Category: Creating

Creating

New Year, New Look

Elizabeth E.7 Comments

I played around with some changes to the blog this morning, including a new header.  I like it.  Jump out of your readers to take a look.  I looked at a lot of my quilts trying to decide which to use in the header, and trended toward the ones I’d had a major hand in designing.  There are still some from other people’s visions that I love, like Come A-Round with its dots and circles.  I try to jump out of my reader a lot to look at your blogs as it’s like visiting someone’s home–seeing how they decorate and how they arrange the furniture.  And of course, seeing what kind of chocolate they stock in the private stash!  My current favorites:

and

Suite 88’s dark chocolate with ginger.  Alas, I’m on my last squares and you can only buy it in Montreal!

I had wanted to create a new look for the blog–left it for the Christmas break–and am finally glad I feel like doing something creative.  It’s hard not feeling like yourself.  When I was reading blogs last night from Lee’s WIP, one quilter wrote that it was “her turn to get sick” and she’d posted a photo of herself in her bathrobe, stitching on some applique.  It’s been a bad year for sick–bring on the chocolate–bar, or all frothed up in a steamy mug of liquid deliciousness.  It’s also a strange year for weather–no snow yet in most places in the US.  And down here in OPQland, that is –Southern California, we’ve been having spring since Christmas (guess that means we’ll have a scorcher of a summer).

I added a counter on the side showing the days until Road to California.  That counter may appear and disappear, depending on my mood.

(It’s gone now.)

Creating · Quilts

Quilt Ideas

Elizabeth E.3 Comments

Over at Stitched in Color, Rachel has declared a scrap manifesto: Use Them!

I think that’s a brilliant idea; she’s culled a lot of ideas using scraps to make quilts and has a challenge going to use up our scraps (see her website for more details).  I think the idea, really, is to stash-bust, using up all those bits of fabrics leftover from our projects (or a too-ambitious buying spree).  I’ve been looking for a few of my own ideas on how to use up the stash.  Here’s one, a free pattern from Lila Ashberry, titled Summer House, and you can find the download *here.*

I’m looking for patterns that have a complexity to them, and will use lots of fabric and be quickly put together.

Or how about Mayra Dubrawky’s Sticks and Bricks pattern?  There would be a LOT less angles/triangles in this one, although it doesn’t have that complexity of the other.

Here’s one idea I’ve had in my files for a long time: a scrappy log cabin.

Join Rachel’s “Festival of Scrappiness.” Your finished quilt top is due by the end of March.

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.