Tiny Victories are Still Victories

November 3, 2025 Elizabeth E.10 Comments

Rookie Mistakes could be another title, even though I don’t consider myself a rookie. Both of these ideas are true for me this week.

I’ve had Krakow Circles kicking around since Spring, and when I needed a small something to finish, I chose this.

A quilt from Lois Parish Evans (Australia): Mandala 6 • Winter Solstice

After seeing Lois Evans’ quilts at Carrefour I decided to attempt her tiny stipple. Okay, not as tiny as hers, but a reasonable facsimile. Tiny victory, on this one too.

Then I continued the small stuff with swirly-circles. Tired of that, and not wanting a whole quilt to be that way, for the borders I drew on a wavy line, added more lines, then finally, a circle to echo all the others. Cool, I thought, a close-to-the-end tiny victory. Now, on to the binding. I chose to do it from the back-wrap-to-the-front, as for some quilts, I’ve come to love this look of the finished binding being on top.

Trouble.

I didn’t count on/remember/realize that the teensy stippling would draw up the quilt that much. Now those corner yellow circles would be cut off by the binding. I snipped a few threads, releasing them, and finished sewing the binding.

None of my circle templates would work, so I traced the end of a spool of thread onto freezer paper, cut those out and shaped them for appliqué. Except for one. That one I had to make even smaller. Yes, I do personalize my patchwork.

Kraków Circles, quilt #309, 28″ square
I started designing this at the end of May, after our return from Poland, and cut the first shapes June 3, 2025.

I think the back looks cool — it’s an older ombre-type fabric.

Labels are oldies from Northcott, by Deborah Edwards. I found them when we had to pull out the sewing desk from the wall when the new blinds went in. (Hmmm. There’s a lesson here somewhere.)

Finished: November 3, 2025. It’s a little victory to get this one done and it will hang in my sewing room, reminding me of Krakow’s churches and our trip there this past May. I’ll take tiny victories, these days.

Hope you have some too–

This and That • October 2025 • Quilt Finish

October 20, 2025October 20, 2025 Elizabeth E.4 Comments

Boo!

This latest finish had a few mothers:

1) a bag of scraps from mine and Leisa’s Halloween in the Vegetable Patch quilt, and…

2) a need to make a quick quilt, which Azulejos is, and…

3) After the Great Computer Debacle and File Deletion Tragedy, I’ve been trying to put back together my pattern files, and Azulejos was the first one I finished. So I needed to test it out, and…

4) This cartoon from one of my favorites (Grant Snider) and a collaborator (Jon Acuff), and…

5) Realizing that I still had the 4th of July redwhiteblue quilt above this cupboard and now it was the orangeblackwhite season.

This is how it came together in two days (click to enlarge any photo below):

I kept the quilting simple. On the back were two leftover panel blocks from the original kitted Halloween Quilt, along with some rando orange dot fabric from the stash. I used the bits we’d cut off to border the panels, so they’d be large enough. And since this pattern — while quick and easy — calls for a template, I put tape on the back so it won’t move around, then I use a ruler to help in the cutting.

Quilt #308 | Halloween Mini-quilt | approximately 28″ square.

This is still one of my favorite versions of this pattern: SeaDepths. I have one more version to try, a deep blue and cheddar combo. Some of this is that I realize that every corner of my room holds the promise of a project/quilt-to-be. I’d been saving the scraps since last year and the bag kept kicking around the edges. GONE! I have been saving the deep blue/cheddar fabrics since 2019. They are washed, and stacked, ready to go next week. And yes, I threw away the scraps from the scraps, as there was so little left.

You know I wouldn’t want to miss America’s throwing itself a party. One of my signs was a cat print-out from Martha Rich’s art (used with permission), and the other sign was my husband’s (Protect Our Freedoms) with the wording he chose. We both wore yellow, as did others.

Bravo to all the unicorns who came out to walk and gather. Lots of flags, lots of good will and as I noted in my Instagram post, we detoured into the Korean chicken place mid-way. It was delicious. Then back to the march. Then home.

Our signs posed together in the Butterfly Alley, near the gathering.

Started the latest Thursday Murder Club listen: The Impossible Fortune.

