Don’t Ask Me — they all just crept in!

January 12, 2025August 23, 2025 Elizabeth E.15 Comments

It’s traditional for everyone on the planet, not just quilters, to make a list of projects they want to complete in the upcoming year.

No, it’s not.

The rest of the world makes resolutions. However, we quilters make lists of things we want to make but knowing we can’t possibly get them all done. But still. We do it anyway, as it’s not something we can really help. This year I thought I’d try something different. Smaller bites.

The first one up is a Block of the Month from Sherri of A Quilting Life. This way, I reasoned, I can still list a project but since she only releases the block once a month, I’ll never be behind.

Now, stop that laughing.

Here’s the fun thing. I DO keep a The Master List of Quilts I Absolutely Must Make and “Make a quilt with Sherri’s fabrics” has been on there for several years running. Above are my fabric options for this quilt. Bingo!

I chose Clover Hollow, a stash from way too many moons ago, largely because it had a jelly roll and in her cute demo she mentioned that she’d used one. (But — um — not the grey bits.) If you want to make this quilt, here’s the link.

I picked up these cute project bags at Target for $3 for the duo, and in went my project.

The next one happened when Carol was cleaning out and suggested to me that we do a quilt together, since we’d enjoyed our last one. She went through a couple of her options, and I leapt on this one. Again, finishing this (from a class I took at Road to California in 2020 and we all know what happened to THAT year) is on The Master List of Quilts I Absolutely Must Make. Bingo, again! Carol and I have a goal of 1 block per week or 4/month, and I’d already made four in that class I took, so I’m running ahead for 2025, but just for a minute.

I did finish something:

A Totoro Bag! (L: the front. R: the back, but I changed the tail) And yes, this was also on The Master List of Quilts I Absolutely Must Make. (I do not discriminate. I include quilty bags on that list.) I purchased this in 2019 from a vendor at Road to California, and I knew that if I toted it in, they’d take my photo for their Instagram feed. If they come this year, that is. We’ve had a few fires (ahem) and so many are impacted by the horrors of this. I watch the news daily, and even the diatribes that come from people who have never been in a fire driven by 100-mile-an-hour winds. Folks, there is almost no chance at fighting those — the firefighters have to get creative and try other methods. I hope they never see some of those posts on social media criticizing them. Or as one commenter called it:

I wish I’d had this term when I was raising children.

The wind pushed all the smoke out to sea, but when it stopped blowing, and the firefighters could use their air drops, the smoke came our direction. We live inside the white circle in the image just above, so we are in no danger, but that doesn’t stop us from checking our news feeds to see how things are going. They are going sadly, for so many people.

Maybe we are this stage, already?

I celebrated another run around the sun by buying my birthday cake at Costo, then being taken out to lunch by my husband, accompanied by Donald Duck. Just kidding about that. DDuck was leftover from the Christmas decor at a local Peruvian restaurant. We went to a Peruvian restaurant because I lived in Peru with my family when I was twelve, and they make the best chicken ever, along with the yummiest Pollo Saltado. If you don’t know what that is, it involves the said chicken and french fries. Go get some.

And lastly, time for some real life. I generally always keep the area around the sewing machine straightened up, but the photo below is of The Other Side. There are multiple reasons for this. We’re coming up on the first anniversary of my father’s death (on National Polka Dot Day, no less), and I realized that a block of two years was taken out of my life as I attended to mourning for both my mother and my father — thank you all for your words of wisdom and kindness on this. This mourning was pretty much a huge job (it’s just how I’m put together). Some health struggles also popped up here and there (of course). And many times, I just didn’t have the energy to even walk in there, let alone deal with the mess. I have many more apologies I could make, to friends I just didn’t have the energy to call, or letters I didn’t write. But I’m approaching the other side of this experience and I know that from what you’ve told me, I will always miss my parents. However, I’m catching glimpses of a more engaged life, and I want to head that direction.

It’s good to document stuff like this once in a while (click to see another one).

But the GOOD NEWS is…it’s now fashionable to have messy rooms! Or so says an article in the New York Times, titled “In Defense of Messiness, “written by KC Davis (and you can read it for free with this link). I love this paragraph:

“I’ve been preaching my gospel that being messy is not a moral failing for years now. But I want to take it one step further: Messiness can be a good thing. All communities should have some messy people. We are not all meant to be Joanna Gaines. Some of us are Molly Weasleys, our homes bursting with the cozy chaos of a loving family and cabinets packed full of odds and ends. We cannot be Martha Stewart because we are Thoreau, so consumed by capturing Walden Pond’s essence that we need someone else to bring us meals and do our laundry. And try as we might, no amount of clutching our items to see if they spark joy will turn us into Marie Kondo’s closet, for we are Albert Einstein’s desk.”

