Michelle's Romantic Tangle

Let's Make Baby Quilts Linky Party Rules: 
Link directly to your post or specific Flickr photo. Your post can be about a baby quilt that's finished, or in progress, or you can be writing about what you have planned,  as long as it's about baby quilts. You're welcome to link to baby quilt posts that aren't brand new, but please don't submit the same post or picture more than once. I'd love it if you linked back to my site, either with a text link or the Let's Make Baby Quilts! button.

I'm not going to pretend to understand why, but when I picked up the Finding the Yellow Brick Road socks yesterday afternoon, the cables weren't nearly as fussy as I remembered them being. You can see a hole where one cable ends and one where the next cable begins but those are just from yarn overs. I'll be happy to have the first sock done even if it's not perfect and no one is going to look at the  cable just above my toes.

Let's hope they're as cooperative tonight!

Did you know that Avon made needlework kits? All that I got were the instructions, but now I've got something new to look for. Those bees and owls are right up my alley!
Has anyone ever tried to recreate a crewel piece from the diagram that came with the kit? I'm sure it can be done because where there's a will there's a way!

I'm starting to think that the word "follow" might be trying to replace the world "girl" in the titles of thrillers. I've read Follow Me, Follow Me Back, Followers....and Unfollow Me is still in my TBR list. There are also lots of thrillers involving social media that don't use the word in their titles but still rely on the scary concept of oversharing online.



Follow Me by Kathleen Barber kept me turning pages until the end. Influencer Audrey Miller arrives in Washington  DC prepared to start the job of her dreams and move into an apartment she's only seen in pictures. It's in the basement, with a lock that doesn't always work and a bedroom window that opens onto a narrow alley. She's also moved closer to the stalker she doesn't yet realize is watching her online and off.

The book alternates between Audrey and Cat, her best friend from college. The two women couldn't be more different. While Audrey shares everything with the world, Cat shuns social media and has made a success of the life she keeps private. There's also a third narrator, "Him." I spent the entire book wondering if he was one of the males in Audrey's life or someone else entirely. This is exactly the kind of domestic thriller that I love to read.




The Bug Jar by Ava Black

Samantha Holland hates her job selling lipstick. She believes her therapist may have misdiagnosed her so she takes her prescriptions when and if she thinks they'll work, but can't be bothered to schedule an appointment to figure out exactly what's going on. Oh -- she also thinks she might have killed her lover's stepson. The boy is definitely dead and there's a dent in her car, but her memory of that night isn't too clear.

I was enjoying this one until midway through when it suddenly took a much darker and uncomfortable turn and I was tempted to bail on the whole reading experience.  Honestly, I could have put it down and not missed anything better than the first half.

Disclosure -- The publisher sent me an advance review copy. This post contains affiliate links. 

The actual library is undergoing a "seismic and safety renovation" that will keep it closed through summer 2021 and I'm completely underwhelmed by their temporary location. Forget spur of the moment library trips to find nonfiction books on something the kids want to research -- it looks like less than a quarter of the collection is available on the shelves.

All I can say is that I'm glad the boys are less excited about library days than they used to be. Imagine two years of early childhood without the library and its resources....

To Do This Week --

finish the Emerald City SAL
pull out either pair of unfinished socks
start to sort and inventory floss
stitch bookmark

I got most of the monkey done in one night, the rest of the monkey and all of the wizard done another afternoon and evening, and the hot air balloon (which looked like a lot of stitching before I actually sat down and worked on it) took two short stitching sessions.

Hopefully, I can get the last clue done in the upcoming week, although just by typing that I've probably jinxed myself.

Part of it was my own schedule. I was doing more stitching than knitting in the  evenings. I also spent a lot of evenings actively avoiding these socks because the yarn, a skein of Mary Maxim Tropical Breeze in the Toes in the Sand colorway, was absolutely awful. Craft Warehouse had it on clearance a few years back and I picked up three skeins because cheap sock yarn is one of my weaknesses.

The first skein knit up into what I think of as the Hawaii Socks without much drama. The yarn tended to shred it I wasn't careful, but slowing down and watching my stitches just a bit took care of that problem.

This skein had loosely spun stretches and completely unspun stretches and stretches that were spun so tightly I might as well have been knitting with embroidery floss. Cutting the yarn would have messed up the gradient colors which are the only redeeming feature of this stuff.

You can see how uneven my stitches are....


A more reasonable knitter would have frogged the project and thrown away the yarn, but I'd spent money on it and time on the project and even though I have no moral problem with quitting something as not important as a pair of socks, I insisted on plowing through to the bitter end.

They may or may not fit. I don't know or care. What's important is that they are DONE and now I can move onto the other two pairs of socks that are antagonizing me.

