Duck Creek • Quilt Finish

February 17, 2025August 23, 2025 Elizabeth E.9 Comments

Duck Creek • quilt #302

I know you are really here to see the info on this beautiful mural. It’s by Rosy Cortez, and was done under her guidance by a team of helpers. (Links point to her Instagram page as well as to the website for the mural.) I really love that it’s three different ages/stages of women, honoring our local native tribes. I’ve been two of these ages, and am now in the third (hint: I’m not pregnant).

Sometimes the title of this mural, We Are Still Here, reminds me of all my quilter friends. We cut and piece and hang out in our sewing rooms, studios, basements, garages, spare bedrooms. Every once in a while we pop up with another quilt top finished, the binding on another, and still another in stages of quilting. Dedicated, we follow in the way of artists everywhere: we have the vision. We have to see it through.

Recently an article titled “The Art of the Steal,” discussed the number of original book plots possible. In 330 B.C. Aristotle thought there might be just two: “simple (change of fortune) and complex (in which the change of fortune is accompanied by setbacks and reversals)” (by Emily Eakin, link above should allow you to read the entire article). By 1892, Rudyard Kipling thought there were 69 plots. Between Kipling and our current day, the number fluctuated, and by 2004, Christopher Booker proclaimed there were just seven: “the quest, vanquishing the monster, rags to riches, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy and rebirth” (Eakin, ibid). Not to let the number lay there, another group used a computer in 2016, and proclaimed that the “world’s stories boiled down to ‘six basic shapes‘ (Eakin, ibid.)

So how many original quilts are there in our quilting world? Like the novelists, do we have just six basic shapes?

Two of these are triangles, the rectangle is just a stretched-out square, and the curved wedge is just a segment of a circle. We have rectangle triangles, skinnier triangles, ray-shaped triangles. You’ve used them, I’ve used them. Are we like novelists then? Taking a few basic shapes (boy meets girl, etc.) to make our quilts? I have a child who really likes triangles. Another of mine just likes big quilts, bypassing design altogether. Another likes red quilts, and the last child just wants them all (bless her).

I can satisfy all their requests, for sure. And like my children, some of us are attracted to medallion quilts (my hand is the air), others like samplers, and still others would be happy making intricately pieced quilts for the rest of their lives in a blissful sort of who-cares-about-shapes-let’s-throw-them-all-in-at-once attitude, and come out with spectacular pieces of art. The reality is we take, we borrow, we steal, we adapt, we climb on top of, we turn it around, and then make it ours. Here’s one of my recent favorites, from Linda Hungerford, of Flourishing Palms.

*Feelin’ Groovy*, by Linda Hungerford (used with permission)

So the bottom line is for me, at least, I think there may be very few original quilt designs. No one gets to claim copyright on a triangle, or a circle; we all know that. But where our creativity comes in, and why we are still here, sewing machines humming, has to do with how we use those shapes, those fabrics, and how big we make it and how small we make it.

I have two copies of Barbara Brackman’s Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Shapes, and I also have her version of that for Appliqué. Sorry to say that I feel the same about appliqué: most of us are imitating the vines, swirls, flowers, stars and animals of the appliqué world that we’ve seen before. I have twice had famous quilters threaten me with a lawsuit because they believed I was making money off their designs (seriously?). One was well-known for pinching other people’s designs, too. I pulled that pattern, and have made it free for those who are interested, for who needs a lawsuit? The other quilt I never went far with, but I’ve seen variations of it. One last episode of being accused of plagiarism left me shaken, and I lost a good friend over it, even though the design was available freely online. I really hate run-ins with famous territorial quilters, as most of the time I’m just in my tiny world, doing my thing.

The Duck Creek quilt is made of Cat’s Cradle blocks, sashed with cornerstones and pieced rectangles, and it is the design of Lisa Alexander & Susan Ache, from their book Celebrate with Quilts. I saw this pattern at our Guild night, when Char brought her book to show a couple of us. I was hooked on this design, bought the book and went for it.

The subtitle of the Times’ article has the phrase “Copy that” as in, we get it. But sometimes we quilters seem to be the least able to “get it,” I think. I have seen some incredibly original and interesting quilts this last year, and yes, most all used the shapes above. But they are originals because of the way they used the shapes, colors, negative space and so on; maybe we don’t need to get so territorial about our shapes? We quilters can be “original” even when working with those basics, like Linda’s amazing Feelin’ Groovy.

Nobody can “copy that!”

Keep making, keep quilting, keep being here–and have fun at QuiltCon this week, everyone!

