{I've Been Reading} Sell Low, Sweet Harriet

Sell Low, Sweet Harriet by Sherry Harris

Sarah's latest job is planning the estate sale for a couple of former CIA agents. Their house is full of things accumulated during their extensive travels, but events quickly make her wary of working there alone. There's more going on here than a brother and sister just selling off their parents collection of  antiques. Sarah is also helping to investigate a murder at the air force base, just listening to see what she can find out about the dead woman and her friendships.

I absolutely loved this one. There's a lot of vicarious estate sale shopping to be had (which is always one of my favorite parts of this series) and the mystery kept me guessing. I always enjoy spending time in Sarah's world. The characters are well developed and relationships seem to be evolving so I can't wait to see what's coming in future books. I started reading with book one and they're just getting better and better.

Disclosure -- The publisher sent me an advance review copy. This post contains affiliate links. 

Hedgehogs in Lingonberries

I guess we can hang it on the wall while I search for the perfect frame. I'm still loving the idea of a round one. 

Kit: Hedgehogs in Lingonberries, by Riolis 

The back stitching was tedious (and I was tempted to skip most of it) but it definitely paid off. My prickly little hedgehogs are actually prickly looking. And their little noses look like actual hedgehog noses! In most of the patterns I've seen, they don't. 

Restful Rainbow Shawl

Lion Brand's Shawl in a Ball is exactly the kind of yarn that appeals to me when I'm standing there in the craft store. The promise that I can make a  whole shawl with one skein of yarn? Yes, please!  

When Hobby Lobby had it on clearance, I grabbed all of the different colorways. This one is Restful Rainbow and it's the least subdued of my choices. 

Whether or not you can get a full shawl out of one five hundred yard skein is open to interpretation. This is definitely a shawl and if I'd used a lacy stitch pattern it would have come out bigger. Two skeins would open up a lot more options.

I like the effect of gradient yarn but if there's been knots in the skein (there weren't!) this could have ended completely differently. 

Designer Cross Stitch Projects: Over 100 Colorful & Contemporary Patterns

This is one of those books that I picked up just because it was about cross stitch. The cover didn't particularly appeal to me and I'm much more interested in that "your grandma's cross stitch" that everyone else wants to avoid. So contemporary projects didn't sound promising. 

I'm obviously confused about what's contemporary. Some of these projects absolutely scream 1970s to me.

I can see myself stitching the passport cover, maybe with more muted colors or on a different fabric, and that little blue camera case.

I am absolutely going to stitch the manual typewriter because just about any pattern with an old looking  typewriter is one that appeals to me. The quill and inkwell are adorable, too.

Designer Cross Stitch Projects: Over 100 Colorful & Contemporary Patterns was a pleasant surprise and I'm glad I picked it up at the library. I do think that they're counting creatively to get to that hundred patterns, maybe including each element of the Scrabble tile alphabet. But there are more than enough great patterns in here that I might want my own copy.

If you want to see a complete flip through, click the video below --

Let's Make Baby Quilts! {12/27/19}

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.

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Procrastiknitting

The plan was to knit a couple of ballband dishcloths for my sister's new kitchen. Three seemed like a good number, but they were quick and fun and it made sense to make a fourth one so that there was one of each color combination. 

I also wanted to add something to make it more obvious that it was for the kitchen. That was going to be a little bottle of dish soap or a store bought scrubbie, then I remembered the little rounds ones I'd knitted back when I was making ballband dishcloths a few years ago. It took some searching because I couldn't remember the name of the  pattern  and there wasn't a trace of it in my blog posts from back then. (It's like this Welted Spiral Scrubbie but I was using a different pattern when I made the first ones.)

I can't believe that it was way back in 2006 when I first made some of these from the pattern in Mason Dixon Knitting. How does time pass so quickly?

{I've Been Reading} 17.5 Cartridges in a Pear Tree

There's a new Maizie Albright book out!

I couldn't quite drop everything the second 17.5 Cartridges in a Pear Tree  By Larissa Reinhart came out, but I sure wanted to. This might be my absolute favorite cozy series and this book has everything I love about Maizie and her world -- the chemistry between her and Nash, her dangerous little half-sister and the pack of small dogs that constantly follow her into trouble, and lots of fast paced adventure. Someone is determined to get their hands on a prop from one of Maizie's old movies no mater what they have to do to get it. Maizie is determined to keep the death necklace where it is. I absolutely can't recommend this series enough. Because she spent her childhood acting as Kung Fu Kate and then a teen detective, Maizie manages to be both completely unqualified as a private investigator and also able to defend herself. It's always fun to watch as she gets herself out of impossibly  ridiculous situations and I can't wait for the next book.



