I’ve discovered, rather unscientifically, that there seems to be a direct correlation between the amount and frequency of picture taking I do with the frequency of my blogging. If it ain’t happening here, it ain’t being recorded either. That by itself should be reason enough for me to endeavor to regularly blog 
I made this little discover this morning as I walked into my bedroom from my shower to see my sad little six-year old crosslegged on my bed, elbows on the window sill staring out of the window at the falling snow – a la Cat in the Hat. It would have made a truly awesome picture. And yet, no, nope, unuh, no camera at the ready, no camera readily findable, no extra boost of–I should really dash and find it. Nope. I just shivered and got dressed and let the incredibly adorable moment pass. Sigh. And then I realized that if I were regularly blogging, I would 1) know where the camera is at all times, and 2) have been completely excited for blogging fodder.
I’ve been reflecting a lot on what this blog is meant to be–what utility I get out of it or want to get out of it. I think it boils down to record keeping and sharing for me. I’m not a scrapbooker. That’s never going to happen for me. But I could upload my blog content to a book maker like Blurb and print off each year or logical grouping of years. I think my daughter some day might like to know what I loved and hated to make or read. Or how sometimes I was nutty or indescribably happy. Now the bigger question is just what would inspire me to fulfill that want?
Yeah. Sigh. This was supposed to be the month where I remember that I have a blog. What it ended up being was the month where I remembered that I had a camera… with loads of JUNE pictures from my most fabulous Parisian vacation… that remained on my camera until this very moment. The perpetual excuse of “oh, I can’t blog this or that because I can’t take/upload a picture of it.” For example, almost a month ago I bought a bunch of gorgeous fabric at my favorite LQS. And I wanted to show and tell, but well, I fell back on my “camera is full and busy” excuse. Pathetic, isn’t it. And really not so valid when you consider that I could just change memory cards.
I haven’t been reading either. Well, that’s not true, I’ve been reading fan fiction when I have the time to read at all. I’ve a new batch of novels upstairs from the library that sound interesting. Maybe I’ll get a move on those and post soon.
and that I love to write. Yeah, that would be September. Or, now. Sigh. What a summer. I can’t believe it’s all over but the weather turning much cooler. Bunny is back in school–which, oddly enough, is way more manageable for this mama than camp. Seriously, that about killed me.
So now that school has been back in for a whole week, I’m managing our first crisis of this school year: hubby’s car, his non-piece of shit Mazda 6 with less than 70,000 miles and only 6 years old died. Died as in dead. As in fork out $5000 for a new engine or forever let it hold its peace. Sigh. And cars for clunkers effectively reduced my options in car lots. Sigh. So i’ll be helping the economy along in my own sweet way some time this weekend because this family can’t make it on one car alone. And I will never buy another Mazda again. Their reaction to our issue was beyond lame–which is stupid because my last 3 cars have been Mazdas and I was super close to deciding to get another one later this year when I want to replace my piece of shit 10 year old car.
In other happy news, I am almost done with a sweet little baby blanket for a friend whose daughter is 7 months. And I started working on a version of this lovely embroidery pattern. I hate the cushion that they do, but I was thinking of making a lap quilt with 9 large embroidered blocks with this one in the center. Then I’ll do one block of each type of flower. I think.
I’ll be back with pictures soon–including a lovely stack of yummy fabric I bought this weekend at my LQS’s sale.
I just realized as I picked up needle and thread for the first time in probably a month on Sunday that I am a seasonal sewing type of person. Namely, I hardly ever sew in the summer. You’d think that would be because I am out and about enjoying life. This summer, I’m billing, billing, billing. So, no not so much with the enjoying life part this year.
But, historically for me, I tend not to want something that confines me to one space, no heavy quilting, or frankly thinking all that hard while I’m piecing etc. And certainly no working on some afghan that is getting heavier and hotter by the moment.
I almost always shake out of the no-sew funk around Labor Day. Which I am looking forward to. I’m a little entertained at myself that I only ended up sewing this weekend because, wait for it, it was unseasonably cold… like late September kind of cold
See, I know what I’m really made of.
The subtitle of this books is: “A Woman’s Journal of Struggle and Defense in Occupied France.” I’m not sure that’s necessarily true–I think the book is mostly about her struggle and experience after getting caught being part of the resistance in occupied France. Whichever way, it’s fascinating, sometimes horrifying and heartbreaking reading.
After reading the Diplomat’s Wife, I became more interested in the resistance movements in varying countries occupied by the Nazis during WWII. While on a recent trip to France, browsing a most fabulous book store, I came across Resistance and resolved to get it from my local library as soon as I returned home. (On a sidenote–I must talk a bit more some time about this book shop and how it in the end depressed me.) It was a strange read for me–the kind of book that instantly sucks you in, you read longer than you should, but when you do finally put it down for some reason, you discover that it’s hard to pick back up. After doing that a couple of times, I think I realized that it was because I was so emotionally invested in her story–and I knew that her experience was only going to get worse.
