I am not very bold

“What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you’ve read, Underline the ones you read for school, Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.” [via]

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion [listened to audio book]
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma [this is on my PDA and I read it at odd times when I'm stuck somewhere without anything else to do]
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian: a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible: a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Miserables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes: a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake: a novel
Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down [read this in the evenings to Fiona before she was born]
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood: a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Embroidery

Fiona did some sweet drawings of our family earlier in the week and I decided to use them to try an embroidery project. I dug out the light box and the latest issue of Craft (with Dolin O’Shea’s article, Embroidery 101) and a scrap of linen fabric. I found my embroidery floss and hoops plus the fabric pencil from the sewing kit I bought at my sewing class and, without any final product in mind, started tracing the drawings onto the linen.

It’s coming along pretty well and the jewel colored floss is happy making. Unfortunately, the pencil marks are rubbing off and already too faded to work with. I will try to pick a fabric marker this weekend, retrace the drawing and try again.

Yesterday, I the mail carrier brought me Lotta Jansdotter’s Simple Sewing and I have been poring over it. I definitely want to make the backpack for the bee. We looked at the pictures together and she was all for it. Of course, she requires it be pink.

I also want to make the bed pocket for our king sized bed. The bed is crammed into a little room and there’s just no space for side tables. I wonder if I can incorporate the embroidery onto the bed pocket as a patch.

Stitching pictures

We picked up the latest issue of Craft magazine over the weekend and it has a nice article about getting started doing embroidery. I have been wanting to get started on something but so far I can’t imagine what to embroider. I need to know what something will be used for and I have a mistrust of decorative objects that don’t have a purpose. I think my first sewing project will be a little adventure bag for my daughter but I don’t have a working sewing machine yet. Maybe I can embroider a patch that I can incorporate into the bag. I need to think about this. I don’t know why I’m having trouble starting, there are so many things to embroider: sewing cases, dishtowels, a child’s drawing (and here).

I love the Clover embroidery patterns at Superbuzzy though my limited research pointed out that the Clover embroidery tool might make stitches that are a little too delicate and need to be glued on the back. I’m sure I can use the patterns for conventional embroidery, though. There are more fun patterns at Sublime Stitching; they even have gnomes and forest animals. Primrose design has vintage patterns in her store and a whole series of tutorial posts on her weblog she calls Stitch School.

One thing I would love to use as a pattern is a sketch I did a few years ago as a plan for my vegetable garden beds. I have a scrap of linen fabric (just under a yard) I bought at JoAnne’s for half-price, I have hoops, I have floss. I have ideas, too.