Review: Antelope Canyon Quilt Top Pattern and Kit

Patterns included in kit

Thus begins the quilt making of the year. Antelope Canyon by Laurie Shifrin Designs

A family member is getting married and therefore a quilt must be created to offer on the alter of the Pintrest Gods. I wasn't going to have enough time to go through the whole find a pattern and then find fabric to go with pattern song and dance, so I just went searching for kits. Keepsake Quilting had this one on sale and I thought that it would go nicely for a modern, Pintrest-obsessed bride who's house I've never seen and thus am unable to design for. Sadly it doesn't look like they carry the kit anymore, but you can get the pattern, I'm not sure if it will come with all the pattern info as I got shown in the picture above. The nice part about the info I got in the kit was that they had handy cutting guides with photos of the fabric making it a lot easier to keep things organized.

The only real issue I had with the directions was how the cutting directions were formatted. Although it would have taken up a lot more space, having each fabric's cutting amounts listed as bullet points as opposed to one long sentence that you have to go back through a few different times to double check, would have been nice.

But that brings me to the most important thing about this pattern. It is, for all intensive purposes, fairly easy. You have a good rotary cutting set-up, a reliable 1/4" foot, space to lay everything out, you should not have a problem with this pattern at all. HOWEVER, and I can't stress this enough, MAKE SURE YOU LABEL AND DOUBLE CHECK EVERYTHING.

All strips after they have been cut, labeled and organized by sewing order 

I spent about 2 days cutting strips. Partly because I don't really have a great deal of room to cut stuff out, and partly because I get super bored cutting stuff out. Yes, even if I am listening to new episodes of the You Must Remember This podcast.

I then spent another two days sewing the off-white pieces to the colored pieces, which is another step that is a hell of a lot easier if you have the space to keep everything organized. Once you have started to question your choices in life and made it through most of the Blacklist episodes of You Must Remember This, you will have halved the number of strips by sewing them together and it will be time to start the block construction.

a surprising amount of time spent on sewing fabric that you just cut apart back together

The top is 4 blocks, the blocks are a variation on a traditional log cabin block. The directions say to make them all at the same time, sewing each strip onto each of the 4 blocks at the same time. This works to help you keep track of where you are, keep from putting the wrong strip on the wrong side, etc. It's very good advice. in the kit each section has two different colors but no guide as to which sides you should put them on outside of the obvious. Trying to replicate the top on the cover I used pieces of post-its to help me look at the values and keep straight where I was in the pattern.

The other thing that I did to help things along was to use spray starch every time I ironed a piece back. Just an aside, I make my own spray starch as I go through quite a bit and don't like to have to throw out the metal starch containers. It's super easy to make your own, just got to any larger store like Target or Hel-mart and buy a plastic spray bottle and some undiluted liquid starch (I use Sta-Flo, because it was there and you can get like half a gallon for a dollar). You can mix your starch as heavy or light as you like, I usually use a med-heavy mix.

You thought your life was cutting strips? No, it's pinning them, this is your life now, all the pinning for forever

It took me roughly two weeks to piece everything. Mostly because I had five million other things to do at the same time, and also, it was somewhat boring. Great time to catch up on all those podcasts and audio books you've been meaning to listen to.

Once you have your blocks finished the pattern will walk you through sewing them together using a partial seam, which is super easy. As you can see from the first picture, this pattern has multiple ways of setting it to get different looks, which is really nice. I'd like to make it again with black and jewel tones and see how a different setting would look.

If you are only doing the basic pattern/kit, this would be the end. The kit included more than enough fabric to do the binding, and frankly quite a bit of all the other fabrics so that if you messed up you are pretty safe. I LOVED that about this kit. I honestly think that I have enough fabric that I could cobble together something of a matching baby quilt if the need ever arose (how's that for Pintrest cred?). The finished size of the pattern is 74 1/2"x 74 1/2". So, a good twin/double size. However, as this is a wedding quilt and thus, should probably be big enough for two people to get under at once, I had to enlarge it.
So off to boarder town we go!