UPDATE: Some truly unique and original quilts were hanging this year at QuiltCon 2025. Here’s a post that will show them off. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here.

Quilts · Something to Think About · WIP

Incomplete

February 9, 2025February 10, 2025 Elizabeth E.17 Comments

I keep finding WIPs. Here’s one from eleven (!) years ago:

More about the process on this post, but this was discovered when I was looking for a February-ish theme for my Instagram Monthly Marker post, and found this.

I have this many finished. Even though I still like this group, I don’t even think selvage quilts are in fashion anymore, are they?

It wasn’t until I tried cutting out pieces for the Oh My Cacti Quilt pattern that I realized what a helpful thing are these little tags. I have digitally wiped all the dimensions off them so as not to give away her pattern, but yes — I’m in favor of little pieces of paper that tell you what to cut.

So this is one of those in-betweeners: technically still a WIP because it’s not yet quilted, bound, or labeled. But hey! The quilt top is finished! I met my goal of piecing a (complicated) quilt in one week’s time. And then I just laid about like a sleepy toddler the next week. Good news: it’s already been dropped off at the quilter.

BLOCK OF THE MONTH 2025 PROGRESS

I finished up Sherri’s February Block of the Month (BOM) and it has this cute little ribbon star in the middle. If you need calming down from the dumpster fire in your life (not naming names, here), put on one of Sherri’s videos and you will end up smiling and believing that you can Conquer All. She’s like that in real life, too.

Here they are together.

My Posh Penelope blocks are coming along fine. We are supposed to make four per month, Carol and I. I got in the groove and made more:

It’s tempting to just use all one color family in the blocks, but I finally busted out on that last one with the blue corners.

Here’s the family, so far. I could go green in March…but then there are also a TON of blues in my stash closet. One can never have too many blue blocks in my world, so we’ll see.

Farm Report

In spite of the signs on the front of the egg case, we seem to be doing fine in this department. At this point in our new presidency, I’d almost rather have the eggs scarce again and a calmer presence in the White House. When I saw the metal letters for USAID pulled off the building and on the ground, my heart cracked open a little. This agency was one of our best soft powers we had, which made me remember when my family lived in Lima, Peru for two years. My father had a dual appointment with Stanford University and USAID, working with the government of Peru, building bridges, making connections.

This was our family photo in 1966, just before we left our mountain home in Utah Valley and flung into the great wide world. There were many doing this at this time, for we believed in our global mission of making friends across the world, building bridges, and yes, maybe currying favor before the Communists in the Soviet Union got there first. Maybe that idealism just couldn’t be sustained once the enemy had dissipated (I do still have a Soviet Union guidebook), but oh, wow. The scenes and the stories from this week have broken my heart twice: once for the death of the ideals that USAID espoused and worked and accomplished, and once more for the way it was –and is — being done. Not in the open, where it can be debated and talked about, as is our usual approach here in the US, but in secret, with skullduggery and deception and anger, displacement and many many lives at home and abroad being harmed.

Whatever comes of this episode in our American History, our lives in the 1960s as a family were changed forever. We had lived outside our little enclave and safe enclosure and had been exposed to new ideas, and people who spoke a different language. We went to an American school, but the rest of our life was with the community in Lima. We traveled only a bit, for we were not rich, but enough so I have a picture of my little brother and I, standing in the town square in Huancayo, Peru:

I have very few photos from that time. (Wouldn’t I love to go back with an iPhone!) But the best gift from my father’s work at USAID and Stanford was the idea that people are people all over the world. This I hope to carry with me forever: the world is good and welcoming and we need to be a part of it.

Now, stay away from the news and get to quilting!

300 Quilts · Something to Think About · Totes and Purses

Don’t Ask Me — they all just crept in!

January 12, 2025August 23, 2025 Elizabeth E.15 Comments

It’s traditional for everyone on the planet, not just quilters, to make a list of projects they want to complete in the upcoming year.

No, it’s not.

The rest of the world makes resolutions. However, we quilters make lists of things we want to make but knowing we can’t possibly get them all done. But still. We do it anyway, as it’s not something we can really help. This year I thought I’d try something different. Smaller bites.

The first one up is a Block of the Month from Sherri of A Quilting Life. This way, I reasoned, I can still list a project but since she only releases the block once a month, I’ll never be behind.

Now, stop that laughing.

Here’s the fun thing. I DO keep a The Master List of Quilts I Absolutely Must Make and “Make a quilt with Sherri’s fabrics” has been on there for several years running. Above are my fabric options for this quilt. Bingo!