I've only read a few of the Lucy Stone mystery series by Leslie Meir. Invitation Only Murder intrigued me because it involves a billionaire's island that's been stripped of modern conveniences. After attending a party where the locals get a glimpse at what's been done to restore Holiday Island, Lucy is invited to spend some time there gathering information for an article. She jumps at the chance, not realizing until too late how isolated the place really is and how dangerous that would be if something went wrong. I enjoyed this one, especially the glimpse of how the family that's lived on the island for their entire lives deals with their lifestyle.

Disclosure -- I purchased 17.5 Cartridges myself. The publisher sent me an advance review copy of Invitation Only Murder. This post contains affiliate links. 

Let's Make Baby Quilts! {12/20/19}

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've Been Reading} Sylvia Stryker Space Case

It was more than two months into my three month trial, but I finally found what I wanted to read on Kindle Unlimited. Last week, I read through all three of the Sylvia Stryker Space Case mysteries back to back.




In I'm Your Venus, Sylvia has signed on with Moon Unit 6, this time as the official uniform lieutenant with no false credentials or computer hacking involved. On her first Moon Unit trip, she found a body in the uniform closet. This time, she finds a body in a hallway just outside the uniform ward. The carefully screened winner of the Moon Unit corporation's promotional contest isn't who she claimed she was, and  the atmosphere of Venus is having a strong effect on the ship's passengers.


 In Saturn Night Fever, Sylvia and Neptune, the head of ship security, steal a Moon Unit ship to rescue a friend who sent a plea for help via Sylvia's robot cat. With a crew they acquired under false pretenses and far more passengers than they planned on, not  to mention some sinister grey aliens who shouldn't be on the ship at all, Sylvia has more to deal with than ever.



I really enjoy this series. It's different from any of the other cozy mysteries I've been reading. It's fun and fast paced and mostly light-hearted. Imagine it as the sort of thing that one of Diane Vallere's other characters, Madison Night, might watch or read when she's not working or solving her own mysteries.


Disclosure -- This post contains affiliate links. 

{Thrift Shop Temptations} A Break from Christmas Shopping

I must not have been the only one who had the idea to take a break from Christmas shopping and duck into the thrift shops on Monday afternoon. They were more crowded than the mall. 

This piece of needlepoint was hanging in with a lot of old bedding and tablecloths. I'm not in love with the texture, which reminds me of the wrong side of a stockinette sweater, but I love the colors. Just look at the froth on the waves and the detail of the rocks!

I had to remind myself that I already have an old radio. Mine doesn't have that amazing Zenith logo....but it does have sentimental value. I didn't even check to see if green tags might be half off, because as much as I love this thing I couldn't justify bringing it home with me.

To see everything else I found, click on the video below --

What Delilah Did Presents Storyland Cross Stitch

I literally squealed when I saw Storyland Cross Stitch on the shelf at Goodwill. Then I flipped through it and realized that I'd mistaken it for another book that's on my wish list. That's okay, though, because there are patterns in this one that I want to play around with.

Every project in this book, even the ones labeled as for the courageous and determined, are simple. Most have only one color or floss.

I'll probably stitch some of them, but what I really really want to do is take the jackalope pattern and convert it to make a postage stamp quilt out of dark and light neutrals. Wouldn't that be the best thing ever?!

To watch my full flip through of the book, click the video below --

Let's Make Baby Quilts! {12/13/19}

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!

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On My Needles in Mid-December

2019 is coming to a close and I'm thinking/hoping that I might be able to get all of these projects finished and bound off before the new year. There's also the pair of Finding the Yellow Brick Road socks, which are buried in a project bag. 

The shawl should be easy enough and so should the Toes in the Sand Socks. The second Smock Madness sock....Let's just say that this is the third time I've cast on for that one. If I make the first, I should be able to do it again, right?

{I've Been Reading} Space Mysteries and a Ghost Chicken

I knew there were going to be Kindle Unlimited books that I wanted to read and after a slow start I've finally started to find them!




A Frosty Mug of Murder by Contance Barker is the first in the Grumpy Chicken Irish Pub mystery series and I've never read a  cozy quite like this one. Ginger O'Mallory runs her family's pub which just happens to be haunted by a ghost chicken with a grudge against the pickled egg jar. When Ginger returns a stray cat and finds its owner dead, everyone she knows wants to get in on solving the mystery. All of the team work between the quirky characters made this one a fun read.



