Kaffe Fassett In The Studio

Ok, the writing in this is maybe not five star material, but it is very good, and the book goes about descibing in pictures and in words the life work of Kaffe Fassett and it does a spectacularly beautiful and broad sweeping job of it. I am taking a class which takes you into his home and studio through Quiltfolk--until I signed up for it, I did not realize just how actively he travels and teaches. He is basically a giant in the area of textile arts. He is an iconic fabric designer, and he works in needlepoint, knitting, and quilting. He has been a working artist for over 50 years and has been a prolific author as well. In 1988 he became the first living textile artist to have a one-man show at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. The exhibition attracted such crowds that the Museum doubled attendance figures during the run and the exhibition toured to nine countries afterwards. This book takes you through his living space, which is one of the things I love to see--where people lived and worked. When I am on the road, those are intentional stops for me. Carl Larssen is a Swedish painter known for painting his family, and his home is adorned with painted doors and walls that are evocative of his work--the same can be said for Fassett's home. He worked on this book during the pandemic, when we were all home more or less, and has an intimate feel to it, maybe aided and abetted by the amount of time he spent there that year. If you are a fan, do not miss this--he even manages to include a few patterns, even though that is not what the book's primary aim is, and if you aren't, take it out of the library--you might become one. His fabric isn't exactly my cup of tea, but it is vibrant, distinctive, and I have used small bits of it in quilts to add pop and color. Truely a one of a kind artist.

Heiress Takes All by Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka

I have generally enjoyed the YA books that Reese Witherspoon has picked for her book club, and this mat very well hit the spot for the target audience, but I did not love it. A daughter, Olivia, who's father is marrying his 3rd wife has invited her to the wedding--she is a product of marriage number one, and when that ended, she and her mother were left penniless, withouth health insurance, and in dept. he mother has worked multiple minimum wage jobs, and Olivia is out for revenge. Ok, that is all understandable, but what I do not get is why her crew agree to help her with the plan to get the codes to her father's off shore bank accounts and transfer the fortune she sees as her birth right, but why would the rest of them aid and abet her? So once that disbelief is suspending we can move on. With the help of an eclectic crew of high school students and one former teacher, Olivia has plotted her mid-nuptial heist down to the second. But she didn't plan for an obnoxiously nosy wedding guest, an interfering ex-boyfriend intent on winning her back, greedy European cousins with their own agenda, or a vengeful second wife. When everything seems like it's going wrong, Olivia has to keep her eyes on what really matters: getting rich. It is slow going and a few plot twists along the way--which set us up for a sequel--and all does not turn out as hoped.

The History of Sound (2025)

This is a quiet movie, muted in both tone and cinematography, and while that sometimes drives me crazy, the slow lazy pace of it is suited to the material. The one thing that is not restrained is when they are going on about the music. And then it bursts with passion and pure emotion. The folk songs that provide the film’s spine spring from a deeply authentic place, infused with a love of storytelling and a yearning for connection with the past. It is is about the romance that forms between two men who find each other through their shared love of the timeless tunes from country people. One is from Kentucky and the other has visited the villages of England and they are deeply drawn to these often sad ballads. Because of the period when the story takes place, World War I, theirs is a love that cannot be. These two men who couldn’t be more different outside their mutual obsession with music. His story begins in 1910 Kentucky, where, in an opening voiceover (the wise, gravelly tones of Chris Cooper), we learn that young Lionel is a musical prodigy. He has perfect pitch; his mother sneezes, and he can name that note. His ability lifts him out of rural poverty and carries him to the elite Boston Conservatory to study vocal performance. After a brief separation when David goes off to fight in the war—“Don’t die,” Lionel orders as he leaves—they eventually reunite to travel throughout rural Maine, knocking on doors and recording the folk songs that families have passed down from one generation to the next. This section is the heart of the film and gives it real spark--the power behind the vocal performances is undeniable. From front porches and kitchen tables, the ability of music to transform and transcend is evident. Afterwards they head their seperate ways, with this time leaving a shadow across Lionel's life that he eventually needs to unpack, and what is revealed to him is sad and inevitable. The one thing that has stuck with me is that the story is told at a time when this music was under appreciated and catalogued, but that changed in my life time, thank goodness.

The Call of the Honeyguide: What Science Tells Us about How to Live Well with the Rest of Life by Rob Dunn

I enjoyed this book, and there are a lot of engaging stories told in it, but it is not ground breaking when read by someone with a life long interest and participation in science. It opens with a couple of interesting stories about inter species cooperation. The first is the one that the title of the book is derived from. In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, birds known as honeyguides once used a specific call to lead humans to beehives so they could split the spoils of wax and honey. The other takes place in southeastern Australia, wild orcas partnered with Thaua people to hunt baleen whales. The Inca empire banned the killing of cormorants and pelicans whose droppings fertilized their crops. These relationships are known as “mutualisms,” and the author suggests such dynamics were once common and could be again in this thought-provoking and wide-ranging exploration of how different species interact in cooperative ways. This is particularly important to think about at a time when so many people are trying to break things rather than fix them. The United States in particular has become a pugilistic bully with a fascist leader bent on getting his way and trampling everything and everybody in his way--instead, diplomacy and cooperation have gotten us so much further and benefitted the greatest number of people. May we go the way of the Honeyguide.

