Finger Paints Quilt-A-Long • Painter’s Palette Solids

July 29, 2021September 15, 2025 Elizabeth E.18 Comments

I saw this online and immediately jumped. This was one of my favorite quilts at QuiltConTogether, and yes–I’ll take one for myself.

These two quilts, Finger Paints and Cindy’s Delta Breeze, are definitely cousin-quilts, but oh-so different and I’ve had Delta Breeze on the mind for like a 100 years. And the fabric all chosen and set aside in the cupboard, but I can always use another quilt that combines style and color and cool ideas.

Laura Loewen is a relative to another favorite online friend (the Medallion Queen!). Laura has two versions of this quilt: one made straight up, with rulers, etc. and one that is a bit more improv. I decided to jump on the improv class, so am signed up for August 28, Saturday. If you are in that class, come and sit by me! I’m kind of shy as we’ve been in the house like forever, and I don’t quite know how to deal with real people anymore, but I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.

I’m a Painters Palette Solids gal, and Laura doesn’t list these fabrics, so I set out to figure out my colors. Long ago I grabbed one of Paintbrush Studios’ charm packs with all the colors, broke it apart and wrote the number of the color on the small square. But I also wrote another number: one referring to the column on the fabric swatch chart, so I could find them easily. I never understood everyone who cut up their color charts (I mean, I understood why they said they did it, but didn’t understand how it would be easier to find colors), but this system works for me.

(And you can win a complete set of Painters Palette charm colors at the end of the post, if you are a Painters Palette user, or want to be.)

So here’s three photos, showing my chosen colors. You can’t see the Black, but it’s written in pencil beside it: 004. And a quick tip: if you go to Pineapple Fabrics and want to order your Painters Palette Solids, just type in 121- and then the color number in the search bar. It finds it a LOT faster than wading through their menus. (So Black would be 121-004 in the search box.)

The neutrals. I laid the squares over Laura’s cutting instructions so as not to give away any info from her pattern. Again, if you can’t see the number written on the swatch, most are in pencil beside the colored square in her pattern.

Purple is 080. I couldn’t decide on Fabric C–it calls for a light purple and I have two that could do that: a light pinky lavender (084) and a periwinkle lavender (012). I’m holding off on cutting until I see where they go and what will work. Since I think this is sort of the warm colors, it may have to be 084 vs. 012.

Sorry–navy is hard to read, too: It’s Fabric W: 008; Dark Green is 074. I went back and forth on the navy, as to me that color is a bluey-black, but in her original quilt, the color appears much brighter. (The quilt on the cover of her pattern is made up in different fabrics than her original, shown below.)

This is a screenshot from the MQG Website, showing all the award winners from QuiltConTogether 2021, if you want to go and look at the rest. I love what Laura wrote on her blog about creating this quilt: “I had been in a sewing rut, as many of us found ourselves mid-pandemic, and I knew I needed a splash of color and playing with fabric to get back into sewing. I decided on a simple bear paw quilt block but wanted to put a modern spin on it with improv piecing.”

While I did notice that she pressed open all of her seams, I don’t know if I can follow her down that rabbit hole. We’ll see. I’m a press-to-the-side sort of person, because I like the dimension.

Here’s an IG quick movie to show you my mess when I was choosing. Above is my version of the Painter’s Palette Solids color card. Because I’ve been collecting solids for a while, I only had to buy two more colors from Pineapple Fabrics. Hooray for sewing from the stash. (Hooray for collecting!)

This is my Criss-Cross Color pattern. Obviously I like this sort of quilt! Now to get busy on cleaning up the sewing room. We cleared out a lot of my stuff out of the guest room because — oh, gosh — we had guests, and I need to finish ~~cramming stuff onto shelves~~ organizing to get the detritus off the floor.

UPDATE: Giveway closed. Thanks for entering! ~~If you want to enter the giveaway for the charm-packs-color swatches, mention it in your comment below. (Domestic USA only.)~~

Happy Quilting!

Triad Harmony Workshop

October 18, 2020November 6, 2020 Elizabeth E.8 Comments

A song from my childhood always pops into my head when I start my Zoom classes, bright and early, on Saturday morning. It’s something about “bright, smiling faces” that are “all in their places,” and when you see that class portrait where I cue them all to look at the camera and smile, it certainly resonates. (I like to do a class portrait, giving the students time to compose themselves, so as to avoid that strange deer-in-the-headlights-slightly-tipsy portrait that can happen when we try to freeze a video feed with a snapshot.)

The portrait above is the Coastal Quilters from Santa Barbara, one of those Guild engagements that morphed from in-person to Zoom. Again, I have to say I’m really loving teaching this way, with everyone in their own spaces with their own equipment and fabrics. (Do we have to go back to the other way?) I did teach one Zoom class once where they all gathered in the back room of a quilt shop, masks in place, but there wasn’t the interaction; I really missed the individual conversations that the traditional Zoom set-up allows.

And this is what a busy workshop looks like in reality. Everyone is on task (since I took this unannounced, I have blurred out any faces), working hard at creating their own versions of Triad Harmony. This is later in the afternoon and they had all made incredible progress.

Something I do — which I think is unusual — is a Follow-up Workshop Session, one week later. It’s one of the best parts of the class, in my opinion.

In this Follow-Up class, the students send me photos of their quilts the day before, and I put them up into a slide show. This is my view from my computer, and we all engage in discussing the quilts, the fabric choices, successes, and challenges. It’s a lovely time to hear from the quilt makers, the quilters involved at a granular level in creating these masterpieces. It’s not often that we get to talk like this, and it’s a treasured time.

