I got back into reading pretty heavily in May and finished 9 books. I liked all of the except for the first one, The Light Pirate. Spoiler alert, that trend will continue for June as I'm close to finishing another book that I really don't like. I read 3 "real" books this month and enjoyed all of them. Probably my favorite were the Mark Dawson books. These are #2 and #3 in the Atticus Priest series.

​What good books have you read this month?
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The Light Pirate
By Lily Brooks-Dalton, Read By Rosemary Benson

The best thing about this book is the narrator. Everything else about it is awful. It ranks right up there with Where the Crawdad Sings on my top 10 most hated books ever. I knew after the first 2 hours that I wasn't going to like the book and I should have shelved it at that point but I decided to ride it out just to see how it ended.

This is a poorly conceived story centered around climate change effects on Florida specifically. It starts in current time where Florida is already flooding and having multiple severe hurricanes every year. Of course, that's not really happening but I can go with the fiction. Within 10 years Miami and all of South Florida has been evacuated but at that point the climate change effects seem to stop because there's no more change for the next 40 years. What's up with that?

The story is centered around Wanda. She was born during hurricane Wanda, the most devastating hurricane to hit Florida. Over the next decade most people leave the state except for Wanda, her father and a few other oddballs who decided to stay and eek out a living much like pre-civilization. They all could (and would) have left in normal circumstances. There's no power, water or communication services and all of the buildings are flooded. But they stay anyway because Wanda has never known any other place. There also don't seem to be any issues with alligators or snakes or other critters that dwell in permanent swamps. That's convenient. The whole premise, is stupid. I could go on and on.

Supposedly the books is told in 4 parts: power, water, light and time but I didn't get that at all and didn't realize that was the premise until I re-read the summary. Much of the last half is hard to follow because there were jumps back and forth in time and between character perspectives.

​Now, If you read the reviews, this one (like Crawdad) gets rave reviews across the board so you might want to ignore my lone dissenting voice and give it a try.

The Words We Whisper
By Mary Ellen Taylor, Read By a cast

Set in Nazi-occupied Italy during WWII and modern day Richmond, VA. Zara Mitchell is a hospice nurse and has just finished a case and adopted a third dog left behind by it's owner. She received a call from her sister in Richmond telling her that their Grandmother Nonna is dying and has asked specifically for Zara to come home. Nonna is obsessed with finding a box that's hidden somewhere in the overstuffed attic and that becomes Zara's job.

With the box comes stories from Nonna's past during the War in Italy. She had been a seamstress for a couture dressmaker and witnessed the transition to Nazi occupation and the eventual arrival of the Americans.

It was a good story with excellent character development. 

Resurrection Walk
By Michael Connelly, Read By a cast

This is #7 in the Lincoln Lawyer series and it's a huge improvement over the #6 book. In the last book, Mickey Haller got a wrongfully convicted man out of prison. The walk out of prison is called the "resurrection walk". 

He has now hired is half-brother, retired detective Harry Bosch, to help him assess potential other cases of wrongfully imprisoned people. Harry identifies one potential case of a woman convicted of killing her sherriff husband. It's a high risk case in federal court.

​Like all of Connelly's books, it's fast paced and it's fun to have Mickey and Harry together in this one.

The Amber Room: The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure
By Catherine Scott Clark and Adrian Levy

​I picked up this book in hardback at a library sale. Honestly, I had never heard of the Amber Room. It was a very opulent room that was started in 1701 and was eventually installed in the Catherine Palace in Russia. It disappeared during WWII and has never been seen since. 

Clark and Levy spent years digging through research but mostly being stonewalled by various agencies and people in Russia and Germany. It all sounds eerily like our government today. 

It was an interesting book but a little tedious. I expect that it would appeal to about 1% of people. But I liked it.

A Place to Bury Strangers
By Mark Dawson, Read By Simon Vance

This is #2 in the Atticus Priest series. I've only read this one series of Dawson's but I expect that all of his series are very dependent on reading the books in order and that's the case with this one. It picks up with some unfinished business from the first book, The House In The Woods. This series is set in Salisbury in the UK.

