The Reading Year in Review – 2011

Time for the annual rundown of last year’s books! The grand total ended up being 122 (though I suspect that’s actually 123, as I found a book I know I read but didn’t record, and I can’t remember at all what month I read it in. Oh well.) This is down from last year’s number, but I was doing a lot more temari this year, so I don’t consider this a failure.

• 26 were books I bought
• 11 were borrowed/gifts
• 5 were read as free ebooks online
• 81 were from the library
• 0 were rereads

Genre breakdown:

• 87 were SFF
• 33 were mysteries
• 1 was nonfiction
• 1 was a graphic novel

New (to me) series/authors:

• Laurie R. King’s Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series. I started this one on a friend’s recommendation in January, and by September I had read all the books in the series currently in existence (12). So good! I love them. I was actually surprised to see I’d only started these in January, because it feels like I must have been reading them for a lot longer, so much space have they come to take up in my mind now. The short version, for those that haven’t read any of them, is that the main character of these books, Mary Russell, meets the now-retired Sherlock Holmes as a teenager. She becomes his apprentice, and later his partner. They made me come to love the Holmes-ian universe all the more.
• The Bordertown books. How did I not know about these before? Classic early urban fantasy, from back when urban fantasy was more about artistic creative types who saw magic existing in the real world, rather than mostly about solving mysteries (which I also love, don’t get me wrong.) I wrote about this more here. I remain frustrated that I haven’t yet been able to get copies of the earlier anthologies, now out-of-print.
• Alex Bledsoe. I started out by reading The Sword-Edged Blonde, which is a brilliant combination of hardboiled mystery in a classic fantasy setting. (The other two books in that series are good, too, but the first one is so far the best, in part because the other two involve a lot of flashbacks to flesh out the main character’s background, and thus the linearity of the story can be hard to remember.) But then he wrote a book in an entirely different setting, The Hum & the Shiver, and I think I love it even more. It is, in the author’s words, “gravel road fantasy” (as opposed to urban), taking place in the mountains of Eastern Tennessee. Bledsoe cites Charles de Lint as one of his influences, and you can see it in the importance music plays in the magic the characters use. There’s some question as to whether this was going to be a one-off novel, but I really hope it’s not. There’s still a lot more I want to know about the main character and all the people of the town in general.
• Jo Walton. I read her newest book first, the stand-alone novel Among Others, and it was just wonderful. I especially loved how the main character explored her thoughts about growing up through her discussions of the science fiction and fantasy books she was reading, because it made her seem so real and so much like an actual friend. But then I decided that since I loved that book so much, as well as all of Walton’s book reviews on Tor.com, I should read her other stuff, too, so I’m now 2/3 through her Farthing trilogy. It’s less fantasy, in that it doesn’t have any magical elements, but definitely alternative reality, as it is set in a post-war England where WW2 ended in 1941 with a truce and Hitler was allowed to take over all of continental Europe except Russia, essentially. Each book features the same police detective being asked to solve a case that turns out to be very politically involved with the growing fascist movement in England. I can’t wait to get the third one.
• Kate Griffin’s Matthew Swift series. These books feature the most detailed and unique approach to the magic of urban fantasy I’ve yet seen. Matthew Swift is a sorcerer whose magic is absolutely tied to being in a urban setting and truly knowing his city. He knows London like it’s a living being, and he interacts with and manipulates it masterfully. Of course, it would be nice if people would stop trying to kill him all the time… I haven’t yet read the third one of these, but I really need to. So many books, so little time! (Oooh, yay, her blog notes that there are going to be at least 5 books in this series, if not more, so things to look forward to!)
• Richard Morgan. I technically started reading his stuff in 2010, but I think I didn’t really appreciate him truly until 2011, so there you go. His books are a lot harder edged, and the writing is what I can only think of as supremely male (and I don’t normally find myself thinking about the gender of the author at all,) but neither of those things are bad. For some reason, his stand-alone novel, Thirteen, (or Black Man, as it was originally known in the UK) is standing out to me as one of the most interesting things I read this year.

