Santa’s Night Ride • Quilt Finish

November 26, 2023August 30, 2025 Elizabeth E.14 Comments

This quilt has been on quite a ride. A Santa’s Night Ride, to be exact.

It has flown over to France, to the QuiltMania people, who publish three fine magazines: QuiltMania, Simply Moderne and Simply Vintage.

It has flown home.

And it will be making its debut in one of the QuiltMania magazines: Simply Vintage!

I know my friend Carol will like the Corgi on the bed. I do too! My quilt, Santa’s Night Ride will be in this issue, Number #49, which should be out about now. For those of you not aware of the THREE Mania magazines, let me introduce you to this one. While it says “Vintage” on the top, you might instead think of it as more traditional than vintage. It has a lot of our favorite quilt designs, as well as some new ones. I’m just pleased as punch to have my quilt published, and you can buy it from them directly here. Just click on the newest issue, with the Corgi on the front.

The center blocks are Foundation Paper Pieced (FPP) and they go together quickly.

I also made the border with FPP, and here you see my favorite roller. Instead of running to the ironing board, just use this tool, an automotive tool, with ball bearings — I prefer it to the old wooden one I used to use, and it’s $cheaper$.

I always print out a light version of my quilt and map out my quilting. Then I will often use a disappearing pen to transfer my ideas to the quilt.

I even sewed on the binding by machine. It seems like every December, when I’m deep in the Christmas season, I get the bug to make a quilt, but I always finish it up in January. Not this one! This is Quilt #272 in my Quilt Index.

Some tips on using scraps: Keep them in similar values for the center blocks. All my blocks are different, but they “read” the same because I used the same red/white for the inner triangles, and while I used four different greens for the large triangles, they are distributed evenly throughout each block.

Go for one fabric for the light background for both the center blocks and the outside little tree-triangles in the border, as it helps tie the quilt together. You can see above all the different fabrics I used in the outer tree-triangles: cut loose and cut from your scraps.

This has been in the works for nearly a year, so while you may have had a glimpse or two of this small quilt, I was waiting for the day when I could share the happy news, of this publication.

Happy almost December!

Other QM published quilts:
Riverside Sawtooth (in QuiltMania)
Elizabeth’s Lollipops (in QuiltMania: a photograph from a quilt show, but I’m counting it!)
Crossroads (in Simply Moderne)

During the pandemic, I agreed to let them share my blocks with readers of the QuiltMania newsletter. The patterns have now come home to stay, and most are free (see tab, above).

300 Quilts · Patterns by Elizabeth of OPQuilt · Something to Think About

Crossroads

July 9, 2023August 31, 2025 Elizabeth E.12 Comments

What is the difference between achievement and accomplishment? asked Adam Gopnick. That question has set me thinking about it ever since. We quilters work hard to get our quilts finished, our patches pieced and all the little scraps of fabric marching in order toward our vision. Are we achieving? Or are we accomplishing?

“Achievement,” writes Gopnick, “is the completion of a task imposed from outside — the reward often being a path to the next achievement. Accomplishment is the end point of an engulfing activity we’ve chosen, whose reward is the sudden rush of fulfillment, the sense of happiness that rises uniquely from absorption in a thing outside ourselves.”

“Our social world often conspires to denigrate accomplishment in favor of the rote work of achievement,” write Gopnik, and many of us are “perpetually being pushed toward the next test or the “best” grammar school, high school or college they can get into.” The result of this is that we drive the young (and maybe ourselves) toward achievement, toward “tasks that lead only to other tasks.”

Our Guild recently handed out their yearly challenge fabric, chosen by someone who loves purple:

While the challenge (due in September) is divided up into four categories (wallhangings/runners, quilts, wearables, bags/totes), for me the real challenge was working with this fabric.

Challenge accepted. When I was in Utah, I stopped by The Quilters Lodge and they helped me pick out some hues not readily observable, as well as a bold and sassy turquoise polkadot. Was this merely another task that led onto a task, “the point of it all never made plain,” as Gopnik asks?

I remember that Bonnie Hunter, master of the scrap quilt, always said that if a fabric is ugly to you, then you haven’t cut it up into small enough pieces. I didn’t find the fabric ugly — no Philip Jacobs fabric ever is, to my way of thinking. But the colors were definitely a challenge. So…I cut it up small. I chose one of my older patterns that I’d had previously published in Simply Moderne to be my guide through this. It has never been published as a stand-alone pattern, and I knew it was really versatile and strong enough to handle any fabric thrown at it. And it was fast and easy…also a requisite for this Guild challenge, to my way of thinking.

This could have been a series of exercises, dictated-from-the-outside, as so many guild challenges are. I’ve seen some so constrained that it really is ridiculous: how many of you have done the “crayon” challenge, or the “scraps in paper bag” challenge, or the “page number in a magazine” challenge? (However constraining, I happen to like that one.)

But on the other hand, says Gopnik, we’ll head towards accomplishment by looking at this big self-assigned task and “breaking it down into small, manageable tasks” that later lead to the final result. This experience of breaking down, then building up can also inform later professional work, even leading to a vocation. And my guess is that Gopnik meant these as self-directed tasks, with enough time and little enough direction, so that we can roam far and wide and back again in order to find that accomplishment.

