Vintage Sewing

Last weekend, I finally finished the two baby quilts that have lingered in my sewing "to-do" stack for over two years. As a reward, I splurged this week and made an ensemble for my Midge doll. For more pictures of Midge, her history, and her escapades in the last year, you can look at my prior posts. I am fortunate to have two vintage Barbie clothing patterns from my childhood, and I used one of them for the dress I made for Midge. Once the dress was complete, it was obvious that some type of accessory was needed, so I designed a little box-bottom tote out of the dress fabric. Midge seems very pleased.

I used the pattern for View A, but I did not make the detachable collar which is shown in this view. (A Barbie-sized detachable collar??? Unbelievable.) The bag was so much fun to make, that I immediatey made a second one for my friend LoLo's Barbie.

National Short Story Month

May is National Short Story month. I didn't realize this until today, but fortunately I happened to bring home two short story collections from the library yesterday. My unwitting salute to NSS month began last night, when I read one story each from the following books.

A friend recently told me how much he has enjoyed reading Yoko Ogawa's The Housekeeper and the Professor. In reading about Ms. Ogawa, I was impressed that she has won "every major Japanese literary award." The Diving Pool is a collection of three novellas. The first story, also entitled The Diving Pool, is a coming of age tale narrated by an unnamed adolescent girl, as she experiences the curiosity, angst, and ultimate devastation of a youthful crush.

Press 53 just announced the release of Pinckney Benedict's latest collection of short stories, Miracle Boy and Other Stories. Having never read anything by Benedict either, I checked out Town Smokes, his first short story collection published in 1986 when he was 23. Benedict sets his stories in the bleak, often brutally hard-scrabble rural south. Sutton Pie Safe is the first selection in the book, and contains iconic southern-lit components: a snake, a gun, a beautiful woman, an angry father and his son.