Hallo, Hallo dear hearts!
You may or may not remember how much I *love!* Old World Arts & Crafts as it isn’t a topic which I share too often on Jorie Loves A Story. However, if you caught sight of a book about the artful approach to natural dying for fibre arts – you would have known how much I love playing with fibre as a knitter and how much I’d love to expand my skill set with both the projects I knit and what I can create as a fibre artist in the future.
I’ve been binge watching podcasts (which I used to consider vlogs) via YouTube with my Mum for the past several years now which involve all manners of the world of knitting – from festivals and fibre shows to knitters who are vlogging (er, podcasting) their knitting lives to the world via their YT channels. It is quite an interesting section of YouTube as it is similar to our bookish booktube world wherein the niche of interest is just as passionate about the world of fibre, knitting, crochet, spinning and other fibre art delights as we are about books, reading and book world culture.
When I first heard of this series I thought it sounded quite delightful – even though I wasn’t sure if I was ready to read a series that involves Alzheimer’s as I’ve gone through that personally with family members and at times I find those stories to be quite harder hitting than I presume they will be going into them. I tend to shy away from stories involving dementia and/or terminal illness – even though there are times where I feel inspired to seek them out as I love the overall plot and the journey of the characters. This particular series seems to be dealing with the early on-set of the disease and not the mid-to-late stages of it which I feel is an easier place to enter into that thread of the storyline which is why I look forward to seeking this series one day to read for myself.
As an aside, as a knitter I’ve not picked up my projects in four years – as I sort of lost track of where I am in the patterns. I was on such a strong roll with knitting several projects at once as I enjoy charity knitting as much as personal projects and/or gifts for friends and family. The hard bit is that when I lose where I am with the patterns, it is harder to re-adjust as our knitting and yarn shoppes have either shrunken over the years or have had reduced their hours which makes getting to their places a bit inconvenient. I look forward to visiting a shoppe in the future – sorting out where I am with my projects and getting back into knitting. It is something that I love to do and it is such wonderful blissitude to be lost in fibre and stitches.
If you enjoy Fibre Arts yourself, perhaps this series will resonate with you – I am thankful I could champion the collection on Jorie Loves A Story today. And, hopefully the extract which is being shared leaves you with a few ruminations, too!
This is a Self-Published series
Converse via: #ForTheLoveOfFiber, Contemporary Fiction, #Fiber, #Yarn & #Spinning
as well as #WomensFiction and #LFPrism
Book One : For the Love of Fiber Series
Published: 26th August, 2019 | ISBN: 978-1733467407
A determined widow faces the challenge of a new life to regain the confidence and independence of her youth, but finds that life, unlike knitting, doesn’t always follow a pattern.
After twenty-five years of being the perfect wife and mother, Martha LeBeau finds herself unexpectedly widowed and shocked to discover her husband had been living a double life, leaving her penniless and in debt. Determined to regain her lost confidence and independence, she sells her suburban Chicago home and moves to the Wisconsin countryside to forge a new life away from cheating men and smothering children. There she meets the Wool Gatherers, a group of fiber artists who teach her the art of spinning wool and raising sheep. Along with one determined Border Collie, she begins on the path to self-growth and healing.
Riley O’Connor is the single father of a child with Asperger Syndrome. The child’s mother walked out on them because she found that life too difficult to handle. Since then, he has dedicated himself to protecting his son from any further emotional damage.
Meeting Riley and his son through her new job brings love and challenges to Martha’s newly found independence. Romance blooms like a finely knit cable, entwining their lives.
Can either of them learn to trust again?
Book Two : For the Love of Fiber Series
Published: 9th May, 2020 | ISBN: 978-1733467421
Cara Olson is forced to put aside her struggling art career in Chicago to care for her ailing grandmother in Wisconsin. While journeying with her beloved Gram through the diagnosis of possible Alzheimer’s disease, she loses and then rediscovers her passion for art and experiences the resurrection of a past love.
Struggling artist Cara Olson is called home to Wisconsin to care for her ailing grandmother who is showing signs of Alzheimer’s disease. Leaving behind her mentor//boyfriend, Stefan, she begins to look at her unsuccessful career and relationship in a new light.
Surprised to find her Gram’s doctor is her high-school crush, Peter Andreson, she fights her reignited feelings. When Chicago critics dismiss her artwork as a poor imitation of Stefan’s, she is devastated and vows to give up art.
While caring for Gram and running her small Scandinavian gift shop, the Wool Gatherers, a local group of fiber artists, help her find new outlets for her creativity, designing works of art with hand-made felt and her re-emerging love of landscape and portrait painting.
Along the way, her feelings for Peter grow, and she realizes she has once again fallen for a man only dedicated to his career. When the opportunity arises for her to return to Chicago with the promise of a new career, she seizes it. But even her success can’t fill the void she experiences without Gram, her new friends, and Peter.
Can she return to Shoreview, the place that inspires her art, and be satisfied with a life that doesn’t include him?
Enjoy this small Extract from “The Spin I’m In”:
“Who can I get to shear?”
“Riley, of course.” Carol looked at me like I was slipping into dementia.
