Happy Valley Quilt Finish • This and That April 2024

April 28, 2024August 30, 2025 Elizabeth E.14 Comments

Need some insight into my quilting?

Here it is: the “Insight Table” for the HandiQuilter Sweet Sixteen. This table was purchased in another life, in January of this year. I had avoided trying to quilt with it since so much had crowded my personal spaces. But finally, I pulled this quilt top from the closet:

June 2021 — title: Happy Valley.

It was perfect for trying to learn to quilt a new way to work with this machine. The little “eyeballs” on either side of the needle (see above) are supposed to track my movements. It’s all coordinated with a few dials and buttons on the screen, which I couldn’t figure out at first, leaving me with skips in my stitches:

I’d be moving the quilt, and it would stop, skip a stitch, then start again. The stitches were very even, but…sigh. Because this is so new, there’s not much out there on the internet. I finally figured out to up the percentage of my “Cruise Speed” to 18% (I previously had it at 11%). That seemed to fix it. This doesn’t make me go faster, but it keeps up with me when I do. I could always get even stitches when I was going really slow, but now this sensing system gives me more even stitches, a welcome assistant in my world.

I’d started sketching this out (right side, white arrow), setting the grid into the colors. However, that seemed to make the black come forward, when I wanted it to go backward. So I reversed it (left side, blue arrow).

Break for dinner. I knew I was going to be sore the next day, as I hadn’t quilted on this machine for nearly four months. (I was.)

After dinner, laid out on the floor. All the black was quilted, so I could start deciding on how I want to quilt the colors. You’ll have to take my word for it, as the camera was fighting for a proper exposure with all those reds.

I finished it up a few days later. I always have troubles when trying to figure out how to quilt borders; this one showed me as we went along.

This is quilt #250, from when I finished up the quilt top and listed it in my Index, above. Here is another post about the origins, if you are for some more reading. The original block came from my rendition of a Chinese wooden window screen, as I was fascinated by all the patterns that I saw when I went to China about a thousand years ago.

All these photos are from Shanghai. I strolled the streets while my husband was in scientific meetings. All of this was one month after 9/11; the airports were ghost towns, the streets in Shanghai had plentiful police officers. Half the people in the conference had cancelled their travel, but we were so anxious to see China (and Japan, which was also part of the trip) that we went. With great trepidation. I wrote personal letters to all the children, just in case our airplane was shot out of the sky, but the trip was a wonderful introduction to that part of the world. We’ve been back to Japan one more time, but not to China, and I doubt we ever will return.

NYBeauties Update:
I’ve mapped out a schedule for finishing the blocks, for those who are doing this with me. It will also help keep me honest, and keep me on track, especially when Leila has started a really fun foundation paper piecing freebie called Back to Nature (visit her Instagram to find out more). I’ve got to get those going, too.

Leila is incredibly talented. And the flip side is: I wish I had a better attitude for doing all those itty-bitty wedges around the outside. But it’s done, and only three weeks late. I’m so spoiled by using freezer paper on my Foundation Paper Piecing, that going back to paper (and I even used my vellum paper) is driving me nuts. I’ll have to try the next one with freezer paper.

This was a shock: QuiltMania stopped publishing. There doesn’t seem to be any information about this at all, but I do know that they, along with every other magazine, were struggling after covid. I guess they finally just ran out of the ability to go forward.

I feel fortunate that I was able to have some quilts published in their magazines. (I’ve been holding off on releasing one of my patterns, because a variation could be found in their recent Simply Vintage magazine.)
I will miss Carol’s unerring eye for bringing us new and interesting quilt shows and quilts. She made a difference in what I see and what I make. Thank you, Carol and QuiltMania.

This week I had some friends come over for a Sew Day, and one of them brought the new project she was trying out: Manx quilting, which originated on the Isle of Man.

We were all fascinated when she told us the history, and how the measurements and sizes were based on a quilter’s hand. While my friend used a rotary cutter and a ruler to help her get her fabrics ready, in traditional Manx quilting, strips were torn from worn garments. Amy Smart has a tutorial on how to make one of these blocks, typically done in red, white and blue. There are other links, if you want to do a search on this. I like the little tucks that are formed: all construction is hidden and the sewing is done by hand.

I worked on this: a new-to-me collage technique from Emily Taylor, the Collage Quilter. Unlike the Laura Heine version, this one is based on color and value, rather than shape.

My greatest challenge was not cutting out shapes that looked like jelly beans. I’m working on it, I’m working on it.

I’d purchased a roll of parchment paper from the grocery store H-E-B when were there. Who can’t succeed with a name like this (see below)?

(Really, it was just like regular parchment paper, but don’t tell the good folks at H-E-B.)

Local cherry blossoms, not plum blossoms. Here’s why I think so (no leaves, oval buds, multiple blooms on a stem).

(I call this version Summer Snowcone. Same pattern.)

Quilts

Pause

January 23, 2024August 30, 2025 Elizabeth E.35 Comments

This is the other bookend to my life this past fourteen months: my father died Monday afternoon. He was 98, a wit, a smart man with grand ambitions, most of all for his children.

Finally that gulf between he and Mother — opened up in November of 2022 when she left this earth — has been closed.

I wanted to write about Road to California this year, but aside from some bright moments, I wept on and off all week, probably in anticipation of the news I was to receive of his death. (It’s okay in my world to say death.) We all knew it was close.

So I’m going to pause for a moment before I pick up the strands of my quilting. Since he was an artist himself (and a businessman and a faith-filled scholar and a father-to-seven-husband-to-one), he knew about picking up that brush and getting back to work.

