End of June

The last day of June finds me in a happy place 😄 tallying-up fabric use through the month. 

Though I made a fabric purchase - a total of four yards of Painter's Palette: Aruba, Oyster, and French Blue - on sale from Heather Black at Quiltachusetts....

...I still used-up more fabric than I took in! Yay! I used 8.93 yards, for a net of 4.93 yards OUT of my stash.

Fabric used went into:

• Like Totally BOM blocks
• 10 selvedge blocks for the Bibliography quilt (I do not count selvedges as yardage out)
• a 3.2 pound bag of snippets for pet beds
• and 50 blocks for my 100-day Quilt Your Life project 

Whoo-ee! Yes! I made 50 five-inch blocks this month that represent ten different activities in which I regularly engage. They're related to faith, friendship, fitness, and fun.

It seems that this month I was most engaged in line dancing - 9 times. Those are blocks with black and white striped fabric. Line dancing is not only good exercise, but learning different dance patterns is great mind exercise. I've been on a search for more challenging line dances (closer to level 4 dancing, out of 5), so I've been visiting different instructors' classes. 

Book Recommendation

It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover tells Lily's story beginning with the death of her father, a man who physically abused Lily's mother. Growing up in this situation, always aware of her parent's fights, Lily finds friendship and understanding from an unlikely source: a young man living in an abandoned house behind Lily's home. 

Now Lily has met Ryle, a man who claims to be a "one night stand" guy with no intentions of marrying or having children. As they slowly fall hard for each other, Lily comes to know a side of Ryle that's difficult to accept. Faced with impossible choices, compounded by an unexpected situation, consequent decisions will not be easy to live with. 

Initially I thought this would be a "girl meets boy and falls in love story," but it's more than that. Some moments between Lily and Ryle are flat-out pornographic, but that part of the narrative is understandable in light of the point of the author's story - abuse of a woman by a man, and how difficult it is to get out of such a relationship. 

Linda's score: 4.0/5.0

It Ends With Us gives me a total of eight books listened-to in June. Those are reflected in the "book blocks," lower right, of my Quilt Your Life photo. 

Here's my June book recap, in score order:

1. The Women, Kristin Hannah, 4.8
2. Someone Else's Shoes, JoJo Moyes, 4.5
3. The Cutting Season, Attica Locke, 4.3
4. This Time Tomorrow, Emma Straub, 4.2
5. It Ends With Us, Colleen Hoover, 4.0
6. Twist of Fate, D.L. Mark, 3.7
7. The Last List of Mabel Beaumont, Laura Pearson, 3.0
8. The Holy Spirit, John Bevere, (no score)

Half way through 2024, my Book Bracket looks like this. Obviously, The Women is my runaway favorite!

June also means we've now lived in Florida for 12 years! It's incredible to think we've been away from Iowa, and living in this "new" house for so long. Time really does fly. Linda