Howling Frog Books

 Happy July!  I had an unexpectedly busy week so I'm a couple of days late but who cares.  One thing I did was spend an afternoon at the county board of supervisors' budget meeting, lobbying for them not to cut the library budget (which they already did last year).  It would have brought the largest branches in the system down to three days a week.  To our great surprise, it actually worked and the board decided not to enact the cuts -- but only for one year.   We also held an unexpected early birthday party, due to various factors such as the presence of the person involved and another friend being present from out of town.  So I spent a lot of time thinking about food -- a thing I don't do a lot any more now that I'm an empty nester.  And now, on to the books!  Actually, I have been too lazy.  There are too many books here for just one post.  I'm going to put my Books of Summer here, and do another post on the books I've read...

 There has been enormous popular demand (well, one request) for me to show the reading-themed quilt that my friend made for me, so here it is.  She made it look kind of like me! I also realized that when I took a break back in November/December, that meant that I never posted about the guild quilt show.  I entered several items for show, and two for judging.  I don't think of myself as a person who produces judge-worthy quilts, but on the other hand, if nobody puts in quilts for judging it's not as interesting.  So I generally challenge myself to enter something as a personal goal, not because my quilts are all that fantastic.  And guess what, each won a first prize in its category!  (There are a lot of categories.)  So here they are: "When the Tripods Came," a very small quilt "It's Only Forever," a giant quilt There were a lot of amazing quilts at the show.  It was a lot of fun, and really nice to have an event again after three years; usua...

 Hey all!  Happy Magic March!  I hope you're reading lots of DWJ and Pterry.  It's spring here, but we're also having incredibly cold and precipitous weather.  I live on the valley floor, so it's just been lots of rain, but anybody with any elevation has gotten inches, if not actual feet, of snow, which is wild.  Precipitation is great, but it's also almond blossom season, so I'm kind of worried about the bees getting the job done.  One of my best friends is a co-manager at our local quilt shop, and she came up with the idea of having a featured quilter every month.  It's not fame, just encouragement to get to know each other and share ideas.  She asked me to be a guinea pig, I agreed, and for the sake of posterity I thought I'd save it here too.  Here you go: Honey Run Featured Quilter March 2023 This is the latest in our series of monthly emails detailing a customer's background and interest in quilting. We hope you enjoy and are fasci...

 Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle, by Clare Hunter We all know I'm a sucker for a book about the history of sewing or textiles.  Clare Hunter is a Scots woman (from Glasgow) and has done a lot of community work around sewing, so she's in a great position to write a book about the history. Hunter divides her book into loosely themed chapters, such as 'Loss,' Protest,' 'Captivity,' etc.  She bounces all over history, discussing embroidery therapy for wounded World War I soldiers and then moving on to the elaborate banners once used in marches -- every community group seems to have had several, and the suffragists' banners were of course embroidered instead of printed.  Then it's off to group projects for urban pride, or the patchwork 'liberation skirts' made by Dutch women after World War II, or Hmong storycloths.  She goes all over the world in this way, just telling stories about how stitching brings people ...

Week 3: (November 15-19) – Be The Expert/ Ask the Expert/ Become the Expert with Veronica at The Thousand Book Project : Three ways to join in this week! You can either share 3 or more books on a single topic that you have read and can recommend (be the expert), you can put the call out for good nonfiction on a specific topic that you have been dying to read (ask the expert), or you can create your own list of books on a topic that you’d like to read (become the expert).   For week 3, I decided to Be The Expert (and do a little Becoming) about the history of fabric, thread,  the development thereof, and its place in societies and history.  I stayed away from fashion -- that's not my area.  But I sure do love reading about fabric!    These are the books I've read so far: Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times, by Elizabeth Wayland Barber : My favorite book comes first, and is about the invention of string, w...

