A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

I picked up a recording of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn from the Fremont Public Library and started listening to it in my car this morning.  I haven't read this book in almost 30 years, and I remember details from this book better than I remember things in the book I finished yesterday or the newspaper I read this morning.  They are odd details, like going to the store to buy a paper collar or the story of the blue baby that survives because it is born in a hospital.  I don't remember reading this book more than once, I also don't remember it as being a particular favorite but these details have stuck with me.  

It could be because I was a girl who loved the library and wanted to read through all of the books in alphabetical order.  It could be that I was Francie's age when I read the book.  It could also be that Betty Smith was very good at describing the details that make a place or shape a life.  The soup bone with scraps of meat attached to it that with some tired vegetables makes a rich and nourishing soup flecked with meat, the bowl of nasturtiums on the librarian's desk, or the immaculate linen and threadbare tuxedo jacket on Johnny Nolan.

I am not sure, but it is a bit magical while driving on the Illinois Tollway to hear something that reminds me of being 14.

Six word memoirs for pets

I read the book Not Quite what I was Planning which is full of six word memoirs collected by Smith Magazine and I have been writing some of my own for my pets. Holly, the beautiful, long-haired calico cat wants only to be waited on and left alone. However, her long, soft fur and beauty make her irresistible -- everyone wants to pet her.

I know I'm beautiful, don't touch.

Gambit on the other hand is extremely tame, to the point that we have sometimes wondered if there is something wrong with him.

I am shameless; rub my tummy.

In addition to the pets in the house, we have animals outside the house. I apparently did not scare Mama Robin off by cutting down half the tree and exposing her nest, she has laid her final egg and has taken up residence. She stays put when the dogs are out but gets up and scolds us when we get too close. I suppose we are lucky that we don't have a nesting red winged blackbird -- they apparently dive bomb people who come too close to their nests.

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I made up some six-word memoirs for myself as well, they include:

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Iron low, thyroid low, very tired.

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Mother, manager, engineer, artist -- hired housekeeper.

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Teenager driving, parents gray and broke.

September Flowers

I thought I would share some pictures of the flowers in my garden at the end of the season. The bees and other insects are quite happy that we have so many flowers. This bright green insect shown on the yellow chrysanthemum is harmless, but one of the furry bumble bees bit me on my leg while I was clearing weeds out of the garden. The swelling around the bite took a week to come down. The Firecracker climbing rose is one of the prettier end of season blooms.

I have been stitching too but I don't have any finished things to share right now. I am knitting my second sock, working on parts 5 and 6 of Chatelaine's Elizabethan Sweet Bag and I finished another row of over one stitching on Anne Depauw. I should have some things to share later in the week.

Recently, I purchased some new books. I found a copy of Macrame: Creative Design in Knotting by Dona Meilach on the Friends of the Library used book shelf for $1.00. It has the Berry Knot necklace my mother made in the 1970s on page 150. I still have my mother's necklace. I also bought Bead Embroidery: The Complete Guide by Jane Davis at JoAnn's fabrics. It contains different methods of attaching beads to fabric, beaded fringe patterns and beads incorporated into surface embroidery and pulled thread embroidery stitches.

2000 visits and pictures of stitching . . .

Some time this week the stat counter registered visit number 2000 to my blog. It is fun to know that I have readers and that some of you come back more than once. I also think it is interesting to see where my visitors are from, the map shows visitor locations from the end of June on.

A stitching blog should sometimes have pictures of stitching. Here is the front and back of a pincushion that I made for an exchange. It is a Whimsey & Wit design from their Charming Elegance Series. I planned to make a biscornu but quickly realized that it would be enormous so I made a stuffed square instead. It is stitched on tobacco linen with chestnut weeks dye works.

I am reading People of the Abyss by Jack London. I am familiar with his animal and adventure stories but I did not realize that he was a socialist or that he wrote social history. His descriptions of life on the East End of London at the beginning of the 20th Century are chilling. I enjoyed his description of the Coronation Parade -- all of the military and ethnic groups that were part of the British Empire at that time are represented.

Take a Stitch Tuesday

I have been trying to catch up on the Take a Stitch Tuesday challenge. Here is a stitching sample that contains buttonhole wheel, cast on stitch, and crested chain. I need more practice with the cast on stitch but I think that the rest came out reasonably well. I sketched an owl this morning that I also plan to stitch using these same stitches -- I will post my progess later.

