -- I was provided with an advance review copy of Behind Closed Doors by the publisher. I'm Thinking of Ending Things came from the library. All opinions are my own. This post is linked to Patchwork Times, Yarn Along 

One Body Part Left

As soon as I stitch the  ribs, I'll be able to put the top together. But before I tackle that, I think I'll stitch something with some color!