I really liked making this quilt, but it’s good to have it done. My husband found a perfect mural for us for the backdrop, and it echoed all the right colors.
No big thoughts today, just a bit of happiness over the outcome and more than a few photos.
What I found interesting about this backing was that close-up it appeared random. But from a distance, I detected a rhythm of color and pattern.
This week I gave it to my daughter-in-law, Karen. When I was trying to figure out the borders, I asked what her favorite colors were: those were the colors I had planned for. Obviously this quilt was meant to be hers, as when she saw the beginnings of the blocks — the squircle (square with rounded shape) — she said that was one of her favorite motifs. And from then on, I stitched with her in mind.
Quilt #321 • Began August 2025 • Finished August 2026 Pieced by Elizabeth Eastmond • Quilted by Nancy Behner • 65 1/2” wide x 71” long FMQ pattern is Four Square Rounded by Urban Elementz • Thread: Superior Microquilter, color 7007
Lots of color in this one. Hope it will be well-loved, and well-used.
Not airplanes. More like what’s demonstrated in the above photo, if you can figure it out.
Math-type planes, like angles and parabolas and spheres and not only those, but rectangles and triangles and hallelujah, now we’re talking quilter language. Right? Well, it gets trickier when you are in Mathland.
The circle above is the Klein Quartic. No, please don’t ask. Just enjoy the colors and shapes. On the right is the Klein Quartic that’s quilted, a structure by Elisabetta Matsumoto, showing how this works. No, I don’t know how it works either.
After I’d finished my quilt with the four houses, I went looking for something “four-ish” so I could give it a name and fell into this article, from the 1860s…
…which had the quilt title phrase in the article. Good thing, because all that about nodal and zomal is way above my quilty pay grade.
There are all kind of “fours” in our world.
Crawling on all fours.
Four points of the compass. Four elements. Or the Montessori delineations. Or the anatomy descriptions of Planes of the Body. And if you are willing to wade through AI slop when in an internet search, there is all sorts of mumbo-jumbo about matter-life-mind-culture.
It’s purely coincidental that the rocket-ship-math-fabric was grabbed in this photo. Actually, I was thinking more about family relationships.
Our four children. My four sisters. Four grandparents.
All of us with planes of connection through shared memories, good days, bad days, sorrow, joy…many more than just four ways to connect. It could be a neighborhood of friends that come in and out of our lives. But when I look at these houses, I see family most of all, which sometimes can be as tangled as a Klein Quartic.
One of my books notes that “The basic relationships governing planes are relatively few in number. Much of the problem of using these relationships is determining just where and how to use them.” **
After a long hot summer I must admit I often struggled with some of those planes of connection. Relationships and relating to each other can be a challenge as well as a delight. However, our lives hold good, our lives hold the awful, and we build a multi-faceted experience just by living in this real world of ours.
And for me, August brings a remembrance of one of those happy experiences.
Glad our planes connected–
**Book was found in a library discard cart and is titled Graphic Science and Design, by Thomas E. French and Charles J. Vierck.
The mural at The Armory is by Katya Orlovie, and is in Fairmont Park in Riverside, California.
The four houses are in a PatternLite in my pattern shop, surrounded by sawtooth blocks. Instructions for all are in the recently updated 15-page pattern. It’s a PatternLite, so it’s cheap!
I love the backing, a Denise Schmidt fabric. FMQ pattern is Delicate Daisy by Urban Elements. This is #320 in my Index of Quilts. And yes, we had fun photographing this last night. We were out to dinner to celebrate our anniversary, and kept seeing fun backdrops in the downtown. It was a great evening, with the heat dialed down a bit after a hot few scorchers. Unlike the early days — where I’d want to get all fancied up and do fine dining — the Korean chicken place was fine by both of us.
I put our cards up on the table. True love, right?
It’s a big, fancy year for the United States, this 250th celebration of those men in white powdered wigs slaving through the heat of Philadelphia in 1776, trying to figure out how not to have a king, but something else. As Honest Abe Lincoln described it 87 years later, we wanted a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” The three documents that were eventually crafted, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are known collectively as the Charters of Freedom. And so we celebrate this beginning.
We’ve done this celebrating before.
The first one I remember was in 1976, and it was the summer of the Bicentennial (200 years). This is about all I can recollect: a picnic with my toddler.
This year, the Semiquincentennial (250), that son will be celebrating the 4th with his family of five in another state, and hopefully they will remember more than a picnic.
When starting a government, or a marriage, or a school, or any great endeavor, there might be some failures. According to noted historian, Joseph J. Ellis, author of The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding, there were “two unquestionably horrific tragedies the founders oversaw: the failure to end slavery, and the failure to avoid Indian removal” (Kindle, p. 8). Ellis’ book discusses these contradictions, and we are still grappling with these today. Between 1500 and 1800, while “five times as many Africans as Europeans were carried to the New World” (ibid., 13), only a small portion of that diaspora was carried to North America, making us a predominantly white nation of interlopers on the Native Americans who lived here.
Those aren’t the only mistakes we’ve made.
Thomas Jefferson declared in The Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” This year, we celebrate that, but I do keep wondering: are we moving towards that beautiful idea, or away from it? And with all the examinations and navel-gazing, maybe we can acknowledge that we aren’t perfect as a nation, but that we generally are pretty amazing?
While I try to hold all these disparate thoughts in my tiny brain — for this 250th celebration, I made a quilt.