Gradients in Quilting

Johanna Masko talked to our guild about how to think about, design, and operationalize gradients in our quilting. Use of gradation is a prominent part of modern quilting, and there are a lot of ways to think about it. One is the paint chip aisle at the hardware store. There each individual chip shows a particular starting color, and then what happens when you add more and more white to it, or conversely more and more black. This is a familiar and maybe one could say conventional way to look at gradation. Masko advocates thinking about it more broadly--she uses gradents in the background of this quilt, which moves across a large area, and then in each of the dresden plates, she uses it more subtly. I really like the details of her design process, and what she thought about as she was designing this and other quilts that she has made. A couple of take aways from her lecture for me was to use the color apps that are available in order to better train my eye to correctly identify the gradient--so if I want to incorporate it that I can do it right. The other was that when developing a quilt, to think about if this will be a part of the design or not, to think more intentionally about design, and to figure out not only where you are going, but where you want to go. Once again, I feel like the more I learn the less I know--that I figure out more of what I didn't know but am also more aware of the vastness of what there is to know.

All That Life Can Afford by Emily Everett

I have spent some time during my recovery from shoulder surgery getting further along in one of my long term reading goals, which is to read most of the Reese Witherspoon Book Club selections. This is a pretty classic rags to riches romance--sort of. Anna first fell in love with London at her hometown library—its Jane Austen balls a far cry from her life of food stamps and hand-me-downs. She has an absent father and her mother recently died, so she is running on a mixture of adventure and grief. Her father is unsupportive of her plan to do a master's degree in British Literature in London. When she finally arrives after college, the real London is a moldy flat and the same paycheck-to-paycheck grind—that fairy-tale life still out of reach. Then Anna meets the Wilders, who fly her to Saint-Tropez to tutor their teenage daughter. Anna is sependent on tutoring for income, and she has happened upon a sweet gig, which is preparing students who want to study in the US for the SAT. Swept up by the sphinxlike elder sister, Anna soon finds herself plunged into a heady whirlpool of parties and excess, a place where confidence is a birthright. There she meets two handsome young men—one who wants to whisk her into his world in a chauffeured car, the other who sees through Anna's struggle to outrun her past. As any experienced reader of this genre could predict, there are some obvious pitfalls, but never fear, there are people in Anna's court who aren't put off by her impoverished past and who will help her.

The Devil Wears Prada (2006)

There was so much hype about the second installation in this coming 20 years after the first, and while I remembered liking this when I first saw it, I couldn't remember why, or really much about it, so while recovering from surgery and largely bed bound, I watched it again. Initially when I saw this it reminded me of a college friend who had interned for a year at Women's Wear Daily--which is down the fashion magazine rungs quite a ways from Runway (the magazine featured here) but the lifestyle, where you are on call 24/7, that your life is not your own, and that you are essentially enslaved for a year to an editor in exchange for an entree into a job in publishing that is more about your skill as a writer than as a personal assistant. Her stories and the story that unfolds here share a lot of the same qualities. The selling your soul aspect is the part I did not remember. Since the first time I saw this I have seen all the major characters (Tucchi, Blunt, Streep, and Hathaway) many times over, and have a lot of respect for their work, so fun to see this earlier work again, which was more at the beginning of a couple of their careers. Their work here couldn't have hurt. Overall, not having seen the second one yet, I would recommend a rewatch. It holds up well.

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

This is a multi-layered story, where on the one hand it is about dinner parties and petty rivalries, men and their bright resentments and wars against misfortune. It’s about affairs and empty wine bottles and quail with mushrooms and A.I. and animals and how the best poets read their work aloud. Underneath, it is much much darker. This is a world that hasn’t ended, exactly, but has outlived itself. Civilization persists, thinner and more tentative. The seas have risen, archives have vanished and England has splintered into an archipelago. Yet the survivors remain civil--ignoring the roving gangs that are not the least bit lawful. They read poetry, debate the nuances of a long-ago dinner conversation and stroll through their ruined but beautiful world. It’s a very British dystopia—measured, melancholy and devastatingly polite. Set in 2120, the novel unfolds in the aftermath of climate and nuclear disasters that reshaped the planet. Civilization has retreated inland; knowledge is fragmentary; universities now study “the literature of the inundation.” The protagonist, Thomas Metcalfe, is a professor of literature—not a soldier or revolutionary—who becomes obsessed with reconstructing a lost poem. In the end, you have to choose what to save, and for him, this is it. It is a puzzling and unsettling read.

Robert Bosscher: Pushing Boundaries

I am a bottomless pit when it comes to watching lectures on quilting in general and modern quilting specifically. This speaker is a frequent flyer at QuiltCon and several of my guild mates recommended him--I saw him in conjunction with Libs Elliot's Sew Squad. There were two main points that he covered--the first is what is modern quilting. You have to have a working definition of it before you can talk about pushing the boundaries of it. As you might imagine, there are a lot of ways to look at it, going all the way from close to traditional quilting, with some modification in pattern and fabric, all the way to pure are quilts. Then he launched into some of the artists that he enjoys following. My favorite amongst them that I know was Bisa Butler, which he calls an artist working in fiber rather than a quilter, which I agree with, and the favorite that I was unfamiliar with was Kaitlim Rim, who does exploded blocks in a whimsical manner. He is well worth checking out if you get the chance, and he talks about a lot of different things in the modern quilting realm.

Rich People Problems by Kevin Kwan

This is the third instalment of the series, and I have to say that I am sorry to see the whole thing end, I have gotten to know this extended family, and am at the point where I feel like I can anticipate how each and everyone of them will react. The family comedy takes a more bittersweet tone, as the Shang-Young matriarch Shang Su Yi lies on her deathbed. Whereas the first two books lampooned the lifestyles of the rich and wealthy by presenting it through the perspective of an outsider thrust into that world, this installment discards the outsider’s surprise altogether and takes us into each character’s plans and motivations.  Whether it’s dealing with the potential loss of a loved one or fighting to keep the family’s legacy alive, and while their priorities are all messed up. It is a fun and relatable read.