#CRAFTS WITH ANASTASIA--GUEST AUTHOR CAROLYN MULFORD ON MAKING A BLANKET COAT

Hudson Bay blanket coat
photo by Steelbeard1 from Wikimedia Commons

Carolyn Mulford worked on five continents as a magazine editor and freelance writer before making the transition to fiction. She divides her time between her first love, historical novels, and her last love, mysteries. Her latest releases are Thunder Beneath My Feet, set during the devastating New Madrid earthquakes, Show Me the Ashes, the fourth book in her Show Me series. Learn more about Carolyn and her books at her website.

My teenager had to have a blanket coat. Nothing else would do for her.

Lots of young women felt that way last year when fall fashions arrived. But the blanket coats advertised in 2015 were ponchos or ruanas rather than the original hooded, calf-length wool coat. Worn by French-Canadian voyageurs from the late 1700s, the warm, durable garment spread rapidly among American fur trappers and Native Americans.

And it endured. Most fashions and textiles have changed drastically in 200 years, but the frontier blanket coats—particularly those made from the Hudson Bay Company’s white wool blanket with short red, yellow, green, and black stripes—lived into this century. Today those who value them for outdoor activities settle for used ones or buy the blanket and make their own.

My teenager, fifteen-year-old Betsy, wasn’t making a fashion statement in 1812. She needed the coat to survive a three-week trek from a mild climate into weather so cold that the Mississippi River froze from bank to bank.

Betsy is the resourceful, courageous protagonist of Thunder Beneath My Feet, a novel for tweens and teens set during the devastating earthquakes centered near New Madrid, Upper Louisiana (Missouri) Territory in 1811-1812. Weeks of quakes, severe aftershocks, and shakes destroyed homes, made the river run backwards, created lakes, and prompted most of the population to flee.

Betsy stayed on her family’s farm with her younger brother and four strangers until the shocks and shakes posed more danger than a 200-mile walk north.

I’d placed her in this historically accurate fix, so I had to find her a realistic way out. Her shawls definitely wouldn’t withstand the cold and snow. She couldn’t walk and work under the weight of the buffalo robe. She lacked the time and materials to make a wool-lined buckskin coat. That left the blanket coat, which she could also curl up in at night.

I’d seen the coats in photos and a museum, but my 4-H sewing projects hadn’t included making a coat of any kind. I remembered how frustrating it had been to put a sleeve in a blouse or a dress. At least these coats had no buttonholes to contend with. Instead a sash held the open front closed. Could Betsy make coats for herself and her little brother?

I went to Google for advice. To my surprise, links led me to information on making blanket coats, including the original French-Canadian capote (cape). One site said it took only three to five hours. A Californian who used a pattern to make one for winter hiking warns that he’d spent three days, part of that time practicing on an old blanket. Smart man. And he had no regrets.

Betsy had no pattern. She borrowed a blanket coat to figure out how to size it by measuring with a piece of yarn, cut the pieces with a knife and by tearing, and sewed together the loose-fitting garment. Ease of construction and warmth far outweighed such considerations as how it draped.

A traditional blanket coat has only five or six pieces. The major one is the body, made by cutting according to the wearer’s girth and height and folding that piece with the edges overlapping several inches at the front. Betsy would have overlapped folds on the shoulders and left a flap for the collar. The pointed hood, two pieces sewn together, attached to that. The hood had to be big enough to go over a skunk- or coon-skin cap.

A slit from each shoulder to under the armpit allowed her to insert the broad end of the raglan-style sleeves, ones long enough that she could turn down the cuffs to cover her mittened hands. She would have used a multipurpose rope rather than a sash to keep the front closed.

Making a blanket coat remains relatively simple today despite our concern for fashion. If you want to make a traditional or modified one, I recommend investing in a pattern rather than winging it as Betsy did.

