{I've Been Reading} Antiques Ravin'

The thirteenth book of the Trash 'n' Treasures mystery series by Barbara Allan, Antiques Ravin' has an appropriately dark theme. Newly elected sheriff Vivian Borne and her daughter are investigating a murder at the Edgar Allen Poe festival -- after her performance of The Raven. It's a fun fast read that I highly recommend. To quote Brandy, "For newbies just jumping in -- heaven help you," but it's easy to start reading this series out of order. Brandy and Vivian, who alternate chapters, will tell you what you need to know and frequently tell you what book certain events happened in. I've probably read half of the books in the series and I find myself curious about past events, but never feeling too lost. 



I picked up The Loch Ness Papers by Paige Shelton because the description sounded interesting. It's the fourth book in the series, but I frequently read things out of order and most of the time it works. This time, it didn't. Delaney Nichols works at a bookshop in Scotland and is preparing for her wedding. While going to make last minute arrangements to replace the pastor who was supposed to perform the ceremony, she meets Norval, an old man who is obsessed with Nessie and looking for someone to take over his research. When his nephew is murdered, Delaney tries to help Norval clear his name. 

The murder mystery and Norval's stories about his childhood encounters with the monster, who he firmly believes took his father, are interesting but I never really felt pulled into Delaney's world. She hears "bookish voices" which aren't explained at all until most of the way  through the book, and although she was planning a wedding I really didn't get any sense of her relationship with her fiance. Those are things that I probably would have known if I'd started with the first book in the series, but jumping in with this one wasn't the best idea.

Disclosure -- The publishers provided me with advance review copies. My opinions are my own. 

New Bandwagons to Jump On

If you've followed my blog for long at all, you'll have noticed that I tend to jump on bandwagons. Not all of them, by any stretch, but the ones that look fun.

Stitch Maynia is starting in a couple of days and I'm playing along this year. Cross stitchers start either nineteen projects (because it's 2019) or thirty one projects (one for each day of the month) or whatever other self-determined rule they decide to follow. Some are monogamous stitchers and work on one projects, some do a mix of WIPs and new starts, some do all new starts...and you can change your own rules any time you want.

I'm planning a mix of new stitches and new knits and probably some project bags. Thirty-one is the goal...but I know how my life is.

The Witchy Stitcher (she designed Home is Where the Horror Is, which I stitched last year) has a new mystery SAL with nine universal monsters in the rooms of a haunted mansion and I'm soooo soooo sooo tempted that I'll probably have purchased it by the time this posts. You can buy it on her etsy shop.

There are also those Target bags. They have a grid of holes which form squares, so of course people are buying them to stitch on. And buying them to resell at hugely inflated prices, which might be why there were none in our local store even before they went on clearance.

I stopped at the Target by Ikea while my daughter and I were shopping and not only did they have the bags, they had them for 70% off. I bought five, which seemed like too many...then I got home and the boys saw them and started putting in requests and it might not be enough. If I don't wind up stitching anything on any of them, it was still a good purchase since the entire state just passed a ban on plastic shopping bags. 

I Stitched a Thing...

I'd been carrying around the pattern and fabric and floss in my project bag since January. Sometimes it seemed like the most appropriate thing I could possibly stitch. Some days things were going smoothly and I was happy with hedgehogs and snowy scenery. 

A week or so ago, I really needed to work on something that was simple and one color and didn't requite much concentration. So it got stitched. 

Pattern: Swearing Helps, a free download from Glowfall Love & Craft

There should have been a swag of flowers across the bottom, but leaving those off meant that it would fit the hoop that I'd recently used as a prop for something else so I left them off. They would have been pretty, but this piece represents a particular moment in time and on that morning flowers weren't a priority. 

I've got mixed feelings about what I've seen described as snarky stitching. Some captures me feelings almost perfectly, but I wouldn't hang it on my wall. This one is iffy, but it's going in the sewing room and I'm the only one who should be in the sewing room and I honestly don't worry about the entire world seeing it. It's tame enough. 

Let's Make Baby Quilts! {4/26/19}

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.

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

{Thrift Shop Temptations} Sewing Boxes and a Camel Teapot

There are some things that just call to you from across the room...

