Road to California Quilt Show 2026 • Part 1

March 8, 2026March 8, 2026 Elizabeth E.10 Comments

The Road to California Quilt Show was held January 20-24, 2026 in Ontario, California — a location about 45 minutes to the east of Los Angeles. It is close to the Ontario California airport, so we attract many attendees from all over California, the Mountain West, and others who may drive or fly in.

I’ve been attending for many of these years, and aside from the blows of Covid-19 in 2021 and 2022, it’s a strong show with many international entries. Road is a juried show, allowing just three entries per person, so those that are accepted have already self-edited their choices. This show also has multiple special exhibits.

I can’t show you all the quilts I saw, nor would you want to sit here and read through that kind of blog post, but I did want to write about some of the ones that caught my eye, although (again), there are many more wonderful quilts here. In the second post, I’ll focus on group exhibits, show you a bit of the flavor and people I met and visited with. Come on out — it’s a wonderful show!

First up are my two quilts: Mercato Square and New York Beauties — for Barbara.

Mercato Square was accepted, and as is the usual with Road, they showed it with all the red and white quilts. (Yes, all the animal quilts are shown together, all the moderns are shown together, and so on. It’s a bit of a visual tic that has been going on for a while, so we just expect it now.) My husband and I went up on Opening Night to see the show, and he was a great help in photographing quilts, and cheering me on (thanks, honey!).

The second quilt accepted was New York Beauties — for Barbara.

It was lovely to see it hanging here! Their title cards:

They omitted the quilter’s name on Mercato Square, so I wrote it on: Jen Boyer. The original posts about these quilts can be found here and here.

I don’t know if you’ve ever entered a quilt show, whether it be nationally ranked (like this one), or a local guild show, but no matter what the show, it’s kind of a big deal, as this is our “art gallery” or “museum” for quilters. So I celebrate all the following quilters and a hearty congratulations to them!

This quilt was my neighbor on the right: a scene from Cuzco, Peru.

(Click to enlarge.) Lynn Jurss: Cuzco Fruit Stand (I’m writing out the maker and title to make it easier for searches.)

And this was my neighbor to the left: a gorgeous Star of Bethlehem.

Jean McElherne: Red Radiance Quilter: Vicki Ruebel

Stunning thread painting, all the way from Spain.

Isabel Muñoz: Beyond the Seas

I loved how the maker combined an image and appliqué.

Great detail of the shell. This isn’t a huge quilt, but the little details are charming, especially the sea star in his back pocket.

Laura Golden: Ocean Rescue

This was across the way from Mercato Square; I loved it.

Sherry Priest: Core Memory

A beautifully colored Sarah Fielke design.

Renee Miles: Coming Home

I love that we are still seeing quilts made during the Covid experience.

Robbi Eklow: A Bit Garish

You saw some of Vicki Ruebel’s quilting earlier, on the Star of Bethlehem. Here is one of her quilts.

Makers: Vicki Ruebel, with her mother, Judy: The 95

What a gorgeous bouquet of a quilt!

Gareth Griffin: Spring Bouquet
Her quilting was worth studying, and was so detailed.

Here’s another quilt, full of beautiful quilting.

Caryl Bryer Fallert-Gentry: Tricuspid Biomorph #1

I’m still trying to get used to digital prints being “quilts” but I’m making progress on accepting tri-layered, quilted rectangles as quilts, no matter how they started. Seeing some of the entries in the Carrefour Patchwork Show in France this past year helped me on this journey.

I noticed, also, how many “layered” quilts there were this year. I’ll be showing more later, but this one is more modern, and is not raw-edge appliqué. Stunning work.

Here’s an almanac of quilt stitches for you.

Sandy Curran: Survivor

Amy does it again, with her beautifully worked miniatures.

Amy Pabst: Pink Lemonade

I’m always curious: when she says they were foundation pieced, does this mean she did it over a fabric or non-woven that stays in, as I would hate to think of her having to take out all those teensy bits of paper. (As always with these smaller gallery images, click to enlarge.)

This was just down a bit from my New York Beauties quilt, and I visited it often. I saw Cassandra putting up the blocks on her Instagram feed while she was making it.