IF YOU ARE GOING TO DO BOARDERS LIKE MINE DO NOT CUT OUT THE BINDING STRIPS CALLED FOR IN THE CUTTING GUIDE!! You will be using that binding fabric for the first boarder.

Completed top est size of 98"x 98"

So I ended up having 32" of the binding fabric left, I figure out that the largest boarder I could get out of it was 4" cut strips, so the finished boarder would be 3 1/2".
I looked at what a basic Queen sized quilt was and figured if I added another 8" boarder that would get me in the ballpark while not getting to big and being a decent size to quilt in. Although I only needed 2 1/8 yards to get the 8" boarder, I went ahead and got 2 1/2 so that I could use the extra on pillowcases once I get to that point. It's all coordinating crafts on deck to win the wedding present game my friends.

I use this boarders calculator all the time, as well as their backing, and binding calculators.

I got the 8" boarder fabric from Joanne's, and although I like the pattern, I'm not thrilled about the weave, but oh well. If you get the fabric from the kit you will find that they are all warm grays which makes finding matching fabric a little tricky.

All in all, I really liked this pattern and kit. I'm not sure how I am going to quilt it, I like the way they did it in the pattern picture with concentric circles, but I'm not quite sure how I can pull that off with my tiny home machine. I think I will deferentially look into more of Shifrin's patterns in the future, and will hopefully be able to do this one again in a different colorways.

Review: Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches' Guide to Romance Novels

Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches' Guide to Romance Novels by Sarah Wendell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As a relatively new reader of the genre I found this book helpful in giving me some background on the community (for good or for ill) as well as some starting points for authors to look into.

It was interesting to read the take on the history, although for a more in depth look I highly suggest going on a dive into the posts of Kelly Faircloth who has done some excellently researched work on the subject (https://pictorial.jezebel.com/how-har...).

The main problem that I found with this book was how dated most of it was. Published in 2009, nine years later there has been a lot of change in the genre and I found myself skimming a lot of things that are either common knowledge that I felt the authors spent too much time on, or things that no longer really apply. On the other hand, it is a really easy book to skim or pick up and put down as the mood strikes you. There are all sorts of different approaches the authors take to get their points across, games, cartoons, and a choose your own adventure section where in some cases some of the stories end in surprisingly bleak ways.

If you like the website Smart Bitches you'll probably not have an issue with the snarky tone, although it can get a little wearing in some places. However, the book does a good overview of the genre and jumping off points even if most of the information is presented with tongue firmly in (someone's) cheek. If you are trying your hand at writing in the genre you can use this book as a way to see some of the over-used tropes, etc. to be aware of, but beyond that and giving you other authors to look into, that's about it.

It would be interesting to have an updated version that addressed the increase in the LBGTQ stories and the like, but looking at current posts on the internet might be the way to go for that.

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Review: Bollywood and the Beast

Bollywood and the Beast by Suleikha Snyder
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I don't know any think about Bollywood outside of a few clips I've watched, but I have liked what I've seen. On the flip side, I am specious of retellings of fairy tales as there are so many, and so many that have gone horribly wrong. Add to that, Beauty and the Beast has to be one of my least liked stories for many reasons.

All that said, I really liked this book.
It owns the Beauty and Beast connection upfront, the characters referencing it with derision on the part of the 'beauty' Rakhee “Rocky” Varma, an American who is trying to make her way in the Bollywood movie business. The character's outsider status was really nice as it helps introduce concepts, language, and references to those of us who have no knowledge of any of it without it feeling like an info dump.

The one issue I have with the story is the 'insta lust' between Rocky and the 'beast' Taj Ali Khan. Khan was disfigured in an accident and has spent the last ten or so years never leaving his family's mansion. He was a great heroic/romantic actor before the accident, and has continued to be the most dramatic, scene eating alpha into his chosen isolation.
Rocky stands up to him, but the first time they kiss I found myself desperately wishing that she had just cold-cocked him right in the nose. Lady, there is no reason to put up with that crap!

