Want, want, want, want!!!!

For a baby quilt. The line includes different panels, either depicting tree surrounded by ABC tiles or only ABC tiles. Very pretty. And isn't that little owl adorable? So far, my favourite fabric store only has the layer cake and the jelly roll. I hope the rest of the line arrives soon!!!

In other news: I want to crawl into a hole and never come out.

Proof!!!

Here's the irrefutable proof that I am indeed turning into a chicken:


You might say, "But you've still got your head." Which is true, of course. You can clearly see it on the picture: I've still got my head. BUT -- for how much longer? I ask you. By now it can only be a matter of days, perhaps hours even, before it's going to fall off!

Academic Tablescaping

Essentials:

• 1 cup of tea
• 1 primary text
• 1 sheet of paper for mindmapping
• 1 table

The Result:

I spent the afternoon planning my paper for the Manchester conference (for some reason, they want the papers well in advance) (no finishing the paper on the evening before the day you're going to present it for this conference - drat!). As you can just about see, my mindmap looks ... eh ... interesting - I hope I'll still be able to read my own handwriting tomorrow morning!

In case you're wondering: the topic of my paper is "'It is only with one's heart that one can see clearly': The Loss of Sight in Teresa Medeiros's The Bride and the Beast and Yours Until Dawn".

My Favourite Soup: Kallaloo

Three weeks from the day after tomorrow I'll have my final oral exam. If I pass it, you can then call me Dr. Schwab (I won't be able to call myself Dr. Schwab yet as I'll have to find a publisher for the Dratted Diss first). But in the time until then I'll probably enter Lala-Land again and keep running around like a headless chicken, shouting "Waaaaargh! Waaaaaargh! Waaaaaaargh!" (Not an easy feat, given that the chicken is headless!) As this might be my last sensible post in a while, I'd like to share the recipe for my favourite soup with you. It's yummy and will keep you warm on cold autumn evenings. :)

Take 400g pumpkin, cut into squares, put into a large pot, add three potatoes, also cut into squares, then add some water and cook until pumpkin and potatoes are tender.

Take that thingie-dings with which you can stomp and mash potatoes. Stomp pumpkin and potatoes (or simply purée them), add vegetable stock, finely diced ginger. Mince 500g of spinach (or simply take a large package of Rahmspinat *g*), then add to soup. Add 200 ml of coconut milk, salt and pepper (and some chili, if you like - me, I don't like).

Heat and admire the marvellous greenish colour. And when the soup is all nice and hot, it's ready to be enjoyed.

I got the recipe from a friend (hello, Matze!), and the pumpkin that was cooked in these pictures had grown in the garden of another friend (hello, Anna!). The pot and the kitchen are all mine, though. :)

Tablescaping with Books & Kitteh

You will need:

one pile of books

one kitteh.

Artfully arrange both on the dining table. Like this:

Try different angles.

With kitteh looking left ...

... looking right ...

... looking embarrassed.

(Do we have to continue with this? asks the kitteh. I feel a little bit stupid. - Yes, I say. - Ah, well, says the kitteh.)

Hmm.

Hmmmmmmm.

Hmmmm hmmmm hmmmmmmmmmmm

Hmm - ooops!

Sew & Tell Friday ... er ... on Saturday

or, On the Search for the Religiously Neutral Christmas Present :)

Take: One of the patterns from Gail Pan's lovely A Christmas Wish BOM.

Trace, stitch, cut out, add a backing and a nice ribbon, stitch together, turn, stuff - finished!

Nice, easy, oh-so-fast, and the result is just lovely. Instead of the normal cotton stuffing, you could also use some dried lavendar and thus transform your pendant into a moth repellant. :)

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Sew & Tell is organised by Amy. Click on the button to see what kind of projects other people finished this week!

Remembering my Sweetie

One year ago we had to say goodbye to Jago. I still miss him so very much.

Temptation, Temptation, Temptation

I haven't even finished my first quilt yet, but I'm already thinking about the second ... and third ... and fourth ... And it's all the fault of the Fatquarter Shop and their fiendish newsletter which leads me oh-so-much into temptation every single time I find it in my inbox. (Poor little me!)

