Carrefour 2024: Quilts 1

October 12, 2024August 30, 2025 Elizabeth E.12 Comments

(I had meant to roll these out quickly, every few days, but I brought home covid and it has stayed too long. My apologies.)

There are over sixteen different venues between the four towns in this corner of Alsace, and often there are there distinctly different groupings of quilts in each venue. So there are lot of different things to see.

All posts in order are on the European Patchwork (Carrefour) page.

After hitting all the vendors and grabbing lunch, we went to the Theater, in Saint-Marie-Aux-Mines.

We knew to look for this banner on the front of the venues. Downstairs in the Theater, is a series of red and white quilts from the International Quilt Museum, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. For years and years, two dealers in antique quilts held court on this bottom floor, and now they had retired, so the Quilt Museum lent some quilts.

I’m including the signage, as it has a specific number from the museum at the top (a reference if you want to find them online) as well as the year the quilt was made. A little video is here.

Peeking above the “walls” for the quilts is the proscenium arch of the theater, a rather elegant quilt venue.
(Click to enlarge the image of the quilt below to see it fully.)

We then headed upstairs to see quilts by Brazilian artist Sarah Luise Kaminski. Usually they have the artist by their exhibit, but unfortunately (the sign said), she couldn’t be there. I would have loved to ask her questions about the type of threads she used, and how long each “thread painting” took. See for yourself.

This next painting is based on a classical image by Lucas Cranach from 1527. I think you can see that at Carrefours, so many quilts are indeed works of art, and not just “quilts.”

Usually they have the dimensions on these cards, but to give you a sense of things, Semente (Seed), is about 14-16″ wide and about 24-ish inches tall. Here is a quick video from her Instagram, showing the scale of the quilts next to the visitors.

Missed getting the title card on this one, but you can tell who inspired this work. I have uploaded these photos in twice my normal size/resolution so you can (hopefully) enlarge them.

This was one of my favorites.

Loved the “giant marbles” on this playground.

Last one.

Down the stairs on the other side (note the tiny nine-patch mosaics on the floor), and out to the next venue.

Down the block and over a bit, and we come to this building, where the big contest/exhibit, Ocean, was held. The EPS (European Patchwork Show) chooses a theme every year, and asks for a specific size, and the following were some quilts from 2024. (Small video of the exhibit is here.)

This is to show you the scale.

The quilting! The size is 80 cm x 120 cm, which is about 23″ x 47″ very roughly. So, a small wall-size quilt. Here’s the website page announcing all the winners, and if you want to enter, here’s the entry info for 2025: Avant Garde, just in case you want to enter.

This one won Best of Show.

One of my favorites.

This won the People’s Choice Award, as well as receiving an honor from Babylock.

I thought the binding was beautiful: the use of the batik blended right into the quilt, so there isn’t much delineation in most of the quilt.

This one fascinated me: all those pearls, and the teensy pieces.

I tried to take it from the side, as I’m pretty sure all those pearls are sewn on under a fine netting of some kind: thicker than a tulle, I think, but fairly transparent. I just re-read the title card: poly-mesh, whatever that is.

And that’s the last of the Ocean quilts. In the same area (think of a senior center, or something), there were a couple of other exhibits.

They had a grouping of crazy patchwork quilts, and although I waited and waited…

…there were others who were determined to figure it all out. So I moved on to Carmen Netto’s small grouping of minimalist quilts.

Another quilter from Brazil, and she was here. I don’t speak Portuguese and she didn’t speak much English, so I just kind of patted my heart and thanked her in Spanish, hoping it might get across the language barrier. It did. She nicely posed for a photo with her work, Weather.

At first glance I thought it was a fabric example of kintsugi.

But no, it was couched thread. I loved the little bit of red.

Click to enlarge the small quilt to see it better.

Remember this? We’ve done #1 Theater, and #2 Pavilion Osmont, where we saw the Ocean exhibit. We are moving on to #3 Église St. Louis, walking along the small streets of this village.

Tiny Murals

European Patchwork Meeting · Free Download · Quilts

Strawberry & Saint Marie-aux-Mines

October 1, 2024August 30, 2025 Elizabeth E.9 Comments

I have so much to share from my trip to the Carrefours European Patchwork Show in Alsace, France last month, but first…strawberries.