How does he come up with these plot lines? I am really loving this.

Even though there are technically three more blocks to this A Quilting Life 2025 Block of the Month Quilt, I’ve using Grant Snider’s advice #6 — getting rid of rules — and calling it done here. It’s been a fun project and hats off to Sherri for her creativity and for sharing these free blocks with us. Now to figure out a border, and get it quilted.

Finally, Squircles will finish this edition of This and That for October 2025. The hashtag we’re using — #backtosquircle — showed up with two more squircle makers: Lisa and Betty, both from the mountain west.

Mine are on the above left, and Gladi has some that are shown on the above right, out of beautiful brocades and silks.

On the train to Strasbourg.

On the train to Colmar. I must admit that I looked out the windows a lot.

Now, with a new sewing box, courtesy of a run through Le Grande epicerie in Paris (where I purchased some cookies just.for.the.tin), this is me stitching in the airplane on the way home. In the dark (again). Why do we never put up our window screens anymore to see the miracle of flying through the air? Nevermind. #screensrule

I’m almost to 60 squircles finished, one-third of the way there.
Keep stitching, keep stitching!

Last Look

Summer Flowers • Quilt Finish • Etc.

October 11, 2025 Elizabeth E.12 Comments

The title of this quilt pattern is Posh Penelope, and as one commenter said, “That is a name that needs to be changed.” So I did.

Summer Flowers is quilt #307 and measures 80″ tall by 69 1/2″ wide.

At first we tried this building for the photographs (click to enlarge). Love the building, but it’s not really working. And I had my QHH (Quilt Holding Husband) grab it by the side. Whoops! (This is how I knew the label was sewn on sideways.)

It only took me seven pieces of fabric to audition for the binding, and I sewed it on by machine. There are times when you just have to get it done.

We got the direction correct on this photo. Even though I sewed the label on the wrong way, I’m not changing it. So, this is finished!

You are all aware, no doubt, of the corrupted digital files saga in my life (see the highlighted pink, above.) After multiple calls to Tech Support, I have resigned myself to the fact that all the files with little down-arrows are pretty much gone, and these date from last month to way back into my history of making little digital files.

So when I’m on Low Energy (lately, that’s been a lot), I sit and go through them, dumping them one-by-one, then when the trash on my computer gets filled up, I dump them. Gone. Never to be seen again.

It looks like I’m fully in the Age of Subtraction, my Dad would say. For years I created and compiled and wrote. Now I’m dumping all that unceremoniously. I lost about half of my journal files. The ones I could recover, like when I had four teenagers in the house, were hard to read, frankly. They were filled with sturm und drang (aka “storm and stress”), and nobody wants to remember that time of life. Reading backwards into my life has triggered some realizations.

One: I chose well in deciding to be someone who makes things, if that can be a choice. I have donated dresses I made long ago, but they served their purpose and maybe someone, somewhere is walking around in them. My family now runs when they see me coming, but I have managed to give away quilts, too. That work lives on until it doesn’t, but at least I won’t have to be the one dumping them in the trash.

MFA graduate picture and a post with some reflections on my life

Two: I also chose well when I decided to chronicle my life in writing, which is a choice. You are perhaps used to my public-facing writing from reading this blog, but I have come to learn that personal writing is something done just for yourself. That in this kind of writing, we struggle on the page to capture an event, and to write it for our future selves, or for our families, if they don’t throw it all in the trash (just trying to be realistic here). And now that I’m way beyond the baby-toddler-children-teenager stage, I’m glad I have some writings to remind me of how busy a mother of one (or few) can be. I’m glad I have some written evidence of that to which I gave several decades of my life.

taken at a time when I started doing Zoom workshops

Three: Taking photos has surpassed the writing. Is it because we always have our phones on us? When I first started shooting photos of my life as a young mother, it would take three months to use up one roll of 24 shots of film. That was by design, as film was a cost, and developing was a cost, and I was always broke. Now we can capture 24 images on a walk around the park in the morning and compile thousands of photos in our digital drives. Interestingly, I didn’t lose any photographs in this Great Subtraction, as they were not part of the save-to-drive-that-may-have-been-corrupted-which-was-then-uploaded-to-the-cloud-which-was-probably-a-faulty-process-in-itself.

