Hoop Art!

 I have a few hoop finishes to show off. 

Over the summer I picked up the book Boho Embroidery by Nicole Vogelsinger. Her style is lots of fun; she layers bright, quirky, colorful fabrics on top of each other, then embellishes them with embroidery and beads. I was excited to try the technique:

I cut out a cat face from some Tula Pink fabric and appliqued it onto a Kaffe Fassett background. Then came the fun part -- embroidering lazy daisy petals and adding beads at the flower centers. For the frame around the cat I used fringe beads, little tear drops that naturally fall into an alternating pattern when strung together. 

I'll be doing more of this; I have all sorts of ideas for the novelty prints in my stash.

For Christmas my husband gave me a Winter wreath kit from Nicky Franklin:

The vintage linen the kit came with was a dream to stitch, so soft. There was an awful lot of satin stitching, but otherwise this kit was a fun one.

This pattern, Fall Leaf by Cutesy Crafts, was supposed to be finished in November, but I ran out of the silk I was using when stitching the outline. I debated switching to a different color because I was dying to see the completed stitching, but I'm really glad I waited to get more. One variegated color was exactly the look I was going for.

When finishing the back, I tried the string art technique for the first time. It uses a whole lot of thread, but looks neat:

Finally, I did the little freebie kit that came with an issue of Love Embroidery magazine:

The bird was supposed to be stitched with long-and-short stitch in browns and reds, but I hate long-and-short even more than I hate satin stitching, so I made my bird a little more abstract.

Whew!

Emotionally Weird by Kate Atkinson

 

This was the first book I read by Atkinson and it remains my favorite of hers. It's a delightful mix of academic satire, slapstick comedy, deep dark family secrets, and post-modern metafiction.

The last bit is apparent in its structure -- different typefaces are used to convey the multiples stories we get: Effie's trials and tribulations as a university student in her last year, the truth about Nora (Effie's mother), and Effie's first attempt at writing a mystery novel; not to mention snippets from self-important literary fiction by one of Effie's professors, a romance novel by his lecturer wife, a sci-fi story by a fellow student, and several formal logic problems for good measure.

The bulk of the story is that of Effie's, but she is repeatedly interrupted mid-narrative by her mother, who complains whenever she thinks too many characters are in a scene, or there should be more plot, or that Effie is taking too long to get to the point. The irony is that Nora herself has a story to tell, about her own and Effie's origins, but she uses the same narrative tricks Effie does to avoid telling it. Effie knows this, so she manipulates her own story (introducing certain characters at particular points, pretending to know less than she does) to get a reaction out of Nora, and eventually persuade her to come clean.

There are other games Atkinson plays. One professor's name alternates between "Watson Grant" and "Grant Watson," one page has a black square on it (a callback to Tristam Shandy), and on several occasions Effie revises her story as she is narrating it, to avoid an unpleasant event. Atkinson also makes subtle but repeated use of foreshadowing, rewarding a second reading. And throughout the book there is wordplay of every kind, and not just puns and jokes; books fly out of windows and send people to the hospital and a baby chokes on a crumpled page (words are dangerous!). A manuscript page is burnt, thereby undoing a parallel, tragic event in Effie's story. Words literally fall off pages and land on the ground, or they prise themselves off and hover like flies.

With all this going on, the novel is indisputably about the art of storytelling. Effie switches genres on a whim, Nora's frequent interruptions expound on the necessary elements of a story, and the classroom dialogue Effie depicts serves as a biting satire of literary criticism. All of it serves a higher purpose, however; what Effie wants, more than anything, is to understand how she came into the world -- her own story. Once she knows it, she can finish other stories.