Category: 100 Quilts

100 Quilts · Creating · Quilts

Cowgirls Write Letters

Elizabeth E.4 Comments

My husband and I lived for a year in Washington, D.C. while he did his sabbatical at the Department of State.  (That’s what they call it.  Most of the rest of us just call it the State Department.)  I investigated any fabric store within reasonable driving distance and one of the ones was Material Girls in La Plata Maryland, about 45 minutes drive from where we lived.  Fast forward a year, and I went back for a visit to see my pal Rhonda, and of course, we had to hit some fabric stores.  Didn’t have a lot of room in the luggage, so I was drawn to the collection of fat quarters they had, and selected as many of this line as I could find.

But what pattern?  Luckily they had a whole rack of Schnibbles patterns, by Miss Rosie’s Quilt Company, and Rhonda and I each chose a couple of them.  I decided on this one, Decoy, then enlarged the blocks, cut them out, and had to piece the border because I was running out of fabric.

But what backing?  Of course it had to be a Western theme.  The cowboys were heavily represented on the front, so I went with the women on the back.

And I had lots of letter fabric, so I envisioned them all out on the plains, posting letters to each other as they herded the cattle wherever cowboys and cowgirls herd cattle.

We all know that the ladies are more frequent letter writers than the men.  So I titled it, Cowgirls Write Letters.  I made it extra tall for my own cowboy to use while he watches his spaghetti westerns on the television.  Thanks, Carrie, for such a great pattern!

100 Quilts · Quilts · Something to Think About

Come A-Round: Finishing School Friday

Elizabeth E.11 Comments

Come A-Round is finished.  This has lived in our house under many names: Crop Circles, Dotty Quilt, Elizabeth’s Masterpiece, That Quilt.  But its real name is Come A-Round. *This* is how I came up with the name.

I finished the top and sent it to the quilter, Cathy Kreter, who quilted the central fan-like circles, and the spaces in between them.  She also ran a line of stitching on the dark green stem and the outer edge.  I was to take over from there, but it went back to her to tackle the middle of the circles–a space about 2″ in diameter, which I couldn’t quilt because of so many layers.  Then back to me and I did the rest of the details.  It’s a good partnership.  The back fabric is about perfect for machine quilting: lots of tiny dots in all colors that hide a multitude of sins.  Just not green thread branches, and no, I didn’t pick them out.  I knew that if I turned back at that point, it would never be finished.  At least not by the end of summer.  And sometimes good-enough-but-done is better than perfect-but-undone.

The circle is simple in its geometry: one continuous looping whole.  Yet most of our lives feel more like jagged peaks on an EKG monitor with little blips of up and down in a rhythmic pattern–peaks and valleys that indicate there’s a life going on–that a heart is beating.  So when my husband’s sister called us early Monday morning with a voice full of peaks and valleys, so different from her usual and we heard the news about her young adult son gone too early, the rhythmic pattern of heartbeat stilled by his own hand, my husband and I sat together quietly for a long while afterward.  The silence between us was thick with emotion and sadness and wondering about whatever could have gone wrong?  We’d start a question, then pause mid-thought, not really knowing where we were headed, but knowing that there was no easy path around this sorrow.  This circle had been rent, broken.

My husband called our eldest son, and now his voice echoed his sister’s; as we called each of our children, we took turns pausing to let the emotion fall away so we could continue with the necessary news.  We went about our day.  We sat stunned.  We fixed dinner.  We took a walk.  We kept talking, thinking about Scott’s widow and his two young daughters.  The couple had recently separated and we wondered how we could let her know that no one blamed her.  I made a cake.  We were more gentle with each other.  We lingered outside after dinner on the patio, the sun falling into darkness.  Then the phone conversations turned to funeral arrangments.  Then the task of travel arrangements, and my voice cracked as I tried to arrange flights, blessing the kindness of the faceless voice on the other end of the line.  We talked with our children: life is fragile.  As people of faith, we believe we will see him again: whole.  After a few days the jagged peaks and valleys of those initial numbing hours leveled out.

It’s really a circle, this thing we call life.  The idea is not a new one, and certainly has a myriad of cliches to accompany the idea: one eternal round, the wedding ring’s symbolism, death to life and back to death again.  You name it, you’ve heard it.  But at the end of the day, we are all encircled about by a sense of going forth and returning, a feeling of beginning and ending, yet sometimes the lines that create those divisions are so subtle that they fade away.  What we send out, we see in return.  What is born, dies.

There’s a famous passage in the Bible, in Ecclesiastes, about a time for everything.  I looked it up again today and interestingly, in among the weightier references of death and life, mourning and laughter, peace and war, it notes that there is a time to rend, and a time to sew.

This week, I sewed circles.

100 Quilts

Red, White & Blue Quilt

Elizabeth E.6 Comments

On Memorial Day, I put on the earrings I’d purchased in Washington, DC ages and ages ago on the 4th of July.

And we walk over to our main boulevard, about half a mile from our house, flags in hand and cheer on the West Coast Rolling Thunder, a compliment to the Rolling Thunder in Washington, DC on Memorial Day Weekend.  This year they anticpated about 9,000 participants–it lasted about an hour.

We waved and cheered and then I came home and put up my Red, White and Blue Quilt, made some years ago with my Quilt Night group–before we were zombie-fied.

We each made a block.  The requirements were red, white and blue and it had to be some sort of a star.  We were loose on the definitions, as you can see.  I had heard Margaret Miller talk the year before at Camp Watch-a-Patcher in Orange County, and she said you can tilt a quilt more towards one look or another by how you sash it and border it.  Because I wanted to push this more towards the red and whites, I chose this toile and made more tiny triangle points and densely colored red stars to pull it that direction.

One afternoon, I laid a few of the blocks out for my husband on our bedroom floor and asked him what he thought about them.  He pointed to this one and said he didn’t like it very much.  Well. . . that was the one I made–trying to work the theme of American baseball into our red, white and blue quilt.  (You can see the eagle that Lisa fussy cut for our centers on the block to the right.)  I laughed, then made another one.

He liked this flag block a lot better.

I also like this block, made by Susan, titled Peaceful Hours.  She now lives in Idaho, and I think of her every time I see this block.  That’s the beauty of group quilts: when you look at them, they remind you of your friends.  We used to call ourselves The Good Heart Quilters, but now we just call it “Quilt Night.”

I made up this Master List so I could remember everyone and what they’d contributed.  I also did the quilting, lines one inch apart and switching directions when I thought it was a good time to do so.

We also didn’t put size restrictions (that’s evident) and I like the fact that this made for a more free-form arrangement of the blocks.  I have Quilt Pro quilt software, so after the blocks were chosen, I put them into the program and worked them up for this handout.