I like tidiness, I really do. But if I waited to clean up my mess, I would never sew. And the world would be poorer for not having one more Totoro tote bag. Right?

So I’m launching myself into not ONE, but TWO monthly projects, and at this point, I’m in good shape. Happy Messy rooms. Happy Polk Dot Day. Happy 2025!

( a snowy Elizabeth, because we’re supposed to be in winter, not in raging infernos)

A photo of Albert Einstein’s office – just as the Nobel Prize-winning physicist left it – taken mere hours after Einstein died, Princeton, New Jersey, April 1955.

And you can now find me on Bluesky. Come on over!

Quilts · Something to Think About

Last I checked, I’m still here

January 4, 2025August 23, 2025 Elizabeth E.13 Comments

I was supposed to be on a road trip to see art and family. We were going to duck in to a wintery state on a week that was forecast to be freezing cold (to us Californians), but we hit a fork in the road, and so stayed home.

A passage from a book I’ve been reading (Niall Williams’ This Is Happiness, p. 50, Kindle edition) springs to mind:

He believed that human beings were inside a story that had no ending because its teller had started it without conceiving of one, and that after ten thousand tales was no nearer to finding the resolution of the last page. Story was the stuff of life, and to realise you were inside one allowed you to sometimes surrender to the plot, to bear a little easier the griefs and sufferings and to enjoy more fully the twists that came along the way.

Fork…twist…schmist. A new story where the old one had been planned, and obviously abandoned.

So now you are subject to one of those wearisome Year-end Wrap-up posts, usually posted in December, but January is how things are going around here, so here we are. My 2024 visual history:

There. I’ve time-date stamped my creations of this past year, which of course doesn’t include the ones in process. One year I had 24 quilts in my wrap-up post, and I must say I hardly recognize that person who cranked out two dozen in one calendar year (another arbitrary, but useful measurement of time and progress). But the fascination with measuring progress is strong with me, as strong as the habit to open a brand-new calendar/planner/book every January and start predicting The Future: birthdays and doctor appointments, which, at the right moment, will turn into The Past, glittering as we pass over them. Why note them at all?
Why?
To record a life.

It seems to me the quality that makes any book, music, painting worthwhile is life, just that. Books, music, painting are not life, can never be as full, rich, complex, surprising or beautiful, but the best of them can catch an echo of that, can turn you back to look out the window, go out the door aware that you’ve been enriched, that you have been in the company of something alive that has caused you to realise once again how astonishing life is, and you leave the book, gallery or concert hall with that illumination, which feels I’m going to say holy, by which I mean human raptness. (ibid, page 73, Kindle edition)

My sewing room is still in a disaster zone from when two quilts ago I was on the hunt for the binding for the pomegranate quilt, and as I excavated the dungeons in my closet, I discovered a stack of Kona fat quarters. I knew who those should go to, and they did. But I never did find the batiks that matched the quilt, discovering only later, that they went off somewhere else a year ago, and this is just the closet we’re talking about, and I have even’t enlightened you on the cupboards or the area under the ironing board, or drawers in my sewing desk.

January is when we clean out, set straight and while I used to believe in that in my earlier days, now I’m mostly amused by the industry and energy we expend to Set Things Straight. I still think it’s a quality worth striving for, if you are into striving, but currently I am not. Mostly I’m enthralled with what Williams alludes to above, which is being astonished by life. I can watch the sun rise out our office window every morning and notice the shape of the clouds or the hue of the different grays being woken up by the sun around the corner, checking it every other email, until the sun is up and it’s time to leap out into the day, to discover what lies ahead.

My children astonish me, though they are enmeshed in their own lives.

My grandchildren astonish me, though I never see them enough (classic grandma refrain).

I have friends who send me short texts that read like novels, and they astonish me, as do phone calls, emails, visits, and all interactions that are alive and illuminate. Perhaps our forced fast of each others’ company during the pandemic is echoing in the back hallways of my musings, but here we are again in January, going forward, making plans whether they be forked or twisted, but always with hope, moving into the future.

Happy 2025, everyone.

I don’t have cats. I have Mollys. (I was going to take hexies on the road trip.)