The secondary plot of Khan's younger brother will tear your heart out and stomp on it, and then you will want to stop on Khan a bit for being such an ass to the poor guy. As this book is part of a series I am hoping that one of the other books covers the younger Khan's story and that he gets all the happy ever, a pile of kittens, and the world's most comfortable chair to enjoy them in.

The writing and descriptions are really nice, I have a little issue with the time frame of the romance, but then I don't get the insta love thing or the putting up with alpha-holes. But the book is a fast fun read, you want to hang out with Rocky and her family. I would love a prequel or sequel about her parents as we got to see some of how badass her mom is and I would love to see her parents interact.

The ending was a little shoehorned in and felt too quick even though we all know what's going to happen. However, a pretty good/fast introduction to a series.

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Review: Hell & High Water

Hell & High Water by Charlie Cochet
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I picked this up on a recommendation and then promptly forgot about it until I went back through my ereader to get a sense of my TBR pile (spoiler: I cried both happy and terrified tears at the size of said pile) so by the time I started reading this had had totally forgotten what it was about.

Thus I was highly irritated through the first couple of chapters when they kept talking about how due to military shenanigans some people's genes had awoken/mutated creating an off-shoot of homo sapiens, what the author refers to as 'Therins' I'm not going to bother looking up if I spelled it right as the author didn't think it was necessary to tell me until about 20% in that it was just a fancy word of 'Shiftier.' Yep this book is about a special government unit staffed by shiftiers, character archetypes, and oddly, their extended family. They also apparently have a crazy amount of funding and extra special computer programs.

There is a hell of a lot of world building in the first 30-40% which gets in the way of getting to know the main character Dex, meaning that the feel and pacing of the first half of this work is very uneven and Cochet might as well have just introduced half the side characters with 'and this guy will be having his own book in the series so hope you enjoy his unnecessarily grumpy/nerdy/co-dependent ass.'

Okay, fine, I was willing to let most of this go (lord just say 'shiftier!) because Dex is an interesting character put into a difficult spot as he turned his human police partner in for killing a shiftier and everyone he works with seems to have taken this as a personal insult and takes every opportunity to beat the crap out of him. I liked beginning of the book Dex, what I could see through the world building that is. However, once he is transferred to the THIRDS (fancy well-funded shiftier and friends science SWAT team) he turns into the world's biggest joker. I get it, you like singing music from the 1980s, you have no problem with making dick jokes with your co-workers, being a car owner is something you enjoy.

But this gets me to the part that really bugged the hell out of me, apparently CSI: Shiftier must have the world's worst HR department. I don't know if I've become really sensitive to workplace harassment and power imbalance, but I spent most of the middle of the book think 'where the hell is their supervisor? Every interaction Dex has with one member of the team (the team he is supposed to trust enough to have his back in life and death situations mind you) is a series of sexual jokes and intimidation on the other guy's part. And no one in the team seems to think this is a big deal? Then the first time Dex gets...together I guess? with the romantic lead there were some consent issues that had me giving the whole thing a pointed side-eye. Dex is into it, but honestly I spent most of the book thinking 'leave, you can do better and this is just a lawsuit or something worse waiting to happen.'

The plot is all about trying to solve killings by a shiftier that you as the reader will figure out pretty quickly and then spend the rest of the book wondering why none of the characters do. The reason to why the killings happen...ugh, a bit of a weak cop-out to me.

Anyway, the next books might be an improvement as (in theory) you wouldn't have to get through as much world building. I found the ending to this one irritating as Dex, I know you are irritating and if you were my friend I could only hang out with you once a month as you are literary and introvert's nightmare, but you can do better! The sexytimes are pretty graphic so if that isn't your jam you can probably skip those pages. I had problems with them as each time the characters did the 'oh we shouldn't!' and then did anyway. I need to have at least one conversation where they discuss it as I'm not a fan of the 'I love you so much our sexual relationship will be dictated totally by your needs' trope. Blah.

As it is, I doubt I will be picking up the next book.

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