I wish I could have had you all there. More than once, someone said, I was scared to work with this precision, but it went together really well. Or they’d say, they had a stack of triangles cut and changed out. At that point, several people picked up their stacks and flashed them at the camera. A couple of people had theirs already quilted, some were still finishing up borders, and one quilter had printed off onto paper an image of the fabric she was missing in order to show us how it should look. All in all, the follow-up class motivated them to work hard, and finish up as much as they could.

Enjoy the show!

Sue K.
(*The black is for display only.*)

I try to give something a little extra to each class, and for this class I included four different videos they could watch, with different tips and instructions for making the quilt, as well as a line drawing for use in coloring in preferences.

I also included pattern pieces that would make a larger size, shown here for comparison. I’ve updated the pattern in my PayHip shop, and the pattern now includes the larger size. The fabric line I chose for the larger size is Geo Stones, by Riley Blake.

Thank you all, Coastal Quilters, for a lovely experience!

Giveaway · Live-Online Classes · Patterns by Elizabeth of OPQuilt · Quilt Patterns

Criss-Cross Autumn Quilt Top

August 7, 2020August 14, 2020 Elizabeth E.34 Comments

I’m getting ready to do a live-online presentation and teaching at Glendale Quilt Guild next week, and a deadline always sends my I-should-try-this into overdrive. So while I have the Criss-Cross pattern up online, and I thought I was pretty settled, a little voice in the back of my head said I should try some autumn colors in the largest size block in the pattern.

Okey-dokey. So I pulled a group of red-orange, purple, gold, orange, yellow fabrics and I was cooking along, pretty happy with the choices I’d made, but when I was looking for another darkish to put into what was up on the design wall…

…this fell out of a bin. It was Jennifer Sampou’s Chalk and Charcoal fat quarter stack, purchased some years ago. I used to have it out on a surface, just because I liked the colors so much, but had never opened it. (I’m sure you have never done this.)

So, in a flash, all the previous choices were down from the wall, and I had cut and was arranging all the new choices up there. The last image is adding in the strips.

So here is Criss-Cross Autumn, a 35″ square wall hanging. And since we don’t live in a climate that has a lot of rusts, golds, purples, reds in the tree canopies, but we do live in a climate that at the end of summer has a lot of golds, browns and yellows, my husband and I took a drive out in the countryside to shoot some photographs.

We were out in Hemet, by the golden San Jacinto mountains (shown above). One writer once compared the California hills to a tawny mountain lion. I grew up in the Bay Area, where in autumn, the golden grassy hills are interspersed by giant spreading oaks. What we have mostly now is not native, as I discovered when reading this essay, but like the author, I do love the colors.

Now, what to do with that other almost-quilt? How about I give it away? I’ll send you the almost-quilt (already cut!) and its strips (also, already cut, although I have to tell you that once you get adding and subtracting, you may find yourself adding more). There are also a few extra pieces in there, in case you have a different vision. I will also include a hard copy of this new pattern, with multiples sizes and variations.

Leave me a comment at the end, tell me about what colors are in your landscape around you right now, and how you feel about those colors. I’ll pick a winner using the husband-draw-a-paper-out-of-hat method, and let the winner know by email. Here are some image/photos of Criss-Cross Quilt, done in Christmas fabrics:

I’m looking forward to live-online teaching this quilt at the Glendale Quilt Guild next Saturday!

*Criss-Cross Autumn*, Quilt Index No. 232

UPDATE: Just thought I’d add this to the post. I finished the quilt a few days later, using a simple straight-line quilting pattern, varying the directions. It will be perfect for hanging up during September, when autumn arrives.

UPDATE: Comments are now closed. Winner will be contacted via email on Monday, August 10, 2020.

P.S. There’s a coupon code for the pattern, good for 25% off Criss-Cross Quilt through the end of August. The code is listed on the PayHip page.

Guild Visits · Live-Online Classes

Zoom, Part 3: Follow-up Workshop

August 4, 2020August 4, 2020 Elizabeth E.3 Comments

This morning, we had part three of our Zoom experience: a Workshop Follow-Up, the final meeting together. I designed my Zoom structure from the point of view of a student, and something I would always like to see would be all my fellow students holding up what they’d made from our class. The date needs to be far enough in the distance to give me some time to get my quilt/blocks/project finished (or at least have a good start), but not so far that I can put off the making.

So, this morning, one week after our Zoom Workshop, we all got together again. Several of the students sent me photos to put into a slide show, but sadly, some were too small to see the detail, so we had the quilter hold up what they’d finished so we could see it in person. As the pictures were shown, each quilter narrated her process, and talked about her quilt. It was wonderful.

One quilter sent me a picture of her quilt after this, so here are three to share:

From the top: Betty Ann’s quilt, then Martha’s and the bottom quilt is Judy’s. I’m quite impressed with this group of quilters, happy that they were able to use the videos and the other materials I’d provided for them this week. I was glad they found them helpful.

The pattern for the workshop was Merrion Square, found here on my PayHip Shop. I have quite a few more ideas about what I want to try with this pattern, given the wealth of choices shown to me this morning.

My next Zoom Guild presentation will be in less than two weeks, for the Glendale Quilt Guild, where I’ll do another evening presentation, then a Workshop. The quilt for that workshop is Criss-Cross Quilt:

I’ve designed a couple more variations, which I’m madly sewing on now, trying to get the tops done in time for the workshop. Today I finished up my videos, and uploaded them to the Workshop Password-Protected Page, so I’m making progress in getting ready to meet the Glendale Guild!

Now I think we’d have to say almost five months ago. Yes, it’s been 144 days (a truly Biblical number) since we started living Covid quarantine. I think we all deserve a pat on the back!

Happy Quilting!