But how to choose? Not just which pattern (I'm thinking about trying out some sort of scrappy log cabin), but, more importantly, which fabrics? Here's a selection of my favourites. What do you think? Any favourites?

Rouenneries is, hands down, my current favourite. The prints have been inspired by old French fabrics - don't they look wonderfully elegant, but in a somewhat faded, shabby way?

~*~

And here's Nostalgia. Aaaaah, Nostalgia. Makes you think of an English garden, doesn't it? To strengthen the impression of a garden, one could always go with the greens only. Like this:

~*~

Or perhaps another Glacé quilt? (Minus the blue again. I don't think it really fits with all the other colours.)

~*~

Blessings is more earthy and looks as if it would keep you nicely warm in winter. :)

~*~

Aster Manor - very feminine.

~*~

Alliance - another collection in more earthy tones.

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And now some collections which would make fantabulous coin quilts (small stacks of colour against a solid - quite often white - background):

Thoughts? Ideas?

Preparing for Winter

Each month the arrival of the credit card statement tells me that I'm spending too much money on books. It could be worse, I guess. Like other women, I could have a serious passion for shoes. Or bags and purses. Or jewellery. Books are relatively cheap by comparison (welllllll, if you love buying rare 19th-century editions of the Brothers Grimm's fairy tales, you might find that books can be horrendously expensive, too!).

So the piles on the top of my piano continue to grow and make me smile with satisfaction whenever I enter my little library-cum-music-room. (The Kitteh is less satisfied, I'm afraid, since the piles tend to be in her way when she climbs about on the piano and the lower bookshelves.) The sight of books has always filled me with warm, fuzzy feelings and thoughts of happily snuggled up on the couch with a cup of tea and a nice book (and a Kitteh).

Of course, at the moment I don't really have time to actually read all these new books thanks to the Dratted Exam that will hit me over the head in three or four weeks' time (*gasp* so soon??? Waaaargh!). So for now I regard those lovely piles as my winter hoard to be enjoyed over Christmas and in the new year. :)

Which reminds me of this lovely story:



Not that I would ever need an excuse to drool over the lovely Mr. Armitage. :)

Good Bed-Fellows

In one of the last chapters of Susan Hill's Howards End Is on the Landing, titled "Bad Bed-Fellows", you find the following passage:

A child's nursery rhyme books does not have the language in which to speak to a Latin dictionary. Chaucer does not know the words in which Henry James communicates but here they are forced to live together, forever speechless. [...] Does Elizabeth Bowen find Swift congenial company? Ah yes, surely, they were both Irish, they have a lot in common. I should like to sit here on the landing in the last glimmer of daylight and listen to them whispering together. [...] Can books learn from one another? Can they change as a result of sitting on a shelf beside another for years?

What an intriguing thought, isn't it? To test the idea I'd want to sandwich Anne Bronte's (please imagine those two dots over the e; I've no idea how to insert an e with dots here in Blogger) The Tenant of Wildfell Hall between Elizabeth Taylor's At Mrs. Lippincote's and Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Making of a Marchioness. One hopes that this would improve Bronte's angelic heroine (hey-ho, I run away from my husband because he's a beastly sadist, but when he's about to kick the bucket I'm going to return to mop his brow and make sure he doesn't kick the bucket after all *head desk*) and that, upon opening The Tenant the next time, one would find that Helen has bashed in her beastly husband's skull with the chamber pot.

Not that Burnett's heroine isn't any less angelic - in fact, she's a much better person than Helen: always smiling, always being grateful to other people, always happy to run errands for others. No, in The Making of a Marchioness you have to turn to the secondary female characters to get women with some more bite (and, eventually, one dead beastly husband).

Reading both At Mrs. Lippincote's and The Making of a Marchioness has finally convinced me (if I needed any convincing at all!) to teach a course on women writers of the early 20th century. Next winter, perhaps?