Thunder Beneath My Feet

Shy, sensible fifteen-year-old Betsy takes charge of the family farm and her ten-year-old brother Johnnie when their mother rides south to bring her sick husband home to New Madrid, Missouri Territory. Four days later on December 16, 1811, powerful earthquakes destroy homes and trees, flood and poison the land, and turn the Mississippi into a river of death. Their neighbors flee the never-ending quakes. Betsy stays to wait for her parents, care for the animals, and find the family’s stolen money. She and Johnnie share a lean-to with four strangers—a 16-year-old French-Shawnee boy, a mute slave woman, a poor French tutor, and his elegant Spanish wife. Their secrets hold them there as the quakes and the cold threaten their lives.

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BOOK CLUB FRIDAY--GUEST AUTHOR STEVE LISKOW

Steve Liskow is a panelist and mentor for both Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime and has been named a finalist for both the Edgar Award and the Shamus Award. His next novel, The Nowhere Man (hello, Beatle fans), will be published in May. Learn more about Steve and his books at his website. 

Rock & Roll Mystery

When I started college, I was a big British Invasion fan. I also liked the Monkees and Paul Revere and the Raiders, all of which helps you guess my age. In the fall of my sophomore year, I took a date to see Martha and the Vandellas, and the opening act was some guys called the Muddy Waters Blues Band. I’d never heard of them, but they blew me out of the water and I dropped my teeny-bopper allegiance and became a blues fan on the spot.

About two months later, I bought my first guitar, slightly better than what you’d find at Toys ‘R’ Us now, and began struggling to fingerpick the blues. I wanted to become the next Charley Patton, but sounded more like General Patton. Small hands, a lack of talent, and a wrist broken playing football didn’t help, but I still play. Since then, I’ve bought, sold or traded about twenty-five guitars and I can’t even guess how many amplifiers. I perform at local open mic nights, and I love it.

The writing epiphany came several years ago when my wife and I returned to Michigan for my high school reunion and I met a classmate—a woman I never knew then—who was now a session keyboard player in Detroit. In fact, her escort was the former drummer from Bob Seger’s Silver Bullet band. That meeting inspired my Chris “Woody” Guthrie PI series, set in Detroit. I envisioned the character as a guitar player and set out to list song titles that might also suggest a mystery. Right now, that list is five pages long and most of my published titles use songs or a line from a song.

The manuscript collected over 100 rejections under four different titles and dozens of revisions. Woody’s name changed three times, too, but the basic premise never varied. Years later, one of my musician friends commented that it sounded like the Bobby Fuller murder in 1966, and I admitted that I hadn’t thought about that at the time. I self-published the book in 2013 as Blood On the Tracks (the title of a Bob Dylan album), and it placed in the top ten of over 1500 entries for the Writer’s Digest Self-Published Novel Awards.

Now, Chris “Woody” Guthrie has his own series. He and girlfriend Megan Traine, an ex-keyboard player, get involved in cases that have a music slant. The first book solved the cold case of a rock star who died in his car years before, and it got some decent reviews. Oh Lord, Won’t You Steal Me a Mercedes Benz involves a car thief, the Detroit Mob, and a pregnant stripper. One of the important clues is a Gibson Les Paul guitar, which a man bought only weeks before someone kills him. Under one of his earlier names, Woody solves the murder of a rock singer in “Stranglehold,” which won the Black Orchid Novella Award for 2009, too.

I gave Woody my general appearance and musical preferences, so he plays a Fender Stratocaster for electric and a Gibson Hummingbird for acoustic. Now that he’s hooked up with Megan, a real musician, he practices more often and he’s a much better player than I am. In the third book, slated for fall of 2016, he’s learning to play “Crossroad Blues,” a classic by Robert Johnson, the King of the Delta Blues (You may know Eric Clapton’s reworking of it with Cream). Johnson was murdered at the age of 27, and a line from that song is my title: Dark Gonna Catch Me Here.

Music helps me write because a good song involves rhythm and harmony, too.  The chords and rhythm in a song are like the subplots and pacing in a good story, and I like to change points of view so everyone gets a solo.

Does it work? Well, I know the title of the fourth Woody Guthrie book that I won’t start writing until next fall. And I still have about 325 song titles left on my list.

