Keep Kalm-a-La and Carry On-A-La

November 10, 2024August 30, 2025 Elizabeth E.13 Comments

Well, my candidate didn’t win.

However, I was making this bag the whole last week of the election, and because I was inadvertently using the Keep Calm and Carry On (only it was Press On, Quilt On, etc.) and they had a skit on Saturday Night Light Live with Maya Rudolf and Kamala Harris that had a lot of joy and lot of play on words (including the title of this blog post), you really can’t blame me for merging it into the effort, can you?

I say it’s okay to name things after current events, as I’m just fitting in with my quilting ancestors (thinking of all the quilts I saw in the DAR exhibits while I lived in DC that were named after election things like the Henry Clay Campaign Quilt or the Fort Sumter Flag Quilt and such). Really I just call it the Black and White and a Pop of Color challenge project for my guild, and I’m done a full 6 weeks early, for which I am celebrating! And no, no one from my Guild ever reads this blog, so I’m safe to write about it.

This took me ton of time, because of all that cord-loop business inside.

The pattern came from a book I picked up in France, which was all in French, but it was a Japanese designer, and yes, I made some shortcuts and mistakes and no, we aren’t going to talk about those. But thank heaven for Google Translate. Isn’t that colorful one on the cover a lot of fun?

I used some handles I’d purchased ages ago in Japan at Yuzawaya (and attached with little cloth loops), but it took me numerous shopping expeditions both at brick-and-mortar stores and ETSY, to even get something resembling the cord I needed, and I raided another bag for the clasp. Like I said, if I were in Japan, all these parts would be at the local Yuzawaya store. I still think I need to order thicker cord for the right look, but oh well.

Side, side, and bottom. Since it took me as much time as some of my quilts, it has a number (293) and is indexed in my Indices, above. I do think it’s clever how the cord draws up the bag to give it shape, but just don’t know if it will work long-term. At any rate, the Guild Challenge is due in December, and I’m DONE!

While I was out shopping for cording — in early November — Christmas music was playing. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. November is a time for gratitude, fall colors and fall quilts.

*Autumn: The Chestnut Gatherers, 1894* by Georges Lacomb. Seen at the Norton Simon Museum.

*Autumn Leaves*, original design More autumn quilts seen here.

Why do I bring up autumn quilts? Because we’ve all seen these blocks from the #sweaterweathersampler2024 in our Instagram feed, an offering from some very talented women. I like the 2024 quilt offering better than their 2023, but they are fun to see pop up (check out this exhibit from some quilters in Germany). The one above is from Iva Steiner, an incredibly talented longarmer and quilter.

But, given the general season of thankfulness and thanksgiving, I’m happy that I like the autumn quilts that are in my house.

Given the general anxiety we all felt the past two weeks, I’m glad that the election is over and I don’t want to hear anymore about it for a long, long while. I was also feeling anxiety over quilting a very organic quilt that I’d made, and all my usual doodling wasn’t cutting it. My husband suggested just going with the flow, meaning following the lines of the organic fabric.

I guess I knew that in my heart, but it took my sweetheart to state the obvious: all those fancy geometric designs I was familiar with in my usual fmquilting just weren’t going to cut it with this one.

The back, a conglomerate of leftover fabrics. I have great light in my bathroom, so I take progress shots in there a lot.

Even in the border, I went organic, like blocks of waving grain, or striated boulders, or I don’t know what. Full reveal after I get the borders on.

I only have three hours left in this novel. I almost can’t stand to stop, but this morning I’ve got a lesson to teach to the church ladies, so things will slow down on the listening for a while.

But a good book can really get me to sit down and get the quilting done. I’ve got my eye on getting this one and this one quilted up and finished, too.

We’ve spent so much time in the last few months looking ahead, so I thought I would leave you with this quote, from Adam Miller from his book Original Grace: An Experiment in Restoration Thinking:

“Creation unfolds exclusively in the present tense. Nothing is created in the past—though the past was once present. And nothing is created in the future—though the future will eventually arrive.”