And I’m going to stop there, because I read so much new stuff this year, I’m never going to really be able to summarize it all. It’s really strange to notice that I didn’t reread a single book this year. I remember back when I was a teenager sometimes worrying that I would eventually run out of books that I was interested in reading, because I only loved these X authors, but seriously, there’s so much new stuff coming out all the time, and so much stuff I am still discovering, that I don’t have that worry anymore.

In future reading news, I got a Kindle for Christmas. Now I have the difficult decision of how to split up my reading selections. What do I read on the Kindle vs. real book? Library books would be an obvious choice, but currently my library’s ebook selection is… limited. So far, I’ve been buying things for the Kindle that are only available in electronic format, like novellas that authors put out between books, or short story collections, etc. Oh, the hardship!

O Christmas Tree

Over the course of the week, I have finally succeeded in getting our Christmas tree up! Last Saturday, it got bought and brought home and put in the stand. I stalled on putting the lights on because Mark has a very specific way he likes them done, and I was hoping he would be inspired to do it himself, but this turned out to be a pretty busy week, so I ended up doing it on Thursday.

Mark’s way, for those who are curious and don’t already know, involves wrapping each individual branch of the tree in lights from the trunk out to the tip and back. This always takes forever, as you might imagine, but this year it was a particular challenge because our tree has some very… interesting branching patterns. The sub-branches appear to go in completely random directions, leading to sort of a twisty tree, rather than a classic orderly one. There was one sub-branch that actually grew backwards over its main branch, back past the trunk, and then out the other side of the tree. Needless to say, I didn’t actually wrap every single branch, but I must have done pretty well anyway, because I used up every strand of lights we owned.

Just the lights

By the time I was done with the lights, though, I couldn’t face doing anything else to the tree because I was already so tired. But it was a good thing I procrastinated the ornaments, because the next day I met my mom for some final shopping, and she had my childhood ornaments in boxes for me in the car!

Now with ornaments!

Our family has so many ornaments now, they won’t all fit on my parents’ tree, and they get a really big one. Surely having all my ornaments out of the set helps solve some of this problem! One of the reasons we had so many ornaments was because my dad’s sister, my aunt Janice, made every person in the family a new ornament every year. She was a brilliant needleworker, and loved needlepoint especially, so we got some truly gorgeous ornaments from her. Here are a few:

Two Santas

The Christmas Koala

Who doesn’t love a holiday marsupial?

Unicorn and violin

The violin is from the time when I played the cello, and I suspect it was one of the closest patterns she had to looking like a cello. I’m not actually sure who gave me the unicorn, but I love it.

Mailbox ornament

The mailbox ornament isn’t the most sophisticated example of needlepoint, but I actually remember helping her put these together! Given that I was 4 at the time, I’m not sure how much help I really was, but I have very few clear memories that I know are from that age, so I think that’s pretty cool. I’m not sure if you can see, but they have little tiny packages inside them, too. And a little fake pearl for the handle to open the mailbox door, which will really open and close.

Dana House ornament and Santa stocking

The metal ornament there in the center isn’t a Janice ornament, I grant you, (though the Santa stocking on the left is,) but my brother and I also got a number of ornaments from my mom’s friend’s kids in Chicago (really, it was the moms sending things back and forth for each other’s kids, but the cards always said they were from the kids themselves.) Their family lives in Oak Park, so one year, or possibly two years, we got ornaments from the Frank Lloyd Wright museum. This one was deemed mine automatically, because it’s a design from the Dana House.

I’m so happy to have all my ornaments! Now the tree feels like a real Christmas tree.

Shibori Show

Over the weekend, I went to the NC Japan Center to see their winter art exhibition, “Hard and Soft,” featuring shibori fabric art by Susan Fennell and pottery by Takuro and Hitomi Shibata. Everything was beautiful, and the artists gave talks about their journeys as artists and what had inspired their work. I was there especially to see Susan’s work. For this exhibit, she concentrated on her work with indigo, although she does also work with other colors and dyes (as you may remember from the fabric she made for me for the craft fair.) Unlike the previous exhibition I went to in the fall, when they were displaying Barb Suess’s temari, I remembered to take pictures this time! (See Barb’s own blog for pictures of her amazing temari displays.)

