Incomplete

February 9, 2025February 10, 2025 Elizabeth E.17 Comments

I keep finding WIPs. Here’s one from eleven (!) years ago:

More about the process on this post, but this was discovered when I was looking for a February-ish theme for my Instagram Monthly Marker post, and found this.

I have this many finished. Even though I still like this group, I don’t even think selvage quilts are in fashion anymore, are they?

It wasn’t until I tried cutting out pieces for the Oh My Cacti Quilt pattern that I realized what a helpful thing are these little tags. I have digitally wiped all the dimensions off them so as not to give away her pattern, but yes — I’m in favor of little pieces of paper that tell you what to cut.

So this is one of those in-betweeners: technically still a WIP because it’s not yet quilted, bound, or labeled. But hey! The quilt top is finished! I met my goal of piecing a (complicated) quilt in one week’s time. And then I just laid about like a sleepy toddler the next week. Good news: it’s already been dropped off at the quilter.

BLOCK OF THE MONTH 2025 PROGRESS

I finished up Sherri’s February Block of the Month (BOM) and it has this cute little ribbon star in the middle. If you need calming down from the dumpster fire in your life (not naming names, here), put on one of Sherri’s videos and you will end up smiling and believing that you can Conquer All. She’s like that in real life, too.

Here they are together.

My Posh Penelope blocks are coming along fine. We are supposed to make four per month, Carol and I. I got in the groove and made more:

It’s tempting to just use all one color family in the blocks, but I finally busted out on that last one with the blue corners.

Here’s the family, so far. I could go green in March…but then there are also a TON of blues in my stash closet. One can never have too many blue blocks in my world, so we’ll see.

Farm Report

In spite of the signs on the front of the egg case, we seem to be doing fine in this department. At this point in our new presidency, I’d almost rather have the eggs scarce again and a calmer presence in the White House. When I saw the metal letters for USAID pulled off the building and on the ground, my heart cracked open a little. This agency was one of our best soft powers we had, which made me remember when my family lived in Lima, Peru for two years. My father had a dual appointment with Stanford University and USAID, working with the government of Peru, building bridges, making connections.

This was our family photo in 1966, just before we left our mountain home in Utah Valley and flung into the great wide world. There were many doing this at this time, for we believed in our global mission of making friends across the world, building bridges, and yes, maybe currying favor before the Communists in the Soviet Union got there first. Maybe that idealism just couldn’t be sustained once the enemy had dissipated (I do still have a Soviet Union guidebook), but oh, wow. The scenes and the stories from this week have broken my heart twice: once for the death of the ideals that USAID espoused and worked and accomplished, and once more for the way it was –and is — being done. Not in the open, where it can be debated and talked about, as is our usual approach here in the US, but in secret, with skullduggery and deception and anger, displacement and many many lives at home and abroad being harmed.

Whatever comes of this episode in our American History, our lives in the 1960s as a family were changed forever. We had lived outside our little enclave and safe enclosure and had been exposed to new ideas, and people who spoke a different language. We went to an American school, but the rest of our life was with the community in Lima. We traveled only a bit, for we were not rich, but enough so I have a picture of my little brother and I, standing in the town square in Huancayo, Peru:

I have very few photos from that time. (Wouldn’t I love to go back with an iPhone!) But the best gift from my father’s work at USAID and Stanford was the idea that people are people all over the world. This I hope to carry with me forever: the world is good and welcoming and we need to be a part of it.

Now, stay away from the news and get to quilting!

Quilts · This-and-That

Why do I do this? • February 2025 This and That

February 2, 2025August 23, 2025 Elizabeth E.5 Comments

BlueSky comment: “What a great hobby (and don’t be upset if it’s more than a hobby). These quilts are beautiful. Quilting is fascinating to me.”

Hobby. Hmmm. (This person obviously doesn’t know quilters.) I did hit a goal of mine on BlueSkySocial, but that’s not really what I’m looking for on there. (And if you are trying to learn this new space, the advice I got on Reddit was to skip the on-the-phone-app and go straight to the computer, as it’s easier. They were right.)

I’m looking for more of a retreat from Instagram/Meta/Facebook conglomerate, accelerated by logging into Facebook and checking the following:

Off-Facebook Activity, or in other words, all the info from OTHER businesses, not Meta. They funnel my data to Meta to build my profile; I had about 25 different entities who were sharing my info with Facebook. From following the instructions on Facebook, I learned I could download what Meta knew about me, etc. which was kind of interesting and scary all at once.