A human bone is found is the middle of a field. DCI Mackenzie Jones is called to investigate and she's struggling to figure out where the bone came from. She calls in Atticus Priest to help. They trace the bone to an abandoned church graveyard in a nearby town. That leads to the discovery of a deeper mystery.

It's such a good series that I immediately downloaded the 3rd book in the series.

The Other Wes Moore by Wes Moore

In the summer I like to sit outside in the sun a bit and like to have a book to read. I usually pick them up at thrift stores and from Thrift Books. This was a Thrift Books find. It was published in 2011 but the story and message are still relevant today.

There were two Wes Moores born within a year of each other in close neighborhoods in Baltimore. Both were fatherless and led difficult lives. One grew up to be a decorated veteran and Rhodes scholar. The other is in jail with a life sentence. 

Why is that? The author sent a letter to the other Wes Moore one day and he wrote back. That led to many letter and meetings and this book tells the stories of both men. I found it fascinating and thought provoking.
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The Red Room
By Mark Dawson, Read By Simon Vance

This is the 3rd, and I think last, in the Atticus Priest series. The crimes in all 3 books are related and this one wraps up the series.

A man falls from a cathedral spire. Authorities are sure it's suicide but his family says no. Then a video is delivered to a local newspaper and it seems the family is right. The victim may have been blackmailed. That's quickly followed by two more victims and two more videos. The videos are all set in a red room and the victims in the videos are all children. Someone seems to be on a revenge tour.

I enjoyed this series and will probably checkout some of his other series. I was particularly grateful that, although much of the story takes place during pandemic times, he left out all references to anything pandemic related. I think that will give these books a much longer shelf life.

The Falcon Thief
By Joshua Hammer

This is the book that I took for my beach read. It became my ER read when Chris was injured. It's a very interesting story and reminds me a lot of The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson. Both books are about people stealing things that you would never imagine. In this case it's rare and protected falcon eggs.

Jeffrey Lendrum was traveling from Birmingham in May 2003. A janitor, and former security guard, felt that he was acting suspiciously in an airline club restroom. He alerted the authorities and they discovered Lundrum with 14 live peregrine falcon eggs. 

This book is the story of Lundrum's life but also the background of falcon racing and breeding along with profiles of people involved in the crimes and investigations.

It's a really interesting book if you like these kinds of books.

Starter Villian
By John Scalzi, Read By Wil Wheaton

We picked this book for our drive time to and from our vacation and it was perfect in length and entertainment value. If you like Carl Hiaasen, I think you will like this book. Wil Wheaton was an excellent choice for narrator!

Charlie is a divorced substitute teach who is just barely getting by. His dream is to buy a local pub but the bank doesn't seem interested in extending him the loan.

Then his uncle Jake dies. He hasn't seen Jake since his mother's death when he was a young boy. Jake has left him his business....a supervillain business. Jake had a lot of enemies and Charlie has inherited those too. With the help of unionized dolphins and intelligent spy cats, he has to fight his new enemies.

We really enjoyed it and I will read more by Scalzi. It was a perfect road trip book.

The weather here is just spectacular this week so I am making sure that I spend an hour or so outside every day. It won't be long before it's Hades hot and humid and I won't want to be outside more than 3 minutes. After a thunderstorm in the afternoon we opened the windows and enjoyed the fresh air inside. I think the open windows will last a couple of day. That's a good thing since we can't run the downstairs AC until the breaker is fixed next week.