“Self-directed accomplishment, no matter how absurd it may look to outsiders or how partial it may be, can become a foundation of our sense of self and of our sense of possibility. Losing ourselves in an all-absorbing action, we become ourselves.” (from here)

I spent the better part of a day cutting, arranging, sewing, finishing the top in a short amount of time. I recognize that I now have the opportunity to do that, and the support of my family. It was not always so easy, and when I was in graduate school (can we say “outside task” to “outside task” to “outside task”?) trying to get a degree so I could launch my professional life, I didn’t sew or quilt for two years. But I returned to it, and when I retired from teaching, my days of quilting — coupled with my education — allowed me to move into teaching Guilds, and writing this blog (“inside” tasks).

“Pursuit of a resistant task, if persevered in stubbornly and passionately at any age, even if only for a short time, generates a kind of cognitive opiate that has no equivalent. There are many drugs that we swallow or inject in our veins; this is one drug that we produce in our brains, and to good effect. The hobbyist or retiree taking a course in batik or yoga, who might be easily patronized by achievers, has rocket fuel in her hands. Indeed, the beautiful paradox is that pursuing things we may do poorly can produce the sense of absorption, which is all that happiness is, while persisting in those we already do well does not.”

So what is achievement? What is accomplishment? Maybe the words don’t fully articulate the slender difference, but we know it when we push through something hard, to end with something beautiful. We know it when that pursuit doesn’t end, although we may leave and come back to it after a time. We know it when we finally finish the quilting or the binding or the label, having worked our way through color choices and fabric choices and design and cutting and stitching, and hang up that quilt and stand back to look.

We most certainly know it then.

Double Star • new pattern

July 3, 2023August 31, 2025 Elizabeth E.17 Comments

Kolob Canyon.

We were about mid-point in our drive from the Salt Lake City area to our home in Southern California, when we turned into the Kolob Canyon parking lot, in the upper section of Zion National Park. Ever since I sewed the binding on my newest quilt, Double Star, on the drive up to see a grandson get married, we’d been trying to find a place for a photograph. Kolob Canyon, with its red rock and green foliage, called to us.

We have a hymn in our church, If You Could Hie To Kolob, which is a fancy way to say “If you could get to Heaven.” The rest of the first verse sort of opens up the possibility of seeing where It All Began, and indeed, as we began the drive up the road to the Taylor’s Creek trailhead it does feel like you are in different space. There weren’t too many people, perhaps because of the threatening storm, or the advent of the Fourth of July weekend. But whatever the reason, it was bliss. We began to sing the hymn, then wondered how many other visitors were singing that same hymn, too, on their way up the canyon? And how many more of them were looking for a quilt photo?

A willing, helping visitor provided answers to both those questions: we were the only ones looking for a quilt photograph, but yes, he (on the right) and his wife did sing the first verse to that hymn as they drove up the canyon. The music is based on an old English tune, Kingfold, which figures because many of the early pioneers in this state hailed from England (including mine and my husband’s ancestors).

We struggled in the canyon’s wind, chatted with them, and wanted to go farther into the canyon, but the upper road had been closed because of winter damage.

The label notes the quilter, Jen Boyer, and that it is from my newest pattern, Double Star. This was a quick one for me, given my languid pace of the last six months, but to be fair, that doesn’t include the two years the bag sat sitting under my ironing board full of black and cream fabrics, collected bit by bit.

I love the curvy quilting pattern, but hate the name of the e2e pattern (Target Practice).

It was quiet up in the canyon with the road closed, with only a handful of visitors to these beautiful finger canyons. I hummed the tune, and was reminded that the last verses talk about how “Improvement and progression / Have one eternal round.” That is a good thing, given that I am always striving to be better, not only in quilting, but also in kindness, grace, and all those other perfectly wonderful attributes that the author Phelps wrote about in the 1850s. Revisiting some of those ideals helps ground me, and encourages me to live well in today’s world, where Phelps might have scratched his head about all the challenges that we face.

Back home, trying to finish up the writing of a pattern, I realized that while we’d had a grand time out in nature, none of those photos would work for the pattern front. So we headed to the California Air Resources Building, which was close by and that we knew had a dramatic entry, shielded from the windy day.

I promise my Quilt-Holding Husband is behind there, but it does look like the quilt is floating.

So now it is finished. You probably recognize that smaller bonus quilt from another post of mine. I included two versions of the smaller quilt in the pattern — one with the border, and one without the black/white triangle border (but it’s not hard to make). The whole pattern is pretty straightforward in the making so it earned at Beginner Plus label.

You can get the pattern in my PayHip shop, and if you act before July 17th, you can get 20% off with the code in the speech bubble, spoken by some rando with a black-and-cream quilt in red rock country. Glorious red rock country.

UPDATE: On JULY 20, 2023, the coupon will expire. I added a couple of extra days.