“Anyone but Riley.” The less I saw of that man, the happier I’d be. He may be good at shearing sheep, but he was lousy at personal relationships.
“Are you crazy? He’s the best there is,” Lila said.
“We didn’t hit it off too well the few times we’ve met.”
All activity stopped. You would’ve thought I’d said I had a fight with the Pope.
“I never heard of anyone not getting along with Riley,” Lila murmured.
“You didn’t tell me that.” Carol’s face lit with interest. “Tell us about it.”
“I can’t go into it, it’s private.” It wouldn’t be professional to tell tales out of school. “Let’s just say I didn’t impress him with my teaching credentials.” Or with anything else for that matter. The man had made me feel like a worm.
“Your problem is you’re too sensitive,” Carol said. “Men don’t always let on when they’re impressed. They have to think about things for a while.”
I couldn’t hold back a loud laugh. She hadn’t seen the annoyed look on his face when I last saw him.
“Regardless, I don’t want to call him. I’d rather shear them myself with barber scissors.”
“Oh, don’t be such a wuss. He’s very professional about his work. And I know he likes small jobs because he can take Jake with him. And don’t forget to have a good dinner prepared.” She laughed at my shocked expression.
“What? What does that have to do with shearing sheep?”
“It’s tradition. The host farmer always feeds the shearer if he’s there near mealtime.” Joan gave me a sympathetic glance.
“Yeah, and if Riley was traveling any distance to the area, you’d have to put him up for the night.”
I couldn’t believe the dreamy expressions on their faces at the thought.
“It might be worth moving to another city just for that experience alone,” Carol said.
“Oh, for crying out loud,” I muttered. “You people are unbelievable.”
They sure had a different opinion of the man than I did. He might be eye candy to them, but after that awkward thirty-minute session in the classroom, I could easily put my first impression of those dreamy blue eyes down to an aberration of my people-reading skills. When I talked about his son’s problems, those eyes had turned downright glacial.
Coming into the story at this junction is interesting because it pulls back the veil of how different people see different circumstances whilst it also eludes to the fact that someone has more information about one of the characters than the others do themselves. I love how characters sometimes get into the thick of it with each other – of how they don’t want to recognise that perhaps someone might be giving grief to someone else about circumstances they are not clued into recognising for themselves and they only have the wool over their eyes without realising there is much more to the person in question than what they can surmise themselves! It would be interesting to see how the scene and sequence of these events play out and how they relate to the overall thread of the storyline.
What do you love about stories which celebrate old world arts & crafts like fibre arts, knitting, spinning and what you can do with a fibre farm with either alpacas or llamas?
About Kate Bowman
Born in Wisconsin to an original Brady Bunch, I had the dubious honor of being #14 in the family. As a result, I’ll never run out of characters. The early years of my marriage were spent moving around the country with my engineer husband, collecting interesting stories and characters along the way. I picked up my first romance after a particularly stressful shift at a suburban Chicago hospital where I worked as an RN. Hours later, bleary-eyed and exhausted, but able to sleep because the story affirmed that good things can happen to good people, I was hooked.
After seventeen years in the Chicago suburbs we returned to Wisconsin and a new life of country living. After a local class in spinning, I decided it would be fun to have my own source of wool. Several years and many animals later, I found a new source of humor for my stories. I’ve always loved animals and you’ll find many of them populate my books. My stories are about real people trying to make it in this crazy, sometimes funny, sometimes sad world—but always with an ending that will renew your faith in love and life.
When I’m not writing, you’ll find me with my family or out walking in my fields, spinning wool, knitting or weaving, but always listening to the interesting stories of those characters living in my head.
This blog tour is courtesy of: Prism Book Tours
NOTE: Similar to blog tours wherein I feature book reviews, book spotlights (with or without extracts), book announcements (or Cover Reveals) – I may elect to feature an author, editor, narrator, publisher or other creative person connected to the book, audiobook, Indie film project or otherwise creative publishing medium being featured wherein the supplemental content on my blog is never compensated monetarily nor am I ever obligated to feature this kind of content. I provide (98.5%) of all questions and guest topics regularly featured on Jorie Loves A Story. I receive direct responses back to those enquiries by publicists, literary agents, authors, blog tour companies, etc of whom I am working with to bring these supplemental features and showcases to my blog. I am naturally curious about the ‘behind-the-scenes’ of stories and the writers who pen them: I have a heap of joy bringing this content to my readers. Whenever there is a conflict of connection I do disclose those connections per post and disclose the connection as it applies.
{SOURCES: Cover art of “The Spin I’m In” and “It Never Felt So Good”, synopsis, the author’s photo (for Kate Bowman) and biography as well as the blog tour banner, the extract from the book, teaser banner from the book and The Prism Book Tours badge were all provided by Prism Book Tours and used with permission. Post dividers and My Thoughts badge by Fun Stuff for Your Blog via Pure Imagination. Tweets embedded by codes provided by Twitter. Blog graphics created by Jorie via Canva: Stories in the Spotlight banner and the Comment Box Banner.}
Copyright © Jorie Loves A Story, 2020.
Leave a Reply