I am continuing to read books by Chicago or Illinois authors. I finished Driving Blind by Ray Bradbury. I read many of his books and stories when I was younger. I still remember one story that I believe he wrote -- in it men are living on the moon. They have found life there in the form of some kind of animal and have the ability to turn into the animals and go out on the moon surface. One man makes the transformation and discovers how marvelous it feels to be free on the surface in the animal's body. He never returns to the space station. My next Chicago book is Because of the Rain by Daniel Buckman.

Pinkeep Exchanges

I came back from Texas to find my lovely pinkeep exchange waiting for me on the dining room table along with the package that I should have sent before I left. Here are pictures of both of them. The lovely purple heart and the brittercup designs pattern came to me, the Ewe and Eye and Friends flower basket and the JBW designs heart are on their way to their new owner.

A stitching update will be coming. I have been reading more -- I finished The Road by Cormac McCarthy and have been reading Women in Love by DH Lawrence. In a last attempt to finish reading 5 books by Illinois authors or about Illinois by the end of the week for the library summer book club I picked up some books that looked short and interesting yesterday. I am 2/3 of the way done with a book of short stories by Ray Bradbury. I will see how far I get by Friday.

Everyone is reading Harry Potter

Everyone at my house is reading Harry Potter right now. We are sharing the new book while my daughter reads her way through the series from the beginning. As you can see from the photo, the humans are not the only ones who are interested in what happens in the book. Holly is very intently staring at the book over my daughter's shoulder. Maybe she knows that there are cats in the story.

I did some stitching last week but not very much. I worked on my monochrome piece for the Sumptuous Stitches class. It is coming along fairly well -- I like the pulled satin stitch but I am not sure about the random stitches in the top section of the background and need to work on the center more. I will see if I can make more progress this week. Lesson 3 deals with embellishment -- I will have to see what I can come up with.

Bullion Stitch - Take a Stitch Tuesday

I experimented with the bullion stitch this week making a conventional picture with different flowers and a flying insect. Before I started the picture on the right, I looked through back issues of Inspirations magazine to get ideas. Most of the flowers are stitched using gumnuts petals, the bug has rayon wings and a purple cotton overdyed body. After some practice, my skill with the bullions improved and I think that most of them look pretty good. My son pointed out that although the flowers are fairly realistic, he has never seen a purple bee. It is stitched on a piece of overdyed cotton -- I bought a bag of pieces packaged for crazy quilters and then forgot about it. I will probably use them for finishing cross stitch pieces but I could use them to make crazy quilt blocks using some of my TAST experiments with flowers as focal points.

I also experimented with adding bullions to the free embroidery piece that I started last week. The cream is silk and the green is a DMC linen thread. The additional stitches add some textural interest and more color to the piece. I am starting to like it a bit more than I did before. It is interesting -- I described this piece last week as a mess but someone saw it in the TAST Flikr group and added a comment to indicate that they really liked it.

In addition to stitching, I finished reading The Peoples Act of Love by James Meek and started reading The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards. I also watched The Big Sleep this afternoon -- I love watching Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall together. I have been entertaining the cats by winding yarn into balls and I successfully started my first sock. Maybe later this week, I will be able to post a progress picture.

Fruit and Flower Shares start . . .

I finished a 4th of July project today it is a Silver Needle Secret Needle Night kit. Yesterday, we had a fairly quiet, family oriented day. We had 4th of July food -- hamburgers, hot dogs, macaroni salad, potato salad and strawberries. Then we went and joined the neighbors to watch the fireworks. Our dogs stayed home and protected the house.

Today the fruit and flower shares started so in addition to vegetables, I picked up a bouquet of flowers and fruit. The vegetables selections included beets, Japanese turnips, cippoline onions, garlic, lettuce, cilantro, parsley, arugula and broccoli. The fruit includes organic blueberries, sweet cherries and black raspberries. I cheated and didn't keep the beet and turnip greens because I still have kale from last week and we will be on vacation part of next week but the newsletter had a delicious recipe for beet greens in a coconut curry sauce with pasta that I may have to try next time.

The flowers, as always, are beautiful and I enjoy having them in the house. We have flowers in our garden, but we grow random perennials and do not have much of a cutting garden. I love all the different colors of sunflowers that we get throughout the summer, you can see a deep red one on the right side of the arrangement.

