WIP Wednesday

November 13, 2013April 27, 2014 Elizabeth E.14 Comments

I seem to be on an Amish trend. First the book announcement and a round-up of my Amish quilts, and then with this WIP Wednesday, news of my Amish With A Twist-2 BOM status. I was sailing through these monthly chapters of fabric and pattern until this one: twenty-eight blocks, all log cabin style.

I got out my trusty swatch/color helper and started cutting. I had to add a bunch to my cards to keep them current, one selvage snip at a time.

At first I was confused, with what they wanted, then I figured it out. They want a TOTAL of 28 strips, in a variety of the colors listed. I did my math, and figured out that would be about 4 strips of each different color, in the dark color way and a different number in the medium color way, so lined them up on the board and started cutting.

And cutting.

I sewed the centers together, then did one complete round of strips. They look kind of cool lined up here, I think.

I assembled them in kind of a log-cabin-block arrangement, just trying to get the visual.

And finally–twenty-eight blocks completed. I have eight more to go in a different coloration, then assemble and finish.

I’m also working on the #friendshipxandplusswap showing up on blogs and instagram; there are quite a few of us who have paired up, decided on the number of blocks, and are going at it. In October I was supposed to send my partner two blocks (we make four and send off half), and in November, four. Well, here’s a part of November’s, I still owe October’s and December is right around the corner. We all plan to blog on the last Friday of the month, so if you are not entertaining a turkey-pumpkin-pie hangover from the day before (American Thanksgiving), and can head back around, you’ll see some more of these blocks.

Next WIP rattling around in my head comes from when Leanne announced the theme for our next Four-in-Art challenge: Structure. So when I was visiting my sister and her husband at Cedar-Sinai hospital this past week, I took some photos to get me in the mood. They have very cool structures there, in terms of modern, angular buildings. But it’s their art on the inside which is swoon-worthy. (That’s another post).

Here’s the Big Kahuna of WIP projects, and the deadline is fast approaching. I have now received all the 12″ squares from my bee mates. Now to find the hyper-overdrive-Christmas-blast of energy to get it done! I’ve not arranged these yet how I want them, but I love seeing them and all the signature squares, up on the pinwall.

I could bore you with more, but I think that’s more than enough.

Linking up with Lee of Freshly Pieced.

What I Learned from the Cedars-Sinai Hospital Hallway Art

November 11, 2013November 10, 2013 Elizabeth E.8 Comments

This collection started as a way to help a beloved husband heal. I was there to share some time with my sister, as her beloved husband is battling cancer.

But when I went to get her a soda, and found my way back to the right space by following the trail left by the art in the hallway, I learned that a line. . .

. . . can be colored in. . .

. . . to make some great shapes.

Maybe a quilt block or two?

More about the art in the Cedars-Sinai hospital, on YouTube. And Happy Veteran’s Day, if you are in the United States. Thank a vet for their sacrifice.

100 Quilts · Quilts

Harvest Weekend

November 9, 2013January 10, 2026 Elizabeth E.12 Comments

With pumpkins and tawny hues and brown grasses prevalent in the colors at this time of year and in the Northern Hemisphere, falling temperatures, it triggers the idea of harvest: cutting the wheat, gathering the last of the fall vegetables, All Is Safely Gathered In, and that sort of thing. Well, what constitutes a harvest?

It all starts with seeds, a planting of an idea, a sowing of labor with the yield some time off in the future. An idea, like beginning to learn how to make Amish quilts from a book, as I sat in the scorching heat of a Dallas Texas summer many years ago, sweat running down my back reading Roberta Horton’s Amish Adventure.

I had escaped to the back porch for three minutes peace from the marauding hordes of hot tired children in watching some movie on the VCR, steeping my mind in the stillness of these stunning quilts.

Strong graphic design and the muted, yet brilliant, colors enticed me, and I began small, with doll quilts, experimenting in the shapes, the colors. At that time the best we could hope in terms of solid fabrics was a mix of cottons and polyester-cottons. Purists would gasp now, but we had just barely graduated from using cardboard templates with taped edges to cutting out the lids of margarine tubs to use instead.

Roberta Horton’s book, first published in 1983, rocked my tiny isolated world of quilting.

I moved from doll quilt-sized quilts to a larger wall quilt, still unfinished. And then to a larger quilt, laid out in rows in the corner of my bedroom for weeks, while I refined the gradations of color.