I'd love to know more about that adorable little stove, mostly who cooked on it and where and what the rest of their life was like.

My son really, really wanted the silver camel tea pot, but I couldn't quite justify it.

We checked out an antique shop with an interesting sign and found some pretty sewing boxes...

That one is absolutely gorgeous and I had to remind myself that I don't use the sewing boxes I already own.  This one wasn't as cute, but it was filled to the brim with sewing goodies.

And I got a reminder that I can't afford mid-century barware. This isn't the set that I'm coveting, but it was entertaining.

Let's Make Baby Quilts! {4/18/19}

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.

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

I Love Lighthouses

I'm sure I've mentioned that before, but I'm having so much fun with this kit, Beacon at Daybreak, that I don't want to work on any of my other stitching projects. I just kind of love everything about this one. 

Hobby Lobby has cross stitch kits on clearance again...

There were a couple of other tempting me, but these are three that I know I'll stitch.

Tide Pools Instead of Museums?

Remember last year's plan to visit a different museum at least once a month? I didn't pull it off. Going places was possible, but spacing them evenly out, let alone spacing them evenly out and getting them to mesh with the actual calendar...that didn't happen. 

I thought we'd go to the Marine Science Center while we were at the coast, but it turns out they don't have an octopus on display right now. Since the octopus and the touch pools are the main attractions, we didn't go.  Instead, we spent a couple of afternoons clambering around on the rocks and looking at actual tide pools. 

There weren't informative signs, or helpful volunteers to answer our questions but we know most of the creatures by sight and we have smart phones that helped fill in the gaps in our existing knowledge. 

This was a lot more fun -- and a lot more exercise -- than walking through a museum reading signs. 

I've still got a  whole long list of places we plan to visit, but I'm scrapping the idea of doing one a month.

Let's Make Baby Quilts! {4/12/19}

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.

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

There was an Estate Sale and I Got Drenched

It's definitely spring in Oregon. We stopped at an estate sale on Friday. The weather was decent so I wasn't wearing my coat. On the way back to the car, the clouds opened up and I got soaked to the skin. That was the second time that's happened this week. The first time we were exploring the tide pools and I misjudged how far in a wave would come. 

We found some old hanging planters for the porch of our daughter's place....

I found some nice books and some old hot iron transfers in designs I hadn't seen before.

And we also found some other stuff that wasn't particularly tempting, but it was inexpensive and practical. Check out the video if you want to see the flatware and old 2" television set.


Did you find anything good this week? Are you staying dry?

Starting Another New Shawl

The colors are pretty and the pattern is perfect...but the yarn is loosely spun and doesn't want to play nicely. It's a shawl I plan to donate, so I  really do need  to make sure that the stitches are even and not wonky. 

I need to make a checklist of things I hate about yarn and then refer to it the next time there's a big clearance sale. I remember most of my pet peeves, but that loosely spun yarn gets me every single time.

Back to....Something or Other

One of my biggest challenges has always been bouncing back from vacation -- or just a few days of unexpected chaos -- to our usual daily schedule. I'm very good at losing track of what I was working on before life got crazy. Sometimes it's still there starting at me when things settle down, but if it was in the bottom of a project bag, the odds of my remembering it were slim. 

The daily project tracker in my planner has been a life saver. Everything I've started since January of 2018 and not yet finished is there on the list. I may need to come up with a rule about when it's okay to stop moving things over to the new month, because I'm never going to be one of those women who finishes everything, but I'm finishing most things. 

This Week's List --

knit a skein of yarn into the Skoosh shawl
finish gridding the fabric for Beacon at Daybreak
 finish gridding the fabric for All is Calm
zigzag the edges of projects that need it

{I've Been Reading} Lots of Domestic Thrillers

I managed to read three domestic thrillers last week, one after the other.



I must not be the target audience for these thrillers where a mother isn't paying attention and loses another parent's child. Her One Mistake by Heidi Perks sets us up immediately to dislike both mothers. Charlotte is annoyed by the fact that Harriet's  four-year-old is wearing sunscreen so she'll need to find some for her own three children. She's annoyed by their whining and it wasn't long at all before I was annoyed by Charlotte and the way it felt like the author was carefully choosing details to make me dislike the woman.  She's playing on her phone while she waits for the kids to come out of the inflatable Jungle Run, "reading some inane quiz and then scrolling through posts, getting caught up in everyone else's lives." Her own kids come running up to her after a few trips through, but little Alice doesn't.

