Category: Creating

Creating · Something to Think About

Christmas Is Coming!

Elizabeth E.4 Comments

Christmas has come to the bedroom.

I think that’s one of the enjoyable things about the holidays: reacquainting yourself with packed-away treasures.  This quilt took me about half a year to make, but I love looking at each individual star, and thinking about how all quilts, people, puppies and babies are like: each unique in its own way.

I’ve been busy baking and cooking, a side effect from having too much grading.

I made Stuffed Pumpkin. . .

and Pear-Persimmon bread, which is wonderful. And then. . .

I had to give you the recipe for Pear, Cranberry and Gingersnap Crumble for the holidays.  It serves a bunch, and is really festive looking.  And delicious.

All the links are to my recipe blog, one that I set up to share the things I bake and make.  Today’s goal is to make my annual homemade Christmas Caramels.  Here’s a shot from the year before, as I wrap them.

I’m sure that each of you has a traditional holiday recipe that you pull out every year and make.  While this makes extra work for ourselves, in some way, Christmas is a time to put away the usual and do the unusual, to show love and caring for everyone in our lives.  I’d been dragging my feet on getting the decorations up this week — thinking, as we put out the nutcrackers and nativity sets — that no little children would be coming to see our Christmas.  But yesterday that all changed as we made arrangements for our grandchildren to spend the night!.  We’ll pick them up at 5:00 p.m.,  go to see the Muppets movie, then come back here, settle in to our evening.  In the morning, I plan to make waffles and they’ll all squeeze orange juice with their grandpa, another tradition.  My son will come and retrieve them mid-morning.  Just knowing that some children would come for Christmas made all the difference.  I was able to set up the Christmas Village, get the garlands hung and the advent calendar put up in one fell swoop yesterday afternoon.

  Here’s hoping you have some children involved in your celebrations this year!

100 Quilts · Creating

Light in the Crook of Shadows

Elizabeth E.6 Comments

Fall’s come to the bedroom.

I like to change up the quilt at the bottom of my bed every once in a while away from the standard blue one-patch that usually resides there.  And the fall colors really create a different mood in the room.

I began this quilt in a class about plaids, taught at Road to California by Roberta Horton.  One thing she said always stuck with me, and that was not too worry too much if the grain line was perfectly straight.  Part of that is because you could lose your mind trying to get it perfect on these ikat and plaid fabrics.  But, she said, slightly off-grain plaids give an energy to the quilt, and so to worry over them also deprives you of some motion within the design.

I chose a simple block design of a smaller square bordered by two triangles, all sewn to a larger triangle.  You can do a lot of things with this block.

I had fun adding that orange checkerboard as an inner border.

Here’s the crazy-pieced back.

And the labels.  The title and blurb come from my love of two words at the time: crook, meaning in the corner of something, like a “crooked elbow,” and illume, a variant of illuminate.  Click to enlarge if you want to see someone get carried away with fancy words, although I still like the title of the quilt very much.  I’d just change up a few things in that description tag. At that time I was in the final years of my undergraduate degree in Creative Writing, and was awash in fancy words — not only my own, but those of my classmates and visiting writers and seminars and all the books I was reading.  But I’ve decided that our quilts are as much a creation for all times as they are a record of who we were when we made them. Fancy-schmancy words and all.

Creating · Something to Think About

Orvieto, Austria and Quilting Designs

Elizabeth E.2 Comments

I’ve been working on posting to our travel blog (The TraveledMind.com) some photos from a trip we took to Italy in 2007 (I know, I know).  And given that my last post was about a contemporary artist who inspires me, I thought I’d mention that many old architectural sites inspire me too.

This is a pillar on the front of the Duomo (cathedral) in Orvieto, Italy.  Can’t you just see some of these very old (13th century, some of them) inlaid mosaic designs being made into a quilt?  Just simple shapes, really, but really fun to think about. Here are some more shots of that cathedral (it’s what the town is known for).

I love digital cameras.  Before I’d be whipping out my sketch book to take it all down for a future quilt, rather than waste my film (always limited on international trips).

The one on the left is from a trip to Asia (my husband is a scientist and has spoken at seminars all over the world.  I try to go along when I can).  The sketchbook on the right is from a vacation to England long, long ago.  I think I was sketching the armor patterns from the Tower of London.  Of course sketchbooks are always handy when The Powers That Be won’t let you take photos.

And this one’s from my honeymoon with my scientist husband.  I was a single mom with four children and he married me us, then took me on a honeymoon to Austria (hence the notation above of “Wien” was Vienna).  Yep.  He’s a gem.  We just celebrated 22 years together–it took us that long to get all the children raised and out on their own.  And I’m still grateful to my parents for watching the children so we could start our married life in a memorable way.

This post has taken a bit of a detour, but sometimes when I reflect on the path that has brought me to where I am, I marvel at my good fortune.  It has not been without difficulties, like many of your lives, but we are very fortunate to be at a place in time and space where we have blogs, and lots of access to fabrics and sewing, and have the ability to make quilts, both for art’s sake and for use in our lives.

My road has taken me to many places, but I’m always happy to come home, unpack the bags and take up the reins of my life again.