Reading

While the quilting drought lingers on, my first love, reading, fills in the gap nicely. I have been waiting for a few months, ever since seeing this book advertised in a couple of quilting mags for an August release, I ran across it at JoAnn's the other day. Whoopee! And with a 40% off coupon to boot--can't beat it with a stick.

It is Foolproof Machine Quilting by Mary Mashuta. Oh, I have tons of machine quilting books but this one is a little different. It is not about free-motion quilting. It is all about walking foot--feed dogs up style. It has a lot of tips for achieving great designs with a bit more control than the free-motion allows. Can't wait to have a small project ready for experimentation with some of Mashuta's techniques. Of course, the always-present problem of shoving a huge quilt through a small opening on a domestic home machine still exists! But I think this will give some ideas for mixing with walking-foot with free-motion.

The second book I am engrossed in is Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. The past year or so I have become very interested in where our food comes from, how far away that is, how long it takes to get to my supermarket, how much genetic alteration was involved in growing it, and how much fuel was required to get it to me. With a renewed interest in cooking has come a renewed interest in nutrition and food safety and quality. This book is the story of a family who decided to journey away from the "industrial food pipeline to a rural life in which they vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves or learn to live without it." Very. very intriguing reading. And, of course, Kingsolver's writing style is delightful.

Lookin' For Inspiration In All the Wrong Places...

In addition to a compulsive desire to make quilts and play on the computer for endless hours, I have a deep love of reading. That hobby has been on the backburner for several weeks (unless you count quilt books, quilt magazines and quilt directions!!!) until day before yesterday. I had been on the waiting list at my local library for this book for ages. Finally, I got the email: "Come get your book." Oh, and was it ever worth the wait. Eat, Pray, Love (by Elizabeth Gilbert) is a wonderful read. It's about a 30ish woman writer who decides to "find herself" after a disastrous divorce and the breakup of a second romance. She travels to Italy (my mostest favorite country in the world next to America), then India and last Indonesia in search of--well, food, God, and romance. I absolutely could not put the thing down and it consumed all of yesterday and a bit of the day before. Because of that compulsiveness I mentioned in the first sentence, I went online to my library to request all other books by this author! I tend to overdose on one author then move on to the next LOL! I lost track of how many John Grisham novels I read before discovering Rick Bragg, then Lisa Scottoline, Janet Evanovich, Sue Grafton, Dan Brown and those three fantastic Ya-Ya sisterhood books!!! And there have been more! For the longest time I was on a CIA/spy/mafia/intrigue kick and couldn't get enough of those types. I went through my women's biographies phase, too. Jackie, Eleanor, Dolly (Madison, not Parton, though I'd love to read Dolly Parton's life story too), even Marilyn Monroe. Not to appear sexist (in my own mind) I spent a lot of time with Harry Truman and John Adams! Books that take place in a certain locale that I'm interested in can just take over my life. Before my husband and I went to Charleston, Savannah and Natchez one year, I devoured every book I could find--fiction or nonfiction--on the Civil War and the deep south. It is really quite amazing to be able to get so lost in words and mental images. I was like this as a kid too. I read all the Betsy, Tacy and Tib books and all the Carolyn Haywood books.

Well, now you know more about my reading habits than you ever cared to know.

Just to keep this post the tee-tiniest quilt related, I made the penny rug pictured above several years ago, but darned if I can remember the designer's name.