I’m so excited! Melanie from followingthethread.ca is hosting a literary sewalong! I have been thinking about how great it would be to do something like that for a while now, and the universe answered my half-baked thoughts about it by sending a fairy-literary-sewalong-mother in the shape of Melanie to organize and host it. Woo-hoo!

The first book Melanie has proposed for her Literary Sewing Circle is Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. I’m such a keener that I’ve already finished the book — which I really enjoyed — and found my sewing inspiration. Tom Fury is a lightning rod salesman that ambles into town “all dressed in storm-colored clothes” while “somewhere not so far back, vast lightnings stomped the earth. Somewhere, a storm like a great beast with terrible teeth could not be denied.”  And all this on page one! Bradbury sets the tone of this dark, creepy tale really well from the get-go.

I hope you’ll join in the fun. Melanie has planned for us to discuss the book online and to share our Bradbury-inspired makes, and all within a generous time frame. If you’re not much of a reader, there was a movie version of the book made in the 80s, I think. I won’t tell anyone you took a shortcut. ;D You’ll find all the details here on Melanie’s site.

Helena and I chatted with Melanie, who is a librarian by profession and a passionate sewist, on our Clothes Making Mavens podcast. We discuss what the Literary Sewing Circle is all about and talk about some books that could be chosen for future sewalongs and what types of sewing inspiration could come from them. Have a listen!

Have you read Something Wicked This Way Comes? What did you think? I find Bradbury’s prose to be very evocative and even poetic, and his character names are rivalled only by those of Dickens (take Tom Fury and Jim Nightshade, for example, not to mention the Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show carnival that drifts into town).

What books do you think would make for interesting sewing inspiration? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks for stopping by!

— Lori