Agnes Humbert was one of the first members of the first resistance cell in France. You see her flee Paris as the Nazis take over and then return with some idyllic and mostly naive sense that there must be something she can do in Paris to help her country. And she does. She had many interesting political connections before the war, which enables her to get in front of the right people at the right time. Initially her work is merely leaflets to be distributed to Parisians who have only heard the Vichy french or German point of view of the war–a perspective decidedly out of whack with reality. Eventually, leaflets are no longer enough and she spearheads an underground newspaper–appropriately called resistance. In the final days of her efforts, she harbors a British soldier who is trying to escape and helps coordinate the dissemination of stolen important intelligence documents and maps. With just over a year of efforts to the resistance under her belt, a member of the cell’s inner circle betrays them all and the gestapo takes her away unexpectedly.
Agnes spends about a year in a horrid french prison with vermin, little food, torture, and freezing conditions. Eventually, she is tried with the rest of the cell, but being a woman is spared the death penalty, unlike her comrades. She then is deported as a political prisoner to Germany, where she discovers that political prisoners there are no different to the Germans than murderers, thieves and other convicts and she is set to hard, progressively dangerous labor. The next many sections of the book cover her movement in Germany to a couple of different work factories, where her greatest accomplishment other than staying alive is knowing that everything she produces in the factory is subtly defective–not enough so that someone immediately inspecting it could tell, but so that as soon as it is untraceable to her and needed for use, it would not meet its function. For which I felt glee for her as well.
The ending is inspiring. She stays on to help with intelligence before going home to France. All told she spent nigh on four years behind bars of some sort for her little over one year’s largely publication efforts at resistance.
I don’t know if I can love a book about so much misery and destruction. But I can say that it was very worth while–one that I won’t forget. And that I am better educated for having read. One commentator to the book praised it saying that the quality of the writing is not what one would expect from the many memoirs made about WWII–rather, it was great literature. I wholeheartedly agree. I think it’s even more important in the grand scheme of important WWII books because it’s a woman’s point of view, who was in the thick of it, who used her brilliance to make a difference.
I’d read it again–I mean as a “go back in time and make the choice to read it again” but I won’t really re-read it. I’m not sure where I stand on this book overall yet.
The Diplomat’s Wife is an interesting premise, beginning with a story that immediately gets you in the thick of the protagonist’s WWII resistance efforts, arrest, struggle to remain alive, rescue and convalescence. And it makes an admirable transition to love story where you root for her to want to live again. For about the first half of the book, I am amazed at the twists and turns of the plot. But it ends up being far more convoluted than I usually like in a story. Once you realize the type of gyrations the author is willing to employ, it’s terribly easy to predict the rest of thee entire book, which removes a lot of fun of the read.
All that said Jenoff is a tremendous painter of pictures with her words. I was there in the darkness of her cell. I was with her in the mildewy gardener’s shack with the very hot American soldier. I could clearly envision a grey, hopeless day in Poland at the park. From this perspective alone, I would recommend giving it a read. The author is really quite talented–I think she just needed an editor or someone to tell her you don’t actually have to use all of the standard “gotchas” of pseudo-suspence novels in one go.
Her talent with words has sufficiently captured my interest though to to add a book on the Resistance to my TBR list and I will likely read her acclaimed “The Kommandant’s Girl” at some point.
No, no, no. (Note to self, read the first and third Pamela Aidan book soon to detox from these successive poorly done “fan fics” I’ve read lately). Le Sigh.
According to Ms. Berdoll, Darcy and Lizzy weren’t really good at communication before their marriage (fairly realistic) and that they don’t really need to ever talk to improve that–they just need to do it a lot (less realistic). Frequently. All the time. Anywhere. Everywhere. Hold up, middle of a serious conversation, well, it’s time to get it on, now what were you saying dear?
It was tedious. Yes, they are newlyweds. I get that. They do it like bunnies. But their actual character development and relationship building was so sporadic and disjointed–it was really difficult to figure out where they had progressed on what subject. The first few chapters of this book establish this pattern of “hunh? *head scratching.* They’re in the carriage, and Lizzy seems pissed at Darcy even though it’s the wedding day… no resolution, just sex. A few chapters go by and we go back with Lizzy thinking about what insensitivity had her pissed at him that day back in the first chapter.
It was also tediously long. If we hadn’t been there with them in the bedroom for so many pages, it all could have been so much shorter. There’s also some crazy kidnapping of Lizzy and near (well, actually partial) defilement by the nasty man and Darcy turning into some cool killer in his rage. I won’t speak to the fact that I don’t know why some women think it’s romantic to be saved from defilement.