As I have been shuttling kids to karate and back, I have been reading. I finished Sara Gruen's book Water for Elephants yesterday. It was very good -- she presents the main character in his 20s and 90s and presents both well.

A reading weekend . . .

Not much stitching this weekend but a lot of reading. I finally finished Memoirs of Hadrian this weekend. Yourcenar writes beautifully in French and the book was beautifully translated into English but this is not a quick read. I read through most of the discussion from the Book Group List. Unlike most of the readers on that list, I found Yourcenar grounded in the tradition of old French heroic literature with Racine rather than writing a novel about ideas and philosophy or starting the modern historical novel/non-fiction biography. The difference could be that I studied French Literature in college rather than philosophy.

I went on to read Elizabeth Bowen's book The House in Paris and Ayn Rand's Anthem. The House in Paris does a good job of portraying the events through a child's eyes as Henrietta observes the adults and Leopold in the beginning and end of the book. I am not sure that it does as well with the adult characters in the middle. I need to think about it some more. Anthem seemed to me to fit in with 1984 and Animal Farm or even with C.S. Lewis's science fiction as a modern day retelling of the story of Adam and Eve. Maybe now I will be motivated enough to finish Team of Rivals.

June Ornament - in June!

I finished my June Christmas Ornament today -- Partridge and Pears 2005 by Prairie Schooler from the 2005 Just Cross Stitch Christmas Ornament Issue. It is stitched using one strand of DMC over two on left over 40 count linen. I updated the date since it was stitched in 2007. It is brighter in person than it is in the picture and was fun to stitch.

I like ornaments, they are quick to stitch, I can imagine finishing them and using them someday and I can stitch them using leftover fabric and thread from my stash.

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In addition to stitching, I have a cook book recommendation -- Joan Nathan's The New American Cooking. It was a Christmas present in 2005 -- the same year that the ornament pattern was published. I have used many recipes from it -- most recently an asian chicken salad. They are all delicious and every time I bring something from this cookbook to a pot luck or family gathering I am asked for the recipe. The Door County Oatmeal/Dried Cherry cookies are great (even with raisins) and so is the salad with the maple syrup based dressing.

This blog is sometimes about books . . .

Last year I read 60 books. This year I have finished less than ten. I still listen to books in the car but I have finished very few actual books. That may be partly because I have picked such long books to read but is may also be because I just do not feel like reading. This is unusual for me and I am sure that it will change.

In the mean time, I have set aside Founding Mothers in favor of Memoirs of Hadrian by Margerite Yourcenar. This was a selection of the bookgrouplist which has now moved on to Ayn Rand. I am sticking with ancient Rome described by the first woman elected to the Academie Francaise. I am cheating in a way, reading Yourcenar in an English translation instead of the original French but it has been 20 years since I finished my BA in French Litterature and I rarely use the language. I find that I can still read French and I can understand a newspaper or decipher a French language web site but I do not use it every day.

More EQ6 Lessons and some reading

I finished the second lesson in the EQ6 User Manual, my second quilt is show above. I had fun playing with the randomize features and it is cool to watch the computer match the colors you use to real fabrics. I followed the instructions and added the entire wild west library to my sketchbook so the brown fabric with arrow head repeats came up often. It didn't do much for me and the arrowheads detracted from some of the more intricate designs. I will have to go back and play some more when I have time.

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I looked at the Take a Stitch Tuesday selection for this week -- Butterfly Chain -- and I am thinking barbed wire, multi-colored lines, and porcupines. I am going to think about the porcupine idea some more -- it could be interesting.

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There has not been a whole lot of reading going on recently -- more listening. I listened to The World is Flat while watching gas prices rise to $3.30 per gallon. Then for some escapism I listened to Whiskey Sour, a Jack Daniels Mystery, by Joe Konrath, and started Looks to Die For by Janice Kaplan. Whiskey Sour was a bit violent but entertaining and I liked Jack. Looks to Die For is annoying, one review suggested that the author should have stuck with romance novels. I have moved on to more intellectual listening and have started John Banville's The Sea, the language and images are beautiful but I am not sure listening is the best way to enjoy this book. I am reading one real book, Founding Mothers by Cokie Roberts. The women of the revolutionary generation were quite independent and resourceful.