They believed I wanted to see posts about dogs, sports, cars, cars and trucks, types of sports, and I stopped reading there. A few of my friends have close relationships with *their* pets, so maybe that’s why on that one. But trucks?

Apparently I speak English, Spanish, French, Swiss (I assume that’s zh?), have no idea what “pt” is (Portuguese?), Italian, and Korean. One of my “Locations of Interest” is Melbourne, Australia. (Hi, Susan!)

This is my earliest Instagram profile. My first Instagram comment was in May 2012, to my friend Krista, as it was she who got me started on social media in the first place.

The real treasure was a huge file of all my Instagram posts (images and caption). I’ve been trying to build some Chatbooks, but apparently that company doesn’t talk to the Instagram code like they used to, so it’s been just me, filling the pages of my books slowly. This will help me go much faster to get them produced and printed. I saved that file on my photos drive, and have promised myself I will be checking that Meta setting again sooner, rather than later. Note: This above info is only the data from the Meta bunch. I wonder what I would have found if I’d downloaded everything from everyone (shudder).

A few photos from this week, beginning Monday, ending Saturday:

Final series of blocks, cornerstones and sashing. The center of the quilt is Cat’s Cradle blocks, sashed with cornerstones and pieced rectangles. Quilt design: Lisa Alexander & Susan Ache

I still have to do the borders. In the fourth photo, I am auditioning fabrics as I was running out and was determined not to buy more (can’t, really, because most of our fabric shops have closed down in our town, anyway). I went through everything, and found a few strips in my string-piecing bin, some other contenders deep in the stash stacks. So tonight while I listened to The Thursday Murders Club, Book Two, I finished piecing this section. I hope there are no mistakes.

Just in case you need this info.

Back to the quilt. I’m a person who generally averse to buying pre-cuts of any kind, but then had to ask myself as to why I hadn’t done something with what few bundles of fabrics I had? The collection of grey-green-cream was probably eight years old, with some fading along the folds (but it didn’t seem to affect how it looked, once cut up into all those wee triangles). I wanted to finish the bulk of the piecing in one week. Many reasons for this, mostly because I remembered when I used to crank out these heavily pieced quilt tops. Could I still do it? And then I ran across this quote:

I do not believe there is an artist in history who hasn’t asked themself — at least once — “Why do I do this?” The designation of “creator” may make for a glorious calling card, but as an occupation, it involves a disproportionate amount of spirit-crushing struggle and relatively few rewards.
–Mary Gabriel

Current Events (you know we talk about most everything on here)

A word or two about January’s Current Events: Many of us on Instagram & BlueSkySocial have been writing about our “spirit-crushing struggle” this week. My feeds have been filled with memes:

I knew there would be a transition between President Biden and President Trump, and I expected some chaos, given how things were the last time he was president. But I didn’t expect what we’ve had, and the plane crash after all the firings of the air safety personnel was really hard to take. But many people I know and love voted for him. I will do my best to give grace, because of them.

However, I will continue to monitor the situation where DOGE was given full access to the federal payment system (confession: my hair is on fire over this one). I can see the irony in my fretting about what Meta has on me (above), as compared with what the government has. I don’t think there is anywhere I can petition and download a file to see what personal information is being given to the owner of Twitter, a platform I quit because I didn’t trust their ability to keep my info safe and secure.

In a book I read this week, I found this: “Good work is a stay against despair” (Terry Tempest Williams). I need to work. I need to create. And even though it can make me wonder Why Do I Do This? once in a while, I still want to pull fabric from bins and stacks, cut it all up and put it back into a new order.

I’ll leave you with some pretty blooms from my February garden.

And a wonderful conversation with Peter Brown, the man who wrote The Wild Robot. (illustration from here)

Quilt Shows · Quilts

Road to California 2025

January 24, 2025August 23, 2025 Elizabeth E.16 Comments

This is in two parts: the top is the bits and pieces.
The bottom are the quilts. Yes, they are all in one post, so get your popcorn and let’s get scrolling.

Road to California, for me, always begins with this hallway lined with hanging quilts. So many different styles and colors, all from one Guild that is chosen at random from those who enter their names. This was at about 8:30 am. on Tuesday morning, January 21st, and I was there to take the Blackwork Embroidery class from Kathie Kerler.

