Most of my sewing lately has been limited to the Animal Hospital. Our stuffed animals have an inordinate number of injuries.
But when a little girl asked for some curtains for the Gingerbread Doll House, I was in.
How could I say no to that?
Now that I see the curtains against the wallpaper, I’m thinking white would have been a better choice. But that’s easy enough to fix.
On the reading front, I raided my dad’s shelves for a mystery. Donald E. Westlake was a consummate mystery writer and wrote under the name Richard Stark. (Stark’s books are serious mysteries, well plotted and beautifully written). Westlake also wrote a fantastic series of humorous mysteries, the Dortmunder Novels, under his own name. Of course, I love the Dortmunder books.
I read Jimmy the Kid first, in which Dortmunder (a criminal who fails often, though it’s never his fault) and his crew copy a sure-thing heist lifted from a Richard Stark novel. Loved it. This week I finished Don’t Ask, another heist novel involving a religious relic from a small Slavic nation. Genius. I spent all of Christmas break laughing as I read it.
For more needle and thREAD, check out In the Heart of My Home.
Learning As We Go 
I love your book recommendations and can’t wait until the day I can pick them up myself. Which did he write first, the Stark mysteries or the humorous Dortmunder books? BTW … you only have a little time left to raid your parent’s libraries…better get crackin’.
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The Stark books were definitely started first, but I think the last few were written in parallel.
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