This quote has made me think, and ponder a lot. When our Instagram feeds are blitzed full of other people’s achievements and when we are battling one demon after another, it can make us long for days when we used to be super-charged in making, or looking forward to days when we can get to the machines and roll like crazy. But, as Miller notes, creation unfolds in the present. All that we take in now will be fuel for the creativity when we sit down and enjoy the stitching in a present-not-here-yet. We need days when we can stop and notice the autumn colors. Or take a few days to practice forgiveness. Or linger on some days to fill our heart with thanksgiving.

Happy Autumn, y’all!

Creating · Patterns by Elizabeth of OPQuilt

Invention/Re-invention

June 9, 2024August 30, 2025 Elizabeth E.12 Comments

I received the sweetest letter this week from Laurie, who makes regular quilts as well as paints barn quilts. She chose my Home, Sweet Home pattern to make her design, and thoughtfully included a photo of her barnquilt, featuring the local councilwoman, Ruby. Ruby, according to Laurie, “has made it her mission in life to spearhead a Community Outreach program to bring residents together for the betterment of our community.” This barn quilt was presented to her on her birthday. The website for Laurie’s group is Chatt Hills Barn Quilt Trail, if you are interested. Click on Tour the Trail to see them all. Can’t wait until mine is up there with all the others–thank you, Laurie!

Here’s a rendition of the front of the pattern, with all its variations. I usually just make one, and oh, maybe another, and every once in a while I’ll go back into a pattern and rework the clockworks at the center to either improve the pattern, or make it into a more comprehensive pattern.

This is the one I’m working on now. For ages, it’s been a simple pattern/block, but when Anne sent me a photo of her Poppies quilt, I knew the potential was much much greater for this little block:

My sketch:

The software I use, Affinity Designer, added a few new tools so I could color in the blocks with “fabrics,” helping me visualize what it might look like. I woke up one morning, thinking of a fat-quarter short stack of red/white toiles I had, as well as stack of French blue fabrics, and spent some time drawing this out.

I have been struggling with this, though, because how do I draft a pattern out of this idea?

A block with several parts, cut in half on the diagonal, with seam allowance added on one side?

The quarter block was even messier.

So I have resigned myself to just making a stack of blocks and then cutting them. I finished this week and am now playing the take-a-photo-rearrange-the-blocks game.

I have a small space for sewing, but it works for me, even though it can get a bit out of control on occasion.

I can already see I need to make one more to replace one that just isn’t going to work. I put these here so you can see I’m just like everyone you know: I stay up later at night, cut fabric, make a mess, try to herd cats (so to speak) while trying to put it together, all the while wondering– do I really want to re-do this pattern? It’s just that Anne’s is so inspiring. Sigh. You can find more of her brilliant work here: SpringLeaf Studios on ETSY.

Finally satisfied — or just ready to be done — I started sewing the blocks together. Anne has already warned me about those borders.

Another pattern that started out just a pattern for a block, then morphed:

And another:

Is it because re-invention is sometimes easier than invention? I love all the traditional blocks, but think some could lend themselves to new treatments, just like when we replace the window coverings. Or choose a new hairdo, which I’m currently struggling with now.

Hot Tip: It’s easier to search in DuckDuckGo for a new haircut than in Google. Google’s search engines have some infamy now in techie circles as being too bogged down, too tied to ads and AI murkiness to deliver decent search results. I agree. There are some other tricks to getting past the inundation of ads on Google, but we are all still battling with the greed of our Digital Overlords on social media (which is why I still write a blog, and why I don’t have ads).