Let's Make Baby Quilts Linky Party Rules: 
Link directly to your post or specific Flickr photo. Your post can be about a baby quilt that's finished, or in progress, or you can be writing about what you have planned,  as long as it's about baby quilts. You're welcome to link to baby quilt posts that aren't brand new, but please don't submit the same post or picture more than once. I'd love it if you linked back to my site, either with a text link or the Let's Make Baby Quilts! button.

My husband and I had followed an estate sale sign out into the middle of nowhere, without success. The next morning, we saw an ad on Craigslist that directed us to the same sign, which now had another sign telling us to turn and go another eight miles.

It was an interesting sale with lots of canning stuff and kitchen stuff and lots of artsy stuff.  Not the kind of sale that I dream of finding, but this made it well worth the sixteen mile detour.

And  did I mention that I got it for a dollar?

Lover Come Hack by Diane Vallere

I'd read all of the books in the Madison Night mystery series so far, but I managed to miss this one when it came out over a year ago. At the last possible moment Jane Strong, Madison's new bestie and partner in a design competition, sends her a completely out of the blue email dissolving their partnership and listing all of Madison's personality flaws. While she's still reeling from the unexpected end to what she thought was a great friendship and scrambling to put together a competition submission of her own in the last few hours before the submission deadline, Madison's computer is hit by a virus that deletes all of her files.  Even before Jane's suspicious death leaves her as the prime suspect, Madison was in trouble.

Madison has always been feisty and resourceful and this book has her at her best...and sometimes her her worst. I had to remind myself a few times that this is a book inspired by Doris Day movies and not to hold Madison's actions to real life standards. I hate that this is the last book in the series, although I'm glad t hat Diane Vallere let us know that in her author's note so I'm not watching to see what happens next.




How many cozy mysteries can I read before my Kindle Unlimited membership expires? After stumbling around for months, not really knowing how to navigate this thing, I've found a bunch of series that caught my interest.

Murder at Stake by Constance Barker

When the tornado sirens sound, Mercy Howard and the patrons of her diner take shelter in the building's cellar. The damage from the storm isn't as bad as they feared it would be, but when Mercy visits one of her regular customers later that date about a meat order, she finds him next to his destroyed barn with a wooden stake through the man's heart. I piked this one to read because the book's description says that there were rumors the victim was a vampire, but that's just one customer's theory based on the stake in his heart. Despite the lack of vampires (and no I wasn't expecting the real thing) I really enjoyed this mystery. It was a quick, fun read with a more involved murder mystery than I first expected.



Haunting in a Winter Wonderland by Rose Pressey

Ripley's haunted Christmas tour is disrupted by threats, an ominous black shadow, and malicious carolers. This one popped up in my Kindle Unlimited recommendations and I clicked the button even though I still haven't read a full book in the Haunted Tour Guide series. The boys needed an adult down at the pool with them and I needed something entertaining to read and  this novella fit the bill perfectly.

Disclosure -- All of these books were through my Kindle Unlimited subscription. This post contains affiliate links.

They're a simpler version of that Treasure Chest Snap Bag I made for my son a few years back and there was supposed to be a tutorial but the video got twisted... I never did figure out how to untwist it, but at least I know what went wrong and can hopefully keep it from happening again.

The last two weeks have been full of big things and stupid little things and (because why not?) a week at the coast that I didn't see coming until the last possible minute. It was going to be another stitching retreat with my mom for four days or so, then she couldn't go and my husband was able to shift his vacation around so we went with our two youngest kids for the whole week because no one else was going to be able to use the room.

This week, we'll hopefully get the refrigerator fixed (the parts are here and the appointment is scheduled) and I'll be back to life without two full size fridges and a dorm fridge in my already cramped kitchen. I need to catch up on the things I would have done if I wasn't doing everything else. And I'll hopefully make some progress on the stuff in the picture.

I cant wait to stitch my way up to the orange and the grapes.  Please don't ask me why those sound exciting to stitch, because I have no earthly idea.


If you want to see everyone else's progress, check the posts over on Instagram at #riolissal. And use the hashtag yourself if you're working on a Riolis kit that you'd like to show off.

Let's Make Baby Quilts Linky Party Rules: 
Link directly to your post or specific Flickr photo. Your post can be about a baby quilt that's finished, or in progress, or you can be writing about what you have planned,  as long as it's about baby quilts. You're welcome to link to baby quilt posts that aren't brand new, but please don't submit the same post or picture more than once. I'd love it if you linked back to my site, either with a text link or the Let's Make Baby Quilts! button.

I didn't care for the first third or so of Black Friday by Michael Hodges. There are a lot of characters, all of them with fully fleshed out back stories that drowned out whatever it was that had just happened at the Bridgefield Mall. Something awful had gotten rid of all of the other shoppers and  the mall was suddenly surrounded by impossibly swirling fog, but I was still wading through everyone's histories and wondering if this was just a rip off of The Mist.