Shibori banners on the porch

Shibori banners on the porch, other side

Shibori hangings in the front hallway

My favorite set of hangings in the upstairs room

The eclipse was the same weekend. Coincidence?

A little bit of red, and some of the smaller pieces of pottery below.

Temari: Jyouge Douji and Wrapped Bands Study

For the last requirement for the JTA Level 1 certification, we needed to show an example of jyouge douji kagari, often translated into English as the “merry-go-round” stitch because of a particular pattern that introduced the stitch to many people in the English-speaking temari community. This stitch is defined by going from one side of a simple division ball to the other, crossing over the equator. This definition is a little hazy, because there’s no real rule about how far on either side the stitch has to cross, etc., but the safest bet is that they mean a symmetrical path on both sides of the equator, with the stitches at all the points being identical. This is really what makes it different from just being really big kiku herringbone stitches, because those have the stacked triangle shape at the inside points and nice sharp points at the outsides. For jyouge douji stitches, you want to do either the stacked triangles at both ends, or the sharp points. I usually choose sharp points. (More than half my readers at this point have no idea what I’m talking about, so here’s a picture! I’m talking about those big green zigzags.)

Blue Morning Glory, obi view

One interesting thing all this “up and down, but with the same style of stitching on each end” action makes happen is that all the threads have to cross over each other as they go over the equator line, hence those big green gathers in the middle there. If you don’t add something there to hold all those built-up threads in place, they’ll eventually get sort of knocked over, and disorganize your nice, clean zigzags.

As it turns out, though, the zigzags weren’t the thing I found the most interesting about this pattern, which is Barb’s Morning Glory. Our local group got to help test the pattern back when she was first developing it for classes. As you can see, the main part of the pattern before the jyouge doujistuff is wrapped bands along all the S8 dividing lines. (Let’s look at another picture that shows that a bit more clearly.)

Morning Glory group

(Those bands really are wrapped on all the dividing lines. The metallic lines you see going through the middle of the open diamonds around the middle are added as decoration at the end. I just realized that’s slightly confusing.)

Anyway, while we were testing the pattern, we realized that the way the instructions were written for the order to wrap the bands in was different than what the picture showed. Both are perfectly valid way to wrap bands, of course, there are no real rules about that, but they created rather different looks. The picture showed the way the blue ball is done, with all the white parts wrapped first, and then the blue parts done later, to create a stacked square around the pole. (There’s a clear picture of this below.) The way the instructions read indicated that each band should be wrapped fully, both white part and colored part, so there’s one solid stripe passing over the top of whatever band got wrapped last. (This is how the purple one is done below.)

Morning Glory group, pole view

And then because I was so interested in how those different pole designs were coming out with different ways of wrapping, I did the orange one just to see what would happen if I wrapped each and every row of thread for the bands individually and in order, so they interlock and stack all the way out. (Like the blue one, but more complicated, basically. You can blow that picture way up by clicking on it and look in more detail.) Conclusion: It looks really neat, but it encourages the threads to spread out too much, so I had to constantly be pushing them back into place to maintain the nice outline of the pole center and keep the outer edges of the bands actually with their bands. The purple one, on the other hand, looks too blah. So the blue pattern, the way Barb originally did the ball, is the best combination of looks and stability.

And I got a lot of practice with wrapped bands and jyouge douji kagari while discovering that. (Plus this interesting set of balls.)

Temari: Fire Flower

As I mentioned yesterday, one of the other Level 1 JTA requirements was an S12 ball done with in uwagake chidori kagari, or the kiku herringbone stitch, which is my favorite. Weirdly, though I had lots of other markings with that stitch, (see Purple Passion (second ball in that post), Blue Mum, and even Peacock,) I didn’t have any on a 12, so I whipped up this one.

