Halloween in the Vegetable Patch

August 31, 2024August 30, 2025 Elizabeth E.10 Comments

At first I thought it was a squash patch, but there were the onions. And the carrots. And the cabbage and corn, so I included them all:

Of course, the fabric is by J. Wecker Frisch, which I fell in love with (pattern) and convinced Leisa and Carol to buy, too. Leisa and I sewed the quilts together, then dropped the tops off on Tuesday. The quilter had them back to us by Thursday night — a record. We wonder what we are going to make next, for we are both giving them to our sisters. A quilt this whimsical needs to be gifted.

As I was trying to beat a deadline, I put a machine-stitched binding on it, but the quilt is still very soft and snuggly, due to the very loose density of the quilting. I hope my sister loves using it this coming season. I snapped a photo of the backing while I stitched. I thought these Halloween heads were hilarious. And I loved how well the seaming went on the back — it was a challenge to match up those pumpkins, but I think I did okay.

My sister Susan said she’s going to hang it over her stair rail, so I thought I’d given it a try before it left our house. Halloween in front, summer in the back hanging on the wall. Time to change out the hanging quilt, as tomorrow, what my daughter calls the “bers” will be here: September, October, November, December. But we’ll also have a scorcher of a week, so out here in Southern California, we’re not quite through with summer’s heat.

Quilt #291 • 54″ square

And it’s gone!

And this one waits patiently to be finished.

Soon, soon.

(Too early for pumpkins?)

P.S. The quilt arrived, and is hanging nicely on her stairwell.

300 Quilts · Patterns by Elizabeth of OPQuilt · Something to Think About

Do you like giant?

August 25, 2024August 30, 2025 Elizabeth E.9 Comments

Giant ideas? Giant bugs? Giant fabric stores? Giant mounds of laundry?

Sometimes we like giant things, like big spaces, big bowls of our favorite desert, big travel trips that include The Very Large Array. Other times, we don’t: huge messes that we have to clean up, massive surprise expenses, big insects, a huge amount of bumper-to-bumper traffic, or hurricanes. It’s like we know that some leaps of fancy and expressive gestures bring exuberance, excitement, joy, like standing next to a really tall sunflower in a field of yellow in the south of France. This big, we like.

Standing next to the heap of stuff we just dragged out of the garage and now have to sort and put it back in? Or the downed trees and aftermath of a storm system on our corner of the world? Or a task we’ve been putting off and putting off that has gotten ginormous in our imagination? Maybe not so much.

We like Big that we choose. We like Big that takes our breath away, like the Grand Canyon, or a sunset that stretches for miles across the New Mexico desert. We like Big where we can stand on our own solid ground and meet that idea or sight or brilliance, while not being swept down a canyon in life-threatening rushing water. As Arash Javanbakht and Linda Saab note “When our “thinking” brain gives feedback to our “emotional” brain and we perceive ourselves as being in a safe space, we can then quickly shift the way we experience that high arousal state, going from one of fear to one of enjoyment or excitement.”

Consider The Lilies of the Front Yard, quilt number 51 • March 2003

However, I’m more interested in the brain shift needed to think Big. I remember taking a class with Jane Sassaman once at a guild retreat, and she was encouraging and lovely. I have always done better with small-scale projects, but in Sassaman’s class I got busy creating the wildest thing I could, as I greatly admired her quilts. She strolled around the class and came to help, when I raised my hand, stuck as I was on the design in front of me.

“Can you go bigger?” she asked. “Really make that lily jump out of its place? Get those leaves to look slightly menacing?” I’ll try, I said. Alas, I could not. Did not.

One website offers up that large-scale art is a way for the artist “to express themselves in a way that is unique and personal” and that “[l]arge scale art follows the tradition of monumental masters like Botticelli, Rembrandt, Monet, Picasso, and Klimt. Especially popular in the 18th century, it was used to depict scenes of history on large scale wall art. Thus, for its sheer size and themes, this type of painting was considered “more important” than portraiture, still life, and landscape.”

Well, I don’t know about all that, but I did make a few giant flowers, gave them a latticework frame and a blue-sky border.

So maybe all I have to say today is to do something big.
You might surprise yourself.

Giant Flower pattern found here.

Free Download · Museums

Quilt Care | Surface Designs

August 11, 2024August 30, 2025 Elizabeth E.7 Comments

Freebie alert!

Now you can give them to the people who get your quilts. Download the freebie below by clicking on the button.

Quilt Washing Instructions 4x Download

This is what it looks like: four to page. Print it out on cardstock, cut it apart and pass them out with your quilts.

I did have an old Quilt Care Card, but when my sister Susan needed one for the quilt she was making, I rustled up a new one. Much better.

