I hope you all had a great weekend. It was a busy one for me but I was able to do a few things that brought me a lot of joy and made me feel like life was almost normal. In March I had signed up for a class at the Austin Book Arts Center but then things started to get cancelled due to the pandemic. Well, they finally were able to host a virtual over zoom. They mailed out kits and some background info ahead of time and honestly even if I hadn’t received my kit, being that I do bookbinding I have a lot of stuff on hand.

The class was only a few hours but it was a lot of fun. I learned to make book cloth which basically just opens up a whole new way to decorate your book covers. The reason you want to back the cloth before you use it on the book board is so the glue doesn’t seep through and it makes it more sturdy and easier to work with when covering your boards.

I used a fat quarter for my trial run but you can use all kinds of fabrics. The sky is the limit. Granted if you are using silk or a very thin fabric the method we used might not be the best because it required an iron but there are other ways to get around that.

The other exciting part about the weekend is that my husband and I “attended” another Austin Classical Guitar concert and it was a performance by two musicians, Duo Sonidos, a guitarist and violinist. Lovely music by Handel, Manuel de Falla and others. Have I ever mentioned that my husband plays guitar and I used to play the violin? Maybe you’ll see us touring when we’re in retirement. Haha…

How about you, how was your weekend? Let me know if you did something different or what did you do that brought you joy?

I wanted to just share a bit about the current books I’m reading. My reading has been a bit slow going but I’m really enjoying my current reads very much so I don’t mind if it’s taking me a while to get through them.

First is Devotions by Mary Oliver. I purchased a Kindle edition earlier this year when it was at a special price and I think I’ve learned that I need poetry books in physical form. When I read poetry I like to go back and forth between the pages and this is just not working as well for me. Of course when it comes to the poems themselves, what can I say, I have fallen in love with several of them.

My other read is O Pioneers! by Willa Cather. What a wonderful story of struggle, love and family in the Great Plains. I love the main character, Alexandra Bergson, who is intelligent and willing to take risks to get ahead. I’m more than half way through this book and think there’s going to be some heartbreak ahead but I can’t wait to see what happens next.

For Paris in July I decided to read All the Flowers in Paris by Sarah Jio. This is a dual storyline with two characters from different time frames. Celine is living in Paris during the German Occupation and Caroline is living in Paris in current times. The two women’s lives are somehow connected and this will be discovered through some letters. I don’t know why but I thought this was going to be all in epistolary form but it’s not. While I definitely want to know how this is going to be wrapped up, there are some aspects of the story that are bugging me. I’ll have to share more about that once I finish this book.

Finally, I started Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosely. Now this book has a ton of atmosphere and I feel like I’m right there with Easy Rawlins in 1940s Los Angeles. I can hear the music of the clubs he’s visiting and sense the charged-atmosphere of encounters he has with men who may be wearing suits but you know are gangsters and would soon put a bullet in anyone who looked at them in the wrong way. I hope I can finish this one by Tuesday for my book group meeting. So curious to hear what the other readers have to say about this book.

So those are my current reads. I hope you are reading some great books. I’m going to be doing some bookbinding this weekend so I’ll tell you more about that in the next blog post. Let me know what you are up this weekend and hope you have a great one!