No matter how many pairs I make



handknit socks are still kind of magic.

(This is the Trekking "Aquarelle" pair - just finished them last night. Sort of my standard sock pattern - 64 sts, 1 1/2 inches ribbing, 6 inches stockinette, heel flap, French heel, 7 1/2 inch foot before toe, round toe.)

I really like the color combination in these and I hope that soon it will be cool enough to actually wear them outside my house.

I also got all the strips cut for the Straits of Georgia quilt and made a few trial blocks:



I haven't squared them up yet so they may look a little off-square. I am going to make all the blocks for this quilt and then square them up before I lay it out, so the finished quilt will look neater.

And more quilts. I don't think I ever posted a picture of the Turtle Quilt I have made from vintage blocks.



I found a set of 25 pieced "turtle" blocks (it is a variation on Drunkard's Path, with appliqued heads and tails) in an antique shop here. (They were only $25 for the set, which I found almost unbelievable - you probably can't buy new fabric sufficient for 25 blocks for that). Of course I had to have them.

The turtles themselves are probably feedsack material - they have that sort-of coarse texture and also the large, bright (sometimes slightly gaudy) prints that I tend to associate with feedsacks. The background is one of those 1930s greens - it's not quite a sateen but it's shinier and harder than the typical solid-color quilting cottons you buy now. The woman who sold them to me didn't know the exact vintage but I'm guessing they could be anywhere from 1930s to 1950s (especially if the person had kept and saved the fabrics.)

I set 24 of them together (4x6). I still have the 25th tucked away; I keep thinking I should do a pillow with it. I bought some shirting-print reproduction fabric for the outer border (you can't see in the photo but it's scenes from the Aesop fable about the tortoise and the hare) and also the pale pink inner border. The ladies at my mom's church quilted it (they have a quilting group to raise money for Helpful Projects). Yes, I use it on my bed sometimes. I try to be gentle with it and especially if I have to wear calamine lotion (like when I have poison ivy) or something like that to bed, I make sure to put a different quilt on so I won't get it dirty.

And here's a closeup showing four of the turtles:



The lighting is not very good and I had to take it standing on the bed.

(Incidentally, you can just barely see in the full-bed picture that I have Bob, Bertie, and my little beanbag Kogepan sitting on the bed. And I found that YouTube has the Kogepan cartoons on it - with English subtitles even. They're odd, surprisingly philosophical little cartoons. Here are two: the story of Kogepan and the last episode, which is probably my favorite because of its philosophical ending: "A breath in the winter is white...no matter what pan [bread], all their breaths are white...it's a sign that you exist....It's not much....but it's something worth being happy about."

And with that, Kogepan seems to have accepted his existence as a little burnt bread...

I have a real fondness for Kogepan...I think I said once before that he's one of those characters, not unlike Eeyore or Puddleglum [from the Narnia books] whose outlook on life is kind of unrealistically sad, and somehow that appeals, I think, to certain children. I know when I was a child it made me feel all maternal, like there HAD to be something that I could have done to cheer Eeyore up...Perhaps there's a need for those types of characters in the culture.

But I will say I do like that Kogepan's story seems to end with him accepting his existence. Maybe now he won't go out and get drunk on milk any more.)

And I know this will make the post excessively long, but I'm going to add this:

1001 books you "must" read before you die. Lynn listed the ones she'd read, so I thought I'd go through and look up the ones I'd read.

I'm actually kind of pleased with myself. I often whinge about how I'm really not that well-read, how there are these big gaps of books "everyone" has read but I have not.

So here (with the odd bit of commentary) are the ones I've read. I also have to add that a lot of the books in my "to be read someday" list are on this list.

But here are the ones I've actually READ:

2000s
19. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon (Fascinating book.)
49. Life of Pi – Yann Martel (I prefer the story with the animals.)

1900s
86. The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
93. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
147. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
196. A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
240. Less Than Zero – Bret Easton Ellis
242. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
272. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
276. The House of the Spirits – Isabel Allende
291. Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
300. If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler – Italo Calvino
301. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
303. The World According to Garp – John Irving
340. Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
367. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
411. Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
418. Everything That Rises Must Converge – Flannery O’Connor
433. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
436. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
437. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
444. Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein
445. Franny and Zooey – J.D. Salinger
450. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
451. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
452. The Violent Bear it Away – Flannery O’Connor
456. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
467. Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote
495. The Talented Mr. Ripley – Patricia Highsmith (yes, read the book. Never have seen the movie.)
508. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
520. Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
522. Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor
529. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
535. The Third Man – Graham Greene (Both the book and the movie. Actually read the book after seeing the movie.)
547. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
563. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
564. Animal Farm – George Orwell
569. Christ Stopped at Eboli – Carlo Levi (Just read it this summer)
574. The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (et en Francais, no less)
579. The Outsider – Albert Camus (is this the same as The Stranger? If so, I’ve read it, in the original French even!)
588. Native Son – Richard Wright
609. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
610. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
619. Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
620. Keep the Aspidistra Flying – George Orwell (Wait, I thought that was Huxley who wrote that…)
631. Burmese Days – George Orwell
641. Miss Lonelyhearts – Nathanael West
649. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
650. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons (just read it this summer)
667. All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
699. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
703. The Professor’s House – Willa Cather
717. Siddhartha – Herman Hesse
743. The Thirty-Nine Steps – John Buchan
752. Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton

1800s
788. The Awakening – Kate Chopin (Made to read this in high school. Hated it.)
794. Dracula – Bram Stoker
825. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
853. Middlemarch – George Eliot (one of the BEST books I have ever read)
854. Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll
859. Phineas Finn – Anthony Trollope
866. Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne
868. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
876. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
880. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins (Another very good book – more of an entertainment than Middlemarch is, but still very good)
889. Walden – Henry David Thoreau (This is best read, I think, before you turn 25. I read it at 32 and found Thoreau kind of insufferable in places)
902. Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
904. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
913. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
938. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

1700s
970. Candide – Voltaire
983. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift (I really should NOT include this as it is the book I am currently reading, but I’m going to include it because I’ve read so few 1700s pieces.)
987. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe

Pre-1700
1001. Aesop’s Fables – Aesopus (Well, most of them.)