Fly Me to the Moon by Diane Vallere

I was curious about the Sylvia Stryker space mysteries, but not sure if I'd enjoy them or not. I was so wrong -- these are all kinds of fun!  Half Plunian, half Earthling, Sylvia Stryker has hacked her way onto the crew of a space cruise ship. She's more than qualified to perform the duties of the job, but things go wrong immediately. Starting with the dead guy in the uniform closet and continuing with her discovery of another stowaway. It's light-hearted and fun and Sylvia has a great personality.

Disclosure -- This post contains affiliate links. 

My New Christmas Tradition

We were going to skip the holiday open house at Deepwood and Bush House this year, but the boys wanted to go and I had to drive up to town for another errand anyway. 

I'm so glad we went! There were different volunteers working this year and even though it was our third visit to the two houses we learned a lot of new things. It also recharged my batteries a bit to stand in the spot where my husband and I  got married.

And speaking of Victorian houses and that sort of gorgouesness, I  found an amazing free quilt pattern this morning. The Row by Row Experience is now Quilter's Trek. You can read about the changes here. Hometown Gingerbread combines embroidery and pieced blocks and it's one of those quilts I definitely want to make. You can download the first two parts free by following the link. I know the color of the year is blue, but I'm totally doing one in black and white. Or black and tea dyed muslin.

Rethreading Every Three or Four Stitches...

One of my goals is to see if I can get Crocuses in the Windowsill done by the end of the year. The yellow flowers were feeling extra fiddly as I stitched a color, then another, then went back to fill in whatever little isolated patches were left. That's not my favorite part, especially when there are blended threads involved.

Monday night, it was actually going pretty well and I decided that if I was in the mood to rethread my needle every three or four stitches I might as well see what I do with the hedgehogs.

A couple of evenings of playing hide and seek with the missing stitches and the symbols on the chart and they're all done except for the backstitching!

It's Been Six Years...

My husband was on his way to work Wednesday night and another driver crossed  the center line and clipped his side mirror. They didn't even slow down. When he called to tell me, it was too dark to really assess the damage and I'm sure his adrenaline was racing.

To say that I'm mad doesn't even begin to cover it....

By the light of day, it's not as bad as it first seemed. The side mirror is toast, but it's a piece that can be unbolted and we can order a replacement online which will cost less than our insurance deductible. 

It could have been so much worse. 

But whoever hit him and kept going doesn't know that it wasn't worse. 

It's also a little spooky that it was six years almost to the day of his collision with the drunk driver, only a few miles down the same stretch of highway.

Don't drink and drive and for God's sake, if you hit another car on the highway, STOP. (I'm pretty sure I didn't have to tell any of you those two things.)

Let's Make Baby Quilts! {12/6/19}

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

Things to Love About a Troublesome Shawl

There are things to like about this shawl. I love the colors and the combination of stockinette and garter stitch ridges, which are the same thing I did on the previous Wildstreak Shawl but look better on this one.

I absolutely love the combination of k2p2 ribbing and garter stitch ridges that keep it from flipping up at the bottom like the last one did.

What I don't love is that there were so many knots in the skeins that I now have eighteen ends to weave in. I also don't love that the loosely spun yarn was looking worn while I was still knitting.

I will not buy more loosely spun yarn no matter how cheap it is.

{I've Been Reading} Kindle Unlimited

For the past two months or so, I've been trying Kindle Unlimited. An ad had showed up in my Facebook feed offering three months for (I think) $2.99 and I'd been tempted for quite a while. It seemed like a perfect time to jump in and see if it was worth it.

My first disappointment was that the books that were formerly on Kindle Unlimited, the ones that made me want to try it in the first place, were no longer part of the program. I really should have checked that before I signed up.

In the first month, I read an absolutely awful horror novel. The problem with that one wasn't that it was "extreme," it was that was badly written and boring. I also read a not very useful book about boosting your writing productivity. And half of Harold the Haunted Doll: The Terrifying True Story of the World's Most Sinister Doll.  That one was entertaining, but I sure wouldn't pay the regular price for it.



I started the second month with Real Actors, Not People by Karen Musser Nortman. It's one of the Frannie Shoemaker Campground Mysteries and my first reaction to the book was that I don't enjoy camping nearly enough to want to experience it vicariously through my cozy mystery reading.  I thought that I did, but when it came to campground showers and the configuration of hooks for hanging your clothes on I quickly changed my mind. The book does pick up its pace once all of the RVs are set up and everyone in the group has eaten and near the end it I got so caught up in the story that I wound up crying. (And it was real life camping experiences that made me aware of how scary the situation was...so there's that.)