The White Mountains The City of Gold and Lead The Pool of Fire When the Tripods Came , by John Christopher The original covers!  This is what they look like in my head. I've always really liked John Christopher's novels for -- I guess I'd say ages 10+.  They're fine as YA, and they're not too difficult for most middle-grade readers.  Christopher specialized in apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stories, which generally feature a very ordinary English boy of 12 - 14 as the protagonist.  The Tripod novels were his breakout stories, and are still the most famous today.  Sometime in the mid-80s, Boys' Life did a graphic serial of the stories, and that's where I first read them, in my brothers' magazine.  ( Boys' Life is the Boy Scout magazine, if you're not familiar with it.) The world has been enslaved to the Tripods for at least a hundred years; nobody knows just how long.  Everyone is Capped at the age of 14, and after that they are docile and obe...

The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History, by Kassia St. Clair A while ago, St. Clair's first book, The Secret Lives of Color , was very popular, but I had already read Victoria Finlay's Color: A Natural History of the Palette (which is wonderful, and apparently I read it pre-Howling Frog, which surprises me!) and I -- rather snobbily -- eschewed the newer book, thinking it couldn't be as good.  I will have to rethink that snap judgement.  I can never resist a book about textiles, and though I kind of thought this might be on the light side, I found that I enjoyed it very much and and recommend it to any textile-lover...or for that matter, anybody who has never given a thought to the huge importance of textiles. This book is not a comprehensive history of the development of early textiles, though.  St. Clair hops around a bit in the fields of history and geography.  Each chapter focuses on one sub-topic, and gives several stories about that.  So there ...

There's been no time to post, because I'm helping to organize a mini quilt show of antique, vintage, and reproduction quilts at our town's most historic location.  I'll tell you all about it afterwards, but here's a photo of a lovely hexagon quilt made sometime before 1900.  I'll be back when I can think of something besides keeping this event on the rails!

Celtic, Viking, and Anglo-Saxon Embroidery, by Jan Messent This is such a great book, people.  If you are at all interested in textile arts, or the British Isles a thousand years ago, you've got to find a copy of this and sink into it. Jan Messent has been doing various forms of textile arts, painting, and design for a long time, and if you look you can find a fairly long list of books to her name, most of which are about design or knitting.  She's also written a lot of historical romances under the name Juliet Landon.  In the 1990s, she produced an entire panel of Bayeux embroidery that was a theoretical fill-in for the missing final panel of the Bayeux tapestry (several people have done this).  And in about 2010, she was amusing herself by making mixed-media embroidered books and items in homage to Celtic, Viking, and Anglo-Saxon styles, which became this book. Messent gives some nice history about the clothing and textile styles, and she explains what sh...

Last Sunday, I woke up with a nasty tension headache and didn't write a post, but I had some neat stuff to share.  This week has been very long and busy, so maybe it's just as well; I can squeeze one post out of two weeks! Last weekend was our local quilt show, and my first time exhibiting at said show.  I entered a quilt for judging, and guess what?  It won third place in its category!  (Which would be pieced quilts of medium size.)  I also got to have some fun setting up, taking down, and attending, and admiring  many impressive works of art. Friday I went to a play with a friend.  The play wasn't much but the company was good. I went to the symphony too!  Unbelievably, one of the pieces was the first performance of a symphony by a local musician, and it was commissioned .  So somebody out there still likes classical music.  Well, the whole place was full of people who like classical music, but most of them probably couldn't a...

It must be admitted that I've been in a slump, and not just in the reading and blogging realm.  Things have been a little tough all 'round.  Jenny at Reading the End has noticed that a lot of bloggers are feeling this way  -- possibly disasters, politics, and the disaster of politics has something to do with this -- so she decided to ask people to post "something on Sundays:" The only guidelines are that you write about something that kept you on your feet that week, whether that’s a person that inspired you, an action you took that you’re proud of, a book or movie or TV show that nourished your heart, a self-care strategy that worked for you, a goofy event or moment that brought you joy. Whatever it is, every Sunday, I want you to tell me something that matters to you. If you don’t have enough energy for a post, tweet it at me (you can use the hashtag #SomethingonSunday). So here we go.  This week I finally started doing some sewing again.  Years ago,...