Today I read in a Washington Post article (link should allow you to read) about how our Master Overlord Google is training its Artificial Intelligence (AI) on any and all artists’ works online. Many artists are taking them down from Instagram, because the Master Overlord Meta (formerly Facebook) is also training its AI on what’s on Facebook, Instagram and other social media. Cara, the app, seems to be the landing site for many. Here’s WordPress’ statement on their AI policy, which is the software I use to write this website: clear as mud for non-techies.

Okay, that’s all pretty depressing: I guess eventually we’ll have AI fabrics and AI quilts and there will be nothing original or new. And all our designs (that take days to convert into a pattern) will be subsumed in the Great Quilt AI.

Sigh. Time to download Cara?

In other, hopefully happier, news, I received my latest batch of Painter’s Palette Solids in the mail, so I can proceed with another block of the New York Beauties. And I’m working on some reverse appliqué for this one, made out of Grunge fabrics:

This reminds me of Italy ‘s color-drenched houses. But back in Southern California, the summer heat has arrived, the air conditioner will soon be pressed into service, and maybe, just maybe, we’ll get some decent tomatoes this year before they all burn up.

Happy Summer Sewing!

Creating · Digital/Virtual World

Jack’s Chain Variations & AI Musings

August 28, 2022September 7, 2025 Elizabeth E.9 Comments

Decided to pick this one up again. I don’t know why my mind will flit to an once-begun-left-unfinished quilt, but at least I am well ahead of Christmas.

I chose the red Sassaman print for the centers, and for the background, I knew I wanted to use the white-with-gold Heavy Metal fabric, so last time I was rummaging around in ETSY, I purchased a bit extra (it has disappeared from the marketplace).

My first block. The center was a challenge, so I kept trying. I had another reject, but then figured out three more that would work.

It’s a dot-to-dot sort of construction among the angles.

I press toward the colorful fabrics.

This photo is before I stitched in the white triangles in between everything.

In chatting on IG with Marla (@mingamonga on Instagram), she alerted me to the other name of this block.

(credits are at end of blog; both of these are called Jack’s Chain)

I went over to the Quilt Index, and these were the two earliest quilts listed under Jack’s Chain. This block, shown below, had a Barbara Brackman number of 430, and was first published in late 1939 as Rosalia Flower Garden.

It’s drawn a bit wonky; the center is a true hexagon. But in the newest variation, the rings are pulled apart, set next to each other. That’s what allows that secondary pattern to emerge that we all love.

I did put this up on Instagram today (sorry for the redundancy) but still continue my plea for quilters to acknowledge the deep heritage they have from other quilters. I love stories where “old” blocks are given new life, but let’s not make their works anonymous.

After figuring this all out, my husband Dave took me down to the Beignet Spot, where we shared some small beignets and a Cajun Chicken sandwich. I like those kind of dinners. The temperatures are supposed to soar up into the 100+ next week, so since it was a mild evening, we opened all the windows to enjoy the fresh air. Then we promptly closed them again: smoke from a nearby fire was wafting into the house. One.More.Month. Hopefully by the end of September, we’ll be through the worst of it.

I can recommend this Cold Soup with Noodles & Tomatoes for supper, if you are having the same issues. We used somen noodles and added some poached shrimp. It was also great as leftovers.

And now for a giant leap from Jack’s Chain to AI, aka Artificial Intelligence:

I’ve become most interested in the part of AI that is text-to-image.

DALLE-E was the first one I’d read about, and I think it is one of the original AI text-to-image generators. The operator would type in something like “Teddy bears working on new AI research underwater with 1990s technology” and a the computer would scan gazillions of images, and generate a new image, using the parameters given:

It can generate different types of styles, and while I don’t know where this will eventually lead, neither did I understand where the iPod would go, or how it would be combined with the portable telephone. And so, ever since I read about the ability of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to be used with images, I’ve kind of kept my antenna up when I scroll Instagram. I’m going to throw in a bunch of links here, and just briefly mention some places where you might want to explore, then head back to quilting.

