Book Club Book July

A few months ago my friends and neighbors talked me into joining the local book club, Nene Reads. I love to read, but I hesitated because, well, I want to read what I want to read, and I already have a stack of unread books. It's been fun meeting, though, and sometimes books that few people liked have generated a lot of discussion.

I just finished the July book, West With the Night, a memoir by Beryl Markham. I do a one-sentence synopsis of every book we read and read it aloud at the meetings, so here is the sentence for West with the Night:

"Memories of a bush pilot in Africa in the early 20th century: lions and airplanes and barons, oh my!"

I am very ambiguous about the book; parts of it were good, but I really do enjoy books that have a plot, which it did not. This one was a series of scenes that weren't very connected. I guess life is like that. The language was beautiful, the pace was slow, the story meandered at the writers whim. I enjoyed most the descriptions of flying.

Here is the crew, stitching away. At times like these, I realize how small my house is. We had to put the ironing board in the kitchen, and we were cutting fabric and trimming blocks on the countertop.





This is the other project I have been working on this past week. Sometimes ideas get together in weird ways to make a quilt. A couple of weeks ago, I was looking for a light green background fabric for the group quilt that Kelly, Barbara, and Geni are working on in the picture above. I bought small amounts of several choices to see which fabric worked best. I also found a couple of neutral taupe fabrics that I got just because I liked them. When I saw them next to each other, I knew I needed to make a green and neutral quilt. This is a bit of a change for me because I usually make quilts that use LOTS of different colors. I had this picture of a hot air balloon pinned to my sewing wall for months because I liked it, and I drew a couple of sketches of chevron quilt layouts. I made full-sized freezer paper templates and cut a lot of green and neutral strings from the ends of fabrics in my stash and I've been sewing the fabric to the templates for the past week.

First blog post.

These are colors for a group quilt I'm working on with some friends from my quilt guild. We have an informal sit-and-stitch group that meets now and again. We tried to establish a monthly meeting date, but that never seemed to work. We generally meet on Sunday afternoons when we do meet.

This is really just one of many projects I am working on. I'm hoping that over the next few months I will actually FINISH some of these projects rather than letting them stack up on most available surfaces in my sewing room. . .ahem, STUDIO.