Fire Flower

This one owes a lot to Purple Passion, probably obviously, but it’s a more traditionally done version. The background is again a variegated thread, but it’s more subtle than the purple one I used for the other ball, so I’m not sure it shows up well here. The leaves are longer than the petals still, but don’t cross the equator line. Both the leaves and the petals shade from light to dark, and the petals got a further outline in the gold metallic thread used to mark the divisions. This ball also got an obi around the equator.

Fire Flower, three-quarters view

The obi is fine, but I never feel like I’m doing anything very special on these. One nice thing about this one was I felt like I got the wrapped band ends to blend into the whole better than usual, so that’s something. I probably need to actually spend some time experimenting with wrapped bands designs and more interesting obis, but there’s always something else more complicated to stitch!

Fire Flower, obi view

This last picture I took just to illustrate one of the ways I amuse myself when designing/stitching balls, in that I offset the designs on each side. I’m sure some people would prefer a perfectly symmetrical ball, identical on both sides, but I’ve always preferred this. Of course, once you start crossing the equator, it becomes necessary if you don’t want overlapping designs.

So there you go, a very bright ball to brighten up this December a bit.

Temari: Squares

I don’t think I ever actually explained why I suddenly had a temari explosion here, (aside from it just being fun to do.) The Japan Temari Association (JTA) offers levels of certification for temari stitchers. Yes, really! A few years ago, my teacher started offering online classes to shepherd non-Japanese speakers through the process in connection with her temari friend Ai in Japan. This is particularly important because for every level above Level 1, you have to submit not only pictures and/or actual temari, but also written pattern instructions in Japanese. Ai has been kindly and valiantly doing these translations for several years, and has now sponsored so many foreigners for JTA certification, they’ve tapped her to head up a chapter specifically for foreigners.

Anyway, I knew about this certification thing last year, but didn’t do anything about it. This year, though, I decided to go ahead and do it. You can apply for Level 1 and Level 2 certification at the same time, so I’m attempting to do both. Today I’m focusing on the requirements for Level 1, which are (from Barb’s site linked above):

Level 1 (Honka or Introductory) – Submit one photo of superior quality for each. Good execution of stitching is the important thing about this level. You can apply for this level after one year of temari study. You can apply for levels 1 and 2 at the same time.
1. Simple 4-division temari, stitched in masu kagari (squares)
2. Simple 6-division temari, stitched in mitsubane-kikkou kagari (tri-wing or trefoil)
3. Simple 8-division temari, stitched in jyouge douji kagari (merry-go-round)
4. Simple 12-division temari stitched in uwagake chidori kagari (kiku herringbone).

As it turns out, I already had several of these done. The tri-wing I’ve already posted about. The merry-go-round one I have a future post about, and kiku herringbone I do all the time, although I turned out not to have an S12 after all. The main one I hadn’t done was the squares.

The interesting thing about an S4 division, as noted by Debi at Temari Train, is that it’s really also a combination division, as the poles and the equator intersections are indistinguishable once the ball is full marked. Every intersection has the same number of lines. The squares pattern really emphasizes this, because you do the same design on every intersection all around the ball until they touch.

Behold! A square.

Now that I’ve satisfied my self-obligation to be positive about why this design is intellectually interesting and worthy of being a JTA requirement, I feel I can also say this pattern is really BORING. Endless, endless squares. On and on, around and around, the stitch is exactly the same at all the corners… I grant you, I did run my needle under the beginning stitch of each round when I came back to it at the end so you can’t tell which corner was the starting point, but that was only interesting for about 3 rows of the first square.

More squares.

I did my best. I tried to make the colors interesting, so maybe I can use it as a background ball for a complementary set or something eventually. Mostly, though, I’m just glad this one is done.

Wrapping Paper

I haven’t been able to get a Christmas tree yet, so I’ve been having to find other ways to get more Christmas in my life. This afternoon’s project: hand-decorated wrapping paper made from a recycled paper bag and some Sharpies.

