The Winners and Other Musings

April 11, 2013April 11, 2013 Elizabeth E.8 Comments

Congratulations to Mary of Mary on Lake Pulaski who won the Hot Stuff bundle, and Nita of NitaDances won the boy fabric and the Power Tool button. I’ve had fun going around to people’s blogs and noticing what they are making and quilting and just plain old doing. Some are bemoaning the long cold spring, others are finishing up other projects, some are buying fabric.

Like me.

I’m in love with that Italy fabric and plan to make a Schnibbles with it in Sherri and Sinta’s Another Year of Schnibbles. The pattern they’ve chosen is Top Hat, and as soon as I finish up the prep for class today, I’m going to start cutting out my nine-patches. If it’s not the Italy fabric then how about one or two of those others? I’m saving the Lizzy House Constellations for another project, so it won’t be that fabric that gets rotary-bladed today. This fine stack is from Fabricworm, who will give you a discount of 5 bucks on 50 dollars worth of fabric. No problem! There’s always one more piece I want to buy to get it up to that amount.

This past weekend I flew up to Utah to see my parents, and there is a fabulous quilt shop there: Gardiner’s. I took my Dad in with me and in a few quick minutes, given how well they display everything, I had these cut, paid for and we were out the door.

I always enjoy visiting my parents, and Sunday afternoon we took a drive up Route 89, which winds all the way to Yellowstone, but we weren’t going that far. We were headed to Brigham City, and as we passed through Willard, my mother mentioned that her great-grandmother was buried there. At my request, we veered into this old pioneer cemetery, where we stopped and looked at her great-grandparents’ grave.

Willard Cemetary

Most of this area was settled by immigrants like my great-great-grandparents: he was a tailor in Scotland, who, when he landed here in this sloping valley, became a farmer. I was intrigued that he was a tailor first, given my love of sewing. This Elizabeth Dickson, born in Needles, Scotland, was the mother of Elizabeth in my English Elizabeth quilt.

It’s interesting to hear these things at my age. I’m sure I’ve heard all the stories more than once, but somehow they hit a touchstone now, and these grandparents are more real to me: a tailor, turned farmer, a Scotswoman who immigrated with her husband and gave birth to my great grandmother who I’m named for. Next time I go up, I want to visit all the graves of my relatives, something my mother and father do every Memorial Day, so get ready, Mom and Dad. It’s our next field trip.

Do we have a quilting heritage? I think so. I learned to sew from my mother, from my sixth-grade sewing class where I made a gingham apron, and quilting entered when I was pregnant with my first child and wanted a baby quilt. I’ve lived through one solids phase, when it was the Amish quilts we hungered and thirsted after, stitching them up in bold modern shapes. They are the mother to today’s Modern Quilts, I believe, but instead of black as the neutral, white or gray are preferred in this iteration. I think many of us remember our first quilting experience, whether it be last year or decades ago. While we don’t have markers of stone set in hillsides overlooking Willard Bay and the Great Salt Lake, we might have quilts tucked away in corners, or given to children and friends. There is a rich lineage of quilting in our world, and I’m happy to be a part of it.

I think the associations we form amongst ourselves as quilters, are every bit as valuable as those folds of fabric sitting in our cupboards and closets, the pieced quilts hanging on walls and draped over beds. Thanks again to all those who visited the blog this past week, who leave comments of support and who are (or who became) followers.

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I’m Featured on the Name Game!

April 8, 2013April 10, 2013 Elizabeth E.28 Comments

Today Cindy of Live a Colorful Life is featuring this blog on her series titled, The Name Game, where she highlights a blog whose name she likes. I’m more than happy to be one of her Featurettes. So, please, head over there and see what she has written (you can bet I’ll be looking, too, as I don’t know what she’s said yet, either!)

And leave a comment below if you’d like to win that fun button and the boy-themed fabric.

Or you might want this one (see previous post for more info on both).

If you are a follower, you double your chances of winning, so feel free to enter your email and follow me, now that Google Reader is disappearing (sigh). At any rate, Cindy and I will draw from our comments and will choose some winners–two from each blog. Remember to indicate which button is your first choice.

We’ll close the drawing on Wednesday at 5 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, and announce the winners. Leave your comment below and good luck!

Update: Drawing closed and I will post winners shortly (like, after dinner). Thanks to all who left comments and entered our giveaway. You’re the best!

Quilts

Cranking out those Lollies!

April 6, 2013 Elizabeth E.5 Comments

Cranking is probably the wrong word. It takes me the better part of a day to get one of these pinned, just because I have to leave time for pulling out all of the Kaffe fabrics I own, distributing them around on every flat surface in my sewing room (I have been known to pull out the portable tray tables for another surface) and then finding NOTHING I want, make a run to the fabric store for more. (Oh, and by the way, there’s news about my tiny giveaway at the end.)

