I never hold my own quilts, preferring to be the one behind the camera, taking the shots. But we had a photo shoot for Amarysso, my latest finish, and we traded places. Here’s some more photos, next to two wonderful murals in our mid-town area. Okay, now Dave will hold it:
The back is a random print from the stash, with a rod pocket of Tula.
What does amarysso mean? It means “to sparkle.” It’s one of the root words for Amaryllis, the name of the fabric used for our quilt guild challenge, designed by Philip Jacobs.
Now me:
And we’ll give Dave the last shot:
My husband is a mural-and-art spotter for our town. He has a blog with lots of posts of murals and sculptures and interesting art, and was written up in our city’s newspaper. He started this project after he retired, and it just sort of morphed into his site Murals and Art. The thing that is keen about this is that whenever I need a backdrop for a quilt photo, I just go to his blog, point, and say, “Take me There.”
Thirty-four years ago, I pointed to the future and said “Take me There.” And he did, me and my four children, now *our* four children. This past weekend, we went to the wedding of our granddaughter, child of the little girl you see in the photo. In June, we went to the marriage of our grandson, child of the boy with the black tie on the left. We have a granddaughter on a mission for our church in Argentina, and yesterday, she just turned 20. And I wish I knew where that pink ribbon sash was that’s hooked around my waist (when I had one). I sewed it out of imported French ribbons, to accent my dress, also handmade. And where did the time go?
I’ll celebrate that evening by meeting with the Creatives, my name for our little group that gets together monthly for crafting, sewing, talking, sharing, whatever. It had gone defunct right before covid of its own volition, but we think we want to get together again. It will probably be a different, smaller bunch than who was here last go-round, but under the alchemy of Time, things do change.
We live in the now, framed by the past, and guided by the future. Just like my Dave and I.
The most recent newlyweds at their bridal photo shoot
Since it is not nice to be selfish, the West Coast and SouthWest are graciously sharing their high temperatures with the MidWest and East Coast. We are sorry. Climate Change is upon us all.
But the above image (which reminds me of my time when I lived in Texas) also reminds me of another subject.
Yes, it’s time for another Temperature Quilt. I have decided this for four reasons: 1) With the chilly temps this winter/spring and the highs this summer, the quilt will have a lot of good colors; 2) I like the new line-up (top row) of Painter’s Palette colors — they are softer, yet still strong; 3) I’m approaching a milestone birthday and feel it would help me appreciate this Milestone-Birthday-minus-1 year; 4) my sister wants my 2019 quilt.
My 2019 version of a temperature quilt. However, I’m moving on from Flying Geese, although I still love love the border.
I liked this one by Stephanie Hedstrom of Crafty Ninja Quilting. I like how she incorporated bands on the HSTs for the preciptation that day.
I had several other candidates (houses, birds, leaves, circles) but so much of it felt too fussy for this harder year, although I love all the ideas. Am I crazy for doing another one? It’s kind of like childbirth: you swear once you have that baby you’ll never have another, and then surprise! Another shows up a few years later. Yes, I’m crazy, but Temperature Quilts do get under your skin.
I get my weather info from Weather Underground, in their history section. LINK IS HERE for July and for a weather station in my locale, both changeable. I just take a screenshot of the finished month, and use that to work from.
I learned long ago that using 2 1/2″ squares of a color is better than the itsy-bitsy little swatches on the cards. I numbered the rows, then labeled the small squares with the row and the color number. They used to sell charm packs, but lately I’ve been cutting them from the fabric when I get a new color. And yes, I’m in the Painter’s Palette Camp for solids. 1000%.
This week my husband and I were treated like royalty. He’s been helping a refugee family (I have only done a little bit), and they invited us for lunch. It was amazing. And the mother had been in the hospital for two days, a day prior to that (she’s very shy) and they still hosted us. If we had known, we would have tried to reschedule, but the father kept that info to himself, as he wanted to thank us. Tahira, the young woman in the copper-colored scarf, speaks the most English, and told me that the bread I really liked was Bolani, and was filled with pumpkin and spices. The rice was amazing, and Tahira wrote to tell me it is called Qabole Paluo. Although this family doesn’t have much, they teach me about graciousness and hospitality every time I interact with them.