Cassandra Beaver: 100 Days of Apple Cores

From apples…to eggs.

Nikki Castro: All My Eggs. Quilter: Isabell Prado

Loved the repetition here, of boys pretending to fly and the quilting.

Katie Henrich: Flight of Wonder

Sacred Threads Quilts

You can read more about Sacred Threads online. Here are a few of the quilts that were in Road this year.

Patricia Caldwell: Connections
(As always on these groups, click to enlarge.)

Living within driving distance of the Manzanar Internment Camp, we took a drive one weekend to visit, gaining an appreciation for what these citizens suffered. If you haven’t had a chance to see one of these camps, I hope you can do so in the future.

Patty Kennedy-Zafred: Tagged

Given that we quilters are so dependent on our eyesight, this quilt’s story was sobering.

Susan Price: Insight

These simple shapes evoke history.

Bonnie Bowman: Striped Stripes

Christine Vinh: A Quiet Oasis

QuiltCon Traveling Exhibit

We had a few quilts from the QuiltCon traveling exhibit here, too.

Lucy Engels: Fugue

Did you see that? HAND-appliquéd circles!

Nora Bauser: Dot Your Eyes

This was from a different exhibit, but for some reason, I only have just this quilt.

Janice Willis: Connecting With Your Roots

Free to Sp%@K Special Exhibit

A very interesting exhibit, but one that had a lot of comments from visitors. I was there on Saturday, shortly after the Alex Pretti shooting in Minneapolis, and many of the pieces in this exhibit resonated with the visitors.

Kathryn Pellman: The Revolution Kind (2025)

Kathyn Pellman: My Thank You to Hillary Clinton (2017)

I was interested in the choice to use writing to illustrate some points in these free speech pieces. While Pellman could have gone abstract with shapes and colors and design, the very fact that she’s chosen to use speech dovetails with the subjects of her quilts, and also gives a nod to the idea that freedom of speech is protected in our Constitution, although sadly that weekend, we witnessed the betrayal of that freedom.

Kathryn Pellman writes out the First Amendment to the Constitution on this piece. The title is Donald Trump Made In China Owned by Putin (2025).

MartyO: Weight of Letters (2025)

MartyO: Scrubbed

Kelly Hartigan Goldstein: OLD BABY, MAD KING – July 4th (2025)

So much in this exhibit to think about, such as, is a paper “quilt” a quilt as we think about it? I don’t know, but that’s trivial compared to the issue being raised. The fact that it is cut out from a single newspaper is remarkable.

Layered, Collage Quilts

Sandra Mollon: Crossing the Mkuze River

Sandra Mollon had more than one quilt in this show, and several of her students also had quilts; I liked that all the photographs were attributed. In addition, Road hosted a special exhibit of some of her landscape quilts. They were all so beautifully rendered.

Sandra Mollon: Toroweap Overlook

I’ve always wanted to make one of these, but they look so daunting!

Sandra Mollon: Valley View Yosemite

This holds a special fascination for me, as this valley is where my husband proposed to me.

Sandra Mollon: Smoky Mountain Vista

Sandra Mollon: Boulders at Lower Yosemite Falls

Ricki Selva: Isbjørn

They had lights underneath the quilts, so the value on this is slightly changed: the entire quilt was in saturated hues. Don’t miss that log on the lower edge!

Angie Tustison: Cathedral Trees

Ricki Selva: Emerald Miles

Another amazing quilt by Ricki Selva (and amazing story).

Mimi Ghauri-Young: Stag’s Leap

The detail in the lower river was quite perfect.

Are your eyes crossing yet? So many beautiful quilts, and I know this has been a long post. Just a few more until next post, when I show just a few more.

Kestral Michaud: Echoes of Time and Magic

Similar techniques, but such a different flavor of quilt.

How about this for a change of pace?

Anne Kobus: Let’s Get This Party Started!

More color!

Carlton Brown: Destiny Calling 2

Robyn Phelps: Jasper

Made from Maggie Walker fabrics, which inspired her design. Gorgeous quilting, too.

Last one for this post.

Ricky Tims: The Visitation (loved the quilting in the background).