Wrapping paper

The three designs (though I hope you can tell this just from looking) are jingle bells, holly, and pine cones on branches. I think I like the pine cones best. (Click the pictures for much bigger versions.)

Pine cones!

If I can figure out what I did with the stamps I bought last year, I’ll do another one with snowflakes, because I have some really pretty pearly white ink to go with that stamp. I’m hoping they’re packed away in the box with the tree decorations, so I’ll hopefully find them this weekend.

Temari: Daisies

I started this temari at home one night when we had guests staying with us who were curious how temari were made. I had had the variegated green base wrapped for a while, and I think I had some vague plans for what I wanted to do because I remember looking for thread and not finding what I wanted in the store. This turned into one of my favorite temari. My grandmother actually bought it at the craft fair three years ago, the first time I tried to sell temari there, and she was the only person to buy one, which I remember thinking was silly because I had intended to give it to her for Christmas if it didn’t sell. When she died earlier this year, it came back to me.

This ball is done on a “complex 8″ (C8) division. Every C8 has 6 main square faces, so I intended to do two flowers of each of three colors. I had white and a fairly pale yellow, but I wanted another color in between. Sadly, when I went to the store, I couldn’t find anything. (It was just Michael’s, I grant you, because the nearest good thread store at the time was 30 minutes away, and now I regret not going because it closed earlier this year.) So, time to improvise! I decided for the third “color” I would do alternating rows of the other two colors. From a distance it does look like a paler yellow, and up close it adds some extra interest.

The only thing that might be changed about this one if/when I do a variation of it in the future is that the green I used for the triwing “leaves” blends in more than I originally intended. On the other hand, it doesn’t look bad by any means, and it does let the flowers stand on their own very nicely.

Daisies: three flower view

Daisies: striped flower view

I definitely think this ball needs some complimentary friends. I have another variegated green base that is almost all the way marked for a C8, except I ran out of the right marking thread on the very last row that needed to be wrapped. Finding more of the same type has been kind of a pain since all the thread stores went out of business, but that’s my project for this weekend.

Pupdate Pictures

It has been brought to my attention that this blog has been sadly short on dog pictures since way back when Willow was still a little puppy. He is now as tall as Ivy, but broader and 10 lbs heavier thanks to his pit bull heritage, so it’s probably about time to correct the impression that he is still the “little dog.”

First, a picture of him in between being tiny and big, when he was first discovering his love of tennis balls.

Ball!

And now a picture of Ivy and Willow standing up next to each other so you can see how big they are now.

Same size = good for wrestling

Perhaps not Ivy’s best side, but Willow is much more interested in flashing lights than she is.

Hey look, a camera!

Why does it keep making lights?

They really do get along very well with each other. Here they are curled up together in Willow’s favorite sunspot in the yard.

Nap time

Other favorite sibling activities include insane wrestling in the living room (and on the deck, where they sound like a herd of pygmy elephants) and howling at sirens.

And just so Ivy doesn’t feel like this post is all about Willow, here’s another shot of her looking photogenic by herself.

Deceptively calm

Temari: Peacock

Like Blue Mum, this one is a temari I did a while ago but never posted about. It started as a color play experiment, and I wasn’t really sure about the combination of colors at all until the last row got added. Right up until that last row of darker purple went on, it looked far too much like an Easter egg for my tastes, and then suddenly it didn’t anymore.

Peacock, 3/4 view

This is another ball where I decided to have the stitches cross over the equator line rather than deal with adding an obi, but in this one, the crossover becomes the focal point of the design since the crossing stitches from each half also cross each other and form interwoven diamonds.

Peacock, side view

It did originally have guidelines, (obviously,) but somehow even though all the stitches ended up on the ball evenly around the poles, the poles themselves (where all the guidelines cross, for non-stitchers) had gotten a little wonky, so I pulled them off after all the stitches were on. I ended up liking that effect more than I would have liked the guidelines even if they had been straight. Given that I ended up deciding to call it “Peacock,” the eye effect seems fitting.

Peacock, pole view

Overall, another experimental ball that fortunately turned out well.