Once I started to learn the details of what had happened to Alice it got interesting, but it took a long time to get there, with the chapters alternating between Charlotte (in first person) and Harriet (in third person) on the day of the disappearance, and Charlotte being interviewed in the present.



 The Perfect Child by Lucinda Berry is definitely disturbing. When an abandoned child is found in a parking lot and brought to the hospital where Christopher and Hannah work, the childless couple decide to become foster parents.  Based on her size, the hospital staff originally thought Janie was a toddler, but the growth plates of her bones reveal that she's a brutally abused and malnourished six year old.

I was hoping for a chilling read along the lines of Baby Teeth, but I didn't care for this book at all. It keeps you at a distance from the characters (kind of like a badly written true crime drama) and I spent most of the time wanting to strangle both Christopher and Hannah who seemed to think that proper parenting would solve all of Janie's problems. They refuse to tell the parents of her peers about her past because that will excuse her actions...but with the way she's described in the first few pages of the book how could you not explain? Other parents are going to question her size, or her scars. It seems that one surgery fixed all of Janie's old bone breaks and physical problems (even though that surgery was on her elbow.) They never should have left her alone with a kitten, because you don't send a normal young child off to take care of her new pet without any supervision and Janie definitely isn't a normal young child.

I was honestly shocked when I read the author's bio at the end and learned that Lucinda Berry is a researcher in child trauma. The book felt completely unrealistic to me. I read it as a parent with absolutely no experience in the field, but the world does not end when a kid deliberately knocks paper towels off of the shelf at Target. Hannah wasn't equipped to deal with even that.



In The Girl Across the Street by Vikki Patis, Beth and Isla meet late one night at the site of a hit and run accident. They're unable to save the man, but that awful moment is the beginning of a friendship. Both of them are in bad relationships, although Beth's problems are more obvious than Ilsa's, and both of them are hiding secrets. When those secrets are revealed, they're not as earth-shattering as the book had me expecting. Some things that would be truly awful in real life just don't seem book-worthy.


Disclosure -- The publishers provided me with advance review copies.

Stitching by the Sea

I had the absolute best stitching corner last week. Of course I waited until Friday morning to take the picture and by then the weather had turned so this doesn't capture it at all. 

I did most of my stitching down by the pool and if that sounds nice and relaxing, insert the screams of a bunch of kids on spring break...and their parents. My nerves were frazzled by the time we left the pool each night, but I got a lot of stitching done.

That was an unopened Dimensions kit that I threw into my project bag just in case I had some time to stitch. We saw a couple of real lighthouses, too, but one was closed for the day and one was closed for the winter.  Is April 2 still winter?

{Estate Sale Temptations} The Fancy Woodwork

I wasn't going to go to this sale, based solely on the pictures of the woodwork. It's amazing and impressive and gorgeous...but the person who did all of this probably didn't have what I'm looking for.

We were there in the very last hours of the sale,  so I wonder what will happen to those elaborate clocks. The prices were high, probably rightfully so, but it seems like it would be hard enough to sell one or two, let one an entire room of them. (And if I was going to pay crazy money for a fancy clock, I think I'd want an old one.)

If you were in the market for a ten foot long mid-century couch they had it, along with a properly proportioned coffee table.

This house had steps between the rooms. Up a few inches or down a few inches -- I tripped three times before figuring that out.

A woman was haggling over the price of the treadle sewing machine. If I was in the market, and I keep telling myself I'm not, I wouldn't have balked too much at their reduced price of $65.

That same woman was very excited about this, and I was waiting like a vulture to see if she set it back down. The book is from the late 1800s, some kind of agricultural yearbook, with crochet and quilting patterns pasted inside. It was only the first few pages, though.  If it had been the entire book, I wouldn't have set it back down. I'm also guessing that the first woman wouldn't have set it back down so I wouldn't have had the chance to look at it myself.