Time to end!

I’ll link over the next post when I get it written. Hope you enjoyed seeing these quilts!

(It’s been windy here for several days!)

300 and Beyond · New York Beauties · Patterns by Elizabeth of OPQuilt

New York Beauties • Quilt Finish

September 7, 2025September 7, 2025 Elizabeth E.12 Comments

New York Beauties took a long time to get here: about three years. Started in 2022 from the spark of an idea, with a pillow of four New York Beauty blocks, it quickly morphed to quilt size, with a series of block tutorials. Then it moved from there to the new rage of freezer-paper piecing, tired as we were of ripping off papers from the back of our precision piecing.

While that took some time, to get all those blocks designed and drafted, then figure out a tutorial, then make the required number — it seemed to take longer to quilt it myself. Every block called for a new idea, a new way to outline the rays, or fill in the backgrounds, or sculpt the arcs. Many times I seriously doubted I was up to the task.

I unpicked some areas and re-did them. I’m still not sure about some of them, but it’s time to let this rest.

Quilt #300
Started June 2022 • Finished September 2025, with the label being sewn on this afternoon.

I’ve learned a lot about what colors are my favorites (butter yellow seems to be right up there, along with a bluey aqua).

I found out my machine’s limitations. Neither it — nor I — are high-precision longarm machines, although we do our best.

I remembered that sometimes simple borders are best, and that a ruler and a disappearing marker can get those designs sewn into cloth.

I thought about my very own New York beauty, born in the Empire State. She has fallen in the love with the Big Apple (New York City’s nickname) and tries to go there often. This quilt is for her….

…from me, her mother.

I was stitching the binding down while we were at her house this past week, so yes, you do see little binding clips. Kinda’ adds to the color, don’t you think? But I didn’t want to leave without a picture of her with this quilt, since the full title is:

Usually I do a round-up of blog posts at the end of a Quilt Finish, but this time I’ll just send you up to the New York Beauties page with everything listed, including a free block or two. The rest of them are in the pattern, found in my pattern shop on PayHip.

I will say that the border was cut 5″ wide, then mitered on. I will probably update the pattern at some point in the future, complete with new photos, etc. If you have purchased it, you can re-download it. I’ll announce it on here.

Lastly, I am now working on a visual index for my quilt blog. It’s called Blog Index, and it’s up at the top.

Take a look!

Digital/Virtual World · eQuilt Universe · New York Beauties · Quilts

This and That • August 2025

August 30, 2025August 30, 2025 Elizabeth E.8 Comments

Since today is the 30th, I slid August’s This and That right under the wire.

For those who are new here (and thank you for subscribing) I often do a “This and That” post that contains a lot of small bits, updates on projects and pieces that don’t warrant their own post.

In other news…this is post number 1300. I started writing this blog in January of 2007. Thank you all for reading. And for your comments. And for being a part of my life for many quilty projects!

First up, on America’s Labor Day Weekend (Happy Labor Day, everyone!): a cool and calm photo my husband took near our home. He has a fascination for the flight of herons, and I loved this one, with all its blues.

I made my July block (churn dash, lower left) and August (star), both in this month. I’m using all my collected Sherri & Chelsi fabrics, some from her first lines. Sherri has started putting her quilt together, but I’m not sure how I’ll want to do mine.

I saw this while scrolling through some reels. As she tells it, when you turn 50, you are assigned a hobby.

I am so glad I was assigned Quilting, although I’m getting more and more interested in Geneology. And that group about travel actually sounds sort of interesting.

I went through my house and packed up four boxes of quilt books to send up to the Utah Valley Quilt Guild. My friend Lisa is the Librarian, and she said they’ll keep some and put others up for sale in their fundraiser.

Happy to for them be put to a good use.

And I’ve been putting these up for far too long. With this last one, I am at the end of the quilting on the center. And this is what I’ve sketched out for the borders of this New York Beauties quilt (yellow thread on the yellow border): We’ll see.

I’m sure I’m not the only person in the world that decides to (1) clean out a drawer or (2) lay on the sofa or (3) start a new project or just (4) doomscroll when there is a task awaits that is larger-than-my-tiny-brain-can-handle. After running out of things to procrastinate with, I finally started quilting the border this week. Big sigh, big relief.