Andrew Kudless (@matstydesign) has some explorations in this text-to-image process, and this post and this post have quite the discussion. MidJourney is an AI Art Generator, and you can read more about it here. The Instagram hashtag #midjourney is also interesting, but I find that the heavy dependence on dystopian, creepy, and frankly evil-looking images get in my way. (Maybe that is the true hidden character of computers? Just Kidding.) If you have access to this software, and make something cool with this new medium, send me an image.

But mostly I’m interested in thinking about how quilters might use AI with say nine-patch blocks, or Jack’s Chain, given that AI imagery can think up this for a house:

But maybe it’s not possible to break out of our grid. Maybe we as quilters are doomed to forever lifting patterns from those who have gone before, or subject the people in our IG feed to endless demonstrations of our improv or block-making techniques. [I could apologize, but it’s probably not going to stop.] However fascinating the exploration of improv, or AI, or geometric iterations may be to us, maybe we have to acknowledge that there might be an end point, although I won’t venture to say where that is. In looking at bunches of AI images for this post, I found they can sort of run together in concept, even if they are somewhat singular in design.

I’ve seen some pushing outward, some new quilting ideas, like we are all taking baby steps towards a new language of our own making. But we aren’t there, at least not yet. But it is this sort of challenge: beginning with hundreds of blocks, a full range of values and colors, and multiples of shapes, all being input into our brains as we try to become our own AI machines, combining and recombining. We are forever hoping from this process that a new quilt idea will burble up from the primordial ooze* of our sewing studios/rooms/spaces, and emerge into a full-blown fabulous new quilt. Aren’t we?

This is definitely my sewing space. from here

Or maybe your sewing room looks more like this? From here

No answers from me about this. I imagine us exploring together, pushing outward here, and combining it with a new technique there and using yet-undiscovered tools to create new quilts. Maybe it’s all a bit too Brave New World-ish for you. Maybe for me, too. I love the grid, and I love standing on the shoulders of the women who have come before. I just don’t want to let them down, nor rob our evolving quilt world of potential new and exciting iterations.

NOTES:

*I was kidding about primordial muck on our sewing room floors. Sort of.

If you use an image from the Quilt Index, they like you to include the following info:

• for the white quilt:

• for the yellow/purple quilt:

Creating · This-and-That

Color, Venice and Valentino • This and That July 2021

July 18, 2021September 15, 2025 Elizabeth E.7 Comments

“Fashion is not ‘art’, because the latter is sufficient in itself while the former always has a purpose, a function, a use. Recognizing the differences is the first step to instructing mutual listening, made up of curiosity, enthusiasm, and respect. This listening needs time, just like Haute Couture and ultimately also like art. In fact, the maturation of the project was slow, a rhythm perhaps unusual for our world but just and intimate for the world that I would like to.” -Pierpaolo Piccioli (from here)

And if you understood that, then you are more experienced than I in the language of haute couture–the clothing, the dresses, the fashion that is more concept than something you would hang in your closet. But just like the movie The Devil Wore Prada in that withering scene where Meryl Streep’s character critiques Ann Hamilton’s sweater, the fashion houses often tilt us to what’s coming in shape, in color and in what we’ll be wearing post-pandemic when we finally decide to crawl into stores and buy ourselves some clothes.

It’s also very likely that we’ll be seeing some influences on the colors we use in our quilts, or maybe even the shapes we’ll experiment with (if you are a half-way, non-traditional quilter). Or not.

So I was pretty amazed by the colors put together by the designer for Valentino, Pierpaolo Piccioli, and while I can’t pretend to really absorb what he said (above), I do speak the language of color, and thought you might like to see some of his designs, shown recently in the magical city of Venice, Italy. The contrast between that very old city with its own recent struggles with over-tourism, pollution and dwindling residents is a perfect contrast and foil to the glamorous, hand-sewn clothing made with extraordinary precision with pricey fabrics.

