The Cake Is Not A Lie

So, yesterday was my mom's birthday.  I made the cake!

Triple layer strawberry cake, from The Cake Doctor book.  Very yummy!  Though, unfortunately, I went with store-bought icing, and all those strawberries went sliiiiiding off the cake during the car drive over to my parents'. :(  So they got stuck back on with toothpicks.  Stab!

I haven't been getting much reading done, since I've been concentrating on writing and quilting, but I did (finally!) finish The Silent Tower (369pp) by Barbara Hambly.  I'm not sure what to think of what's happening in it, but it is very much set up as the first part of a series.  Additionally, it takes about a third of the way into the book for the two disparate universes in it to start to mesh.  So, maybe not recommended at this juncture?

And I also bit the bullet, used up my January allowance, and purchased a physical copy of Penric's Demon (135pp) by Lois McMaster Bujold.  I finally have the whole series in book form!  And I've determined that I reallyreally like reading a physical book over a digital one.  (Wonderful Husband is the opposite.)  Rereading this in a physical format was a completely different experience than reading it on a screen.  Much love for Penric and Desdemona!  And now I want to reread the whole series.  Preferably in internal chronology order.  Maybe by the time I finish, Subterranean Press will actually have gotten Knot of Shadows printed and in the mail to me. :)

All You Need Is Love

So last weekend, I participated in the virtual Treadle On Gathering.  Which was quite fun and interesting and I learned more than a few things!  Not all of them having to do with treadle machines, either. ^_^

I also cut up rather a lot of my current scrap pile into usable parts, and finished my other Sneaky Secret Project:

This is 13.5" square, and all the reds are scraps from the quilt I'm making for Squiddle.  It's my fourth mini quilt (and I've just finished the top for my fifth), so I'm thinking of grouping them on a wall somewhere for a display?  Who knows.  Anyhow, it's cute, and was finished in time for Valentine's Day.

Red Things

So, I have finished reading The Red Pyramid (516pp), the first of the Kane Chronicles trilogy.  It was slightly less easy to follow than the Percy Jackson books, but then I have a more thorough grounding in Greek mythology than I do in Egyptian.  I blame the American public education system.

Also, I have finished three parts of the Sneaky Secret Project!  (Part four still in progress.)  You see, I had found a pattern for Valentine's Day card quilts.  And since I had all those red scraps from the quilt I am making for Squiddle, I made three cards, for my boys and my husband:

Caveat on the pattern: it gives you the size for the side triangles, but not the corner triangles.  I used Bonnie Hunter's tutorial to help me figure out the math for those.

And!  Since I used a plain cream fabric for the backing, I'll actually be able to write on these Valentine's cards.

Monday Progress

The star blocks are complete!

Now I just need to pull 12 or 24 reds, and 9 or 18 off-whites (depending on how much variety I'm going for) and start cutting strips to make the X blocks!

But first, Sneaky Secret Project lies in the scraps:

This Week

Went to the Gig Harbor Quilters meeting on Wednesday and had a good time.  I made a contact with a woman who lives not that far from me, and who is interested in having someone to sew with.  The guest speaker had made some lovely quilts, but was, for my taste, just a bit too interested in talking about the classes she teaches locally and her longarm quilting business, with the obvious text/subtext of trying to drum up business.

However, I did purchase some more reds for the Reds for Squiddle quilt off the Treasure Table, as well as a yard of Mario fabric that will be made into a pillowcase for Jazzy.

I haven't gotten any more sewing done since, due to inertia, insomnia, housekeeping, and keeping up with my writing ~4000 words a week on the story I'm currently posting.  (One more scene, and I'll be done with this Friday's chapter!)

Also, finally The Blood of Olympus (502pp) arrived, so I read through that on Thursday.  And now I'm onto The Red Pyramid, which is the first of the Kane Chronicles books.  I must admit, I'm amused by the hints Riordan drops of the other series in both of these volumes.

And, I had my 19th wedding anniversary this week!  We did absolutely nothing for it, as the boys had swimming class that evening. ^_^;;

One Row At A Time

 I spent some of yesterday stitching and cutting and stitching some more.  That's all quilting is, right?  Cutting apart perfectly good fabric just to sew it back together.  In any case, the 24 star blocks got another row each:

Just one more row to go, and then I can move on to the "X" blocks!  That said, I doubt I'll get very much done on it (if any) today or tomorrow.  Today I have homework to do for my writing class, and grocery shopping, and attempting to write for that chapter I have due out on Friday.  And tomorrow is daytime quilt guild followed by the evening being taken up by said writing class.

I did, however, squeeze in one more book for January!  When we hit up Half Price Books earlier this month, they had five Barbara Hambly books on the shelves, and she's an author I've had recommended by several reputable SFF voices on the internet.  So I grabbed Dragonsbane (341pp), and... well, I'm not ashamed to say I stayed up way too late reading it.  Book was gripping!  I need to read the rest of what I have of hers, and then arrange to procure more.  So that brings me to 10 books and 4433 pages read for January.  Completely separate from the fanfiction reading, of course.

And now back to editing for my classmates.

2023, Go!

Ugh.  Back from the vanishing act again!

We spent December in the UK with Wonderful Husband's family, which was lovely on so many levels!  But it did mean that not much sewing got done.  Well.  I took a few baggies of 2" squares with, and borrowed a sewing machine for a couple of sessions, so I'm up to 150 of the 210 strips I need for a project.  But mainly it meant that I still haven't finished Squiddle and Niecelet's Christmas quilts!  And Family Christmas 2.0 happened this last Saturday.  So I need to get cracking!

At the local quilt show in October, Squiddle saw this quilt and fell in love with it:

It was even titled "Reds for [Squiddle's real name]", so clearly it was meant to be!  I plotted it out bigger (bed sized) and started work.  Here's how far I've gotten:

So clearly more work has to be done!

Things I did get accomplished while in the UK, however, was starting to read books again!  I took five with me, and finished all of them.  They were: The Lightning Thief (375pp), The Sea of Monsters (279pp), and The Titan's Curse (312pp), all by Rick Riordan; A Deadly Education (313pp) by Naomi Novik; and A Brightness Long Ago (416pp) by Guy Gavriel Kay.  The Rick Riordan books were written for middle schoolers, and so are like potato chips: easy and fast to read.  A Deadly Education took a while for me to get into it, between the main character's hostility and the world-building, but I'm looking forward to reading its two sequels.  And Guy Gavriel Kay's books are always dense reading but well worth it.  They're also referential to other books in the series, and make me want to reread them.  After getting home, I immediately started the next book in the series, which I think helped.

Which brings me to January's reading.  Thus far it consists of: All the Seas of the World (496pp) by Guy Gavriel Kay, the direct sequel to the above; Nick and Charlie (153pp) by Alice Oseman; Torn (436pp) by Rowena Miller; and The Battle of the Labyrinth (361pp), The Last Olympian (381pp), The Lost Hero (553pp), The Son of Neptune (513pp), The Mark of Athena (574pp), and The House of Hades (583pp + 42pp short story), all by Rick Riordan.  Yes, I'm reading my way through the entire Percy Jackson oeuvre.  The only reason I'm paused is because I'm still waiting for the next book to arrive in the mail.  Regardless, nine books (4092pp) in one month seems pretty decent to me.  And, I need to purchase the two sequels to Torn, now that I've finally gotten through it.  I started trying to read it during the height of the pandemic, but I just didn't have the headspace to explore new worlds at that point; now I do, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  (Thank you, Morag!)