I want to keep up a blogging presence but I find it hard to put up two posts a week if I don't get it done ahead of time.
This is a reprint from a guest blog on Anastasia Pollock's blog.
I’m a crafty person both
in hobbies and in killing off characters in my action adventure and mystery
writing.
One of my hobbies is sewing and making quilt tops. I
don’t make near as many as the avid quilter, but I enjoy the process of picking
fabrics and putting them together in an eye-pleasing pattern. The type I like best are baby quilts. They go
together faster, and I can pick out fabrics that are fun for not only a baby
but the parents, too.
For instance, I had a friend who is a cowgirl at heart
and her husband likes old cars. I knew she was having a boy, so I found vintage
looking western and car fabric to make the quilt out of. That to me is the fun
part, making something that fits a person’s personality
.
Right now I have a “sunflower” themed quilt that I am
sewing together. It’s for me. Sunflowers put a smile on my face and the bright
colors that are in the fabrics I picked shout summer and good times to me.
I’m a bright colors kind of person and while
researching the Maya for my book Secrets
of a Mayan Moon, I discovered some great information about how they dyed
their woven fabrics, papers, and even the clay they used.
The color red came from a tree called brazilwood. The
wood was boiled in water to remove the dye. Another source for red came from
the cochineal. This is an insect that eats prickly pear cactus. The insects
were collected, put in hot water, steamed, or baked; then dried and crushed.
The fruit of the avocado was used to dye cloth green.
Yellow dye came from the blackberry plant, not the
berry.
The indigo plant was broken into pieces and boiled to
make blue dye and a clay was boiled with cloth to make blue cloth.
Purple came from blackberries which made a deep
purple. Wood of the logwood plant gave off a black purple, and the glands of
several species of mollusk also gave the Maya a purple dye.
Black was made by grinding the seeds of a genipa tree.
Blurb: Secrets
of a Mayan Moon
Child prodigy and now Doctor of Anthropology,
Isabella Mumphrey, is about to lose her job at the university. In the world of
publish or perish, her mentor’s request for her assistance on a dig is just the
opportunity she’s been seeking. If she can decipher an ancient stone table—and
she can—she’ll keep her department. She heads to Guatemala, but drug
trafficking bad guys, artifact thieves, and her infatuation for her handsome
guide wreak havoc on her scholarly intentions.
DEA agent Tino Kosta, is out to avenge the
deaths of his family. He’s deep undercover as a jaguar tracker and sometimes
jungle guide, but the appearance of a beautiful, brainy anthropologist heats
his Latin blood taking him on a dangerous detour that could leave them both
casualties of the jungle.
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