Can I just get this off my chest? I am not a fan of AI, even though — it appears — that we will all soon be swimming in it if we aren’t already. This ad is from a prominent mail-order quilt shop. Love the three parts of the glasses in the front: the lenses part, the eyeglass arms…and the other eyeglass arm, sticking out from the right. Every fat quarter fabric is a perfect shape-replica of the one underneath it/above it.
And then there’s this:
Should I be honored that the Giant Vacuums of AI have hoovered up (if you know the reference, you are showing your age) my blog, the thing that I’ve spent years writing and creating and making quilts and talking and thinking up? And if they’ve come for mine, they’ve come for yours, as well as the text in your gmails, the fun stuff on Instagram and Threads and anything that is online. And now, to make money to pay their data center loans, they are selling MY content back to the world?
Yes, I’m a bit ragey when I think about this. In my last post, I wanted to grab a picture of a baby crawling. Fifteen years ago, that would have been no problem. I was happy to share my images with others, and they shared their with me. But now every illustration is AI. I don’t want to put AI on my blog — I want it an AI-free zone. So I went back in my personal photo archives and pulled up a picture from long ago of my child, knowing that by putting it on my blog, I was now subjecting it to the Giant Vacuums of AI (I should copyright that phrase) and now it will also become AI by the very fact that it’s been published online. All my quilts are not now “my” quilts. And if you’ve posted online, yours aren’t either.
Ok, rant over. Sigh. Do I feel any better? Please be assured that I don’t use ANY AI to generate any writing either here on the blog, or in the emails I type back to you.
Moving on…A random shot from Moda’s display at Market a couple of years brings joy to my heart: look at these amazing (mostly) two-color quilts! We generally think in red/white, or blue/white, but definitely I want to make a periwinkle/white quilt now! (Add it to the list, she hollers!)
For a mere $5,000, you, too, can wear a Gee’s Bend Jacket made out of old jeans. Don’t forget your $3,000 tote bag!
In a recent social media post about screaming children on airplanes, I read this:
“Inside thought just broke containment,” may apply to those paragraphs at the beginning of this blog. I apologize.
Recently an artist covered the Pont Neuf Bridge in Paris in order to make it look like a big mountain.
And inside, you could walk through tunnels to some interesting soundscape music. Please click on the Instagram of @kristinetghardeberg to listen. And thank you to her for posting!
This is why that is so fascinating to me: here’s the guy sitting at his (industrial) sewing machine, cranking it out. Oh, I’m sure those belts and geegaws also played a part.
I don’t know about you, but this is more my speed this summer. I did finish up a couple of quilts, but the energy overall has been so incredibly low, for some reason. Good thing I make quilts to nap with! And of course, that’s a screen shot from somewhere and I don’t know who to give credit to. When I did a Google Search, a whole lot more really fun “confetti” quilts pop up. Now I have lots more ideas of what to do with all those leftovers squares from my Oh! Granny quilt.
I don’t know who Poliana Araújo is, but really? She spent “so long picking out these green and blue prints?”
And even though I have this declarative statement on my website? Happily my wonderful readers saw the stolen quilt images and connected it to this one that Riley and I made some years ago, and called her out on it. Hmmm. Is this the early version of the Giant Vacuum of AI? Link to her ill-gotten Facebook post.
BACKGROUND UPDATING IN PROGRESS!
Apparently the “Classic Block” is being phased out. So I’ve been busy updating all my posts to the recommended “Block” style. Besides working on that, I’ve also been working on updating the Blog Index that shows a photo from every blog post, as well as a little bit of the writing.
Here’s a video showing a page from far back…and right in the middle of it is Riley, making his quilt! (Sure hope this works on your computer/browser/whatever.)
These represent the blog Four-in-Art blog on Blogspot/Blogger, as well as the Mid-Century Modern blog. I was supposed to delete them several years ago, but just now (sadly) said good-bye. Here’s a record of the quilts I made in the Mid-Century Modern, as well as other bees. The Four-in-Art quilts are scattered through the Quilt Index, above, or you can do a search by typing that phrase into the cute little box, above right.
As I’m starting to distribute my quilts more frequently now, I *need* this label! Clever way to tack down a binding, too.
As my husband and I are taking a trip to Scotland soon, I’ve been looking at what connections I can make there with quilters. I’m a bit too late for this one!
However, I did find a quilt shop in Edinburgh, as well as a tartan shop (or twenty).
I was named for two “Elizabeth” great-grandmothers. One of them was my great-grandmother who came from Haddington, Scotland. (The other great-grandmother was born in England). Because of this, I’m figuring out bus routes and times, so I can pay a visit to that village, as my mother did when she visited Scotland some time ago. My husband’s forebears also immigrated from the Edinburgh area, so we have another small village to visit for his relatives, too.
I’ve been doing my searching on Family Search, an online archive of lineage and memories. You can find your relatives, too, by going there and setting up an account. I’m not a genealogist, by any stretch, but my friend Dayna is and she’s teaching me how to use it. I’ve got so many things I want to upload on my relatives’ pages, to “make them known to their grandchildren,” as Dayna says. Maybe I’ll bring back a photo or two of her Scotland for her page?
Lest you think I’m a total slacker, this has been patiently waiting for me while I run around like a chicken with her head cut off…wait…wrong image…while I laze around like a woman in August, trying to beat the heat and keep her sanity. (Better.)
Remember these? It’s the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the Indian’s quilt-a-long for our 250th celebration. I made their August 2026 block:
I liked it. I just didn’t love it. So I combed the artist’s Instagram account, looking for other motifs I might like better.