As a person who often wishes she’d studied graphic design (our as they sometimes reference it: surface design) in college, I’ve been amazed by all the graphics I saw on our nightly broadcasts of the Olympics. I want to do something with them all, like making a heart block seen above. Or that very cool half-circle in segments. Another color way is below:

Here’s some links to gaze at, if you’d like seeing some of the graphics in motion:

The cool pictograms denoting the different sports
You know that box the Olympians receive with their medals? Here’s what’s inside.
I liked the little video on this post.
And the connection between the pictograms and a few sports.

Oh. Okay. (Need to update my thinking.)

*Dreams Between the Earth and Sky, 2018* by Judithe Hernández from here

We went over to The Cheech [museum] last week, on the last day of Judith Hernández’s exhibit, most done in pastel chalks. So many intrigued me, but the two ladies on either side of this triptych were “clad” in the embroidered designs from huipils, a typical dress.

Here’s a snapshot of the huipil I brought back from Guatemala in 2019, when I visited my sister Cynthia (she has since returned from her church mission), and she took me to so many interesting places that involved needles, thread, looms, cloth. I could have stayed a week, but we only had a weekend.

Here we are, clowning around in a woven shawl. Don’t worry; I bought a couple.)

Three women, one of them just crowned Queen of her Village, all wearing huipils (woven and embroidered tops).

Patchwork quilt made of woven scraps, with some embroideries here and there. Somewhere I have about 10 of these parches, tucked away (of course). This entire post has more information if you are interested.

But back to the tryptich, above.

In the linked video, Hernández explains the iconography of the red ram in the center image. It’s that thing that seems to come around and interrupt the smooth flow of whatever you are doing. Of course, I’m paraphrasing. I’m all too aware of red rams in my life, in the life of friends far away, in our families. I loved that this idea was put into a visual image.

My husband and I walked on the beach this last week, as we had a mini-celebration for our anniversary. The waves drawing out the different grains of sand into patterns fascinated me.

Celebrate the bits and pieces of surface design you run across in your lives–

Post Script:

One can never have too much paper or too many pencils. The pencil above is a quilt clapper made by Modern American Vintage, with the loot from the Field Notes most recent sale: I’m a sucker for small notebooks. The pencil below is a Blackwing, purchased last year. It glows 🙂 in the dark!

300 Quilts · Patterns by Elizabeth of OPQuilt · Something to Think About

Coquelicot (Poppy) • quilt finish

August 3, 2024August 30, 2025 Elizabeth E.13 Comments

“What’s odd about commencement is that so many people think of it as the end of something, the end of high school or college—but that’s not what the word means at all. It means the beginning, the start of something new.” Will Schwalbe, (from The End of Your Life Book Club: A Memoir)

So is there a commencement for quilts? We celebrate their ending, their finishing, the last stitch. But are we really celebrating the ritual of folding away of a set of squares (or in this case) poppies, and moving it out of the way? Those unique blues that I collected all one year, that particular dye lot and color which was found everywhere, and now, nowhere — so I hoard and treasure and measure the pieces of it I am using. For when it is gone, it is gone. Is this the same as the ending of a high school education? The finishing of a quilt? The end of a season?

And from the same book:

“David K. Reynolds, who had, in the early 1980s, come up with a system he called Constructive Living, a Western combination of two different kinds of Japanese psychotherapies, one based on getting people to stop using feelings as an excuse for their actions and the other based on getting people to practice gratitude. The latter therapy has its roots in a philosophy called Naikan, developed by Ishin Yoshimoto. Naikan reminds people to be grateful for everything. If you are sitting in a chair, you need to realize that someone made that chair, and someone sold it, and someone delivered it—and you are the beneficiary of all that. Just because they didn’t do it especially for you doesn’t mean you aren’t blessed to be using it and enjoying it. The idea is that if you practice the Naikan part of Constructive Living, life becomes a series of small miracles, and you may start to notice everything that goes right in a typical life and not the few things that go wrong” (ibid, 211-212).

So as my husband (chief Quilt Holder) and I took the quilt down to be photographed at what we call the Butterfly Alley, we repeated a few rituals: get the quilt-holding sticks with the clamps, determine if the light is right, find a parking place and watch people’s faces as we unfurl a hand-made quilt in an urban setting, wait for the wind to die down, and take the photos (with lots of “up on the left — the other left!”).

So maybe the commencement of a quilt is a beginning of sorts. We have our rituals for this process: labels, photos, blog post. We fold up the extra blocks and tuck them away. We clean up the cutting area, and perhaps, as Yoshimoto intimates (above) that we find stray moments of gratitude. We are grateful for our tools. We are grateful for the colorful cloth. We are grateful that we have a wonderful community of quilters, of friends, of people who understand the need for quilt stores, quilt shows, and quilts. My quilting life has been a series of small miracles, full of so many things that have gone right.

Like a quilt of poppies in a field of French blue–