Oh Lord, Won’t You Steal Me a Mercedes Benz

When “Hot Rod” Lincoln steals a Mercedes, he doesn’t know Tony Fortunato’s dead in the trunk, but the Detroit cops charge him with murder anyway. He turns to PI Chris “Woody” Guthrie for help, and Guthrie discovers that Tony, who married into the Mob, may have been embezzling—talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

Everyone wants that money, but nobody knows where it is: Tony’s cheating wife, his pregnant stripper girlfriend, his crime boss uncle…or whoever really killed him. Guthrie needs to find the money and the killer before the meter runs out.

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#FASHION WITH MISS MADDIE HATTER

(Photo by Kevin Jepson)

Jayne Barnard has been shortlisted for both the Unhanged Arthur in Canada and the Debut Dagger in the UK. After 25 years of award-winning short fiction, her debut novella, Maddie Hatter and the Deadly Diamond, released last year. A sequel will follow next year. Learn more about Jayne and her writing at her website. 

Today we take a step back in time. The year is 1898, and Miss Maddie Hatter, Jayne’s Victorian fashion reporter and fashionista for the Kettle Conglomerate of Newspapers in the British Isles, sits for an interview.

Tell us, please, what you are wearing today, and why that represents appropriate working costume for a young lady.

MH: As you will see from the attached photograph, I’m wearing a dark, pinstriped skirt and vest. There is a matching jacket, and a hat, as I am wearing on my book cover. But that’s an outdoor setting. Indoors, and in the company of women, it is permissible to be seen in one’s shirtsleeves. The cloth in both is a long-wearing, sturdy weave of good British wool, that will stand up to travel on omnibuses, trains, steamships and airships. Also once on a camel, but getting the hair off afterward was quite a job.

The blouse—in subdued hues to hide dust and ink blotches better—is done up to the neck. A tie for the office, or a stand-up collar and lace-edged tucker for social occasions, finishes the ensemble. On the book jacket, the open throat was suitably daring for my adventurous journey.

Are your suits made for you, or ready-made?

MH: Ah, you are thinking of the rise of pre-assembled, ready-to-wear clothing in the New York City fashion industry. From a slow start in the 1870s, ready-to-wear clothing has been widely adopted by office workers and shop-girls, freeing them—or rather us—to wear the new fashions several years sooner than was possible when all we had access to were custom-made outfits discarded by the wealthier classes as démodé or ‘out of style’.

Because it doesn’t do for a working fashion reporter to be dressed quite as well as the society ladies I report on, I favor darker colors and simpler cuts. In addition, my skirt is still cut very full at the hips. By 1898, society ladies are wearing A-line skirts that, being tighter from hip to knee than mine, assume a woman will never need to climb a ladder, run to catch an omnibus, or leap out of the path of a murderer, all of which I’ve done in the course of my investigations.

This lady in the photograph is your mentor, Madame Taxus-Hemlock. She also wears dark clothing of relatively simple design. But it’s not the same as yours, and how does she get away with that daring hat?

MH: First, Madame is a widow, and wears black as most Victorian widows do. She could wear colours after a year of full mourning (all black) and one of half-mourning (grays and lavenders). Madame has age and respectability to her credit, and never needs to run or jump nowadays, hence the slimmer, modern skirt with several tiers of ruffles.

Her hat is outrageous even by late-Victorian standards, and reflects her freedom from reliance on a spouse, family, or employer. Freed from my family’s strictures I may be, but I am answerable to a hidebound male editor who disdains lady reporters on principle. If I turned up to work in a bright, frivolous hat like hers, CJ Kettle would be confirmed in his opinion that I am too flighty to be a serious journalist, and I’d be condemned to reporting on ribbons, ruffles and lace for as long as I could stand to work for him. I prefer investigating mysterious events, wherever and however they lead.

Your hat on the book cover is covered in frills and even a clockwork bird. We’ve heard rumors that the little bird is far more than mere decoration, and even that the hat is a disguise for the bird, in truth a remarkably gifted automaton who helps with your investigations. What do you have to say to that?

