Remembering my Sweetie

One year ago we had to say goodbye to Jago. I still miss him so very much.

Temptation, Temptation, Temptation

I haven't even finished my first quilt yet, but I'm already thinking about the second ... and third ... and fourth ... And it's all the fault of the Fatquarter Shop and their fiendish newsletter which leads me oh-so-much into temptation every single time I find it in my inbox. (Poor little me!)

But how to choose? Not just which pattern (I'm thinking about trying out some sort of scrappy log cabin), but, more importantly, which fabrics? Here's a selection of my favourites. What do you think? Any favourites?

Rouenneries is, hands down, my current favourite. The prints have been inspired by old French fabrics - don't they look wonderfully elegant, but in a somewhat faded, shabby way?

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And here's Nostalgia. Aaaaah, Nostalgia. Makes you think of an English garden, doesn't it? To strengthen the impression of a garden, one could always go with the greens only. Like this:

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Or perhaps another Glacé quilt? (Minus the blue again. I don't think it really fits with all the other colours.)

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Blessings is more earthy and looks as if it would keep you nicely warm in winter. :)

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Aster Manor - very feminine.

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Alliance - another collection in more earthy tones.

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And now some collections which would make fantabulous coin quilts (small stacks of colour against a solid - quite often white - background):

Thoughts? Ideas?

Preparing for Winter

Each month the arrival of the credit card statement tells me that I'm spending too much money on books. It could be worse, I guess. Like other women, I could have a serious passion for shoes. Or bags and purses. Or jewellery. Books are relatively cheap by comparison (welllllll, if you love buying rare 19th-century editions of the Brothers Grimm's fairy tales, you might find that books can be horrendously expensive, too!).

So the piles on the top of my piano continue to grow and make me smile with satisfaction whenever I enter my little library-cum-music-room. (The Kitteh is less satisfied, I'm afraid, since the piles tend to be in her way when she climbs about on the piano and the lower bookshelves.) The sight of books has always filled me with warm, fuzzy feelings and thoughts of happily snuggled up on the couch with a cup of tea and a nice book (and a Kitteh).

Of course, at the moment I don't really have time to actually read all these new books thanks to the Dratted Exam that will hit me over the head in three or four weeks' time (*gasp* so soon??? Waaaargh!). So for now I regard those lovely piles as my winter hoard to be enjoyed over Christmas and in the new year. :)

Which reminds me of this lovely story:



Not that I would ever need an excuse to drool over the lovely Mr. Armitage. :)

Good Bed-Fellows

In one of the last chapters of Susan Hill's Howards End Is on the Landing, titled "Bad Bed-Fellows", you find the following passage:

A child's nursery rhyme books does not have the language in which to speak to a Latin dictionary. Chaucer does not know the words in which Henry James communicates but here they are forced to live together, forever speechless. [...] Does Elizabeth Bowen find Swift congenial company? Ah yes, surely, they were both Irish, they have a lot in common. I should like to sit here on the landing in the last glimmer of daylight and listen to them whispering together. [...] Can books learn from one another? Can they change as a result of sitting on a shelf beside another for years?

What an intriguing thought, isn't it? To test the idea I'd want to sandwich Anne Bronte's (please imagine those two dots over the e; I've no idea how to insert an e with dots here in Blogger) The Tenant of Wildfell Hall between Elizabeth Taylor's At Mrs. Lippincote's and Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Making of a Marchioness. One hopes that this would improve Bronte's angelic heroine (hey-ho, I run away from my husband because he's a beastly sadist, but when he's about to kick the bucket I'm going to return to mop his brow and make sure he doesn't kick the bucket after all *head desk*) and that, upon opening The Tenant the next time, one would find that Helen has bashed in her beastly husband's skull with the chamber pot.

Not that Burnett's heroine isn't any less angelic - in fact, she's a much better person than Helen: always smiling, always being grateful to other people, always happy to run errands for others. No, in The Making of a Marchioness you have to turn to the secondary female characters to get women with some more bite (and, eventually, one dead beastly husband).

Reading both At Mrs. Lippincote's and The Making of a Marchioness has finally convinced me (if I needed any convincing at all!) to teach a course on women writers of the early 20th century. Next winter, perhaps?

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The picture was taken inside Barter Books in Alnwick, a gigantic UBS inside an old railway station. I could have spent hours inside there (instead I went to see Alnwick Castle and then travelled on to Berwick-upon-Tweed - that latter point definitely not one of my finer ideas)

Sew & Tell Friday: The Little Red Bag

Remember the little blue bag, my very first sewing project? This week I finished a little red bag (one of two):

Take a few stripes from a Moda honey bun (I used Aster Manor), sew them together.

Choose lining fabric, layer with batting, sew, turn right side out, hand-stitch opening closed - and voilà:

Quilt in the ditch (aka along the seams of the honey bun stripes) with nylon thread, fold, hand-stitch sides closed and as easy as that the itty-bitty bag is finished:

This is what the inside looks like.

It's just perfect for small gifts like a CD or some bags of tea or a nice card with a gift certificate. And don't you just love those reds?

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Sew & Tell is organised by Amy. Click on the button to see what kind of projects other people finished this week!

Edited to add: I cut the jelly roll / honey bun stripes in half before sewing them together!

Post Without Words: Piano Stairs

:)

The Sexist Reader

I freely admit it: I'm a sexist reader. With a few exceptions (Michael Ende, Terry Pratchett, James Patterson's romances), my pleasure reading consists of books written by women. Granted, my favourite novella ever is Ludwig Tieck's "Der blonde Eckbert", I love Tennyson's "Lady of Shalott" and E.T.A. Hoffmann's stories are always charming, but for real flop-onto-the-couch-drink-cup-of-tea-cuddle-cat pleasure reading I inevitably turn to women writers.

In former years this was done entirely unconciously - first there were Enid Blyton, Auguste Lechner, Rosemary Sutcliff, Helen Cresswell, Joan Aiken, Tamora Pearce, and Susan Cooper; then Anne Rice, Anne McCaffrey, Marion Zimmer Bradley (of course!), Mercedes Lackey, Jennifer Roberson, Dorothy Gilman, and Victoria Holt; eventually Diana Gabaldon, Susanna Kearsley, and Dorothy Dunnett; and then I discovered the world of romance fiction.

By now, though, it is a conscious decision. I know I prefer the way women tell stories to the way men go about the business. Women's stories are much more relevant to my experiences and to how I see the world than men's.

A few weeks ago I read Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Literature, and it made me feel sick and angry all at once because the same mechanisms she describes in that study are still at work today. And so, I decided to act. Inspired by Jane Brocket's The Gentle Art of Domesticity, I'm now collecting books by forgotten women writers which I intend to read once the Dratted PhD Exam Thingie (DPHET) is over and done with.

Among the authors on my list are:

• Nancy Mitford


• Elizabeth Taylor (not the movie star!)


• Jan Struther


• Dorothy Whipple


• Marghanita Laski


• Winifred Watson


• Julia Strachey


• Barbara Euphan Todd

In addition, I'm thinking of offering a course on "Lost Voices: Forgotten Women Writers" next winter.