I guess I was just kind of taken with the place, and always have been since I married my husband when I was 34, bringing four kids to the marriage, and like the saint that he is, he brought us all on a trip when we’d been married about a couple of months, and that’s where I first saw Zion National Park, and Kolob’s finger canyons.

Maybe I was taken with the place because on this beautiful day in windy Kolob canyon, we’d just been to my grandson’s wedding the day before; he holding his bride’s hand, both their faces glowing as they said their vows. These two have an easiness about them, and it was lovely to be the grandmother and not have to worry about the arrangements, or the dress, or the tuxes, or the refreshments, but to just be able to sit and enjoy the radiant happiness of this young couple.

I take much hope in the hymn’s words written well over 150 years ago, their ideals firmly rooted in another time; however, they are still good for us.

Time Let Me Play

June 1, 2023August 31, 2025 Elizabeth E.18 Comments

I was struck by the idea that: “…all thinking is an act of memory in some form. That includes imagination, creativity, innovation and other variations of ‘new’ thoughts. That means the components of the thought are not new. Only the combination is new.” I read this in an article in the New York Times by Peter Coy titled “If There Are No New Ideas, How Do We Keep Innovating?“

This quote came from Sheena Iyengar who just wrote a new book called Think Bigger: How to Innovate. In the case of this newest quilt top, which I’m calling Time Let Me Play (more on that in a minute), I went smaller in size, but bigger in the idea of it, which is what I think she is referring to. The idea that there is nothing new under the sun is an old one, but I wonder if she’s trying to get at a new way of thinking about creativity, an “act of memory in some form.”

Coy also notes that Mark Twain believed that there was nothing that is truly original when he wrote to Helen Keller:

“It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a telephone, or any other important thing–and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite–that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.”

In this case, the memory came from a photo my friend Lisa had given me, and I went on to make a large quilt in cream and black:

How many times have we quilters seen a new “original” quilt, and recognized a well-loved quilt block? How often has a traditional block been seen in a recent quilt, and the maker claiming it an original creation? I am always trying to spot new patterns, new shapes, new ways of thinking about things, but I do like Iyengar’s thinking that it’s memory driven. This motivates me to fill up that memory: to keep reading and adding new things to the mind’s hallways and closets. Museums, anyone? Books? A moderated dose of social media? Quilt shows? A visit to the mountains?

Iyengar writes that thinking bigger is about assembling old ideas in a new way… [S]he writes that all successful innovators are “strategic copiers,” who “learned from examples of success, extracted the parts that worked well, imagined new ways of using those pieces, and combined them to create something new and meaningful.”
Peter Coy, New York Times

So as I was working on the pattern (coming soon), I first called the cream/black quilt SunShadow. <Bleh.> Then, Starfriends, which is what I called it when I sent it up to my quilter. I’m still not there yet. But the colorful version? Here’s the deal: It’s been a long, long winter over here, with a significant death, the remodel of a kitchen, gobs of rainstorms (which I loved, but the grey skies are not a usual thing), too many small things which added up to bigger things. When we were able to get back into the kitchen, and everything was put away (and the glass lampshade I had accidentally clocked with a pan was fixed), I found a tiny bit of extra energy that no one had claimed. I started playing around with color and put the shape of this quilt into a drawing…

…it was like Time had opened the window a little bit and found time for me to play. Of course, that phrase could also be read as a plea: Time! Let me play! but I prefer the idea of all the tumblers falling into place to let a person find a memory, a space, an interval not yet filled up in order to play.

Last thought from her book: “Henri Poincaré, the great mathematician and physicist. ‘Invention consists in avoiding the constructing of useless combinations and in constructing the useful combinations which are in infinite minority,’ he wrote in 1913. “To invent is to discern, to choose.” So keep trying. That quilt you want to make is almost here.

Our initial run at this photographing this quilt against the mural wall brought the lady out of the office next to us, with the scold “What is that? Some kind of flag?”
“No,” I replied. “I’m a quilter. This is my quilt.”
She went on to say we were on private property and generally wanted us gone. A flag. A flag? I puzzled about that long and hard until Dave made the connection that June had PRIDE connections, and rainbow flags were being washed over every advertiser’s website.
“Oh,” I said. “She thought my quilt was a flag???”

In her forming memory, seeing this quilt meant rainbows meant Pride Month. In my beginning memory, I was standing in a field of flowers, with pine trees ringing the valley with my quilt in the midst of it all.

But after seeing it, I did think it needed a different border, so added one. And we went back for another round, but asked her permission first. The woman is somewhere behind those mirrored windows. I’m sure she thought we were nuts.

More play time that night, pinning the quilt in my new blue kitchen.

In the deepest parts of this hard winter, I couldn’t write, I couldn’t answer emails, I.just.couldn’t. But Time is working its eternal magic on me, helping me heal and recover and find myself again. I think my Mom would like this quilt, with its bright colors, and I hope — if heaven has a window that can be opened — that she could peer down and catch a glimpse of me letting this quilt top wave to her. Thank you to all who have reached out and understood, thank you to all who have had patience with me.

Now, let’s go play!