Oh, and the new azaleas in my front yard are blooming.
And because my wreaths are looking forward to Easter!
What says Easter more than plastic Easter eggs and neon pink plastic grass?
How about a folded bunny?
This bunny is destined for the Eggstravaganza Craft Show at Klein United Methodist Church on April 9. Starting today I'm going to count down the days with pics of what you'll be able to see at my booth.
The bunny book is folded from an RDCB with a cherry pink and taupe diamond pattern and coordinating pastel watercolor-y endpapers.
Wouldn't it look great sitting on your bookshelf to remind you that Spring is here?
Much better than looking for snakes in the driveway. Trust me.
I have an addiction to RDCBs, but I've told you that already. I even told you about how I ran out of room in the attic and started keeping RDCBs out in the garage. But the other day my OCD kicked in and I started stacking all the books with the same designs together.
See!
Look how pretty they are standing like colorful tin soldiers all at attention!
Anyway, it occured to me that if you've never paid attention to RDCBs, you probably don't realize all the fabulous covers they have.
For instance, there's this beauty...
Or what about this one?
There are so many cool covers, that I decided to make a Pinterest board called Fabulous Book Covers just so you could see.
Well, really I made it because of the OCD thing I was talking about above, but seriously, check it out! I was surprised to find that I already have 24 different designs pictured. But I know there are more designs than that.
Like in all those boxes on the couch waiting to be emptied...
Oh, and that box over there.
I'll get to them sooner or later and keep updating my board, but in the meantime, if you see a cover you like and you want a word folded fabulously into it, let me know at my Etsy shop.
My shelves will thank you.
And so will my couch.
And that box over there on the blue and purple rug.
My very famous brother turned a very significant age recently, so I want to to commemorate it with a special gift.
It is now part of family lore that my parents were so quick to pick up on his innumerable talents as a youngster that they put up a storage shed in the backyard of our childhood home for him to use as his personal playhouse. I'm talking playhouse...as in he put on plays in our backyard. Everything from Charlie Brown to magic shows to Shakespeare.
You should have seen him at age 8 give Macbeth's "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" soliloquy, complete with burning candle, where he finished the speech and blew out the candle all in one terrifying "signifying naaah-thing" breath.
From there it was on to Disneyworld and Broadway (Ever seen Cats in NYC? Or Tommy? Then you've probably seen my very famous brother.) and now he's producing star-studded events like this one..
So like I said, I wanted to make him something special.
The first thing I did was to find a special book.
How about the 1964 Book of the Year for the 1964 man of the year?
Next I had to decide on a word, and no word seemed to sum up my very famous brother more than
I wanted to leave room for a little sumpin'-sumpin' on the end papers, so I twisted the word like I did for Twas which gave me extra space in the corners.
One thing that is different about this book than most of the books I fold is the colored pages. Usually I tear out any colored pages so all the pages look uniform, but this book was full of colored pages. See?
If I tore out all those, there wouldn't be enough pages to fold any word. So, instead of trying to hide the colors, I decided to accent them instead.
That's why I picked a very sparkly black paper to cover the end papers.
Then I added a sentiment in a coordinating aqua. (Hmmm...says the guy on page 49. This is pretty cool!)
...And voila, the finished product.
Here's to many happy returns of the day, very famous brother. Love you!
Thrilled to be featured by Heather Eddy on the Rhymes With Magic blog!
Lots of people ask me how I learned to fold and I always point them to Heather's fabulous tutorials. I bought a couple of them and a bunch of RDCBs a few years ago and it was Katy-bar-the-door.
Check out Heather's pretty heart!
She even has a pattern if you want to fold your own. Check it out and thanks for the shout-out, Heather!
Title: The Book Thief
Author: Markus Zusak
Format: Audible
Reading Dates: 31 Dec 2013 - 31 Jan 2014
Rating: ****1/2
First and foremost, big props to the narrator of this audiobook, Allan Corduner, whose performance was right on target with all the voices and accents. I bumped up my rating of the book just for that. It was one of those audiobooks with a combination of compelling story and riveting narration that makes you want to get in your car and drive and drive just so you can listen some more.