Right after my mother died, I had a chance to serve them by taking the four younger children (one is missing from the photo) to get language-tested for our school district. They were a light to my day that day, and for one whole day I wasn’t weeping. It was a gift, being with them, and all that I thought was complex and hard and difficult in my life paled by comparison to what they were facing: a new land, a new language, new home, and basically no earthly possessions. This time we saw them, they had new glasses (filled with Pepsi), a new-to-them kitchen table, rug and sofa. My niece, Emma, has taught me a lot about working with refugees. They don’t want handouts, but they will accept a hand in getting established. Anyway, it was a beautiful table and I thought you’d like to see it.
We took them a bag of tomatoes from our garden, but left this one home for us. We are in a race to the finish, the tomatoes and us. We put up the sunshade, but now they have been infected with wilt. Sigh. They are so delicious.
Finished my Summer Camp Quilt-A-Long blocks, but after working with some layouts, I think need 24 more the finish I have chosen.
I threw this up on the design wall (at night: hence, soft-focus) thinking of Jen Kingwell’s Boho Quilt. Yep. Not going to work, and I think it’s largely because of the soft contrast between the colors. We were steered toward a not-too-dark, not-too-bright palette on purpose, as the reason why would come at the end. So obviously, this isn’t the end, although I do know where it’s going.
While I stitched down the binding on the Raincross Challenge Quilt (due in September), I watched Fat Quarter Shop’s Kimberly Jolly do a presentation of the new Moda lines, and a couple of other fabric designers they’d chosen to carry. There’s a couple I’m interested in, of course!
To see if I’ve made any progress, here’s an earlier shot from January 2020:
I know it’s a little fuzzy, but the glump of fabrics in the lower right, for Bee Happy Sew-A-Long? It’s finished and renamed Picties and Verities. So is My Small World, now called Golden California. And North Country EPP, called almost the same thing: North Country Patchwork.
I’m here to say that messes can be creative, and allow us to focus on the big picture, and not sweat the small stuff, like seeing the floor once in a while. Projects can get done, even if it is a mess. And doesn’t it feel nice to clean up the messes once in a while — I feel so virtuous when that happens…before I mess it up again.
The other night at Guild, I offered to do an EPP demo for them, and they accepted. So I packed up all my little EPP kits I used to teach with and then made 30 more, a few examples of EPP quilts, tons of needles and tins of thread and participated in the round-robin. The grandmother’s flower garden quilt, above, is designed by Sherri McConnell of A Colorful Life, and is titled Flowers for Emma.
I said I would bring back the RWB version of Shine, and there it is, in all its glory. I have now returned it to its place of honor, hanging in our upstairs hallway. The title,I Hear America Singing, is from the Walt Whitman poem.
Maybe all this was triggered by seeing the movie, Barbie, where mess and chaos and order and structure are part of its themes. A friend bought me this little souvenir treat; it’s the first movie I’d been to since covid, and boy, has movie-going changed! You buy your seats ahead of time, they are the size of my car and they have foot-rests and tilt backwards and arm rests with trays the size of what I used to take notes on at school. When the previews would pause before the next one played, the entire theater sounded like munching mice. And the line for the concessions was longer than the line for getting in. Who knew?
What else have I been working on?
Well…living. Laundry Meals. Dishes. Making messes in my sewing room. Quilting on the Guild’s Challenge Quilt. I don’t think it’s a problem to show it publicly, but just in case, I’m not. Yet. This block, from Raincross Guild’s BOM, called Sedona:
I use the no-waste version of Flying Geese. You can find directions for it on the Flying Geese Tips and Tricks handout that I made — click the black download button to get a copy (again, it’s free). Or click on the title to see it online.
I think the AMH fabrics in the second version look like the Very Large Array in New Mexico. With all the press about the Oppenheimer movie, I think I should also see Trinity (the testing site), the VLA, and certainly Roswell. I’m adding it to my travel list. I’ve already checked out hotel rooms, as we plan to head to Texas for the Solar Eclipse. Rooms that are normally $134/night are now $500. I saw some in Fredericksburg for a thousand bucks. Wow. Celestial events of one kind or another are big business.
I once made an eclipse quilt, but I think I’d rather see the real thing in person, thank you very much. And yes, I just noticed the monster in the upper right corner. Maybe you have to take your celestial events with a creature from Outer Space?