Yesterday afternoon, while we had some rain, I decided to dye up some veterans quilt backs. We buy the wide backing by the bolt. I get some printed and some white. I mostly dye the white fabric in various shades of blue with some gold and an occasional custom color. I cut up a whole bolt and this is enough backing for 15 quilts.
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Just like the batting, they are all pre-cut and ready to use. Because we make our quilts the same size (48 x 60) I can pre-cut the backing and batting into 2 yard widths and that allows us to load and quilt 2 quilts at once. The whole process is quite efficient.
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I also got Becky's quilt loaded and the first pass quilted. I'm using a gold thread and the quilting isn't really going to show at all on the front.
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But it should show pretty nicely on the back. I should have this one done by the end of the weekend. Although I have to spend a good bit of time this weekend cleaning and restoring the guest house after we had some drywall repairs done. We have some guests coming next weekend. They were one of our first Airbnb guests and they came every year for a homeschool convention. We've gotten so close to them that I wanted them to keep coming to stay even after we stopped doing Airbnb. It's been fun to watch the kids grow up. Two are now graduated and one is married! The daughter who took her first steps at our house is now 11.

Last night, while Chris watched Fargo, I started cutting out the Elizabeth Hartman farm quilt. I'm glad I have 2 months to get it cut out. It's kind of daunting but it's the perfect project for a fastidious organizer. I have a big supply of plastic bags that will come in quite handy.

Part of yesterday was my monthly lunch with Mom and my cousin. It's always fun to catch up with her and we planned a trip to Asheville in September to visit her grandson and go to the Chihuly exhibit at Biltmore. We'll also see the other girl cousin so it will be a fun trip.

In the afternoon I did some prep work for things I want to work on this week and weekend. Chris is going away for the weekend and I'm looking forward to having my own vacation recovery time. I want to work on some more veterans quilts so I needed to get out the next roll of batting. Our quilt club buys the backing and batting and I store it.

I cut a whole roll at a time so that Brenda and I have easy access to batting whenever we need it. I do the same with bolts of batting. I have 4 more veterans quilts to be quilted at the moment. One pair of them needs a dyed backing so I plan to dye some backings too.
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But the first project is to quilt this quilt that Becky made. It's not a veterans quilt but it is a charity quilt. We are moving to our new meeting place in June and part of our "rent" is to donate one quilt a year for them to use as a fundraiser. I think that was a great idea and Becky is donating the first quilt. The nice thing about this quilt is that the quilting will not show at all so I can do a pretty pantograph.

My other project for the week is to start cutting out the pieces for this quilt. It's going to be my project for Maine but I want to have as much cut out as possible. This is going to be such a fun project.
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I think I mentioned Monday that our downstairs AC stopped working. We were prepared for the usual bad news of "you need a new compressor". We were lucky that the problems is a bad breaker! We just have to get the electrician out for that small repair and we should be all set. Finally, some good news!

Thank you for your nice comments for Chris. He really appreciated them. He is continuing to heal and I'm getting back into some sort of routine. Today I'm letting him drive to the grocery store!

Yesterday I got two veterans quilted. This one was made by Sheila and it's for a dog lover.
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I quilted this one with a pantograph called Burning Bush.
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This one was made by Glenda (my Mom). The mandalas are from Paula Nadelstern fabric and are printed mandalas, not pieced. 

I used a dark gold thread and quilted it in swirls. I like how it turned out.
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I also went to the REI store to buy some shoes and got some new shorts (on sale) instead. Of course I had to hem them. It took longer than it should because the were sewn together really well. But I got the sewing machine running again and that was good.

Today Mom and I have lunch with my cousin but I think I'm going to start cutting out the farm quilt to get it all ready for our trip to Maine in August.

Well, we mostly had a family vacation but not without a LOT of drama. This was our vacation craft project and provides a hint as to what happened. I'll let you think about it and will give you the story at the end. But as to this project, I am committed to the absolute fact that I need a Cricut machine. After doing my brother's screen printed shirts and this project, I have so many ideas of how I could use it.
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I don't have any beach photos as I only got out to the beach one day and I had one afternoon to do some crochet. This is how far I am on the baby blanket. I'm almost done with the first skein.
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Since I got home I've mostly done unpacking and laundry but I got the next set of veterans quilts loaded. We came home to a broken downstairs air conditioner so it was nice to be in the cooler basement for a couple of hours. The upstairs works so we aren't in any distress and can wait on the repair shop to open this week. No need to pay emergency prices.
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I'm doing a swirly pattern on this quilt.