The #ScrappyMeetsThriftChallenge soldiers on, with this installment. Or as I call them, my Economy Blocks.

I created a new page dedicated to this quilt so its easier to find the free patterns to make this. You can see “Economy Quilt” in the header, above.

Now here’s a random topic for you. I’ve been reading a lot about AI, and present here some clothing examples of bad photos, with arms that look like they were cut-out paper dolls, weird colors of skin, same model in same pose, clothing that fits oddly around the neckline. This is what they call AI Slop.

“Slop, at least in the fast-moving world of online message boards, is a broad term that [is] in reference to shoddy or unwanted A.I. content in social media, art, books and, increasingly, in search results,” wrote Benjamin Hoffman in a recent article in the New York Times.

While that article focused on searches done on a search engine, I found Kristian Hammond’s comment interesting: “You search for something and you get back what you need in order to think — and it actually encourages you to think. What it’s becoming, in this integration with language models, is something that does not encourage you to think. It encourages you to accept. And that, I think, is dangerous.”

Like we’re supposed to accept that this illustration above is a quilt? Hardly.

When an AI visual-creation platform first landed in 2022, I tried to tell it make a nine-patch block (on the left). That was a joke. I wrote in the email to my friend; “My first one was pretty weird, but I tried to improve my text commands, and the illustrations got a bit better.” My commands are in the text box, above. I tried it again this week, even though I’m sort of basically opposed to the use of AI these days (keep reading). The command was “nine-patch quilt block.” The results:

Nope. Couldn’t find one nine-patch in the mix. This is a serious illustration of AI Slop, which is pretty ubiquitous these days.

Like what is this??? (Also from my “nine-patch” prompt.) Love the “quilting needles.”

According to Natalie Fear, “A Google image search screenshot has ruffled feathers online after it showed more AI-generated results than real-world examples of baby peacocks…[T]he screenshot has sparked mass debate online, with many creatives calling for stricter rules for AI-generated search results to mitigate the spread of misinformation.”

This was published last year, and it’s only gotten worse.

Because of AI slop, I rely less and less on Google search, and type in -ai at the end of my search query quite often. I don’t want to be just “accepting” what is served up to me. And I use DuckDuckGo a lot more now, and even Reddit, as search engines.

Again, use -ai if you want a cleaner search.

Commenters on Reddit had this to say about AI Slop:
1) Slop is just a slur that you say after “AI” to show that you don’t like AI.
2) [Slop] refers specifically to AI generated creations that are clearly low effort engagement-farming spam.
3) Some people call everything that’s AI-generated “AI slop” as an insult, while many other people only use it to describe low effort, low quality content.

And lately, we’ve been hearing more and more and more about the downsides to AI.

Like the energy it consumes (a tongue-in-cheek approach).

Such as what it’s like when a Data Center is built down the road from you.

Like the amount of natural resources it eats up.

Also more on that here.

The problem is that AI, a general term, is integrating itself into our world.

For example:
• I like the clean-up tool on my iPhone photos. Is this AI?
• Doing a search on a search engine. Is this AI? (It is, if you don’t type the three digits -ai after your search terms.)

• Reading on social media and liking that picture of a young woman at a sewing machine. Is this AI? (from here. Be sure to read Weeks and Ringle’s text on this Instagram post.)
I think AI will slide in all around us, whether we are cognizant of it or not, and whether we need it or not. And might make mistakes that could be hard to fix. I love Kyla Scanlon’s recent post about how people feel about AI.

For me, it’s mixed.

Is AI all bad? Perhaps not. Genealogy research is putting it to good use. Here in the quilting world, we already have an “AIQuilter.” I enjoyed reading Sherri’s take on this subject, on her SherriQuiltsALot blog. Julia Wachs, on her website, also does an analysis of a few AI “quilts” and how to avoid purchasing AI-generated quilt patterns, which are sketchy at best in the instructions aspect. But to balance it out, this blogpost goes all in on the AI-design concept.

