Bargains Galore

Last week I stopped into my favorite consignment shop, The Pink House in Canton, to see if there was anything interesting. I especially like looking for the items that have been in the shop for more than 2 months because they are 50% off the ticket price.  I found a couple of treasures...

 

I have always been fascinated by Scandinavian style knitwear with its classic designs, so this Dale of Norway cardigan came home with me for only $25! It has all of its original pewter buttons but the buttonholes are a little tight so I left them unbuttoned for the photo. These 100% wool sweaters run $300-$600 new, so I was thrilled to get a good bargain on such a timeless piece.

 

This was a bit of a wild card: an Yves St. Laurent silk blouse made in France for $17. With the gold metal buttons it has somewhat of a 90s vibe (but no shoulder pads!), but it fits well and with black in the print, it will look great with black pants. The paper care tag looks new so I suspect this blouse was hardly worn by its original owner--and I aim to change that!

I'm so happy with the bargains that I've added to my wardrobe!



More Quilt Details

It's fun to compare the old quilt with the new--at least I think it is! The selvedge of the new panel had the title "Off to Dreamland" and I wonder if that was the name of the original fabric design.

 

 

The puppy and kitty design is one of my favorite motifs.

 

 

It's nice that the center medallion has a boy and a girl so that the quilt is appropriate for a baby of either sex.

The colors in "Little Boy Blue" have held up pretty well in the original.

Mark's name was hand-embroidered by his mom many years ago.

Today it's considered good quilting practice to add a quilt label to back of a quilt.  I used MS Word for the words and then traced them onto muslin with a Micron permanent pen.

And that's the end of this quilt odyssey!



Baby quilt finished at last!

Wow, this project took a lot longer than I ever expected!  How much time could it possibly take to hand-quilt a fabric panel?  I'm glad I didn't keep track because I know I'd be really shocked by the answer.

I think it turned out very nicely!  It's still hard to believe that a fabric company recently reprinted the panel that Mark's mother had quilted during the summer of 1946 when she was pregnant with his older brother.  I was so surprised to see the familiar design again that I just had to buy it.

Here's the original quilt!  It was quite worn on the edges when my sister-in-law was expecting her first child so she added fabric to the sides and turned the quilt into a cover for the playpen pad.  Her two boys used it and then our two children used it.  A couple of years after I had returned the playpen, she gave me back the quilt thinking I might like to cut it up and make stuffed animals from it--very popular at the time. I didn't think the printed designs were quite the look I might want for a stuffed animal so I left the quilt alone.  Of course I kept it, especially since Mark's mother said he used to carry it around with him when he was little--in fact she embroidered his name on the back in case he misplaced it.  His name is still there today.



I found the backing fabric at Sew Inspired Quilt Shop in Simsbury, and the helpful ladies who work there helped me pick out the binding fabric.  I was looking for a stripe and this one works perfectly. Tomorrow we'll go shopping for a narrow curtain rod with brackets so that our nephew and his wife can use this new quilt as a wall hanging if they want. (I added a "hanging sleeve" to the back just in case.)

When their little girl arrives, she'll have a quilt just like the one her great-grandmother made for her grandfather!

Books, Books, Books!

I haven't figured out how to crop photos using Windows 8 so I'll use Amazon photos for my recent reads instead.

 

 

Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin was book group's January selection and none of us finished it. At first I thought the writing was lyrical--the author uses 50 words to describe something where 5 would suffice--but I soon tired of his style. Nearly halfway through the book I realized I didn't care about his characters and gave up. Checking the Amazon reviews, this seems to be an "either-or" book--some people think it's the greatest ever and others don't care for it at all. I'm in the latter group!

 

 

 

Mrs. Kennedy and Me by her Secret Service agent, Clint Hill, was so interesting to me. I was ten years old when JFK was assassinated in November 1963.  Growing up Roman Catholic in Massachusetts, it was quite special when our native son and fellow Catholic was inaugurated in 1960--the Kennedys were like gods to us.