With eighteen days left to go, I plan to cancel once my trial is up. I have so many other things to read, either library books or free Kindle titles or review copies from NetGalley, that this isn't working out for me. I found it hard to find Kindle Unlimited books while browsing on Amazon's site. Most of the titles I'm excited about reading are the ones I've found through the author's own self promotion and there are some I'm definitely excited about, but I haven't carved out time to read them. As few books as I've actually read so far, I think I'd be better off just paying for the ones I really want to read and maybe subscribing for a month at a time if there's a particular series I want to binge.

Are you a Kindle Unlimited subscriber? Do you find that it works well for you?

Let's Make Baby Quilts! {11/29/19}

Mom made a quilt top while we were at the coast last week, using fabrics from deep in her stash. 

The trucks were probably purchased with the boys in mind, but the orange triangles are a mystery. They might have been from the huge clearance sale back when Joann's closed a bunch of stores to reopen in new locations. I think they give the quilt the same kind of look as the old Little Golden Books covers had.

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 Store Temptations} All the Cornucopias and Another Conquistador

Do you remember my story from a couple of years back about the stranger who lectured us about cornucopias after I responded to my son's question with "it's a Thanksgiving thing?" I'm still annoyed with her, whoever she was, but at least she sparked a fun game. 

It's not uncommon that one of the boys will ask me what something at the thrift store is and most of the questions are legitimate....but Quinn is really good about catching my attention with something held just out of my line of vision when I least expect it.

I didn't like cornucopias before the incident with that lady and I've been liking them less and less. Although I do admire how skilled his is at ambushing me with them. I decided  to see just how many we could find in one afternoon.

The local Goodwill had seven, plus a ceramic one that's not in the picture. St. Vinnie's had the one in the picture above. The other St. Vinnie's had two (or three, if that decorative hanging basket counted as one.)

We also found this school scene. The little boy has a pair of scissors on his desk and a slingshot in his pocket. He may have something held in the hand behind his back. The little girl in the yellow dress has another pair of scissors behind her back and someone is obviously in trouble. WHAT is going on here? And why is it commemorated in a sculpture?

We also  found this fella. I apologize that he's kind of hard to see between the fan and the pool ladder, but at least they show how big he is.  The ax is removable. And thank God he was a hundred bucks because we could totally make him a lamp to make up for missing out on that other one and that would be ridiculous.

What unreasonable thing have you been tempted by lately? Did you resist?

{I've Been Reading} Someone We Know

I don't know which book it is that I have mixed up with The Couple Next Door, but I keep picking up new books based on the comparison. Someone We Know by Shari Lapena is another one of those, except this time it isn't "in the tradition of" it's by the same author.

A teenager has been breaking into neighborhood houses and snooping through their computers. When his mother finds out, she writes anonymous letters to two of his victims, apologizing for her son's actions. That sounded interesting -- I enjoy domestic thrillers that involve parents. But the focus here isn't on the teenager and his crimes, it's on a woman who left her husband and was then found dead.

There are at least nine different point of view characters and the author switches between them frequently, sometimes after less than a page. I never got interested in any of them enough to care who the murderer was or which affair (there are plenty) might have motivated it.

Disclosure -- This post contains affiliate links.

Stitching at the Coast

The plan was to spend four days at the coast working on our quilts and sewing projects. I spent way more time with Crocuses in the Windowsill than I did in front of my Janome and I'm not complaining. Just look at all of those yellow flowers that weren't there last week! 

I probably should have brought the lighthouse I started on our last coast trip, but I decided to stick with what I've been actively working on. Pyramid of Skulls and the Emerald City SAL were both in my project bag but I never pulled them out.

As glad as I am that I made so much progress on the flowers, I know that once they're done most of what will be left is the windowpane in varying shades of blue and grey. That might get tedious. 

Our Coastal Sewing Room

Take a look at what we had for our sewing room last week! I got my sewing machine all set up and plugged in and....nothing. The foot pedal didn't work at all. I fought with it for a while before stomping angrily on it and thinking some bad words finally did the trick. 

I'll admit that I spent more time on my cross stitching than at my sewing machine, but I did get three bags done. One was a total flop, which sometimes happens when you're making things up as you go along. 

This one is my favorite...

It started out as a flour sack dishtowel I found at the dollar tree and with some fusible interfacing and a thrifted zipper I think I turned it into a pretty little knitting bag.