books I read in 2024

1. Min Jin Lee, Pachinko
2. Linden McIntyre, The Bishop’s Man
3. Louise Erdrich, The Sentence
4. Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing
5. Yasmina Khadra, The Attack
6. Frances Kazan, Halide’s Gift
7. Thrity Umrigar, The World We Found
8. Guy Vanderhaeghe, A Good Man
9. Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle
10. Nell Zink, Mislaid
11. Giles Milton, Samurai William: The Englishman Who Opened Japan
12. Justin Evans, A Good and Happy Child
13. Annabel Lyon, The Golden Mean
14. Matthew Kneale, Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance
15. Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness
16. William Gibson, Neuromancer
17. William Gibson, The Peripheral
18. Jessica Johns, Bad Cree
19. Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
20. Richard Wagamese, Starlight
21. Craig Shreve, The African Samurai
22. Nazanine Hozar, Aria
23. Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
24. Dominique Laporte, History of Shit
25. Tanya Tagaq, Split Tooth
26. Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome and other stories
27. CS Richardson, The End of the Alphabet
28. Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats
29. Carol Shields, The Collected Stories
30. John Vaillant, The Jaguar’s Children
31. Jane Urquhart, Storm Glass
32. Mark Haddon, The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
33. Louise Erdrich, The Round House
34. Bairbre Tóibín, The Rising
35. Thomas King, Medicine River
36. Timothy Findley, Spadework
37. Anne Rice, Angel Time
38. Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
39. Mary Lawson, Road Ends
40. Lydia Kwa, The Walking Boy
41. Michael Ondaatje, Coming Through Slaughter
42. Gabriel García Márquez, The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor
43. Irene Zabytko, The Sky Unwashed
44. Tatiana de Rosnay, Sarah’s Key

pintucks + pleats

On Monday afternoon I took an online workshop on the Quilty Nook (link: The Quilty Nook) with the amazing quilting teacher Heidi Parkes (link: Heidi Parkes) focused on adding texture to your quilts using pintucks and pleats. It turned out to be immensely fun and also maybe has helped me get unblocked on a new line of work I’ve been struggling to find focus with. I immediately realised the potential of this technique for drawing, and Wednesday evening I took a stack of fabric to life drawing club and made some loose contour portraits to try combining my drawing with stitching.

Here’s my first test piece, worked in red sashiko thread on a piece of thrifted cotton bedsheet dyed with tea and iron. This is the pintuck side:

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And here’s the pleat side, with its wonderful clots of pooling red in all the tight little corners and cluster points:

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Exciting, right? I’ve got around ten more sketches of faces on fabric to work with, plus a few hands and feet. I’m looking forward to seeing where this new method takes me, and of course am already bursting with too many ideas.

birthday dress

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I’ve been slammed lately with a big bookbinding commission that I just finished up, but found a bit of time to sew up a new dress for my birthday, a newish tradition. I cut into the good linen with an untested pattern but it worked out okay.

This is a shortened version of the Skyline Dress by Syd Graham (buy the pattern here: Etsy link). I eliminated the bottom tier and lengthened the top tier, and also made the straps fixed instead of adjustable (because the adjustability relies on a bow tied over one shoulder blade, which I know from experience isn’t something I’m going to enjoy wearing). It’s drafted for someone a bit taller than me and on my next one I’ll shorten the bodice. I may go back and shorten it on this version as well.

This is handkerchief weight linen that I dyed with willow leaves and iron. It’s not as drab as it looks in the photos but still pretty drab and I may end up dyeing it again. Worn on my birthday as above, overtop of an ecoprinted cotton gauze Yesterday Dress by Caramiya Maui (shop link: Caramiya Maui) and my indigo dyed toile skirt that I made from an old dress that used to belong to my late mother in law.

Here’s how I wore it again the next day, much more rumpled, over leggings and a safety orange Slocan Tank by Helen’s Closet (shop link: Helen’s Closet). Yeah, I pose the same way every day, I guess.

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Overall I’m happy with the relaxed fit and layerability of this and I’ll definitely make it again. I’m already planning a long tiered patchwork version, and will try the short version next time with a trapezoidal skirt instead of a rectangle. I feel a binge coming on!

blue sketchbook pages 16 & 17

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Howdy friends, it’s been a while!

Here’s another spread from that blue sketchbook. Ballpoint pen, white gel pen, and colour markers of varying quality. Those floating rings reminded me of meat, mac, & cheese, something with which I had a sick fascination as a kid but which I have never eaten (because, ew).

“Peking Duck in Lotus Land” was the title of a painting by an unknown Chinese artist, one of a small collection that were for sale in a gallery I used to work at in the late 90s. The painting depicted a line of ducks zigzagging along a winding river between giant lotus plants and I desperately wanted it but couldn’t afford it because I was in my 20s and working several part-time jobs. I still regret not buying it but, oh well.