MH: I say, read the book if you wish to know the truth about my charming little companion. And about the Bloodshot Diamond, the Eye of Africa mask, and that eccentric explorer, Baron Bodmin.

Thank you, Miss Hatter. May your future adventures end with equally exciting tales for stay-at-home readers of Kettle Conglomerate Newspapers.

Maddie Hatter and the Deadly Diamond

Miss Maddie Hatter, renegade daughter of a powerful Steamlord, is scraping a precarious living as a fashion reporter when the story of a lifetime falls into her lace-gloved hands.

Baron Bodmin, an adventurer with more failed quests than fingernails, has vanished in circumstances that are odd even for him.

While he is supposedly hunting the fabled Eye of Africa diamond in the Nubian Desert, his expeditionary airship is found adrift off the coast of England. Maddie was the last reporter to see the potty peer alive. If she can locate the baron or the Eye of Africa, her career will be made.

Outraged investors and false friends complicate her quest, and a fiendish figure lurks in the shadows, ready to snatch the prize . . . at any price.

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#TEA--IT'S NOT JUST FOR DRINKING

photo by Shizuha 

The English love a good “cuppa.” Many Americans also prefer tea over coffee. I generally only drink tea when I have a cold, at a Chinese restaurant, or on a hot summer day when I drink it iced. However, years ago I learned that tea made an excellent dye when I wanted to “age” a needlework project.

Recently I came across some other uses for tea. I had no idea tea could be so versatile. Here are some examples:

1. Because tea contains a small amount of nitrogen, it’s an excellent houseplant fertilizer. Bury a few leaves from used tea bags just below the surface of your plants. The nutrients in the tea will be transferred to your plants as you water them.

2. Tea also contains antioxidants. For dry or irritated skin, spritz cooled black or green tea on your freshly washed face. Allow your face to air dry. The tea will soothe your skin.

3. If you’re like me, you can’t tolerate the overpowering scent of air-fresheners. So what do you do when you need to deal with odors? Try placing several lemon, cinnamon, or peppermint tea bags in areas that need freshening, such as your car or closets. The tea leaves will absorb the odors instead of just masking them.

4. Ever have a problem cleaning dirty cookware? Tea contains tannic acids that will help lift grease. Simply fill the cookware with hot water, add a few used teabags, and soak overnight. The next morning the cookware will clean up much easier.

5. Do you have a fireplace? Do you dread the task of sweeping up the ashes because they fly everywhere? Sprinkle a few cups of recently steeped loose tea leaves over the area before you sweep. The wet tea leaves cling to the ashes, making sweeping cinders a much easier task.

#COOKING WITH CLORIS--SLOW COOKER HAM

Easter is fast approaching. For many families ham is the go-to entrée for Easter dinner, myself included. However, ham takes a long time to cook in the oven, and that often means the cook is excluded from other special events that day. To the rescue is your slow cooker! If you’ve never thought of cooking a ham in your slow cooker, I can assure you, once you try it, you’ll never again use your oven to bake your holiday ham.

Slow Cooker Ham

Serves 10-12

Ingredients

8-9 lb. spiral-cut ham

1/2 cup orange juice

1/2 cup water

1 tablespoon maple syrup

2 tablespoons Dijon mustard

1/2 teaspoon ground cloves

Place a liner inside a large slow cooker. (It makes clean-up a breeze!) Place the ham cut side down into the slow cooker.

In a small saucepan over medium-high heat, combine the orange juice, water, maple syrup, mustard, and cloves. Whisk until the mixture comes to a simmer.

Pour the liquid on top of the ham. Cover and cook on high for 6 hours, basting with the liquid in-between church, the Easter egg hunt, and anything else you have planned for the day.

Transfer the cooked ham to a serving platter. Pour the liquid into a large saucepan. Bring to a high simmer and cook 10 minutes to reduce the liquid. Pour over ham.

#CRAFTS WITH ANASTASIA--CROSS STITCHED EASTER OR NURSERY BUNNY

This cross stitch bunny design will work equally well for Easter or in a baby nursery. Stitching area is 55w x 43h and measures 4" x 3" when stitched on 14-ct. fabric. 