Her sample is on the lower left. Mine is on the lower right. The room temperature went from freezing-your-hands-stiff to overheated-hot-flash territory. (They did caution us to dress in layers.) My seat mate, Chris, had open her little bag (upper center). I said to her, “That’s my pattern!” Yep, it was my Mini Double-Pocket bag, and we had a good chat–fun to see one out in the wild. I also admired the hoop stands in our class — it seems it would be much easier with one of those.

Souvenirs! I always buy some jewelry from Merry of the Button Box. Contact me if you want her email address. I picked up a few bits of fabric and that freebie yellow stitch-saying bag, posed here once I got home again.

Bob is back, now with YLI Threads (You’ll Love It says Bob), and I was happy to see him, and meet his new wife and chat with them. Quilt shows are ideal for that, especially if you get in before the tour busses and the vendors are just killing time until customers show up.

I bought just a few (haha) colors of their line Elite to try out. It’s a thread similar to Bob’s old Magnifico, which is my all-time favorite thread for quilting. I also picked up some piecing thread; yes, lately I’ve been using polyester thread (fairly fine, at 50 weight) as it cuts down on the lint build-up in my machine. I’ll report in later, after I test them.

Now on to the quilts. I stayed for Preview Night on Tuesday, then went back Thursday morning, before I wimped out and headed home. If you are on BlueSky social media, I have a video of us all lining up next to the scooter carts before it opened — it was a crush! And if you are on BlueSky, please follow me, so we can build our quilting community (#quiltsky) over there.

One of the quilts I always look for, or have for the past 20+ years, is the alphabet quilt from Janet Stone.

She is a master of details and I had fun figuring out that the flowers and the blocks all began with the same letter, indexed around the outside edges of the quilt. Here are some detail shots:

I’ll miss seeing this series. Wonder what she has going on next?

I found the show this year to be subdued, but still — happy to have it here. It feels like they’ve cut down drastically on the number of single-person entry quilts, and they are all crammed together, perhaps evidence that it is expensive to host a show like this? For each quilt, I’ve generally taken three photos: the quilt, a detail and the title card. Click on any of the photos to enlarge.

Amy Pabst is a genius at teensy quilting. Each of those log cabin “logs” is about like a matchstick.

This one was just beautiful.

One of the challenges for photography is the way the quilt show is lit: spots directly underneath the quilts, and NO LIGHTS ON IN THE HALL!! Call you believe it? There’s a pianist on an electronic piano playing lovely music and the first impression is wow. But then you try to actually look at the quilts, and nearly everyone around me is complaining. Or leaving quickly, which was my experience. I usually like to really study and look at the quilts, but seriously? In the dark? It’s fancy, but not functional. Okay, enough whining but now you understand why this is dark on the top and light on the bottom, and that’s even after several different filters being applied at home in my photo-editing program. (I did my best.)

These colors!!

Loved the trapunto flowers.

Although the title card is in Spanish, it’s a tribute to her town. On the back, she’d created her family tree (not shown).

Tough to see this beautifully created quilt (black on black in darkness…).

You can purchase this quilt…

Amazing detail in both the piecing, appliqué and the quilting.

This quilter was standing nearby, but too shy to pose for a photo.

Especially good to remember on this freighted week of Inauguration. My classmate and I carefully talked around the events, trying to figure out if we were a match in current events thinking. We were (whew!). She lived near the fires and told me that her in-laws’ home had burned to the ground with almost no warning. So much damage and so many lives affected by this disaster. [Note: when I came out Tuesday night at 8 p.m. to head home, the whole area smelled like smoke, and I immediately wondered: another fire somewhere?]

A simply drawn landscape, but it was just lovely.

Giraffes! How fun is that?

So that’s the second quilt of Ben Darby in the show — both were beautiful!

Since I should be quilting on my very own New York Beauties quilt, this one below caught my eye.

Just stunning!

One guild had a series of quilts, 100 Days of Tula Blocks, and Tina Curran made this one, in red, white and blue.

Sometimes it’s interesting to see how the quilts are displayed. I showed you this so you could see how tightly they were hung. But Cassandra Beaver always has an interesting quilt to show.

