Azulejos • Quilt #227 61 1/2″ wide by 75 1/2″ long
It was a rainy, wet day in Lisbon, and we’d made our way by bus to the Lisbon National Museum of the Azulejo, or the Tile Museum. We were rewarded for our efforts as I began to call it the Quilters’ Resource Center. If you are a grid enthusiast, as I am, it was heaven to walk through, with all sorts of interesting ways to think about what’s in a grid, as well as how to use color and negative space to make a design. And so, from a small sketch on that day in 2016, I created this quilt.
I was also inspired by a beautiful fabric created by Alison Glass from her Handiwork Collection. It was just so….azul (or blue, in Portuguese). I filled in with other treasures from my stash, and got to work trying to make it easier to construct.
Cathy Kreter, my quilter, did a nice tight design for the quilting.
So why if I finished it in November, have I not put it up here until now? Two reasons: one is I was seeing if my favorite magazine was interested (not this time, they said), and secondly, it was slated to hang at Road to California with a collection of modern quilts made by my guild, the Inland Empire Quilt Guild. We were honored to be able to have our quilts hung in the atrium as quilters entered, so I kept it quiet. There are more pictures on our Guild’s blog, taken by our President’s husband, a professional photographer.
On Sunday after Road was over, I had to wait like forever to pick up the three quilts I had at Road. My husband snapped this as we were leaving, Ladybird in my hands (well, the backing for Ladybird — a stellar print by Jane Sassaman).
Today I took some more photos of Azulejos, laying it down by the tools of the painters who were working at our home that day, scraping popcorn ceilings painting. It’s nice how a quilt can brighten any corner!
I made it up in a 15″ block pattern, and broke into my meager Tula stash to create a colorful quilt. This pattern is made for beginners, with no triangles anywhere. I envisioned the 15″ block to sew up quickly for baby quilts and other times when you need a quilt. Fast.
I cut and sewed this all in a long morning, which leaked a bit into the afternoon. It’s a pretty quick sew if you are experienced, but a bit longer if you are a newbie.
I also learned a few new things in my Affinity Publisher Software, making the pattern more colorful and easy-to-read. Above is the yardage chart for both versions.
Here’s a coupon code for you in case you want to pick it up. Head over to PayHip and use CITYSTREETS20 — it will get you 20% off the price for a little more than a week (it expires on September 17th).
I found this 1920s vintage park with a grandstand in a small town just to the north of me and took my husband and my most recent finished quilt there, so we could do some photographing. And some reminiscing.
It’s a sweet little small-town-built-long-ago park that for some miracle has remained. Named for an officer of the local cement company at the time, it’s known as the Thomas J. Fleming Memorial Park, built circa 1922-1925. Why is this important?
I grew up in a small little town (not so little anymore), but it had that feeling of walking downtown on a hot summer’s evening, catching the fireworks on the 4th of July after seeing the parade that morning. It had the feeling of being able to drop your school bag at the door, change in to your “play clothes,” and head over past the Muehlstein’s home to send this and that sailing down their irrigation canal until you knew it was time to go home for dinner. (And did I mention that my childhood nickname was Betsy?)
We’d walk up to Heber’s house and offer to find the eggs in his chicken coop for him. He’d let us. We would wind crepe paper in our bicycle spokes and all show up for a local parade. This was also a place where I was smallminded at times, like when I teased Marlene in fourth grade over something dumb, and then used up all her Scotch tape. It’s a place where others can also be mean, like when I got beat up by the Mitchell boy, and cried all the way home. (Later my mother saw him on the road, rolled down her car window and gave him a talking-to like I’d never heard.)
This small town in America was my place, where I learned to behave myself so no neighborhood mother would ever have to lean out her car window and give me a scolding. And how I wish I could go back in time and find Marlene and tell her how sorry I am. It was a place to be small, to grow up, and to leave behind.
But I catch glimpses of it when I think of it as a land of red, white and blue, where we love flags and fireworks and the Fourth of July. It’s a land of learning to get along with your neighbor because you never know when that person with the different name would give you a lifetime memory. Like when I needed to learn to ride a bike and Joan Muehlstein gripped the back of the seat, ran alongside me, and hollered, “Turn towards the wobble!”
It’s mountains and vast plains, it’s small towns and big cities. And America is where I like to be the most, even though now I’ve traveled and love Berlin and Bologna and other different places with wonderful people who’ve gone themselves through nice and mean, dark and light, thick and thin. It’s when I return from far away and see that flag on the wall at the airport with a sign that says “Welcome to the United States,” well, I get a misty-eyed, just like in those movies from the 1940s.
It’s my home, this America. And to me, it’s a pretty great place.