Cross stitch with two strands floss. Backstitch with one strand black.

BOOK CLUB FRIDAY--GUEST AUTHOR MARGARET C. MORSE

Margaret C. Morse (left) and Wendy Fallon at the Left Coast Crime 2016 awards banquet

Debut paranormal mystery author Margaret C. Morse used her experience as a criminal defense attorney to create her protagonist, lawyer Petra Rakowitz, who turns into a witch during her first murder case. When not fashioning a magic world, Margaret enjoys cooking, gardening, and bird watching. She shares her Phoenix home with her husband and seven rescue dogs. Learn more about her and her book at her website.

Behold the Inner Princess: The Adventure of the Left Coast Crime Awards Banquet

Attendants flung open the doors to the Regency Room. I squeezed between tables set for seven hundred diners. Books by authors hosting tables decorated place settings. Guests carrying glasses of red wine and amber bottles of beer jostled me. The roar of voices ricocheted off the walls.

The seven ladies seated at my assigned table each wore glittering diadems. The jeweled circlet would look good on me. I plunged my hand into my goodie bag. Silver crinkle paper snaked about my fingers. I pushed aside a book and clasped the crown.

The minute I slipped the diadem on my head, the world sparkled. The cacophony of voices turned into a buzz punctuated with laughs. The crystal gleamed. The silverware (seven pieces, which to use?) shone. Seven faces around the table beamed at me. I adjusted the circlet, so it looked more like a crown and less like a headband. I became a Princess, ready to rule.

Since I was at a banquet, I settled for “Please pass the bread and butter.”  I relished the rich, dark bread. Refreshed, I chatted up a sister royal, a mystery writer from Los Angeles, originally from New York, who wrote about Florida. She asked eager questions about my paranormal mystery, which made her my new best friend. Yet the thrill of bling overrode authorial pride. My hand groped in the gift bag, seeking the magic wand I saw my seatmates waving. A rod topped with a silver star—I flourished it at my plate. A salad appeared.

I relinquished the wand to eat. My magic power ebbed. Released from the spell, I remembered the real me—middle class, nerdy, introverted, practical. True, I wear jewelry, earrings and rings, but I don’t bedeck myself with glitter. Lacking any fashion sense, I’m in awe of ladies who artistically fling scarves around their necks and bosoms. I envy women who create dashing outfits, which I define as not blue jeans and a T-shirt. I’d never be one of the Princesses with long flowing hair, who actually walked in high heels, flashed ruby and diamond rings, and stacked their wrists with gold bracelets.

I wasn’t Princess material. I pushed the wand away. My hand lifted to wrench off the crown. But wait, I am not totally earth bound. I am a writer, the creator of Petra, my protagonist who struggles to control her new magic powers. I made up a world. I deserved magic in my own life.

I flicked the wand. A waiter whisked away my salad plate. With a plop, my book, Murder Casts Its Spell, appeared before me.

“Will you sign it?”

I touched the crown. I’d always wear it.

(Note: Thanks to authors Rochelle Staab and Tammy Kaehler for hosting the table!)

Murder Casts its Spell

In a society divided into those with magic and non-magic powers, Petra finds herself on the non-magical side of the equation, instead opting for a career making sure that all people—powerful or powerless—get the justice they deserve. Her ideas of justice are tested when Petra's first murder case falls into her lap after her lead investigator is arrested for killing his ex-girlfriend. While Petra wants to believe he's innocent, her client conveniently keeps "forgetting" to tell her anything that makes him look bad. Suspects begin to pile up, including one who would kill to keep his secret and one who tempts Petra to let her guard down and fall in love again. And the fact that the accused is a wizard sends the press on a hate campaign, claiming his powers are enough to make him a danger to society. Petra might agree that magic can be unpredictable...especially when she suddenly possesses those powers herself for the first time. With the Wizard Council threatening to lock her up for her inability to control her new power, and her client's life on the line if she doesn't prove him innocent, Petra has to make the real murderer appear before she herself disappears.

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