This is really the usual formula of post-marriage Darcy stories: sex, infertility issues, miscarriages, kidnappings, etc. One unexpected feature was the author’s lingo. Bring a dictionary. She goes old school and won’t settle for words of less than four syllables. At first it was jarring, but after a bit you get used to it and she does stick with it the whole way through–which is a good thing.
The only redeeming quality to this book for me was that, I’ll read anything Pride and Prejudice related, it was one book that was huge and thus ideal for taking on a long vacation knowing it would last me longer than the plane flight. Now it’s with a bouquinist on the banks of the Seine waiting for some American P&P devotee wanting a tome for the long plane ride home. Again, pass on this one–unless you are looking for just one travel book to last you a few days-because hey, you’ve got nothing better to do.
I didn’t like it. And it wasn’t good enough to merit much of a review. Of course, the usual caveat applies: I generally don’t think well of books done in diary format.
But my dislike goes beyond format. The whole purpose of this type of format is to introduce the reader into the characters psyche, and yes that includes some deep dark secrets. But this was just, well, well all wrong.
Ms. Slater’s Darcy is a lecher–but a lecher with a softer side. On the one hand he diddles the help on the other he catalogs his vast library by creating, wait for it, a card catalog. He is supposedly dearest friends with the poet Byron and while he doesn’t “approve” of Byron’s general behavior, he ends up in the midst of an orgy at Byron’s manner.
The rest of the characters are off as well–Bingley is utterly spineless, much more so than the original would imply and yet he ends up with more moral character than Darcy. Understand, I am intrigued by the whole dark side potential of the brooding Darcy, but this isn’t it.
I just don’t have much more to say. It’s boring. The writing is weak. Darcy is weak. Save yourself some time and money. Pass.
So i think I’ve made all but one skirt of those that I intend to make for bunny this year. I stuck with two patterns and modified them as I went so that now, I’ve got just what both Bunny and I both like. I used House on Hill Road’s Twirly Skirt as a base for the fuller skirt and Oliver+S’s Lazy Days Skirt tutorial for a less full skirt. The best part about sewing your own is that you really can learn how to take what you don’t like and make it “better.”
I discovered after making another Twirly Skirt that it was just, well, dare I say it, too twirly. 
I know I know, you’re thinking that is simply not possible, but it is. The way the pattern worked out for Bunny it seemed more appropriate for playing around the house and less so for running around camp or the playground. Erin’s pattern calls for two pieces that go selvedge to selvedge as the width… that’s 72 inches of fabric. Now, I don’t oppose the fabric usage, but I did object to as did Bunny the amount of fabric wadding up and trying to be at her little 22 inch waist.
So, I tried using 1/3 less overall fabric, and it is much much better. The fabric isn’t bunched up squeezing the life out of her little tummy. Another modification I made was more for my speed rather than an issue with how it worked. Erin has you do a pseudo elastic waist plus draw string coming out at a V you leave in the waist seam. That’s a lot of effort. I eliminated it and just made the waist come together like normal. And for the final piece of laziness, I eliminated the casing made from accent fabric… This is not just a turn under and press a few times exercise. This one I’m undecided about, I love the look of the accent fabric, but the fact of the matter is that no one ever sees it because Bunny’s shirts are all longer than the waistline of her skirt and cover it up. So, while pretty, it doesn’t give me much bang for my time invested. Here’s a picture with less twirl, no V and drawstring, and no accented waistband.
I’m not sure how much Lazy Days pattern is left in my implementation.
I never made one exactly as Liesl directs, mostly because I was a moron and then a genius. I know…. I like hyperbole. So, I initially cut her fabric without leaving on the two inches Liesl recommends for the hem and so forth. Once I realized I had done that, I looked about frantically trying to figure out how to elongate the skirt without making it look stupid… I just needed a few inches. Ruffle? Ruffler? yes! I have the Ruffler attachment for my Bernina, that I’ve mentioned before.
So I got some fabric out, ruffled it up (on the 6 setting for those of you playing at home) 
and stitched it to the bottom of the skirt. It’s still a hair too short when you contemplate all that cross-legged sitting she will do at camp, but we’ve practiced sitting like less of a savage 
Oh and I did a little fancy top stitching as I stitched it to the skirt.
This whole ruffle thing actually turned out better for me and my sewing stash… I have almost no ribbon and so it’s easier to find matching fabric than it is go buy matching ribbon expressly for the hem band on this skirt. Bunny happens to love the ruffle a whole bunch and I always have just enough extra to make a matching, little ruffle skirt for her favorite stuffed dinosaur.
More pix of the rest of the pack later.