So maybe cranky is a better word. That’s always I how I feel in the middle of one of these blocks. And also when I look up at the one that’s All Done and I realize the mauvey pink leaves are all wrong all wrong.

And so were these attempts to fix the problem. I was able to find these because in the middle of all this angst, when my entire color-themed cupboard was exploded, I decided to tidy up.

Pretty, right? Notice I didn’t show you the other closet.

But I persisted, cranky or not.

By switching out some of the larger circles it finally came together, so cross that one off my list. I’m also trying to pay attention to how I begin and work through these knots just in case my class carries and I will actually teach it. I’m going to bring chocolate for when they hit the cranky part–that ought to help.

I wanted to try to make a RED-background Lollypop Tree for the holidays. I pulled out my Piece O Cake books and patterns as Becky Goldsmith does such wonderful things with red backgrounds, but whatever I worked with didn’t look holiday-ish enough to suit me.

Better.

So I made it to here, and am going to let it rest.

When I was a local quilt show, I picked up a few fun buttons to giveaway on my blog that have sewing-related themes.

And because I cleaned out my sewing cupboard, I’m throwing in a bit of fabric to go with them.

The second group, with the “power tool” button is a few larger squares of boy-oriented fabric for those quilts for sons or grandsons, or an I-spy quilt you may want to make.

The first batch of fabrics (“Hot Stuff”) has couple of fat quarter solids and a trio of fun novelties.

Cindy, of Live a Colorful Life, is hosting me on her Name Game on her blog on April 8th, Monday. To win one of those buttons, and the bits of fabric that go with them, check back on MONDAY, the same day her feature will post. Don’t leave comments below for the giveaway, as I’ll only draw from Monday’s comments. As usual, you get one chance for your comment, and one more chance if you are a follower of this blog (and leave a comment). I’m hoping you’ll head over to Cindy’s blog and see what she has written (thanks! Cindy), and you can also leave a comment on Cindy’s blog for her buttons (she has two different ones).

Okay, now I have to go and clean up my sewing room.

WIP

Really? It’s Wednesday?

April 3, 2013April 3, 2013 Elizabeth E.10 Comments

I’m not yet “jammified” (in my p.j.’s) but I could be, for how energetic I (don’t) feel. Bob Hope noted that “You never get tired unless you stop and take time for it.” So I’ve taken some time for it this week, after my Ta DA! post of earlier. I also heard Joyce Carol Oates once talk about how, after a novel was newly finished, she took her time to coming back from working–she read poetry until she felt sufficiently ready to start work again.

I was asked to teach a class on the Lollypop Tree quilt, as I’ve noted before, I made up my own pattern, and thought I should get going on the class sample. It was intended to be a Kaffe-fabricked Christmasy design on Kona red. What it ended up becoming was a whimsical Kaffe-fabricked design on aqua polkadots. The red one is still in my future. . . perhaps tomorrow, after I grade some of the late essays and finish up prep for class.

I became stuck on this one leaf. You can see the progression, of trying desperately to become unstuck, and I just noticed I put two of the same in the photo. Ignore that.

I finally got to this point, and although I’m still not happy with parts of it, most of it is coming together.

Eric Maisel said that “If, because of anxiety and self-doubt, you procrastinate and only think about working, you’ll feel more exhausted than if you’d created for hours.” I certainly had a lot of that going on today, but I think it was also because I was listening to the end of a Graham Greene novel, which was driving me a bit batty. Then I switched to This American Life and listened to the two-part episode about Harper High School, which starts *here* and ends *here,* which I’m still thinking about, and which should be required listening for every American, no matter where you stand on the gun-control debate. It was sad, frustrating, illuminating and it got me working through my puny problems of how different pinks should go where. Perspective is always a valuable thing.

Then I went downstairs to the kitchen and made two dinners: tonight’s and tomorrow’s, as I don’t get home from class until later and my husband and I just aren’t up for cooking, or for going out.

After dishes, I finished off a good book–the latest Guido Brunetti mystery–and then traced off and cut out another Lollypop Tree, ESE-style, to begin again tomorrow with a red background, for my shop sample for the class.

I was talking to a biologist friend once, describing how sometimes I felt as there was nothing creative coming forward (this was when I was an undergrad in Creative Writing) and yet the deadlines didn’t seem to go away. “Ah,” she said. “You’re in lag phase.” I didn’t know exactly what it meant, but the gist of it was that while I felt like I was doing nothing, my ideas were percolating, growing, or “metabolically active” as a biologist would say, before I entered a time of real growth (log phase, if you must know). I’ve experienced this more than once. During that time, I feel unfocused, blasé, wiped out, or just plain stupid, if you must know the truth. I ingest vast amounts of silly internet videos, or lollygag through quilt images online, or read blogs without commenting. Then slowly, something shifts, I become truly bored with being bored and I get back to work.