Four, and last: Quilts last. Scrubbing the house doesn’t. Laundry doesn’t. Our digital lives won’t. Our real lives will someday end and fade away, but a grandchild or someone who is the recipient of our charitable work can wrap themself in a quilt and know that someone’s hands made this, a transfer of self via cloth and stitches.

Keep quilting–

Too Many Other posts about this quilt:

Road to California 2022 • Part I
Writing Poetry
Incomplete
Don’t Ask Me — they all just crept in!
March 2025 This and That
If I Do This, Can I Do That? April 2025
Flying Through Rainbows
This and That: No June Gloom, please.
The Zeigarnik Effect: the Power of the Unfinished
Summer Flowers (aka Posh Penelope)

Thank you, dear!

300 and Beyond · Family Quilts · Quilt Finish · Quilts

Two Quilt Finishes • March 2025

March 7, 2025March 9, 2025 Elizabeth E.11 Comments

What is this mess? My exploded Orphan Quilt Box. I’ve been putting things in here for nearly two decades (the little airplane blocks are for my grandson’s baby quilt, and he just went off to college), and it was time to excavate and see what to toss and what to keep.

I pretty much threw out all blocks with red fabric. I love reds, but that color of fabric went through a hard time for a while, bleeding every time it was used. I started to test the blocks one-by-one, but then just tossed them all. What’s that old song say? Know when to hold ’em and know when to throw ’em away. Yep.

I found several blocks that were orphans of a different quilt. Baby Hurren is getting a little sibling, and we don’t know yet whether it’s a boy or a girl, so I tried to make a jolly quilt that could go either way for his mother. (I need to change out the February quilt behind it.) Here’s a wee pattern for it on my pattern shop–for a tiny price!

A simple outlining of the blocks did the trick. It was a fun project to sew while we feel like we are watching our world collapse. (Baby Hurren’s mom is Canadian, and I feel like I need to apologize all the time.) The last time I felt this chaotic was when I had three teenagers living at home.

Now to switch gears: when we stayed in my daughter’s home last time, in our room were these cute cactus pots. In fact there were several of them. So yes, that cactus quilt you’ve seen being made is to hang out in this room, which has huge shelves on one side, filled with pillows and blankets and quilts, as the teen uses the room to watch movies with her friends, and to hang out (it also has a small kitchenette, complete with microwave and fridge — Teen Haven!). I thought this next quilt could join them all:

She’s received it now, so I can post about it.

We took Kingman Cacti out to a neighboring street where the cacti were in wild profusion.

It was a dance…close enough to get the quilt with the cactus forest, yet far enough so as not to get stuck. And to get a photo with an almost-in-bloom yellow cactus flower (in the upper left).

Thanks, always, to my Quilt-Holding Husband, Dave. He suggested the location and it was perfect.

I tried a new-to-me edge-to-edge pattern: Edgy from Intelligent Quilter. I like how it almost looks sharp-edged and then it doesn’t. I make a diagram so my quilter knows my preference on size:

I have two or three long-armers I’ve used over time, and Nancy is new; we are still getting used to each other’s vibe. She really rocked this one — I’m so happy how it turned out.

My friend Lisa is teaching me how to do binding by machine (shown here being attached to the back). I’ve started using it on quilts I think will get a lot of abuse/use as I’m hoping it will make them nice and sturdy. I think I’m getting the hang of it.

The cactus quilt in process–so many tiny pieces! And the quilt “packages” all wrapped up in selvages, with the edges to go at the top all marked with a removable and reusable tag. Yes, that’s my selvage quilt on the left, and the next post will feature that one, and that’s all I’ll say about that. Baby Hurren is Quilt #303 and Kingman Cacti is Quilt #304. I’m not trying to hit a goal or anything. Writing them down on my Quilt Index is more about keeping track.

And since this will publish the weekend of March 9th, Happy Daylight Savings Time Day, haha. I’m a morning person, and the thought of being dragged back to dark mornings is not a fun one. The sun will do what it does, and I’ll get up when I want — the blessings of not having to awaken to an alarm.

A reminder: turn your clocks forward on Saturday when you go to bed–