Crazy Quilt D Cor

Part memoir and part urban social history, Pieces from Life?s Crazy Quilt is an African American woman?s personal account of her life during a racially turbulent period in a northern American city. Raised in a black neighborhood in urban Detroit, Marvin V. Arnett begins her book with her birth during the Great Depression, and ends with the infamous Detroit race riot of 1943. Arnett?s close observations and attention to the details of her neighborhood and the complex adult relationships around her make this an understated yet powerful story of witness. ø Like the idiosyncratic pieces of a crazy quilt, each chapter functions alone but takes on particular resonance when considered with the whole. Choreographed as one-act plays, each chapter invites the reader into the life of the Sprague family and their neighbors during the years after the Ford Motor Company closed their Detroit plants. Arnett tells the story of her childhood with subversive allusions to the Victorian-era coming-of-age stories she consumed while growing up and the moral lessons she absorbed in such readings but could not reconcile with her own experience.

Let Linda Lum DeBono show you how to turn playful, super-bright fabrics into playtime quilts. You can invent an entire "wardrobe" of dresses and purses, or plant a "garden" of crayon-colored daisies. Stars have never sparkled like this. And these butterflies only exist in childhood dreams. So whether you make these quilts for a child or use them to add a zing of happiness to your own décor, you'll find a world of quilting fun awaiting you in every color of the rainbow.

In the tradition of Kathleen Norris, Terry Tempest Williams, and Thomas Merton, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes explores the impulse that has drawn seekers into the wilderness for centuries and offers eloquent testimony to the healing power of mountain silence and desert indifference. Interweaving a memoir of his mothers long struggle with Alzheimers and cancer, meditations on his own wilderness experience, and illuminating commentary on the Christian via negativa--a mystical tradition that seeks God in the silence beyond language--Lane rejects the easy affirmations of pop spirituality for the harsher but more profound truths that wilderness can teach us. There is an unaccountable solace that fierce landscapes offer to the soul. They heal, as well as mirror, the brokeness we find within. It is this apparent paradox that lies at the heart of this remarkable book: that inhuman landscapes should be the source of spiritual comfort. Lane shows that the very indifference of the wilderness can release us from the demands of the endlessly anxious ego, teach us to ignore the inessential in our own lives, and enable us to transcend the false self that is ever-obsessed with managing impressions. Drawing upon the wisdom of St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhardt, Simone Weil, Edward Abbey, and many other Christian and non-Christian writers, Lane also demonstrates how those of us cut off from the wilderness might make some desert in our lives. Written with vivid intelligence, narrative ease, and a gracefulness that is itself a comfort, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes gives us not only a description but a performance of an ancient and increasingly relevant spiritual tradition.

In Utility-Style Quilts for Everyday Living, renowned fabric and quilt designer Sharon Holland provides 12 well-illustrated projects for simple yet beautiful quilts, ranging from table runners to a queen-sized quilt. Each fast-pieced, stash-busting project is great for beginners, with skill-building design tips and suggestions throughout.

DIVThere are more than 20 million quilters in the United States, and 78 percent of dedicated quilters read for pleasure. To reach this vast group, we've expanded our line of quilting books by bringing back "A Patchwork of Pieces, previously published in 1993. "Love of Quilts features twenty-eight entertaining short stories about quilts and quilters collected from the pages of classic magazines such as "Godey's Lady's Book, Harper's Bazaar, and "Good Housekeeping, introducing readers to the captivating worlds of quilters in other times and places. From courtings that nearly go astray to husbands and wives brought together by quilts to quilters obsessed with securing scraps, "Love of Quilts has something for every quilter. Fascinating fiction, these stories also provide important social history. This book also includes a bibliography of quilt fiction and a time line that lists American quilt fiction, plays, poems, and patterns published from 1845 to 1940./div