What is the difference between achievement and accomplishment? asked Adam Gopnick. That question has set me thinking about it ever since. We quilters work hard to get our quilts finished, our patches pieced and all the little scraps of fabric marching in order toward our vision. Are we achieving? Or are we accomplishing?
class taught for South Bay Quilters
“Achievement,” writes Gopnick, “is the completion of a task imposed from outside — the reward often being a path to the next achievement. Accomplishment is the end point of an engulfing activity we’ve chosen, whose reward is the sudden rush of fulfillment, the sense of happiness that rises uniquely from absorption in a thing outside ourselves.”
“Our social world often conspires to denigrate accomplishment in favor of the rote work of achievement,” write Gopnik, and many of us are “perpetually being pushed toward the next test or the “best” grammar school, high school or college they can get into.” The result of this is that we drive the young (and maybe ourselves) toward achievement, toward “tasks that lead only to other tasks.”
Guild challenge fabric in front
Our Guild recently handed out their yearly challenge fabric, chosen by someone who loves purple:
While the challenge (due in September) is divided up into four categories (wallhangings/runners, quilts, wearables, bags/totes), for me the real challenge was working with this fabric.
Challenge accepted. When I was in Utah, I stopped by The Quilters Lodge and they helped me pick out some hues not readily observable, as well as a bold and sassy turquoise polkadot. Was this merely another task that led onto a task, “the point of it all never made plain,” as Gopnik asks?
I remember that Bonnie Hunter, master of the scrap quilt, always said that if a fabric is ugly to you, then you haven’t cut it up into small enough pieces. I didn’t find the fabric ugly — no Philip Jacobs fabric ever is, to my way of thinking. But the colors were definitely a challenge. So…I cut it up small. I chose one of my older patterns that I’d had previously published in Simply Moderne to be my guide through this. It has never been published as a stand-alone pattern, and I knew it was really versatile and strong enough to handle any fabric thrown at it. And it was fast and easy…also a requisite for this Guild challenge, to my way of thinking.
This could have been a series of exercises, dictated-from-the-outside, as so many guild challenges are. I’ve seen some so constrained that it really is ridiculous: how many of you have done the “crayon” challenge, or the “scraps in paper bag” challenge, or the “page number in a magazine” challenge? (However constraining, I happen to like that one.)
But on the other hand, says Gopnik, we’ll head towards accomplishment by looking at this big self-assigned task and “breaking it down into small, manageable tasks” that later lead to the final result. This experience of breaking down, then building up can also inform later professional work, even leading to a vocation. And my guess is that Gopnik meant these as self-directed tasks, with enough time and little enough direction, so that we can roam far and wide and back again in order to find that accomplishment.
“Self-directed accomplishment, no matter how absurd it may look to outsiders or how partial it may be, can become a foundation of our sense of self and of our sense of possibility. Losing ourselves in an all-absorbing action, we become ourselves.” (from here)
I spent the better part of a day cutting, arranging, sewing, finishing the top in a short amount of time. I recognize that I now have the opportunity to do that, and the support of my family. It was not always so easy, and when I was in graduate school (can we say “outside task” to “outside task” to “outside task”?) trying to get a degree so I could launch my professional life, I didn’t sew or quilt for two years. But I returned to it, and when I retired from teaching, my days of quilting — coupled with my education — allowed me to move into teaching Guilds, and writing this blog (“inside” tasks).
“Pursuit of a resistant task, if persevered in stubbornly and passionately at any age, even if only for a short time, generates a kind of cognitive opiate that has no equivalent. There are many drugs that we swallow or inject in our veins; this is one drug that we produce in our brains, and to good effect. The hobbyist or retiree taking a course in batik or yoga, who might be easily patronized by achievers, has rocket fuel in her hands. Indeed, the beautiful paradox is that pursuing things we may do poorly can produce the sense of absorption, which is all that happiness is, while persisting in those we already do well does not.”
So what is achievement? What is accomplishment? Maybe the words don’t fully articulate the slender difference, but we know it when we push through something hard, to end with something beautiful. We know it when that pursuit doesn’t end, although we may leave and come back to it after a time. We know it when we finally finish the quilting or the binding or the label, having worked our way through color choices and fabric choices and design and cutting and stitching, and hang up that quilt and stand back to look.
OccasionalPiece--Quilt! 