And I will.

Quilt Shows · Quilts

Eye Candy for the End of Summer

August 26, 2023August 31, 2025 Elizabeth E.14 Comments

While the original version of the word meant light, frothy entertainment, this grouping of quilts was more serious, found in Primal Forces, an exhibit in the BYU Museum of Art. They were part of a traveling show from SAQA, and I was delighted to see them while visiting there for a wedding this summer. One of them, the quilt with “rocks” and “water,” I first saw in France while at the Carrefour Quilt Show in the Alsace region. It was like seeing an old friend. And yes, I always love that overhead thread sculpture by Gabriel Dawe that I led with. It’s too hot to do anything else, so enjoy the quilts!

NOTE: I put some of them together in “galleries;” click to enlarge.

Sonoran Spring, by Stephanie Nordlin

I loved the shaded window above these two quilts, reflecting the shapes in an architectural way.

I love the simplicity/complexity of the quilt above. It just vibrated on the wall.

Thank you all for your well wishes in the last post. It’s taken me longer than I wanted to write back to you, but I’m most grateful for all the lovely things you said. We did survive the “storm” and as I read about the weather that’s been going on at my friend Carol’s home this week (tornados! rain! lightning! more rain!), it confirms that we Californians are all a bunch of wimps. But thanks for understanding how excited/worried/confused we get by a change in our (usually) moderate weather.

Okay, summer. You can head on out, now. It’s back to quilting…

*(All the colors in the center have been quilted)*

P.S. Summer leaving? HA! In Southern California, our summers stretch outward into October. We have more hot days ahead of us.

Quilts

Quilt Baby Pictures

March 5, 2023August 31, 2025 Elizabeth E.15 Comments

I ran across some quilt baby pictures the other day.

And a tangent: Chaucer was on to something when he wrote “The life so short, the craft so long to learn.” I’ll explain, but first you should know that we’re cleaning out, preparing for some home renovation. Or as I like to call it, #kitcheneggedon, where we are moving our entire kitchen into boxes or onto shelves, and our refrigerator out into the garage, which meant that two of our four file cabinets had to go. It was time, really, to figure out what we’d crammed into those moving metal drawers so long ago. We filled one giant curb-side recycle bin, borrowed our neighbor’s and filled his, and I was still going strong. Glance, toss, glance, toss, glance….Whoa.

Several files stopped me dead in my tracks, as they were from the first series of classes I ever took, a veritable record of my how some of my quilts were hatched (hence, Quilt Baby Pictures for the title of this post).

• An embellishment class which sample I promptly tossed. The redeeming factor were finding two beading needles in the class kit, which I needed.
• Two Laura Wasilowski classes: one on fusing, where we learned the Chicago School of Fusing fight song and that her first iron lasted 25 years, and a second where I made a reversible jacket (which I wore for years).
• Debbie Caffrey Mystery Class in which I had fun, but when I took another Mystery Class some years later (teacher shall remain anonymous) it put me off that format forever.
• A two-day Jane Sassaman class through Orange County Quilt Guild’s summer Camp Watch-A-Patcher, where she kept encouraging me to go wilder, bigger, more colorful. She’s genius.
• And a Hollis Chatelein class about close quilting in quilts, a vanguard in that style of quilting.

• I found three classes in my files from Roberta Horton, a personal quilting hero of mine. I did what she called an African-American quilt (or Utility Quilt), a Japanese Quilt, and a Plaid quilt.
• I also took a class from Mary Lou Weidman, where I designed a quilt in honor of my last child leaving home, in honor of our empty nest. The blob on the right is the full-size sketch of the quilt:

*Empty Nest, Full Life* • Quilt #56 in the Quilt Index

This is the quilt made with the Japanese yukata fabrics; we were encouraged to take our smallish square of yukata fabric, design a shape and assemble it, while merging and borrowing it, and extending the design through sashiko or embroidery. Roberta’s classes always gave me more than I expected.

This is the quilt I made in that other class of hers, and I wrote about this method, plus the idea when I discussed the short story I was teaching in my English Class, “Everyday Use.”

*Light in the Crook of Shadows*, the “plaid” quilt.

This is from a class by Jan Krentz, because I so wanted to make a Lone Star Quilt, and she knew how. I used fabric my husband had brought me from Zimbabwe (yes, he’s a keeper) and I’ve not written about it on this blog. It was named Fiat Lux, because I finished it about the time I earned my undergraduate degree after 28 years of slogging. The motto of the University of California is “Fiat Lux,” so I adopted that for the title.

*Fiat Lux*, Quilt #57 in the Quilts Index

I found file folders for the Joen Wolfrom class I mentioned in the last post, as well as a few others, but the file that amazed me most of all was the one that held the papers from a class with Jean Ray Laury, the grandmother of the graphic arts quilts (in my mind).

I even saved a letter she’d written to me, returning the dollar I paid for some class supplies that she ended up giving out for free. Now that she is gone, it’s a treasure newly re-discovered, once long-lost in some random file cabinet (now gone) in my garage.

While it was a treat to find all these “baby quilt photos” I’m more than happy that I actually “raised the baby” and got it launched into the world. No, there will probably never be an embellished quilt — the interest just isn’t there to place sparklies and sequins all over a quilt. But those needles will come in handy when I have to restore the beads Carol put on her block for my Ladies quilt. Yes, I’m a fan of taking quilt classes. Only once have I come out of a class feeling like it was a waste of time (and I’ll never reveal which class it was).