Now, onto the vacation. We stay in Hatteras Village, NC. It's at the very tip end of the Outer Banks by the ferry to Ocracoke. It's far away from everything, including emergency services. This story, surprisingly, does not have an alcohol consumption element. 

Chris rarely, but occasionally, faints and he seems to do it more during the night. Well, the first night we were there it happened and he couldn't have fallen in a worse place. We aren't sure how he fell but we know his nose hit the end of the bed and he was knocked out. We were off to the ER at 5 am on Sunday. The ER is over an hour away and it was raining buckets. He had a broken nose, sore neck and damaged right kidney. We were back at the ouse around 3 pm but he was in too much pain and it was back to the ER at midnight. By 6am, he was being transported to the Norfolk General Trauma Center. Final talley: broken nose, pinched nerve in his neck, bruised rib, bruised lung and lacerated kidney. He has several follow up appointments with specialists and, I expect that there will be a nose surgery in his future. He's doing a lot better but is still moving a little stiffly and I won't let him drive yet. But every day he is getting better and better.

I didn't let him go to the beach but he got to relax by the pool a couple of days. I made it to the beach for one hour with my friend. I was so grateful for my brother and two friends for helping me out. Two of them drove me to Norfolk. One of our friends lives in Norfolk and spent 8 years in and out of that hospital with her Mom. She dropped everything to come over and sit with him Monday evening and Tuesday morning while I wasn't there. She kept him entertained and she knows all the things that the hospital was supposed to be doing for him but wasn't! She was a Godsend. I had not had much sleep so I couldn't drive myself. Our friend, Win, took us to the second ER visit and to Norfolk. My brother took me on the day he got out.

When we were kids it seemed that my Dad got sick on every vacation. He would spend most of vacation in bed with some sort of cold or something and Mom had no choice but to let us run feral on the beach. One year he had a major dental emergency. My brothers accused Chris of trying to take over the family tradition. Everyone,including Chris, kept their senses of humor. He even approved the design of our memento craft project!

Surprisingly, everyone is looking forward to next year! I'm going to pick a less remote place.

Why send your Mom flowers for Mother's Day when you can send her mushrooms? 
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These postcards started with the leftovers from the house quilt. I took a bunch of the scraps and added a backing of fusible web. Then I had to figure out what to do with it.
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I worked on a few different ideas, including butterflies and flowers, but I was watching a potter decorate some mugs with mushrooms and decided to give that a try. I work out ideas with some free cut pieces in various backgrounds.
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So I got several made and stitched them with a black outline. I finished the edges and just wasn't happy with them. They needed something else....like polka dots!

Why, yes! That will do.

This was the most fun part of making these cards. After some experimentation I found that Q-Tips made the best dots. I even used the stick end for some small dots.
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I made 7 of these so I have some birthday cards stocked up. I need to work on a new postcard design in June for the boys in my life.

This is my last post until after vacation. I'll be back Monday, May 27. I hope you have a great week while I'm playing with my new Grand Niece.

Today was a day of knocking things off the list. We started the morning with the chimney sweeps getting the chimney cleaned and inspected. I got the Big Blue Quilt washed and the label sewn on. It's ready to deliver next week.
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I delivered 20 veterans quilts and met a very cute puppy at the coordinator's house.
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Finally, I got the borders on these 2 veterans quilt tops that I started this past weekend. It's kind of hard to see but I used different borders for the top/bottom and sides to enhance the woven effect. I hope to get these quilted and bound before our June meeting.

Today I'll start packing for the family beach vacation that starts Saturday! I normally do a giveaway week on the blog during vacation but I don't have the time to pull that together this time. Sorry about that! I'll try to do one later this summer.

This week is turning into a week fo finishes because I had so many projects that I just couldn't share yet. This one was held up until I could get good weather outside to take photos.

I started this quilt was started last August while we were in Maine. It was a project to use up some of my blue hand dyed scraps. This made a good dent and it was a fun quilt to make. It's big, at about 93" square.