Click to enlarge title card. Really fun quilt, full of bright color. This was a from a grouping in the hallway outside, another guild showing off their quilts.

Cherrywood had a huge display, all along the final back row in this exhibit hall. I think you can tell how dim the lighting was in this photo.

Lots of Flanders Fields themes, and since we’d just been to Normandy, they resonated.

Verushka Zarate’s masterpieces were in a special gallery at the front of the vendor’s hall, where they put all the fancy ones. If you’ve never seen one in person, I hope you get a chance sometime. I took her class at QuiltCon Phoenix, the first year after we came back from covid, and I credit her for teaching me once and for once and for all how to do paper piecing.

Here she is with her boys. Again, if you are on BlueSky, here’s a wee video of the entire series of quilts.

Obviously there are many more quilts and lots of vendors, so come on out to California next January and see us.

The show closes tomorrow, and it will be all over for another year….but we’ll be back!

Quilts · Something to Think About

Last I checked, I’m still here

January 4, 2025August 23, 2025 Elizabeth E.13 Comments

I was supposed to be on a road trip to see art and family. We were going to duck in to a wintery state on a week that was forecast to be freezing cold (to us Californians), but we hit a fork in the road, and so stayed home.

A passage from a book I’ve been reading (Niall Williams’ This Is Happiness, p. 50, Kindle edition) springs to mind:

He believed that human beings were inside a story that had no ending because its teller had started it without conceiving of one, and that after ten thousand tales was no nearer to finding the resolution of the last page. Story was the stuff of life, and to realise you were inside one allowed you to sometimes surrender to the plot, to bear a little easier the griefs and sufferings and to enjoy more fully the twists that came along the way.

Fork…twist…schmist. A new story where the old one had been planned, and obviously abandoned.

So now you are subject to one of those wearisome Year-end Wrap-up posts, usually posted in December, but January is how things are going around here, so here we are. My 2024 visual history:

There. I’ve time-date stamped my creations of this past year, which of course doesn’t include the ones in process. One year I had 24 quilts in my wrap-up post, and I must say I hardly recognize that person who cranked out two dozen in one calendar year (another arbitrary, but useful measurement of time and progress). But the fascination with measuring progress is strong with me, as strong as the habit to open a brand-new calendar/planner/book every January and start predicting The Future: birthdays and doctor appointments, which, at the right moment, will turn into The Past, glittering as we pass over them. Why note them at all?
Why?
To record a life.

It seems to me the quality that makes any book, music, painting worthwhile is life, just that. Books, music, painting are not life, can never be as full, rich, complex, surprising or beautiful, but the best of them can catch an echo of that, can turn you back to look out the window, go out the door aware that you’ve been enriched, that you have been in the company of something alive that has caused you to realise once again how astonishing life is, and you leave the book, gallery or concert hall with that illumination, which feels I’m going to say holy, by which I mean human raptness. (ibid, page 73, Kindle edition)

My sewing room is still in a disaster zone from when two quilts ago I was on the hunt for the binding for the pomegranate quilt, and as I excavated the dungeons in my closet, I discovered a stack of Kona fat quarters. I knew who those should go to, and they did. But I never did find the batiks that matched the quilt, discovering only later, that they went off somewhere else a year ago, and this is just the closet we’re talking about, and I have even’t enlightened you on the cupboards or the area under the ironing board, or drawers in my sewing desk.

January is when we clean out, set straight and while I used to believe in that in my earlier days, now I’m mostly amused by the industry and energy we expend to Set Things Straight. I still think it’s a quality worth striving for, if you are into striving, but currently I am not. Mostly I’m enthralled with what Williams alludes to above, which is being astonished by life. I can watch the sun rise out our office window every morning and notice the shape of the clouds or the hue of the different grays being woken up by the sun around the corner, checking it every other email, until the sun is up and it’s time to leap out into the day, to discover what lies ahead.

My children astonish me, though they are enmeshed in their own lives.

My grandchildren astonish me, though I never see them enough (classic grandma refrain).

I have friends who send me short texts that read like novels, and they astonish me, as do phone calls, emails, visits, and all interactions that are alive and illuminate. Perhaps our forced fast of each others’ company during the pandemic is echoing in the back hallways of my musings, but here we are again in January, going forward, making plans whether they be forked or twisted, but always with hope, moving into the future.

Happy 2025, everyone.