The Patchworks of Lucy Boston, by Diana Boston, photos by Julia Hedgecoe Now that I've told you all about Lucy Boston's house, I also have to tell you about her quilts! Technically speaking, they are not quilts at all, because they are not quilted.  Everybody calls them patchworks, because they are pieced and then only backed with fabric.  This makes them less strong than quilts.  I will probably use both terms for this post, because typing patchwork all the time is a pain. I found out about the patchworks several years ago, and have wanted this book for a long time, but it's not easy to get in the US.  When we planned the UK trip and the visit to the Manor, I promised myself that I would get this book! I'm really glad I got to see the pieces in real life, though; one thing I found was that the photos can't really do justice to them.  They are very complex and technically proficient, with a precision that would impress any quilter.  Lucy carefully...

Bibliocraft: A Modern Crafter's Guide to Using Library Resources to Jumpstart Creative Projects , by Jessica Pigza Talk about a fun book!  Jessica Pigza is a rare book librarian and crafty blogger at the New York Public Library.  She keeps dropping the names of my favorite designers, like Heather Ross, Gretchen Hirsch, and Mary Corbet.  I would like her job, please. Library collections, especially collections of older books full of public-domain images and patterns, are wonderful sources of inspiration if you're an artistic type.  Pigza spends the first half of the book showing the reader how to access all this wonderful stuff, and the second half has various small projects by popular designers, along with their inspirations.  The projects weren't really my favorite, but then I am not actually much of a crafter; I do sewing, mostly of quilts or other particular things. The library information is wonderful.  Pigza explains the different types of libr...

The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine , by Rozika Parker I only found out this book existed a couple of months ago, and then I ILLed it right away.  History of embroidery and talking about what it meant for women?  Yes please!  Sadly the ILL did not come up with the 2010 edition, but it is just the same except for an additional foreword, so wasn't really a big deal.  Parker passed away soon after that, so we cannot hope for a revised and updated edition, but I hope more people will write about it. Parker traces a history of embroidery, almost entirely in England (huge tomes could be written about every country in the world, so it's good to focus), starting with the Middle Ages.  At that time, large-scale embroidery was mostly an industry with employees, and the majority of those employees were probably men.  Embroidery was not a gender-specific activity, as it became later. She covers the development of different technique...

The needles excellency -- a new booke wherin are diuers admirable workes wrought with the needle ; newly inuented and cut in copper for the pleasure and profit of the industrious , by John Taylor My ambition! One of my other interests (besides books) is embroidery.  I like a lot of different kinds of embroidery and lately I've been getting into some historical forms.  I've been learning some crewel work and my next ambition is to learn stumpwork--a hideous name for a lovely kind of embroidery with three-dimensional elements.  I made my family get me some pretty stumpwork books for Christmas, and I'm even taking a gorgeous online course about embroidered caskets. Naturally, therefore, I also like reading about historical embroidery.  It's fascinating, people.  In Europe a few hundred years ago, embroidery was not only an important part of a girl's education and abilities, it was considered to be a virtuous pastime that encouraged moral thought.  Wom...

The Lost Art of Dress: the Women Who Once Made America Stylish, by Linda Przybyszewski This is a fabulous book and will definitely be on my top ten list for 2016.  I loved reading it and did very little else for a few days.  I read a lot of bits out loud to family members who wished I wouldn't.  But it hit all of my buttons: history, fabric, sewing, woman stuff, did I mention fabric?  I even got some family history in there.  Przybyszewski writes about the women she calls "the Dress Doctors:" professional women who mostly worked as academic home economists from 1900 to 1960 and made it their mission to teach American girls and women to dress according to principles of beauty, dignity, practicality, thrift, and egalitarianism.  All you need are a few excellent outfits, suited to your life and put together according to "the art principles," and you will be free to do your work with confidence and poise.  The Dress Doctors are why Agatha Christie nov...