Category: Quilts

Road to California 2025
Quilt Shows · Quilts

Road to California 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!

Last I checked, I’m still here
Quilts · Something to Think About

Last I checked, I’m still here

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.

I don’t have cats. I have Mollys. (I was going to take hexies on the road trip.)

Turning of the Year
300 Quilts · Patterns by Elizabeth of OPQuilt · Quilts

Turning of the Year

Elizabeth E.12 Comments

Thus times do shift, each thing his turn does hold;
New succeed, as former things grow old.
Robert Herrick, from Ceremonies for Candlemas Eve

I don’t know how many more turns this life does hold, but I’m getting better at recognizing them. That’s what living for a while will do for you: give you practice at the painful, help you recognize delight, and deliver the ability to watch calmly as another year turns.

We get our fall this time of year, here in Southern California. We pretend to have colorful autumn arrive with the Northern and Eastern States, putting out our russet and pumpkin and burgundy decorations all through October and November, but really our trees don’t have their turn until December. I gather up a few to rest on my dashboard as I drive around (for we also do that in Southern California), and celebrate the colors.

I made the top to this quilt in December 2020, so it’s appropriate that I finish it when we have turned away from the pandemic, its memory triggered only when we find our cloth masks in the sock drawer, or the junk drawer, or realize that a box of N95s has taken up permanent residence in our hallway closet, a talisman to ward off the unthinkable.

It’s nice to be able to crunch around my “walking” park, the leaves crisp underfoot, finding places that echo the muted tones of this quilt, Pomegranates.

Many of our leaves go from green to brown, a dimming of our usual colorful landscape. It’s as if they say, we gave it all for the year and now are tired, just needing rest. I can understand this. I have times of dimming, as well as times of bright.

Herrick reminded us that “each thing his turn does hold” and I don’t have to have only one season of quiet and rest. I have had many years to watch the days grow shorter, the nights grow longer and then again, and decades to watch the reversal of it all.

I’m lucky that way. Hopefully, so are you–

Quilt # 298 • 42″ square, with a simple single-binding
No label, as I’m sending this off and think they may like the backing of this quilt (a treasured piece from Alexander Henry) as well as the front.

Another post about this quilt

Yes, it is up in my pattern shop and for December, you can choose your own discount if you want to stash it away for New Year’s sewing (another turning for all of us).