A Little Progress

My Marcelle Medallion quilt this morning. I am currently working on border 5, brickwork. Not too bad, but at this point the quilt is too big to measure easily and getting my borders to the right length is proving tricky. I'm also very aware of wonkiness in the narrow aqua border (border 3). This is causing a bit of a bubbling issue which I really hope will work out once the quilt is quilted. All in all, I love the pattern and I love picking the fabrics for each section, but I'm feeling a bit overly challenged by this project and am looking forward to finishing it and sending it out for quilting.

Apart from slowly building my medallion, I'm doing a lot of reading this week. I was very sad to hear that James Herbert passed away last Wednesday. He was a favourite author of mine and will be sadly missed. I'm listening to 'The Fog' while I stitch my stitches. It might be my favourite Herbert novel, if only because it was the first that I ever read. I always enjoy all his books though. He had a knack for inserting contemporary life into horror which felt perfectly natural to me. Most of the horror I read was written a couple of generations before my time, so I fear the contemporary references are somewhat lost on me. But I think that the little references in Herbert's work leave the reader with a similar sense of normality and comfort to those experienced by contemporary (to the writer) M.R. James readers, for example.

Also in the literary vein, I'm going to see Dan Brown in May :) He will be holding a talk in the National Concert Hall, Dublin on May 20th. Billed a 'An Evening with Dan Brown', I have of course subtitled it (in my head) 'An Audience with Robert Langdon', and needless to say I am stupidly excited! Re-reading all the Robert Langdon novels in anticipation. 

I'm housebound today as I injured my foot walking too hard. Hoping it heals by Thursday as I'm off to Cheltenham to see Dan's family. Totally panicking about this. They run a very tidy house and I'm trying to think of a stitchy project I can bring to work on which won't result in a huge mess. Tempted to bring the Swoon but worried it won't go down well.