300 Quilts · Happy Old Year Ending (Wrap-up) · Patterns by Elizabeth of OPQuilt

Happy Old Year Ending 2024

December 29, 2024August 23, 2025 Elizabeth E.15 Comments

Can I squeeze just one more quilt in here?

I’ve made several quilts with prominent flowers in my tenure as a Quilter Who Just Keeps Making. Scroll quickly and you’ll have a flower show in deepest December.

Daisy Star Quilt (#76) Whoa, that is Early Days (2009). Fabric from Lakehouse inspired this one.

Lyon Carolings (#88) which is kind of flower-like.

Colorwheel Blossom (#140) where I totally riffed on a popular image (on our phones).

Tell me this little quilt (Eclipse, #189) doesn’t look like a giant sunflower…I think it does. But after it was pointed out to me once, I can never not unsee the pair of eyes in the upper right staring out at me.

And then I went big:

Annularity, #203, with rainbow petal-like structures around the outer edge.

Serious little dainty flowers in #217: Field Flowers.

Okay, maybe this is technically not a flower (not even the title says so), but with those yellow petal-like pieces on the outside, I’m going to slip it in here. Choose Something Like a Star (#238) is held by a couple of angels from Berlin.

Sunny Flowers (#246) is still a favorite.

Heart’s-Ease #52 (went backward for this one). Made in a Ruth McDowell class, and if you know who she is, you are fortunate.

Heart’s Garden, #264, from 2022, when I ran a Mystery Block on here, because we were all going stir-crazy from being shut in for a year or two from covid. No worries, we are almost done with the flower show.

Blossoming, which I take naps under because it is just the right size (#267).

Sunflowers for Kim (#268) –guess who that is?

A pattern from Yvonne, which I titled Primula Ballerina (#274); made to keep me sane while we remodeled our kitchen.

Blossom (#276) but you also have to see all the variations together for a class I taught on Zoom, during the pandemic:

I think all of these have been given away.

Lollypop Trees are definitely floral, with all those Kaffe fabrics. This is #132, from 2014.

Coquelicot (Poppy) which is #290, and has an earlier variation in just a simple layout.

Twilight Garden (#292) which I stitched while on the Total Eclipse Trip.

And now, of course, the last flower quilt in the parade: Giant Flowers, #299. It’s about 52 inches square.

I had a fun time quilting this, moving from the radiant design I talked about here, to the lattice work of the garden fence, and then I got stuck on that outer border. I had something really ornate planned, but in a conversation with Yvonne I mentioned that while looking at #fmq and #customfmquilting and other tags, my eyes began to glaze over. I can quilt a thick carpet of flowers and vines and whatever on a quilt, but on that afternoon, considering this quilt, it all just seemed like #toomuch. So I paused. While in a church service a few days later, I began studying the carpet (tell me you’ve done this). I did listen, but was also trying to figure out how to replicate the flower-structures. Here’s my drawing, from when I got home:

Yes, it’s still dense, but it’s a different visual than the tightly packed swirly vines and petals in the interior white section. I like the larger scale, but it was a bit of a leap for me. I have to ask: if our quilts aren’t a place where we can experiment and try something new, then why are we making them?

Giant Flowers, showing its checked backing, is quilt #299. I wanted to make it to three-hundred quilts this year, but didn’t quite hit it. Looks like I have something to look forward to at the new year.

I’ve been playing around with this one on the Affinity Designer artboard. Maybe this piece has legs, and can go the distance? I first heard that saying from a professor, when he commented on my short story we’d just discussed in class. I was getting my undergraduate degree in Creative Writing. That short story, turned into a novel, which is now hidden in my bottom drawer after my father said: Don’t Write About Me.

But we writers mine our lives for ideas, for stories, for the beginning strands of a narrative which will take us where? we don’t know. I should have said to my Dad, if you don’t want to be written about, don’t hang out with a writer, but he was my Dad and it wasn’t a command so much as a wish, so I listened. In the end, it turns out maybe I didn’t have the nerve to bring all the bits and pieces of my life — even if disguised — into a novel. Some of my classmates did, and I admired them. But writing can be hard work, and as you saw from the beginning of this post, I’m very happy to take a walk among flowers.

I can do it literally, or just in pieces of cloth and color. The title of this blog tries to capture this idea of staying curious and seeing where dabbling in pieces will lead: it could be a short story or a poem, or a quilt block, or a quilt.

Yes, I make all sorts of pieces, occasionally.

Happy Old Year Ending!