As Vanessa Friedman of the New York Times wrote: “[The designer Piccioli] has been conversing with contemporary artists — about their work, sure, but mostly about life in general, process, emotion, what turns them on — thinking about how to integrate their points of commonality in cloth…The result — shown at sunset beneath the brick arches of the former shipbuilding yard of Venice, with water lapping at the edges of the runway…was as powerful an argument for the interconnectedness of time, human connection and creativity as anything fashion has produced. The lushness of Mr. Piccioli’s palette — as a designer, he is the best colorist since Yves Saint Laurent — was on full display; so was his throwaway elegance, and his generosity. Not just to his atelier (his show notes name-checked the individuals who sewed each garment [italics are mine]) but to the bodies that will wear the clothes.”

So, what do I see?

In the above image, I see scale: large shapes on a larger garment, then those same large shapes on a more narrow profile of a dress. The designer plays with scale in many of his other pieces, using different shapes to emphasize different parts of the body, and different lines (like those flowing hats!).

I also see a lot of color blocking: large swaths of color against slivers of color (a bit of scale, again), causing each to accent the other. This collection is not about fussy little prints. Mostly I see lush, elegant and rich, deep colors:

This palette is missing the mint of the shirt. Sure, it’s a metallic shimmer of color and hard to catch, but that really makes this grouping, in my mind.

In this one, the palette generator is capturing a lot of the background, but it’s that’s slice of bubble-gum pink against those deep coral trousers which really caught my eye. The grey isn’t those flat greys we are used to seeing in our quilting fabrics, but a soft mellow gray, warmed up slightly, but not heading towards taupe or green-gray — maybe a deep off-white?

Orchid appears to be heading our way, but a vivid hue of that color, especially when paired with bright jungle green.

While the palette generator captured a lot of the background (I don’t see that pinky brown anywhere on the model), this palette is a “be-still-my-heart” series of shades for me as I love aqua blue. But it’s a new take on that–a refreshing deeper shade.

Now to shift gears from haute couture to the nuts and bolts of my life lately:

How about some velcro bolts? This is the boot they gave me to wear while my ankle heals. I hate it for a variety of good and not-so-good reasons (would it kill them to add some color?). The doctor okayed my getting around the house without it, so I’ve just decided to ace-bandage-wrap my ankle for protection, stay off it, and stay home. What’s four more weeks of pandemic quarantine?

Very proud of this: I drew the spools up by hand. Well, digital hand. Yes, it’s in my favorite color (aqua blue). I have found lately that getting the hang of a few tools in my Affinity Designer has opened up new worlds for me in terms of satisfaction with my work; it was a bit of a struggle at first, but a bit smoother sailing now. And why did I make these?

Pattern Shop Refresh!

I didn’t like the nuts-and-boltsy (notice how I’m stretching the metaphor) look of BEFORE as it was too chunky and disparate. I also wanted something as well that would indicate degree of difficulty at a glance. So, I made spools. And I like how the shop looks now.

This is the new display pattern front. I still have a few things left to do, but have finished most. PayHip upgraded some of their marketplace tools, so I thought it was a good time for me to fuss around a bit, too.

Quilting SeaDepths (a variation of Azulejos) in spurts, while listening to this:

I like how the themes overlap: the ocean in Harper’s book with the theme of SeaDepths on my newest quilt. I can hardly wait to go upstairs and quilt. I’ve listened to two of her others: The Dry and The Lost Man and loved both of those. I will reserve my review on this until I finish it (5 more hours). While I listen, I think of Susan of PatchNPlay, and her trip to Tasmania. I can’t wait to show off the backing I chose for this quilt.

Lastly, there seems to something in the zeitgeist here, but truth! Patti chose this without knowing all the other watery connections I’ve just mentioned. If you jump on this link, you can see a lot of the blocks she’s received, all laid out together. I love how nice they all play together.

And that’s it for today. Happy July, Happy Not Wearing My Boot, and Happy Quilting!