I chose Clover Hollow, a stash from way too many moons ago, largely because it had a jelly roll and in her cute demo she mentioned that she’d used one. (But — um — not the grey bits.) If you want to make this quilt, here’s the link.

I picked up these cute project bags at Target for $3 for the duo, and in went my project.

The next one happened when Carol was cleaning out and suggested to me that we do a quilt together, since we’d enjoyed our last one. She went through a couple of her options, and I leapt on this one. Again, finishing this (from a class I took at Road to California in 2020 and we all know what happened to THAT year) is on The Master List of Quilts I Absolutely Must Make. Bingo, again! Carol and I have a goal of 1 block per week or 4/month, and I’d already made four in that class I took, so I’m running ahead for 2025, but just for a minute.

I did finish something:

A Totoro Bag! (L: the front. R: the back, but I changed the tail) And yes, this was also on The Master List of Quilts I Absolutely Must Make. (I do not discriminate. I include quilty bags on that list.) I purchased this in 2019 from a vendor at Road to California, and I knew that if I toted it in, they’d take my photo for their Instagram feed. If they come this year, that is. We’ve had a few fires (ahem) and so many are impacted by the horrors of this. I watch the news daily, and even the diatribes that come from people who have never been in a fire driven by 100-mile-an-hour winds. Folks, there is almost no chance at fighting those — the firefighters have to get creative and try other methods. I hope they never see some of those posts on social media criticizing them. Or as one commenter called it:

I wish I’d had this term when I was raising children.

The wind pushed all the smoke out to sea, but when it stopped blowing, and the firefighters could use their air drops, the smoke came our direction. We live inside the white circle in the image just above, so we are in no danger, but that doesn’t stop us from checking our news feeds to see how things are going. They are going sadly, for so many people.

Maybe we are this stage, already?

I celebrated another run around the sun by buying my birthday cake at Costo, then being taken out to lunch by my husband, accompanied by Donald Duck. Just kidding about that. DDuck was leftover from the Christmas decor at a local Peruvian restaurant. We went to a Peruvian restaurant because I lived in Peru with my family when I was twelve, and they make the best chicken ever, along with the yummiest Pollo Saltado. If you don’t know what that is, it involves the said chicken and french fries. Go get some.

And lastly, time for some real life. I generally always keep the area around the sewing machine straightened up, but the photo below is of The Other Side. There are multiple reasons for this. We’re coming up on the first anniversary of my father’s death (on National Polka Dot Day, no less), and I realized that a block of two years was taken out of my life as I attended to mourning for both my mother and my father — thank you all for your words of wisdom and kindness on this. This mourning was pretty much a huge job (it’s just how I’m put together). Some health struggles also popped up here and there (of course). And many times, I just didn’t have the energy to even walk in there, let alone deal with the mess. I have many more apologies I could make, to friends I just didn’t have the energy to call, or letters I didn’t write. But I’m approaching the other side of this experience and I know that from what you’ve told me, I will always miss my parents. However, I’m catching glimpses of a more engaged life, and I want to head that direction.

It’s good to document stuff like this once in a while (click to see another one).

But the GOOD NEWS is…it’s now fashionable to have messy rooms! Or so says an article in the New York Times, titled “In Defense of Messiness, “written by KC Davis (and you can read it for free with this link). I love this paragraph:

“I’ve been preaching my gospel that being messy is not a moral failing for years now. But I want to take it one step further: Messiness can be a good thing. All communities should have some messy people. We are not all meant to be Joanna Gaines. Some of us are Molly Weasleys, our homes bursting with the cozy chaos of a loving family and cabinets packed full of odds and ends. We cannot be Martha Stewart because we are Thoreau, so consumed by capturing Walden Pond’s essence that we need someone else to bring us meals and do our laundry. And try as we might, no amount of clutching our items to see if they spark joy will turn us into Marie Kondo’s closet, for we are Albert Einstein’s desk.”

I like tidiness, I really do. But if I waited to clean up my mess, I would never sew. And the world would be poorer for not having one more Totoro tote bag. Right?

So I’m launching myself into not ONE, but TWO monthly projects, and at this point, I’m in good shape. Happy Messy rooms. Happy Polk Dot Day. Happy 2025!

( a snowy Elizabeth, because we’re supposed to be in winter, not in raging infernos)

A photo of Albert Einstein’s office – just as the Nobel Prize-winning physicist left it – taken mere hours after Einstein died, Princeton, New Jersey, April 1955.

And you can now find me on Bluesky. Come on over!

Quilts · Something to Think About

Last I checked, I’m still here

January 4, 2025August 23, 2025 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.