Christmas Star Quilt

January 18, 2010August 28, 2022 Elizabeth E.

I was ready for a new Christmas Quilt. So one day in October, when I had twenty minutes free of grading, I thought about what I wanted, and really really thought I could get it done by December 1st. So I cut out a bunch of patches, and sewed up this square.

Ick.
Then the grading kicked in, Christmas fol-de-rol arrived and the patches still sat on the cutting mat.
This whole time I’ve had this patch up on the pin wall, and have thought, well. No.

Here I spent all this money on this fabric and I hate the quilt. I remember evaluating dresses I was making in high school, hating them all, thinking why did I waste my time on this? And then I remember my mother saying to me that you can’t judge the success or failure of a sewn outfit until you get the hem in. Of course, she’s right. She’s my mother. So obviously I can’t judge a quilt by one block.

Another factor in the design was my push-back against one-patch quilts–simple designs I see all over the web on my blogs. Quilts used to be about the grid and the geometric-ness of it, if I can make up that word. Then the art quilt hit, and people left the grid behind and certainly the quilt world is better for it. I love many of them.

And the current craze of one-patch or simple designs I think is a result of the large-scale design on a piece of fabric–a design that would just not look good cut up into teensy squares/triangles/rectangles and then sewn back together.

But when I glance at a bed, while I like the large-scale prints and the simple designs, I still long to see something more traditional and perhaps more elaborate, a secondary design that might percolate up from the first blocks placed together. So I got out my trusty-dusty quilt block book, which is simply pages of flannel interspersed with paper. It allows me to plan out a block in a portable form.

Four blocks done. I like how it’s coming along. I no longer believe it will be done quickly–it takes some planning and sewing time–but I think I’ll have it done by this Christmas. Maybe.

100 Quilts

Is it This? Or That?

August 7, 2009August 28, 2022 Elizabeth E.

The zeitgeist in the online quilt world this past few weeks seems to be nine-patches framed by white sashing.

So I made one myself.

I finished the quilt top of the red, orange, pink quilt and also stitched all the squares together for the back. I think the quilter lady is out of town, but my part is done and I’ll wait for her to return.

This summer I have also stitched together a totebag (had to try the pattern), a jacket, two skirts, a purse, two quilts, finished editing my father’s memoir, watched my youngest son get married, taken three short trips, maintained several blogs, written up my teaching course outlines/documents/syllabus and a couple of the first assignments.

I actually made a List of Summer Goals, and was able to check off most of them, including reading the Michael Pollan books, a novel, a “reflection” (that’s what the dust jacket says) and a memoir. I also planted my garden (although its performance is abysmal), had countertops put in, new windows installed, made a trip to L.A. and didn’t get killed on the freeway. And while my hands were busy, I thought about the novel I began in grad school and never fleshed out, never finished. Time to think has been one of the biggest yields of this hiatus.

I need two more summers like this one in order to catch up with everything on my To Do List. But my question is, is this summer my real life, or is it that other life, the one where I’m running like a crazy person, avoiding the grading, trying to check off the list of “have-to” chores and always tired (I counted yesterday while doing errands: a total of 100% of people, when greeted by a friend or a salesclerk asking How Are You? answered “Tired.”).

Is it This? Or That?

Maybe this is why I see lots of cartoons of people shackled to their desks in their cubicles, dreaming of breaking off the cuffs. Maybe that’s why I hear about people quitting their jobs and trying something smaller and new (although my son will attest to the fact that if you are thinking of quitting your daytime job and starting a small business, this is NOT the year to do that).

Maybe we all dream of that Other Life, which holds our possibilities, our potentials while we trudge along in the life that pays the bills, feeds the children, wipes up the floor, watches the tomatoes shrivel in the garden, swelters in the heat and dies knowing they missed out on their Big Chance.

A Quilt, or Two

July 30, 2009April 2, 2024 Elizabeth E.

I couldn’t really talk about these before because they were both gifts. The one above was for my son and his wife. When I made the first round of HUGE quilts, they’d just gotten married and weren’t really sure they wanted a quilt (she told me later her grandma made VERY traditional quilts, and she’s more of a modern gal). But after seeing some of mine, we all went down to the fabric store last Thanksgiving and picked out the pattern and fabrics; I added some from my stash when I needed to broaden the palette.

I gave this to Matthew and Kimberly this weekend, and they seemed happy to have it. I’m sure they’ll send me a photo of it on their bed soon (hint, hint) and I’m happy they like it.

I didn’t really have a name for it when I sent it off with them, but today I had some time to think about it. . . and go through my favorite quote book. I couldn’t resist Marlowe’s verse, from The Passionate Shepherd to his Love:

Come live with me, and be my love,

And we will all the pleasures prove,

That valleys, groves, or hills or fields,

Or woods and steepy mountains, yield.

While it’s everyone’s mind runs to the obvious (we are so conditioned) I read it on a different level. The quilt has zig-zags, that when looked at from a sideways direction, looks like little mountains, so the name is Steepy Mountains. And for Matthew and Kimberly, who are one of the Most Alive Couples in the universe, they will have lush groves in their life, mysterious woods, rolling valleys, but also the steepy mountains and fields and fields to sow and tend and harvest. Of course, I wish them cuddle time under this quilt, but I wish them most of all, that they live together forever and ever and be each other’s love.

This one, titled Sun and Sand was made in honor of the marriage of my son Peter to his love Megan this past weekend. While they both live in Davis, the wedding was held in Monterey, where a lovely confluence of beach and tide pools and sun and sand occurs. The colors of beigy/yellow of a warmed beach and delft blues of a clear summer sky I thought would represent the world around them on the weekend of their wedding.

It was begun in a class I took last summer, and I wasn’t quite sure about it initially. It’s hard to see the final project when you’ve just spent hours at the sewing machine. I bothered my friend Rhonda in Washington, DC until she said finally: “Get it quilted, and then decide!” I took her advice (she’s an award-winning quilter with impeccable taste), and when I brought it home from the quilter’s, I fell in love with it. I’d already decided it should go to my newlyweds, but boy, did I have a hard time parting with it!

And isn’t that how love happens? We begin, we stitch our lives together, not always knowing how things will turn out, but over time, we blend our hopes and dreams and fears together, and our love changes a few disparate pieces, a lump of wadding and some raw materials into a sun-bursting of a quilt. And we like it, and each other. (Of course, this is all rather cheesy, but hey, I’ve just been to a wedding and I’m all aglow.)

I first discovered this experience when I was stitching a quilt at the bedside of my mother, who had just had a heart attack. I had just pinned the quilt top to the batting and backing and struggled to get it in the hoop to quilt it. I sat there day after day, visiting, working. As I put more quilting stitches in, the quilt sandwich ceased to be three separate pieces of fabric and instead started to behave as one piece.

Enough of the metaphors. . . I just know I send my love to these two couples with my hands and heart and quilts.

100 Quilts · Quilt Finish

How I’m Spending My Summer Vacation

June 26, 2009August 28, 2022 Elizabeth E.2 Comments

Some have asked what I’ve been doing lately.
First, I did all those things I left undone during the last two semesters of teaching school, even finding some un-read Christmas cards in the basket as I went through them. And one bill.
I read the middle third of my father’s memoir, edited it, and went up to Utah to visit him. I read the last third of his memoir, edited it and am headed up there on Sunday to visit with him.
I gave a talk in church.
I had some home renovations performed.
I had the five floorboards replaced where they dropped the counter slab tear-out.
I cleaned up after all the workmen (not a sexist term; I promise they were all men).