I just know that when I sit down to design, when I open up my Affinity Designer software, I’m not using 10x energy. Or 10x water.

Finally, Lastly, CanWePleaseStopTalkingAboutThis, my favorite definition of AI’s LLM (Large Language Models, such as ChatGPT) is that it’s “just a bag of words,” so no need to make it your friend, or take it seriously. I’m sure it does have its benefits, which we will discover as time goes on, because whether we like it or not, AI is here to stay.

When my brain is futzed out from all of this, I return to earth, to retreat to the fascinating brilliance of this real world. I return to the human level of making. Like quilts.

Or like a dress, or something. My sister’s been hot on this clothes-making for some time (inspiring me) and you know I’ve been sewing, too. But now I have a couple more pieces of fabric and want to make something else. Oh, what to choose? Hart’s Fabric has an extensive pattern collection, as does Oak Fabrics in Chicago (plus they both have fabric). Another place for both fabrics and patterns is Harmony, a fun shop in Provo, Utah.

Or a piece of writing for the Carrefour Quilt Show? It is being held next month in the Alsace region of France. This year is their 30th Anniversary, and since I’d written about it here in this space, they contacted me to see if I’d like to write something for them. I would! and I did. You can find the first post on their blog.

It’s in English, as well as French and German.

Maybe I’ll see you there?

In the meantime, I’ve got a border to sew, squircles to prep, and everything in between. And I’m not using AI for any of it.

Happy sewing!

NOTE: None of the illustrations or photographs you’ll find on this blog are AI, UNLESS I LABEL THEM AS SUCH (like the silly raccoon, above). None of my quilt designs or patterns are AI, either. It’s all home-grown, here!

300 Quilts · New York Beauties · Patterns by Elizabeth of OPQuilt

New York Beauties: Old Friend

July 12, 2024August 30, 2025 Elizabeth E.10 Comments

New York Beauties is like an old friend: we’ve hung out together, we’ve been sad together, happy together, goofed off together, and are now celebrating together a milestone: this flimsy is finished.

I cut the yellow borders 5 1/4″ because I couldn’t decide between 5″ or 5-and-a-half-inches. So many seams! I found it easier to lift up the seams on the outside curves, and not sew those down. When I couldn’t do that, oh well.

This view always appeals to me: New York Beauties stained-glass. I put it up after our dinner, and waited for the sun to go down, for that golden hour.

Now it will go away for a while to quilting purgatory, as I’ve decided to quilt it myself and I’ve got two in line ahead of it.

As it has hung up on my design wall for the last little bit, I’m kind of in love with it. Yes, I can see all the flaws, but I can also see all the beauty. My sister posits that the spikey part of the design might have been inspired by this lady:

This, from a project in my very first digital art class, long long ago. I looked up the block origins and the sources are crickets on where it started, but, that crown! I’m going to go with my sister’s idea, I think.

I had to design/make one more block to get this quilt top to gel. Here it is, a freebie:

NYB Block 14 Dayspring_OPQuilt Download

You’ll need to download the other free block, Wild Sunflower, to get that outer corner piece. I just couldn’t cram one more piece in here, and I knew you are all resourceful and can figure out how to go to the Main New York Beauties page, or if that fails, head to my pattern shop where I sell the full pattern, if you want to start a relationship with your New York Beauties quilt. But take it slowly at first, while you get your sea legs. For it was Shakespeare himself who noted that “To climb steep hills / Requires slow pace at first” (Henry VIII, Act I, Scene 2, Line 128). On that New York Beauties tab are lots of posts, with lots of tips and hints. One a month might be a good rhythm at first, but towards the end you may want to speed it up. You know how it goes.

There were times I didn’t think I’d ever finish this. Learning how to make it with freezer paper speeded up the process, but so many seams. So many pieces. But what a lovely outcome, hanging from my wisteria vines on a sultry summer evening. This photo shoot took a while, and I savored every minute. I’ve worked with this quilt for a long while, and we’ve become companionable. As I’ve read other people’s blogs, I have noticed this feeling with their long-term quilts. Yes, fast quilts are fun, but there’s something about spending time with one project over many months, savoring the stitches.

Happy Summer’s Eve, everyone.