I'm going to find myself a book and some old falling apart magazines and make my own. Why I didn't check the price to see if it made sense to start with this book, I have no idea....

Let's Make Baby Quilts! {4/5/19}

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.

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

{Vintage Show and Tell} The Famous Artists Painting Course

Remember those advertisements on matchbooks or in the backs of old comic books promising that if you could draw Tippy the Turtle you could win a scholarship and become a famous artist?

I always wondered about those, so when I found this set of four huge canvas covered binders for three dollars, they were definitely coming home with me.

It turns out that Tippy was advertising for Art Instruction Schools and my set is from the Famous Artists Painting Course.

Close enough!

Someone spent a lot of money on these and enrolled in January of 1969, then only completed the first four lessons. The forms to cut out and return with the other submissions are still in the binders.

 I wonder what happened. These would have been a huge investment at the time. In 1950 the course was three hundred dollars and I can't image that it got any less expensive before this edition came out in 1965.

I thought my son might want to flip through these, but he'd rather learn painting by trial and error or through online videos. I can't say that I blame him -- Bob Ross is a lot more fun!

Halfway Home, a Second Time

I could honestly see myself knitting this Halfway Home shawl over and over. The first one I knit was supposed to be for the prayer shawl ministry at my late Aunt's church, but I fell in love with it and kept it for myself. 

I hate to say it, but I love this second attempt even more. I am not keeping it for myself, no matter how much squishier and denser and warmer the slightly thicker yarn (Hobby Lobby I Love This Yarn) made it. What I do wish is that I'd bought more of this yarn when they had that amazing clearance sale last year. It was dirt cheap and I really enjoyed knitting with it.

There are at least a dozen shawls with similar construction in my Ravelry queue, so I'm not making much of a sacrifice by giving this shawl up.

{I've Been Reading} Joanna Campbell Slan's Second Chance Series

If you read Joanna's guest post a couple of weeks ago, you already know that she has a new book out. Before I could read that one myself, I had to catch up on the third book in the series. I'd purchased it when it was first released and then somehow managed not to read it. It's easy to lose track of Kindle purchases, especially if you download as many free titles as I do. I definitely need a better system! Anyone have suggestions?




I've built a very short list of vacation dreams based on the cozy mysteries I read and this series has me almost convinced I want to see the Treasure Coast of Florida. We travel by car and it's about as far from home as I could get without leaving the country....but Joanna makes it sound like such an incredible place I could almost be tempted to get on a plane.

As fantastic as the setting is, the mystery is even better. On an early morning walk, Cara discovers what she first thinks is a sand sculpture of a mermaid. To her horror, she realizes that it's a woman there at the water's edge, barely clinging to life. That's the first in a chain of events that I don't want to spoil for you so I'll keep my mouth shut. It's a great book that will keep you turning pages.

I loved the mystery, but I also loved the stuff going on in Cara's personal life. Her friends are people I'd like to spend more time with...I might've put off reading this book because I liked the Kiki Lowenstein mystery series better, but that was a dumb decision.



Second Chance at Faith picks up not long after the previous book left off. You'll miss out on a lot of the emotional impact if you don't read these two in order. The big mystery in this one is a missing coral and gold artifact from the Spanish Armada, which was stolen from a highly secured charity auction. Cara  can't imagine how anyone made off with the piece and, as one of last people who was in the room, she's under suspicion herself. There's also a lot going on with Cara and her friends. I just read these two books back to back and I'm already anxious for the next one.  I want to find out what's going to happen with the characters and I want to read more about the Treasure Coast.

Starting to Think of Projects for Spring

I'm starting to think of pretty new projects for Spring...and yes I know that a still life on black fabric with a wheel of cheese in the center has nothing to do with Spring but it's new and it's mine and I get to pick my own projects and stitch whatever I want. 

That light house couldn't scream Spring any more loudly if it had bunnies with baskets of eggs hopping down the path, so maybe they'll even each other out. 

There's a stitching group called Stitch Maynia and one of the things members do every spring is start a bunch of new projects. Fifteen...or nineteen....or thirty-one, depending on your particular level of crazy. I'm thinking about it. The problem is that everything on my "to stitch" list is big.