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The picture was taken inside Barter Books in Alnwick, a gigantic UBS inside an old railway station. I could have spent hours inside there (instead I went to see Alnwick Castle and then travelled on to Berwick-upon-Tweed - that latter point definitely not one of my finer ideas)

Sew & Tell Friday: The Little Red Bag

Remember the little blue bag, my very first sewing project? This week I finished a little red bag (one of two):

Take a few stripes from a Moda honey bun (I used Aster Manor), sew them together.

Choose lining fabric, layer with batting, sew, turn right side out, hand-stitch opening closed - and voilà:

Quilt in the ditch (aka along the seams of the honey bun stripes) with nylon thread, fold, hand-stitch sides closed and as easy as that the itty-bitty bag is finished:

This is what the inside looks like.

It's just perfect for small gifts like a CD or some bags of tea or a nice card with a gift certificate. And don't you just love those reds?

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Sew & Tell is organised by Amy. Click on the button to see what kind of projects other people finished this week!

Edited to add: I cut the jelly roll / honey bun stripes in half before sewing them together!

Post Without Words: Piano Stairs

:)

The Sexist Reader

I freely admit it: I'm a sexist reader. With a few exceptions (Michael Ende, Terry Pratchett, James Patterson's romances), my pleasure reading consists of books written by women. Granted, my favourite novella ever is Ludwig Tieck's "Der blonde Eckbert", I love Tennyson's "Lady of Shalott" and E.T.A. Hoffmann's stories are always charming, but for real flop-onto-the-couch-drink-cup-of-tea-cuddle-cat pleasure reading I inevitably turn to women writers.

In former years this was done entirely unconciously - first there were Enid Blyton, Auguste Lechner, Rosemary Sutcliff, Helen Cresswell, Joan Aiken, Tamora Pearce, and Susan Cooper; then Anne Rice, Anne McCaffrey, Marion Zimmer Bradley (of course!), Mercedes Lackey, Jennifer Roberson, Dorothy Gilman, and Victoria Holt; eventually Diana Gabaldon, Susanna Kearsley, and Dorothy Dunnett; and then I discovered the world of romance fiction.

By now, though, it is a conscious decision. I know I prefer the way women tell stories to the way men go about the business. Women's stories are much more relevant to my experiences and to how I see the world than men's.

A few weeks ago I read Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Literature, and it made me feel sick and angry all at once because the same mechanisms she describes in that study are still at work today. And so, I decided to act. Inspired by Jane Brocket's The Gentle Art of Domesticity, I'm now collecting books by forgotten women writers which I intend to read once the Dratted PhD Exam Thingie (DPHET) is over and done with.

Among the authors on my list are:

• Nancy Mitford


• Elizabeth Taylor (not the movie star!)


• Jan Struther


• Dorothy Whipple


• Marghanita Laski


• Winifred Watson


• Julia Strachey


• Barbara Euphan Todd

In addition, I'm thinking of offering a course on "Lost Voices: Forgotten Women Writers" next winter.

And now let's all say WHEEEEEEE!!!!

Richard Armitage is going to read another Heyer novel, namely Venetia. Here's the blurb from amazon:

In all her twenty-five years, lovely Venetia Lanyon has never been further than Harrogate, nor enjoyed the attentions of any but her two wearisomely persistent suitors. Then, in one extraordinary encounter, she meets a neighbour she only knows by reputation - the infamous Lord Damerel - and before she knows better, is egging on a libertine whose way of life has scandalised the North Riding for years.

Yay! :)

Treasure Box

The buttons from Miss Sock Kitteh came from this old sewing box:


My Mom found it in a thrift store a few days ago and bought it for me (for 5 €!!!). It turned out to be a veritable treasure box, filled with old thread, buttons, little hooks, bits of wool, needles, more buttons, cut-off bra straps, elastic, ribbons, and miles and miles of pinkish embroidery thread of the expensive kind. (Which I used for the lazy daisy on Miss Kitteh's belly.)



Needless to say that I was thrilled when my Mom brought the box home. :)