 

At first disappointed when he was reassigned from President Eisenhower's security detail to cover the new President-elect's wife, Clint Hill soon fell under Jackie's spell. It's actually a very sweet memoir and I learned some things about her that I never realized--she smoked, lived away from the White House most of the time that JFK was president, and she traveled extensively without JFK during his short presidency--charming world leaders and their citizens alike wherever she went.  It's safe to say Jackie saw a lot more of Clint Hill than of her husband! The children had nannies and Jackie didn't seem to spend much time with them, but she was one of the first jet-setters. These are my observations and not the author's, and this book is a fascinating look back at the Camelot era. Incidentally, in video footage of the assassination, Mr. Hill is the SS agent seen climbing over the trunk of the presidential limousine immediately after gunshots were fired.

 

 

 

 

The Eighty-Dollar Champion: Snowman, the Horse That Inspired a Nation by Elizabeth Letts is a horse-lover's dream. Saved from a truck headed for the slaughterhouse by a young Dutch immigrant named Harry deLeyer who was looking for a gentle school horse, Snowman goes on to become a champion show-jumper at the national level in the late 1950s-early 1960s.  Nicknamed "Teddy Bear" due to his genial nature, the photo of Harry's young children piled on the horse and swimming in Long Island Sound is priceless. There's a saying along the lines of "when the student is ready, the teacher appears" and Harry is the perfect teacher for Snowman. It's a sweet, heart-warming story for anyone who loves horses.

 

 

 

Book group's selection for this month, Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple is a quick and creative read. The author's descriptions of people in the Seattle/Redmond/Microsoft area are laugh-out-loud funny. Could the events in this story actually happen? Probably not, but it's original and fun.



 



A Baby Shower

 



Our nephew and his wife are expecting their first child and today was the baby shower!

 

His parents had a special cake made for the celebration--lovely to look at and delicious to eat.

There were lots of presents to open and they are almost ready for the special event now.

My trademark shower decoration is a white bear with balloons tied to the paws, so I made Dawn and Ross stand next to the appetizer table to get this photo. Malima is visiting her parents so these few photos will help her share in the party.

The baby girl is due at the beginning of March.  It's been a long time since there has been an infant in the family--we're all so excited!

Book Bonanza

I've been reading a lot lately and have some opinions to share, as usual!

Tell the Wolves I'm Home by Carol Rifka Brunt was a good read. I thought it was an interesting take on the AIDS epidemic as seen through the eyes of a teen whose dear uncle dies from the disease. She befriends his surviving lover and learns so much more about her uncle as a person and an artist than she ever knew. I found it a little unrealistic in that she is able to keep this relationship secret from her family for a long time, but it's a tale well told. Definitely deserves an A for originality and its humanizing treatment of a sensitive topic.

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs is actually Young Adult fiction, but the book kept showing up in the blogs that I follow as a good read. The author basically found a number of old photos showing children and people in unusual circumstances, such as the levitating girl on the cover, and he weaves a very original story around the people in the photos.  It's a quick read and while I don't think it's great literature, I was intrigued enough by the mystery to keep reading.  Definitely deserves an A for originality!

I saved my favorite for last--I loved The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce! It's an original and sensitive story with very believable characters in a modern setting.  Harold is a retired man who receives word that his former coworker is dying from cancer and he decides to walk across England to visit her, the pilgrimage of the title.  There are several minor mysteries here--why is Harold's marriage so empty and can it be saved, what happened to Harold's son, and what is the nature of his relationship with his dying coworker?  The people he meets along the way are just so real that's it a pleasure to read.  For a first novel, I'm very impressed and look forward to reading more by this author. There's just such a sweetness to this story that I found very appealing--no irony, no judgments--the author is very sensitive to all the different characters and their quirks.

Wildlife Tracks in Snow

 

 

We had a dusting of snow yesterday evening and it was fun to see animal tracks in our yard this morning.  The deer made the rounds--checking out the hydrangea near the deck (which they ate last winter so I covered it with chicken wire this year) and walking in front of the living room window and across the driveway.

I had to look up these tracks and I think they're from the rabbit that I often see in our yard.  I'm really surprised that the coyotes or bobcats haven't found him yet.  He's a very cute Eastern cottontail, but he's another plant muncher that we don't need!