Practice Makes Perfect • Frivols #6

June 9, 2018January 11, 2026 Elizabeth E.14 Comments

Practice Makes Perfect
Quilt #204 • June 2018
26″ by 31.5″

The requisite shot of the X-ed out Frivols tins show that I’m now halfway done with my goal. I try not to set goals, as they just give me angst, but there’s just this lingering expectation: finish all the Frivols.

I call this Practice Makes Perfect, as I’ve been thinking about the nature of work, and how much of it is repetitive, boring even, but repetition appears to be a necessary step on the way to mastery. I think I can handle churn dashes, but it was learning the finer points of free-motion quilting loops that needed my attention.

The freebie for tin #6 was this strawberry label with barely any room for a person with two long names. It would have been better if my name were Dot Smith or something.

I had started on this quilt at the end of May, after a long month of travel and serving and caring for people in my life, culminating with an intimate luncheon celebrating my mother’s 90th birthday in Ogden, Utah. We rented a small conference room at a local hotel, and had the hotel cater the meal.

We’d done this two years earlier for my father’s birthday, and had only my brother and sisters and parents there, with no spouses or great-grandchildren. We were worried then (I was wondering) if if it would work without the supporting members, but we did fine two years ago, and again this year too. The feelings expressed to my mother were tender, kind, showing her (and my father’s) careful influence in our lives. Because of them there are amazing individuals in my family: strong men and women, who are good men and women, too.

Some of you know that I’d been up in Utah earlier that month caring for my sister for a week; it was good to see how much progress she’d made in getting around with her crutches and wheelchair. From L to R, around the table: Mom, Dad, Susan (child #3), Scott (#6), David (#5), Cynthia (in gold jacket, child #2), Christine (#1), and Andy (#7). I’m child #4, yes, that infamous “middle child.”

Mothers Olive Oil — *I had little bottles of specialty olive oil etched with the saying “Olive you forever” and “Happy 90th Barbara” (my mother’s name).*

We drove home and two days later I quilted this, finishing it the next day. I was still putting away what I’d gathered on my trip, but needed a break, and Practice Makes Perfect was the tonic for what ailed me.

John Piper wrote: “Work is a glorious thing. And if you stop and think about it, the most enjoyable kinds of leisure are a kind of work. Both these facts are true because the essence of work, as God designed it before the Fall, was creativity — not aimless, random doing, but creative, productive doing….
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“If you are starting to grow lazy, I summon you back to joy. God made us to work. He formed our minds to think and our hands to make. He gave us strength—little or great—to be about the business of altering the way things are.

“That is what work is: seeing the world, thinking of how it could be better, and doing something—from the writing of a note to the building of a boat; from the sewing of what you wear to the praying of a prayer.
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“Come, leave off sloth and idleness. Become what you were made to be. Work.”

excerpted quote found on @TheSmallSeed

Frivols Quilts · Something to Think About

Quilting as Part of Our Life Story

April 28, 2018July 7, 2019 Elizabeth E.18 Comments

FrivolsButton

Happy Almost May with Frivol #5!

I’m beginning this post by talking about my ongoing goal to make up all the Mode Frivols tins. As I mentioned before, it’s been a good experience to try something new, to work with fabrics that weren’t generally found on my shelves, and Frivol Tin #5 is just that sort, as its filled with French General. I’ve used French General before, but it was lighter and airier, when I made a quilt for my sister:

new-journeys-front (1)

After receiving the quilt, she repainted her room to match. Now if that’s not undying love from a sister, I don’t know what is.

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But this tin is a bit darker, filled with lusciously colored deep reds, for the tin was originally placed in the shops in December, a month when we typically sew with those kinds of colors.

First up, this note from Moda:

You can find more about this tin on their blog (including how they turned it into a tin for hand sewing supplies), but for me, I’m dying to open it:

Frivols 5_1a

Frivols 5_1b

It will be a table topper, or even a doll quilt as it’s even tinier that what is printed on the tin (see note, above). However, that means it will sew up quickly.

Frivols 5_2

As I mentioned in last month’s overview, there is always a treat in a tin, and this time it is a beautiful woven ribbon in red and white. Frivols 5_3

Continuing on, I also received news in my Yahoo mailbox about new ownership of that enterprise, including Flickr. So went over to Flickr to see what I would lose if I just ignored that whole thing forever. The newest activity in any Flickr group was over a year ago. Most activity was much older than that, which told me that a lot of other quilty peeps have abandoned that site.

My masthead, but I think that “Joined 2009” thing is when I opened a yahoo email account.

Here’s my first set of photos on the site: March 2012, with my EPP quilt Kaleidoscope.

And my last set, in uploading photos for the Mid-Century Modern Bee, which ended that year.

I used to belong to seven groups on Flickr, most of them Bees, and I also had several Galleries. I got rid of the Galleries, and unjoined all groups that weren’t a bee I had participated in. However, I wanted to write about this most popular bee block.

This is called Starry Sky and was originated by Kylie Kelsheimer. It was originally found online as a download, but I lost track of it.

UPDATE: The links to the original pattern are all gone now–but Kylie now has it up on PayHip. In figuring out the story through email, apparently she thought it was up on Craftsy, but was unaware of Craftsy’s purge of young designers (I think she had a baby at that time).

Here’s a link to her PayHip version: Starry Sky by Kylie Kelsheimer. It’s always good to support young quilters; since her pattern is so reasonable and has three sizes, I encourage people to head over there to purchase it. Kylie has since written me, thanking me for keeping her pattern out there and available.

So I guess I’m saying that it feels weird to have the history of the quilt world on the internet go missing after such a short time, and it feels equally weird to be erasing some of my own history as well.

It reminds me of some of the things I read in The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter (really, it’s a great little book by Margareta Magnusson): “If someone has lived in a home for many years where children, grown-ups, relatives, and guests have stayed and felt welcome, that same someone is often so busy that they never think of reducing the number of things in the household. And so the number of possessions grows and collects quickly over the years. Suddenly the situation is out of control and the weight of all those things can begin to seem tiring.”

My home and my digital media sites and my blog and Flickr are all like guests that have stayed and felt welcome, I guess. Unlike the woman in the Swedish Death Cleaning book, not only will we have garages and drawers and closets full that we’ll need to deal with, we’ll also have digital universes that need clearing out, too. That thought ought to cheer you up, right?

Ken Burns.png

Which leads me, finally, to this a wonderful video about Ken Burns, the historian and documentarian, who sent a lot of his quilts to be exhibited in Nebraska at the International Quilt Study Center and Museum. If you want to see them, they will only be on exhibit for a couple of more weeks, but the museum does have a good gallery of the quilts online, from which I excerpt these:

My favorite is the American Flag, with all the crosses surrounding it. So many terrific quilts, and thankfully, someone, some where, did not clean them out and throw them away. Someone did not think they were household junk to part with. Thank you, Mr. Burns, for sharing your wonderful collection and thoughts:

Ken Burns Quote.png

Ken Burns Shaker Quote.png

“Ann Lee, who founded the Shakers, said ‘Do all your work as if you had a thousand years to live, and as you would if you knew you would die tomorrow.’ The things we leave behind — our children, our land, the environment, but also these made things, the art — will commend us to posterity.” ~Ken Burns

Something to Think About · Travels

Escape to Texas • March 2018

March 16, 2018 Elizabeth E.9 Comments

TexasMarch_0

We escaped to Texas last week, to visit our son and his family, as well as head to San Antonio, where my husband participated in a scientific conference. TexasMarch_1

Pico Iyer, a well-respected travel writer noted that “The urgency of slowing down — to find the time and space to think — is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” TexasMarch_2

So I tried to grab some undistracted time with my grandsons; Alex and I made a Lego sewing machine.

TexasMarch_3 TexasMarch_4 TexasMarch_5 TexasMarch_5a TexasMarch_6

“When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself,” noted Marshall McLuhan, over a half-century ago.

It was nice to get away.

Quilts · Something to Think About

The Calendar is my Friend. Repeat.

March 7, 2018March 4, 2018 Elizabeth E.15 Comments

I read this cartoon, from Stephan Pastis, some time ago, and I’ve saved it as it seems like it hits a bit too close to home with that wasting time on social media thing. But rather than harp on that tired subject again — social media is ruining our lives — I’d rather take it a different direction, and talk about the one thing that helped me manage my social media as it relates to quilting: I made friends with my paper calendar.

In blogging, I used to just write blog posts at random: if I had made a quilt, or ran across something cool to share, I did. But once another blogger said she scheduled her blog posts, I realized that she thought about them, worked out when she wanted to them to show up. In other words, she used that old-fashioned tool of calendaring her posts.

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I use a small desktop calendar, and circle the date and pencil (not pen) in a code word, so I know what’s happening. It helps me space out things (not always successful on this, but I’m working on it).

I came home from QuiltCon, vowing to work smarter, determined to change up how I used my favorite calendaring book, the Get To Work Book. Too often I was using it as a journal — you know, writing down the things I did, or needed to do, and crossing them out in yellow marker when they were completed. Yeah, even if I’d just written them down.

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These are the project pages at the back of each month. Post QuiltCon, I ~~dumped~~ wrote everything that was in my head down on paper. I then took time to break it down into tasks, slipping a few onto every week of the month. Has it helped? Somewhat. I know now what I have to work on. I don’t know about you, but I tend retreat to social media when I am bored, or perhaps, overwhelmed. I can also be easily distracted by the wonderful eye-candy on Instagram (but in some ways that’s another topic for another day.)

In his article, “Warren Buffett’s ‘2 List’ Strategy: How to Maximize Your Focus and Master Your Priorities,” James Clear makes the point that even though many things are good to do, if they are not your top priorities, they will distract you from what’s most important, and from what should be given your best and undivided attention.

He notes that “Every behavior has a cost. Even neutral behaviors aren’t really neutral. They take up time, energy, and space that could be put toward better behaviors or more important tasks.”

Some other tips:

Simplify your media. If you do Facebook, get off of Twitter or Snapchat. Leo Babuta writes: “You can be a part of a social network and not participate all day long…I’ve consciously decided that I’d prefer to be creating rather than always connected to the social stream.” (from Zen Habits)
Notifications (from FB, IG, etc.) are a huge time sink. Bubata recommends turning them off: “Don’t be notified everytime people post things or reply to you or follow you or email you or comment on your blog.”
I also liked the tip from Elizabeth Grace Saunders in the article “Front Load Your Week,” when she says “To minimize stress, spend less time worrying about planning exactly how long every activity will take you to do and more time front-loading your calendar by putting your most important activities with deadlines early in the day and early in the week. For example, something due on Friday should start appearing in your schedule by Tuesday afternoon…Front-loading gives you the ability to stay on top of projects that take longer than expected without getting stressed or working into the wee hours of the night.”
To follow up with that, front load your day. Know when your best energy level is, and stack up tasks for that time.
My favorite focusing device is to ask myself: “What do I want to have completed at the end of this day?” That question alone has propelled me through me many a foggy moment.
Humans come first. My husband is El Numero Uno, then my family, then friends. After my husband, the order is flexible.
I am also a human. (Obviously I have several firsts, but it all works out.) By saying that I am a human, I need to be aware of how I feel after sitting scrunched over, reading my small screen. I need to be aware of how good a walk feels, even if it’s in the middle of the day, and only around the block. I need to be aware of how I feel when I can’t get anything done, because I’ve spent too long reading on the web, instead of getting to my work. I need to be aware of how good it feels to have my life ordered, and not frantic.

Some regular tasks help me order my month, such as:

Gridsters March 2018 — Marsha’s block for the Gridster Bee, March 2018

Sewing Obligations, such as blocks for my mates in the Gridster Bee. I like jumping on it and getting it done at the beginning of the month (see tip about front-loading, above–I like to front-load my months, too!).

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Turning the calendar to a new month. I believe that with all my digital calendars, at times I lose sight of how time can be structured and used. Bringing forward that new page reminds me to check my project lists, re-order priorities, bring on new tasks.

It’s not harmful to be involved in social media as many interesting and significant discoveries, as well as new friends, can be made this way. Some nights, when I’m too tired for sewing tasks, I like to read blogs. I use Feedly and Bloglovin’ to help keep my reading organized and to follow up with people on Instagram, and Facebook. It’s enjoyable to see what everyone else is doing.

Do you have tips for staying focused? If you care to share, please leave them below in a comment.