About halfway through, the pace picks up and it becomes a really good read that kept me turning pages. As soon as I stopped hearing about their lives before the Black Friday sale, I started to care what would happen to the characters.



The Splendor of Fear by Ambrose Ibsen


A couple plans a romantic camping trip in a remote state park on the anniversary of the last known witch trial in United States history. When they arrive, they learn that they have the entire campground to themselves. Even the park ranger is on his way out. 

The book begins with a huge infodump as Penny reads information about the abandoned town of Newsom's Landing and the events that took place there. It's all very Blair Witch. It's also pretty good. The language is poetic and some of the events are creepy. 



Disclosure -- This post contains affiliate links. 

Now I need to decide whether to finish the towers (someone who's read the book recently enough, please remind me -- did the Great and Terrible Oz have a castle? What am I supposed to call this thing?) or stitch the flying monkey, which is super cute.

I don't have any eighteen-inch dolls in my life, which is a shame because Enchanted Knits for Dolls by Nicky Epstein is full of some really amazing projects. This is beautifully detailed, heirloom quality stuff. 


They're not all girly princess gowns. There's a pirate, a Peter Pan costume, a gnome, and a dragon. And they have awesome accessories.

And princess gowns, because....well, probably because princess gowns are wonderful. I love Rapunzel's hair, which is attached to her hat.


The genie is my absolute favorite of the bunch. You can see all of the projects on the book's Ravelry page.


It's almost enough to make me want to run out and find a doll of my own.  I can imagine that if this book has existed while my great-grandmother was alive, she absolutely would have knit these...if she knit. Maybe she just did crochet?

Let's Make Baby Quilts Linky Party Rules: 
Link directly to your post or specific Flickr photo. Your post can be about a baby quilt that's finished, or in progress, or you can be writing about what you have planned,  as long as it's about baby quilts. You're welcome to link to baby quilt posts that aren't brand new, but please don't submit the same post or picture more than once. I'd love it if you linked back to my site, either with a text link or the Let's Make Baby Quilts! button.

The museum is at White's Electronics and they have a huge display of the metal detectors and geiger counters they've been making since the 1950s, along with things found with metal detectors...and things not found with metal detectors.

The teapots found in sunken ships were some of my favorites, along with a coral encrusted sword and a few old rifles that were barely recognizable as guns.


Now we have to research artificial reefs and whether coral can be removed from metal artifacts...

Little Darlings by Melanie Golding

This has got to be one of the creepiest domestic thrillers I've ever read. The first pages perfectly capture how vulnerable and uncertain a new mother can feel, especially one without enough support. That's even before a strange woman appears in Lauren's hospital room, wanting to trade Lauren's newborn identical twin sons for the two miserable things in the stranger's basket. Lauren manages to lock herself and the twins in the bathroom and call for help, but when the authorities do arrive the hospital staff blames Lauren's fragile mental state.

A month later, after the twins are abducted but quickly returned, Lauren is unconvinced that the babies in the stroller are her own. They look like Morgan and Riley, but something is different. She  can no longer tell the two apart or recognize their cries. They behave differently. Their eyes have changed. Even her husband can see that, but it's explained away as the normal change in eye color that all newborns have.

Once Harper, a police officer looking into the incident at the hospital, was introduced my interest started to wane a bit. Lauren and her fears are fascinating, but Harper's presence pulled me away from what I loved most about the book. I wasn't interested in the detective's back story or personal life, but  I guess she was a necessary part of the plot.

Overall, I loved this one and highly recommend it if you're in the mood for a domestic thriller with the possibility of a supernatural element.

Disclosure -- The publisher provided me with an advance review copy. This post contains affiliate links. 

I thought I'd switch to shawls for a while and there were a lot of those in various sizes and yarn weights.
I conquered my fear of zippers and made lots of bags.

Most of the quilting was in the first half of the decade before the sock knitting big bit and took over my life.
And then, two years ago, the cross stitch bug bit harder than the sock knitting bug and that took over my free time.

Lots and lots of WIPs don't appear here because they  aren't finished. Apparently I abandoned a lot of quilts along the way.

111 pairs of socks
24 shawls
114 baby quilts
14 big quilts
10 little quilts
34 bags
27 cross stitched pieces.

Like I said, those totals aren't completely accurate. Not everything is in the pictures, but it gave me a fun glimpse of what I've been doing for the past ten years.

My best guess would be that it's a detail of the tablecloth. I could be completely wrong and I'm not going to spend any time worrying about it. It's completely possible to follow a chart and have no idea what that thing you're stitching actually is. I did that with the crochet hook and doily on Crocuses in the Windowsill. It's clear if you look at the picture on the packaging, but once I start to stitch I get focused on the chart itself. 

Whatever this mystery blob actually is supposed to represent in the finished piece, it's the beginning of my project for the Riolis SAL. As worried as I was about how it would be to stitch on black fabric, the contrast of those colors makes it totally worth the extra concentration!