My childhood nickname was Betsy, so of course I loved this panel for the back.
This is Quilt #317 and many of the details are on the label. I actually had a different title, but this week decided I wanted to call it The Betsy Ross Quilt. So I made a new label and took off the first one:
(Photography location scout and quilt holder is my saintly husband.)
Washington Monument
So this year it will be probably a more contemplative celebration, given the tensions in our national dialogue. I like people on both sides of that dialogue, but my overriding desire is to see how we can care for each other — the people — rather than just going for power or for ruling over the populace. There’s a reason why those Founding Fathers eschewed the idea of a king, and I kind of think they knew what they were doing. The dialogue — fraught as it may be — will continue.
Samuel Adams, 250 years ago this year, was on to something:
Freedom of Thought and the Right of Private Judgment in Matters of Conscience, direct their course to this Happy Country.
While I don’t have any great answers about how we make our way to that Happy Country, I just know I want us to keep trying. As a quilter, I honor that spirit of making mistakes, recognizing them and unpicking a few stitches in the process, so I’ve put out all my red, white and blue quilts around the house to jolly things up over here. To celebrate well.
• The post about Betsy’s Creation, my version of the flag quilt, talks about America (of course), with a link to free download and instructions to make the quilt.
My husband once had a year-long sabbatical with the Department of State, and I got to know that beautiful city well. Here’s the George Washington Monument in November, when the late fall sunlight turns it golden, taken from the World War II Memorial.
This quote, on the side of the Supreme Court, gets at that delicate balance between just being right vs. recognizing that our liberty needs to be guarded by justice.
My favorite memorial of all was the Lincoln Memorial, especially when I could catch it at odd times, when all the tired tourists had gone home.
Below are some paintings on the ceiling of the Capitol Building (in addition to the Samuel Adams quote, above) that remind me how we stitched our country together:
I read recently how Japan has multiple micro-seasons, not just our talked-about four. Some of the micro-seasons are East Wind Melts The Ice, or First Cherry Blossoms, or Great Rains Sometimes Fall. Devon Peticolas has worked out that New York City has 12, and one of my favorites is what he calls “Hell’s Front Porch.” (photos by my DH and I)
Apparently, one of my quilting micro seasons is Make Something in Red, White, and Blue. I know people who have this season year-round (Carol, I’m looking at you), but mine just comes around about every May, right around Memorial Day.
Here is The Kid Sister to Aerial Beacon, a quilt finished some time ago, but the when the Computer Ate My Homework (aka, my Patterns), it took me two more years to redraw and re-write to get the pattern out.
But there’s another there, too: Santa’s Night Ride, which was published in Simply Vintage Magazine, December 2023. The copyright restrictions are now past, so now you also can get this in PayHip, my online pattern shop.
Why didn’t I combine them? The publisher wasn’t interested in the larger quilt, but did like the smaller version, so I wrote that up and it was published. When I went back to finish up the original Aerial Beacon quilt — because I included so many photo illustrations and variations of the pattern (FPP, EPP and regular piecing), as well as three different border treatments — the page count became quite large, and I didn’t want to freak anyone out with the size of the two combined. But I’ve got them both on sale for a couple of weeks (no coupon needed) and combined it’s about the price of one pattern. (So you don’t have to choose, if you don’t want to.)
If your quilty micro-season is calling out for a red, white, and blue quilt, here’s my recipe for this one. Make the four blocks, then add a 1″ border. I added cornerstones in that border.
I tried a new-to-me half-square-triangle method when I found a small baggie of already cut blue and red/white print triangles, cut off from some other project (I have no idea what). I had recently purchased the Quilt in a Day Triangle Square Up Ruler, and I laid the 2 1/2″ marking on the stitched line, then trimmed. Then I pressed to the dark side, as always, and trimmed the dog ears. I was only lacking 7 half-square triangles for my outer border, showing that truly, I am in the right micro-season and the red, white, and blue gods are smiling down on me.
I had a bit of fabric leftover from making these center blocks, so I used that fabric in the corners of my two outer borders.
I’d originally made these red, white and blue blocks to test the Aerial Beacon pattern using the cut-out-the-pattern-pieces method, rather than using the foundation-paper-pieced method. I do think it’s easier to do the FPP method, but take your time with the first block to get the hang of it.
But since school is out in some places, and going-to-be-out-soon in others, maybe you are in your Go To The Beach micro-season, and need something seagreen and sunny. Then maybe make it up in these colors.
All three together in the garden, showing their relative sizes: 26 1/2″, 36 1/2″ and 65″ square.
I’ve been trying to think of other micro seasons for quilters. Certainly the Sew Until You Are Too Tired To See Straight could be put on the calendar somewhere around October and end the night before Christmas. There’s also the New Fabric Lines Drop, which happens right after quilt market. I can think of also think of seasons for Make a New Tote Bag (right before a trip somewhere), Clean out the Stash to Make Room For More (when you see a new group of beautiful fabrics). And I just noticed ads pushing holiday quilts: I detect another micro-season heading our way!
Whatever season you are in, savor it–
Some Real Aerial Beacons
I wrote about Aerial Beacon here, if you want to read about the genesis of it all, and here, for the early signposts, the large concrete arrows, and how airplanes navigated once upon a time (scroll down in the post to get past the Ladies’ quilt). Here are some more images.
OccasionalPiece--Quilt! 