Crazy Quilted Memories

This book is the perfect combination of quilting and genealogy. You can record your family heritage in a beautiful quilt and create a wonderful heirloom to share with future generations.

Crazy-Quilted Memories: Beautiful Embroidery Brings Your Family Portraits to Life by Brian Haggard showcases many different quilts that can help you honor your family.  The link takes you to Amazon which offers a look inside the book to see some of the pages.

I really enjoyed the soft nostalgic colors that he used in all of the projects, even though I didn't use them in the quilt I made. Those colors might show up in future quilts though! The book shows you how to do photo transfers, and provides some embroidery designs, and crazy quilting templates, and encourages you to try your own designs to customize the quilt just for you. I especially like the clock shown on the cover.

There are directions on making specific quilts, but there is a lot of customizing for the size of the photo, the designs of the fabric, etc. This book might be overwhelming for beginners because of all the different techniques - piecing, embroidery, photo transfer, etc, unless the beginner is confident or liberated enough to try things to see how they go.

All of the projects in this book - quilts, pillows, bags, crests - are beautiful. Most of them are small enough projects that they don't look overwhelming to me, and I think I might be trying to make several of these.

The book is published by C&T Publishing. I got it from the local library.

One Day Way

I have to admit that I don't read a lot of diet books. They seem so depressing. They rush into what you should eat and what you shouldn't eat and what exercises to do, and they quickly get overwhelming. I read this book because it was a free for review book from Waterbrook Press, but I am glad that I did. The One-Day Way: Today Is All the Time You Need to Lose All the Weight You Want by Chantel Hobbs spends one chapter on exercise, and one chapter on food.  They are important chapters and provide lots of good information.  There are many (31) different simple exercises to try. And the food provides a weekly menu of simple, easy to prepare, normal foods to eat.  But what I like best about the book is that the rest of the chapters helps you create the mindset to successfully live your life in a healthful manner without beating yourself up for past mistakes or getting overwhelmed with lofty goals.  Choosing today as the point of no return, you won't be looking at whether you were successful yesterday.  You keep moving forward day by day.