Betsy’s Creation • Quilt #225 Pieced by Elizabeth Eastmond • Quilted by Cathy Kreter 72″ wide x 86″ tall
Quilt began on Flag Day: June 14, 2019 Finished August 20, 2019 More info and a free worksheet for making this quilt can be found here. I also made a companion smaller flag:
When I looked outside in my garden today, the zucchini plant had wilted from the heat, mirroring how I felt inside. However, unlike my spectacularly unproductive zucchini plant [we’ve only had ONE], I’ve been pretty productive. Just not on quilts.
I’ve been working on prepping my upcoming Guild Workshops, getting the kits together (in wax paper bags instead of plastic, given my attempt to cut down on plastic where I can), and cute touches like place cards, so I know whose spot is whose once the class gets going.
The pattern cover with thumbnails showing the pattern pages and revisions. Now it’s a pretty good guide to EPP.
I also revised a couple of patterns, the first one being Spectrum. Inland Empire Quilters Guild contacted me for a program for their evening meeting, then they got together a group of women for a workshop who wanted to learn English Paper Piecing. So I changed some things up in the pattern, added more content, and put it back up for sale up on PayHip.
One thing I made for a sample was this tote bag, splitting the main pattern in half and placing it on either side of the bag. I wanted to show that a person can do more with a pattern than simply make a quilt. That version of Spectrum is one of the variations in the pattern (bag pattern not included; I used the one in the October 2019 issue of American Patchwork and Quilting by Kristyne Czepuryk).
I also made a mini-mini to show them how to do the basics. I’ll be passing out this pattern for a Kansas Sunflower block in class, show how to “batch-cut” pieces, glue and prep them. They can then move on to Spectrum, or stay sewing up their mini-mini. We’ll also do one hexie flower, because what’s a class in EPP without a hexie flower?
(We’ll only do one; these are from my Field Flowers quilt.)
Another class I have coming up is Merrion Square and Far Away Doors, teaching it for the Pass Patchers Quilt Guild nearby. For ages, I’d hand out the instruction sheet to Far Away Doors when the class was taught, but adding it to the original Merrion Square pattern was one of the revisions I wanted to make, in order to get all the variations in one place. I took it offline, revised it, and now it’s back up for sale on PayHip, if you want all three versions in one pattern. [Note: If you’ve purchased Merrion Square and haven’t received Far Away Doors from me in a workshop, please contact me and I’ll get it out to you. Proof of purchase is required.]
Of course, all this is made easier by the fact that I’m getting the hang of the three pieces of Affinity Serif software that I purchased last fall: Affinity Photo (replacing Adobe’s Photoshop), Affinity Designer (replacing Illustrator) and Affinity Publisher (instead of InDesign). I’m getting quicker at each one, knowing where the tools are and how to use them.
I also made three batches of low-sugar strawberry jam, after I tasted Laurel’s. Laurel and her husband grow their own strawberries, but the ones from the market in our neighboring town worked well for us. To go with it, I made a batch of zucchini bread with cranberries and left out half the flour (!).
My saintly husband declared it just fine, and takes chunks of this incredibly dense bread in his lunch every day. He makes me look good, even on my very bad days (of fighting asthma), wilting in the heat (like the zucchini plants outside), and trying to get all the guild workshop stuff lined up from here to eternity. I have to remind myself to take it one Guild and a time, and enjoy the process, which I genuinely do.
I finished The Night Tiger (I can recommend highly) and have started Little Fires Everywhere (so far enjoying it, but don’t give a recommendation until I finish).
I decided I was done waiting to start on this Halloween Banner project. I layered the panel (if your store doesn’t carry it, it’s available here), quilted it, and cut out the flags. I cut 1-1/4″ strips of stripey fabric from this line (called Costumer’s Ball by J. Wecker Frisch) cutting it across the stripe and bound the edges of the flags, sewing the strips first to one side of the flag, then the other. After trimming the bottom edge, I folded it up and glued it all down with my trusty friend, a regular old gluestick. Then I pressed and folded in the binding on the sides, again using my gluestick to keep it in place. (Be sure to press after gluing in order to distribute the glue).
Hit those back-to-school sales, people!
I top-stitched down the striped binding, and am now waiting for the fabric to arrive to make the top part so I can get the banners all ready for October 1st.
Lastly, I finished up August’s bee blocks for the Gridster Bee, using an original pattern designed by my talented beemate Kelley. She’s getting ready for Christmas early!
I think my holidays are all mixed up, because I’m working on Christmas blocks, Halloween Banners, and my Fourth of July quilt just came back from the longarmer, needing binding. I hope you are able to keep your days and events and sewing projects straight. Happy Quilting!
OccasionalPiece--Quilt! 