Narrated by Death himself, The Book Thief tells the story of Liesel Meminger, a young girl living in Nazi Germany with her foster family and a hidden Jew in the basement during the early years of World War II. Liesel is obsessed with reading and with books, which sometimes seem to be the only comfort in a crazy world. She reads them. She writes them. She steals them. She gifts them. She receives them.
As I read this book, I couldn't quit thinking about Stones From the River by Ursula Hegi, which I read many years ago. Both are stories of what life was like for the every day German during the war--not the soldier, not the Nazi, but the regular guy who just wants life to be normal. Initially for Liesel her life is not much different than usual, but when her family takes in a dispossessed Jew who has a backstory with her family, that all changes.
When I finished listening to the last of the book, I wanted things to end a little tidier, a little happier, but why should books be different from real life? This is a really great audiobook and one I highly recommend!
Title: A Breast Cancer Alphabet
Author: Madhulika Sikka
Format: Paperback
Reading Dates: 15-21 Jan 2014
Rating: ***1/2
I'm trying to figure out how I got this book. I mean I know I got it from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program, but I don't remember selecting it and it's not normally the kind of book I'd select. That being said, I decided to dive in anyway.
Madhulika Sikka is an editor for NPR News who chronicles her experiences with breast cancer in The Breast Cancer Alphabet. It's not your normal chronicle however. The book is comprised of 26 very small chapters, each a couple of pages long--one for each letter of the alphabet. All the way from "A is for Anxiety" to "Z is for ZZZs." Her intended audience are those women newly diagnosed with breast cancer who are trying to figure out how the hell they just ended up in Cancerland, that "strange land of surgeries, and drugs and side effects, and pain and anxiety, and you didn't even have a minute to prepare for it."
Throughout the book you follow Sikka as she chronicles how she learned to deal with her body, her family, her doctors and her pain. Since each chapter is so small, it's easy to get through them quickly. Their brevity also means that they aren't deep, soul-searching kinds of chapters, if that's what you're looking for, but you definitely get a sense of Sikka's initial disorientation and her life during treatment, and the postscript follows her out the other side.
Sikka positions her book is as a counter to the idea of the pink-powered warrior that dominates much of the conversation around breast cancer. She argues that she's not a warrior, she's just a woman dealing with a terrible disease, and she counsels her readers that Cancerland is not "a world of fuzzy pink gauze, soft teddy bears, and garlands of ribbons" but a world of indignities that it is "okay to feel indignant about."
As I read the book I kept mentally comparing it to The Emperor of All Maladies, which is one of the best non-fiction books that I've read, a real must-read history of the disease, the research behind it, and the attempts to eradicate it. While A Breast Cancer Alphabet doesn't position itself as that sort of book, it gets lost in deciding what kind of book it wants to be--a memoir or a self-help book. Maybe it's because I read the book from the standpoint of a healthy woman (knock on wood), but I found the memoir parts more gripping and wish she had approached the subject solely from that angle.
Title: Assassination Vacation
Author: Sarah Vowell
Format: Kindle
Reading Dates: 31 Dec 2013 - 05 Jan 2014
Rating: ****
Assassination Vacation is another one of those jewels I picked up on a Kindle Daily Deal. I jumped on the offer because I so enjoyed Unfamiliar Fishes a couple of years ago.
I think I enjoyed both of Sarah Vowell's books because I think she might be my twin. My much younger, quite a bit funnier twin that stops to read all the historical markers wherever she goes like me. She's the one who does all the cool things I always wanted to do like write great non-fiction books that bring to light details about historic events that you might not even know about and she gets to travel to cool places to do it. And she was born in Oklahoma!
In Assassination Vacation, Vowell compiles a travelogue describing places she's visited associated with three Presidential murders--Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. Now think about it--when's the last time you read a good book on the McKinley assassination? That's just one good reason you should read this book. (And if you just asked yourself "Did we really have a President McKinley?" that's another.)
Accompanying her on her jaunts through museums and graveyards are her sister and especially lovable nephew. Her stories about them bring a personal touch to the book as do her stories about her family history. The way she weaves the stories of her travels, her family, her politics, and the Presidents makes for a cant-put-it-down book, evidenced by the fact that I finished it in 5 days--way shorter than my usual several months average.
If you're looking to learn interesting stuff told in a funny way, you need to read this book. Highly recommended!
I saw a snake in my driveway. 