I had drawn out Sunshine and Shadow on graph paper, trying to figure out the coloration, mimicking what I saw in fabric. This was early in my quilting career: all of my quilts on this post are numbers 10 and 11 quilts on my 100 Quilts list. I also made a faceless doll to match what I’d heard were common in the Amish country. And then, Amish Quilting was the first quilt class I ever taught, in a small shop in Arlington, Texas, now defunct, and yes, we made a doll quilt, and yes, we used Roberta Horton’s book.

Back to the Sunshine and Shadow, I figured out the borders, sandwiched with flannel (as she noted that Amish quilts were flatter than our fluffy renditions) and I began quilting it by hand, criss-cross, and then cut paper patterns for a twined-vine border design.

The seed planted by Horton and her quilts and her book is now in a second harvest, if that’s possible. Last summer, C & T Publishers put out a call for Amish quilts of all types to be considered for a new rendition of An Amish Adventure. I submitted my photographs and had one quilt accepted. The book has now been released and is titled Amish Quilts–The Adventure Continues, and it as much a celebration of that first book in C & T’s publishing history as it is the style and cultural contribution of the Amish quilt–certainly a forerunner to today’s modern quilts.

Here’s my doll quilt, made so many years ago. I now consider it as an entry in the first round of strong bold graphic designs and solid fabrics. In the book, mine is right next to Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr, of the Modern Quilt Studio and Craft Nectar blog. I certainly did do a happy dance in the kitchen as I opened up the package.

You can get the book from the C & T Publishing website and from Amazon.com. My mother already has her copy, so I know it is shipping. If you haven’t had a chance to make yourself an Amish quilt, perhaps now is the time, before too many more harvests stride past.

I like to think about harvests, as to me it always indicates a leap of faith somewhere. At some point I made a quilt, and now can “raise the song of harvest home.”

200 Quilts · Four-in-Art · Quilts

Childhood’s Wide Avenues

November 1, 2013November 1, 2013 Elizabeth E.20 Comments

4-in-art_3

Childhood’s Wide Avenues is a quilt about memory, of fixing in time a place and a feeling. I grew up in the mountain west, in Provo, Utah, a town laid out in a grid of wide avenues, criss-crossed with streets that seemed to me to be wide as the sky, although I’m sure if I went back there now, they would be reduced in size and dimension. But that feeling that I could ride my bike to the top of the street near our house and see all the way down to my elementary school, or across the valley, or to the other side of the world has remained in my memory.

The possibilities were infinite.

A few weeks ago, as I was thinking about this quilt and how to express the theme of Urban/Maps, I found myself traveling down another very wide avenue through the middle of a town very unlike where I grew up: San Bernardino, California. But the boulevard was so wide and so straight and I could see it head in a straight line for miles, up into the foothills, that I felt as if I had been transported in an instant back to an earlier place and time. But it seemed impossible, until I learned that Mormon pioneers, a branch off the same tree that laid out Provo, had also laid out the wide avenues of this town two states away, in the early 1850s. Asked to settle this place far from their original homes in the Utah valley, they laid out a grid of wide avenues, and gave them names like Salt Lake Street, Kirtland Street, Nauvoo Street, and Utah Street. These have all been renamed, but those early pioneers left their stamp on the valley not only by naming the cemetery Pioneer Cemetery, but by etching long, wide avenues into the landscape.

I had heard about memory being triggered by sounds, and by smells, but never had experienced memory being triggered by a sense of space, of a geographical series of landmarks making headway into my childhood memories. For days afterward, I thought of the family I grew up in, and found pictures to place on my quilt that evoked a sense of that time (that’s me, above).

Who populates these fictional houses on my quilt? The large pink house is my parents’ and the block below contains houses for my husband and I, and our four children and their families, while the blocks surrounding that central block are where my sisters and brothers might live. And because all of their spouses will want their own families, I scattered the grid of avenues with more houses, so that the circle of family would have place and space. A dream, of course, as none of our children, nor any of my family live near us. But in my world, in my memory, we are all there: gathering Easter eggs on the front lawn, jumping in piles of leaves, finding tarantulas in the fissures in the hillside, cracking open walnuts, and smelling the lilacs at the end of the driveway — lovely, amber-colored scenes.

Tomorrow I’ll deconstruct the quilt, describing the technical side of how I put it together. But for now, more quilts depicting this theme of Urban/Maps can be found at: