A Quiet Week

November 23, 2013November 23, 2013 Elizabeth E.14 Comments

After the big TaDa! moment of getting Santa and his blocks and his neighborhood all done, it was a quiet week. No bee blocks. No quilting. No sewing, unless you count the samples that I put together to teach my Pleated Tote Bag class on Tuesday night. Tonight, I finished the bag that I’d used as a teaching sample (above), putting the pieces together, arriving at completion.

And because I have a quiet week, and I’ve had a chance to reflect on recent events, and because we are approaching the Thanksgiving holiday, it’s time to count my blessings, quilt-wise. In the photo above, Cindy, of Live A Colorful Life is seated at my dining room table, sewing on my little featherweight. This was the second year she has come down for our Good Heart Quilters Potluck Event, and I’m so glad she did. One of the blessing of modern quilting is the internet, the connections we make through Instagram, through blogs and their comments, through emails, and through bees (Cindy organized the Mid-Century Modern Bee, of which I’m a part).

When she arrived, on Halloween Night, we turned out the lights on the porch and went out for Pho and flatbread from a new restaurant in town. She was pretty adventurous, even so far as to have the Korean-style flatbread, with kimchi on top. Later, we came back home and talked and sewed (my husband was out of town, so we had the run of the place). Cindy’s gift of collecting people and connecting people has greatly blessed my life.

After sewing all day Friday, we set up the tables in my dining room, and hosted the Good Heart Quilters, or about half of them. It seems it was a very busy weekend, and we were missing a good number of these fine quilters.

This was what I made for my contribution to dinner: stuffed pumpkin (recipe found *here*).

from l: Carol, Laurel, Janette, Leisa and Tracy

from l: Simone, Caitlin, Cindy and Lisa

We always start (and usually finish) with Show and Tell. This is Laurel’s finish–a quilt for her sister. It’s very tall, so the angle isn’t the best, but as always, Laurel combines piecing with appliqué to create something we all want to sneak off with, into our cars.

Lisa got her borders sewn on tonight–a Hallelujah! moment because she’s been busy getting ready for her daughter’s wedding in about three weeks, and she has sewn her own dress and most of Bridget’s trousseau, amidst working all day. We were thrilled for her.

Simone started coming this spring for the first time, and has her first finish: an apple core quilt done in modern fabrics. It’s fabulous.

But she didn’t stop there–she used the scraps to create a table runner. A clever quilter, wouldn’t you say? Last year, we ate and then just chatted, but this year we ate and then got to work and everyone made progress on their projects. Next quilt night is at Simone’s, on Saturday, December 7th, a shift from our usual Fridays (the church Christmas supper snagged that Friday!). In counting my blessings, this quilt group is one of my big quilty blessings. Sometimes we’ve been only a few ladies gathered at a house for munchies and sewing, sometimes there’s been a lot of us, but after meeting for sixteen years, roughly 8-10 times a year, we’ve all become close friends, and are always ready to welcome in a new quilter (like Simone and Caitlin).

I don’t know if you can see this, but when I went to Arizona to spend time with my daughter and her family while her husband was in Tonga doing free dental work, I got to sleep in her daughter Keagan’s room. I turned out the light, pulled up the covers and was greeted by a giant pink Hello Kitty and the time, all broadcast to the ceiling. It made me smile, and count my blessings of having grandchildren who like to know what time it is. Even if it is in the middle of the night.

While I was there, Barbara took me to a giant fabric/quilt shop store where they had tons and tons of great quilt fabrics: 35th Avenue Sew and Vac, in Phoenix Arizona, where I found a piece of Ann Kelle’s Christmas trees for no good reason. Ah, but the very good reason became apparent to me after I finished off the Santa top. This will be the perfect backing (and I got it on sale!).

And lastly, about fifteen years ago I started this Friendship Quilt. At that time I wanted to remember lots of women in my life who had been my mentors, my friends, my sisters and sisters-in-law, my daughter and daughters-in-law. Some of these women: two of my aunts, and my mother-in-law have passed away already. It’s time to get it done. I have put it on my Finish-A-Long list nearly every month, but hadn’t done much about it. Recently I laid out the squares in what I thought I remembered as my original design. Holes in the pattern were apparent. I realized that I had just enough missing blocks that I could gather my granddaughters’ signatures, as well as the my most recent daughter-in-law. It’s tempting to keep it going, to add those friends who are close to me now, but I decided some time ago that with the exception of adding those related to me, I would leave it as it was: a snapshot in time. But because I am counting my quilty blessing on this post, from new friends and far-flung internet friends and old friends both near and far, and all those related to me, I must end by counting these sweet blessings in my life:

These were the signatures I collected last week, from the three-year-old Dani to the eldest granddaughter Keagan, and all the others in between.

I am beyond blessed to know these little women. They make my heart sing.

Happy Thanksgiving week, every one. Don’t let the cooking interfere too much with the sewing (although, judging from what I see on Instagram (photo above), things are proceeding apace! (Nice quilt block, Leanne!)

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As a reminder, if you see an ad on this blog, it is because my blogging software puts it there.
I make no money from their ads, but since I blog for free, I figure it’s a fair trade-off.

Quilts · Something to Think About

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.

Four-in-Art · Quilts · Something to Think About

Map Musings

October 19, 2013October 19, 2013 Elizabeth E.8 Comments

Since the quarterly reveal date for our Four-In-Art is coming up in a couple of days, I thought it was high time to sit down and think about this new overall theme of Urban, and the specific quarterly theme of Maps.

While we love the old maps, shown above on the front page of our family’s travel blog, we all depend on recently updated maps to find our way around. I read somewhere (and of course I can’t find it now,) that at some point in history, maps were kept only for those who had money or a position, guaranteeing them power over the masses who toiled in medieval fields. For to hold a map, and to read it, is to understand your place in the world and how you relate to it.

(Alicia Merritt, Green and Pleasant Land)

In a section of Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, he writes about how maps develop:

“We progress from the infant’s egocentric, purely sensory perception of the world to the young adult’s more abstract and objective analysis of experience.” Children’s drawings of maps advance as 1) simple topographical relationships are presented, without regard for perspective or distances, then 2) intellectural realism evolves connecting what is known with the proportional relationships, then 3) a visual realism appears.

Carr recounts that first maps were rudimentary, then realistic, then scientific in both precision and abstraction. In addition, maps expressed ideas: ” ‘The intellectural process of transforming experience in space to abstraction of space is a revolution in modes of thinking,’ writes Vincent Virga, an expert on cartography affiliated with the Library of Congress.”

While no one under the age of 40 will remember this, once it was common when someone was coming to your house, for them to call you with the question, “How do I get to your house?” Then we’d detail for them the streets to turn on and the landmarks to notice so they could arrive at our home. Then came MapQuest, then Google Maps, then maps on our phones where can follow the little blue dots, then the aggravation with Apple’s Maps, proving again that he who holds an accurate map has real power.

While this is a blurry shot of a city from an airplane, the first maps were of the heavens–of stars and planets and their movement.

(Alicia Merrett, Canal Country)

Only later did it invert, so that maps became aerial views of the earth and its landmarks.

(from the Santa Monica Patch: type in your USA city and see what you see)

Wayne Theibaud, Levee Farms

Don’t we all have multiples of this photo on our cameras? Aren’t we all amazed by the patterns on our earth, invisible to us as we drive/move/walk around at ground level?

(view towards the Archives, taken from the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.)

Maps can also be a window on our lives.

I once had a class do Life Maps, where they depicted an aspect of their life, wrote a paper about it, and presented the map to the class. This was my sample map of my education. In writing in my art journal last night about maps, I began to realize that maps could also freeze time, evoke a memory. Unlike my other Four-in-Arters, who seem to be charging ahead, I’ve been at a loss about what to make, how to proceed. But after sitting down and writing about it, gathering pictures of maps and ideas, I am now creating my own map of where to go with this project.

*******

We are welcoming four new members this year, so the logo, which originally meant four artists, now has — at the suggestion of one of our group — changed to mean the four quarterly challenges we make. We reveal a new over-arching theme in August, then in November, February, April and August we make quilts around that theme, with smaller “subset themes” to guide us. We hope you’ll come back on November 1st to take a quilt art tour, as the eight of us interpret our current theme of Urban/Maps.

Creating · Giveaway · Quilt Bee · Quilts · Something to Think About

Bee Blocks & Winner of Project Folio

August 25, 2013 Elizabeth E.8 Comments

First, while my husband and I were watching Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway in Three Days of the Condor, I leaned over to him and said, “Give me a number between one and sixteen.”

“Five.”

Five it is. Cindy, you are the winner. I’ll mail off the portfolio tomorrow. Thank you to all my very fine readers and followers. You are such lovely people!

I must admit that I did want to give it to my newest follower: my daughter, Barbara (Hi Barb!), but I’ll make her a new something or other for her work-out clothes (what she said she’d use it for) and send this white one to Cindy. Congrats!

Secondly, even though it feels as if I haven’t touched a machine much this month, I did get my Bee Blocks finished. Above is the one for Always Bee Learning. We were sent some some fabrics, a link, and we were off to making arrows. It was a real brain-stretcher, but I finished mine and sent them off to Megan.

And for the Mid-Century Modern Bee, Mary asked for some Cross-X, or X & + blocks as I’ve seen them called, in pinks. So I followed her linked tutorial at Badskirt’s blog and sent them off.

And now, the to pull the biggest rabbit out of the hat: figure out how to start sewing my projects again. With this disjoint summer, a bad beginning to my school year (it will get better), and some time away from the sewing machine, it’s like being on a boat being carried down stream from the dock, slowly, and you can see your picnic lunch there in the middle and you are getting kind of hungry but you can’t figure out how to get to it. Okay, bad analogy, but I think you all know the feeling.

I look at my list of things I want to sew and nothing interests me. I love reading blogs and seeing everyone’s fun projects, and think, I could do that. But if I do everyone else’s project, how will I find time to do mine? It’s a double-edged sword, this living in a world of blogs and Instagram and it’s hard to turn off the input in order to find the creative project that is uniquely mine.

My father, aged 87, goes most mornings down to his painting studio on the second floor of a building in his downtown. There, he thinks, starts his routine, puts on his music, paints, pauses. Of course, I can only imagine this because it is done in solitude, but every October he opens his studio for a painting sale in his studio, proving that he accomplishes, produces, Gets Stuff Done, sending out more paintings into the world.

I find my challenge to still myself — to enjoy the social media-fied quilt world, yet also to let that project that is interesting to me find its way forward. I’ve been tempted by another Polaroid Swap, a recent Signature Swap, this winter’s Scrappy Trip-A-Long, and the Medallion Quilt among other recent popular quilts. But I also know through historical evidence that our quilting grandmothers searched the newspapers for what others were doing, and through imitation, linked themselves together through common projects.

LIke them, I do quilt what is in my universe. I often think of Nancy Crow, a quilt artist I admire from afar who has seemed to produce what is important to her, to follow her own stream of thinking and creating without regard for what is the most popular. Perhaps she, and my father, are at one end of the spectrum while the social media/Instagram/blogging crowd, of which I am a part, is at the other end. No answers here.

Just searching for those oars that will get my boat back to the dock, back to my sewing machine, back to my quilty world.