And this was it. I widened the strips, made a different motif for the center. As a quilter, I’m always considering how the subsequent blocks in a quilt-a-long will play with the first few blocks. I feel like this will play a little bit better, to my way of thinking. I may end up using both? Stay tuned.
Here’s the free PatternLite Handout of what I did. I’m calling it Sunrise on the Prairie. Please don’t sell, don’t steal, and if your pals want one, send them over here to download their own from my website. That is very appreciated. And please don’t tell AI this is up here (haha).
I hope for you gorgeous sunsets at the end of the day, or sunrises at the beginning.
(In honor of the recent eclipse)
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I want to adopt that phrase “Inside thought just broke containment.” I think AI is rightly concerning. I watched a YouTube video about spotting AI videos pertaining to the craft industry. She focused on the ones that show a disadvantaged person attempting to sell their homemade goods at a craft fair to rude and demeaning customers. This is an entirely fictitious scenario designed to solicit empathetic engagement and to promote sympathetic sales of mass produced products. I now wonder how many of the social media posts featuring an allegedly original creation and expressing self-depreciation, while begging the audience to be supportive, are actually AI-produced.
I am flummoxed by the whole AI thing. Can I just keep my head in the sand? I went to a sweet quilt shop in Edinburgh on my last visit. I also recommend looking into the Great Tapestry if Scotland, a short train ride from Edinburgh. https://www.greattapestryofscotland.com/ I spent hours there. I have deep roots in Scotland 🥰
I have seen that post about “I put this together and now I don’t like it” in multiple different iterations.
My inside voice: if you are railing against AI, then you cannot post kittens dancing in hula skirts. Because when did you think that happened in real life?
AI has actually been a great help for me as I have researched health issues and was spot on in diagnosing two medical conditions, which in turn led me to the doctor. A medication was suggested, and I relayed that to the doctor, and it the prescription has been very helpful. BUT – I totally understand the concern about it.
I don’t understand how some people will steal photos and make posts about them as if they are their own. it signals a messed up mental state to me.
I am so excited about your planned trip to Scotland and hope you will take me along vicariously! I have UK ancestry, mainly Scotland, and I have sporadically worked on finding just how far back the Scottish roots are – they are much farther than yours. My problem is that when I start looking, I get sucked into hours of looking for and at documentation and gravestones and before I know it, the day is gone. That is why I stopped my membership at Ancestry.com. Plus I’d rather spend that money on fabric – lol!
I am with you on the unpaid hoovering of others content. Then again the US was a very late adopter for copyright laws. History repeats.
This summer has weighed extra heavy for us all. Every day starts with some fresh new horror. I am not surprised that we are all exhausted.
Lovely quilt you have waiting for you. Piecing is somewhat tolerable in the summer but quilting is made for cooler temps. I have templates for a similar block called Papa’s Star. The curves are a little steeper than what I am used to but yours is so inspiring I really want to drag it out again.
Well! That was a lot!
I just read an article in Wired about how/why kids hate/distrust AI; I was glad to learn that they are skeptical. I decided long ago that anything I post on the internet is gone, even before AI–there have been web crawlers scraping our content long before that. Of course it’s ridiculous but there are so many more things to be concerned about.
I hope you have a wonderful trip to Scotland! Some of my ancestors are from there as well. Happy hunting and I hope you find fun quilty things as well as ancestors.
Things here have also been very slow lately. I have felt a kind of tiredness that I just can’t quite seem to satiate; I’m sleeping well and napping and still have a deep bone weariness i can’t shake. Quilting is just going to have to wait a bit for now, and I am doing my best to be gentle with myself about it.
As for AI, whew, that’s a whole topic that I don’t know how to respond to in just a few snippets (because a lot of my thoughts are not coherent but instead are emotionally charged). I am being asked (required might be just a hair too strongly worded as of yet) to use AI at work, and I don’t love the feeling of lack of agency over the choice. I also understand that it it is powerful in a few use cases. And I am learning about how difficult it is becoming for professors in college to create meaningful assignments and tests for students with access to so much information at a moment’s notice. Things are changing, and they are changing fast. I want to do my best to accept change, and yet here we are. I know in a lot of use cases I have always been a late adopter on new technology. I just keep coming back to my feeling of a lack of agency in the choice.
I think I remember an article from WordPress a few years ago, saying that you could opt in or out of having the web index your blog — if you opt in, more people will be able to find it when doing a search, but then you are also allowing the AI services to find it. So I opted in to allow indexing, and it has been interesting to see how often people do find me from ChatGPT. I know one place they have credited me and linked to my blog is on The Basics of Fiber Processing, which I found pretty funny, because I am sure there are actual experts out there who could explain more clearly.
I have been using ChatGPT a lot lately to help me trace the little niche topics I am interested in, like Chinese funerary tablets, a woman who had photographs in National Geographic in 1910, and French embroidery houses of the 1960s. But I follow the links to the original sources, and I do all my own writing. But I haven’t used Facebook for years due to all the ads and fake accounts. So to each their own, I guess.
Oh! Now I understand what you mean about AI stealing blog content. You make me scared to look! I don’t wanna know. What can we do about it? Nothing. Same goes for the awfulness of Instagram which is more confusing to me every day. I’ll notice that a post has comments and when I look, I can’t see them. Apparently they’re Facebook comment. So why count them there? I’ve never used Facebook. I don’t care! Well, I know the answers… I just dislike it all. How wonderful that you’re going to Scotland! That’s number one on my list of places to go, but I doubt it will ever happen. Have a wonderful trip!