I know we just did Halloweeeeen, but when my beemate asked for strawberries for her block in October, I couldn’t resist drawing up a free block guide for you to download.

Click to download:

Strawberry Block Sketch Download

Almost as soon as I got my suitcases cleared out then I came down with a case of covid, which meant Paxlovid (cue: grimace, for the taste it leaves in your mouth, but cue: happy face, for having this drug). I’m just now coming up to the top of things and curating my photos. All is coming, but here’s a taste of things:

Yes, it really is in a series of small villages set in the beautiful Alsace region of France (just below Strasbourg), and there really were amazing quilts to be seen in beautiful venues, but it’s coming, I promise!

*El Niño*, by Brazilian artist Sarah Luise Kaminski. Done with various fabrics, thread painting and free-motion quilting and layers of metallic thread.

One of the many sites where quilts and art were displayed: this was an old church filled with Amish-style quilts, honoring the early emmigrants from this region to America.

Au revoir!

300 Quilts · Patterns by Elizabeth of OPQuilt · Quilts

Twilight Garden • Quilt Finish

September 8, 2024August 30, 2025 Elizabeth E.13 Comments

One summer night when we were sitting out in the garden, the year before all the mosquitoes arrived, we watched the bats dip and speed away, the tiny bird dash in to alight on the fountain. The night was calm, the sunset was unfurling in the background. We lingered, talked, until the stars blinked on and the twilight had slid into night. This quilt is about that kind of night, that feeling of letting the chatter of children, and friends, and a loved one float around you, when time is…timeless.

Sometimes ideas have to percolate a while in my brain. I’ve learned you can’t hurry them, anymore than you can recapture your sew-jo, as quilters like to say. Creative time comes on its own schedule. (This is Quilt #292 on the Quilt Index, above.)

I was also inspired by a trip in 2016 to Copenhagen and Stockholm, where I learned about the art of Poul Gernes, an artist who used strong colors, and simple shapes that expressed a wild traditionalism, if there is such a term.

(from here)

So somewhere between a summer night and a trip long ago, I started playing around with flowers on strong stems, then threw in the center tendrils to focus the eye. I’d been given a stack of Tilda’s polka dot flowers, which are not a typical palette, and I found some linen-look fabric for the background and leaves.

This was all I’d envisioned, but it just didn’t look “done.” So I ordered up more fabric–difficult to do when designers don’t label their colors (well, Kaffe does…)–and got to work.

It was during my New York Beauties project, so I kept going back and forth between the bright saturated solids of that quilt, to these inviting, musky deep colors of twilight.

I pinned everything together with short appliqué pins, and took it on the road — traveling to see grandchildren and the total eclipse in Texas.

Yes, I cut out the background of the flowers, and lined the centers of the flowers for a flat, solid look. (I glue-dotted the lining into place, to hold it until I would get it quilted.)

A couple of nights ago, I grabbed Dave and we went out to the side garden just as the light was dimming, so as to photograph the quilt. This light makes the details soft, the dense quilted foliage falling into the deep blue background, letting those simple Danish-inspired flowers rise to the front.

I wrote the pattern as I made this, and decided to add in three different sets of instructions, in case you were making it with raw-edge appliqué or needle-turn or machine appliqué. And then I added that outside border, so it’s thorough, with lots of patterns and words. But hopefully you’ll find your own design when you make it, and will add another garden to our world.

I went back and forth between Intermediate or Experienced Beginner, but in the end, decided that if you knew something about appliqué, it would go better. But other than that, it’s not a difficult quilt. I do have an extensive guide for laying it out, but it’s okay if you just want to use your own eye. I do reference a couple of quilters in the pattern, who I thought explained things well. One is Gladi Porshe, who writes about making vines and mixing appliqué styles.

Pattern is in my PayHip Shop here. Usually my patterns are $12 US, but I decided we all need more flowers so I have it for an introductory price until mid-November. Sometimes I post a coupon for a percentage off when I put up a new pattern, but this way, you won’t have to enter in a code, and can just grab the deal if you want it. All my patterns are downloadable PDFs.

Enjoy a night in a twilight garden–

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)?