​I wrote a longer page with more photos and details here.

I have one more finished project to share tomorrow.

Well, this week I am.
This is my brother's logo. In case you are confused about his business, he makes axes and knives. He said a few months ago that he looked into getting some shirts printed with the logo but he was a little shocked by the price. He has a BIG birthday coming up Saturday and I thought it would be a good idea to try to screen print some shirts for him. 
Little did I know what a huge project it was going to be!

MY SIL and niece have a Cricut machine so if I could get the logo file they agreed to cut it in vinyl for me. When I emailed him to get the logo I figured out that he would know why. Fortunately, he had food poisoning that week and wasn't alert enough to figure it out.
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For screen printing, the image has to be cut in reverse and this particular one is a total pain to weed and transfer. The tiny triangles in the "A"s and the holes of the "B" helped me practice my profanity vocabulary. I'm trying to learn Spanish and I should have looked up some Spanish profanity for this project to learn new words. I actually weeded 2 of these because I used the first one to practice.
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Transferring to the screen is no picnic either. After it's on the screen, you cover the rest of the screen in painter's tape.
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My first practice pieces were in black ink on different fabrics. I wanted to see how many prints I can do with one screen and the answer is lots. Here's where I also learned that my ink is old and needed to be thinned out pretty substantially. A close inspection of my practice pieces show that there are some coverage inconsistencies and smudges. It was clear that practicing was needed.

Then I decided to start on the shirts. I frequently dye shirts for him. Nothing fancy, he just likes some hand dyed texture in dullish colors. I got a pack of tshirts and dyed all 6 of them. I printed 3 of them and hated how they were looking so I washed out all of the ink, re-washed the shirts and started again.
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My problem with the first printing was my print surface. I was using this little ironing board and the cover was too loose and gave me an uneven surface. I got my staple gun out and stapled the cover tight and that solved my problem. I never use this as an ironing board so now I have a new print board!
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Because his business is a steel-based business, I wanted the color to be gray. Here are the finished shirts with the logo on the back.

The funny thing is that he pulled the shirts out and looked at the front of them and was commenting on the colors. Chris finally told him to check out the back. I think he loved them.
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While I was weeding the design, I took the waste piece with his initials and put that on another screen and printed this for his birthday postcard. I was so stressed getting the shirts done last weekend that I forgot to write a birthday note or sign the card! He can hang it in his shop somewhere to remind him how cool I am.

One thing that came out of this project is the recognition that I need a Cricut machine too. I might be getting into that later this summer.

I've been working on several of my own veterans quilts lately but wanted to wait to post about them until all 3 were done.

This first one isn't totally mine. The blocks came from several people and Carolyn sewed together the center of the quilt. It wasn't quite big enough so I brought it home, added the borders, quilted it and put he binding on it. So I'm counting it as "mine". I think the lime green narrow border and binding made this quilt.

I quilted it in a free motion all-over design that I've seen called fern or banana peel. It's fun and fast.
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This was one of my veterans quilt kits that I started sewing together last fall. The stars are made from hand dyed scraps. I had planned a different border but it looked horrible so I had to dig in the stash and came up with this medium blue.
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I wanted some light custom quilting and came up with this. It went fast and looks OK but I don't love it so when it came time to quilt the next one I did something different.
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The quilt kit for the blue quilt actually had the making of 2 quilts in it and this was the second one. I love this pattern and will make more kits with this one. It makes great use of small scraps.
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I decided to go with a small wavy crosshatch on this one and I like it much better.
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We had sewing days this weekend and I started a new kit that also had 2 quilts in it. It's a super easy pattern and all I have left to do is add the borders. I might get that done this week although we will be getting ready for vacation this week. Who knows what will or not get done.
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Yesterday we picked up Mom and went to my brother's to deliver Eli's tie dyed tshirts. After we dropped Mom back at home we saw the Weinermobile! Honestly, I've never seen the Weinermobile before. It turns out that you can find out if it's going to be near you on this website. It's a quite shocking thing to see unexpectedly driving down the street.