This and That: October 2023

October 15, 2023August 31, 2025 Elizabeth E.17 Comments

Of course I took my quilt titled Annularity up to the Annular Solar Eclipse, and took its photo while the eclipse was going on.

And my new Eclipse quilt also got a photo. The first photo is beside the car from Colorado, with two photographers, five cameras, boatloads of gear and who still called themselves “amateur.” To our left was Tim from Temecula (about 35 minutes from our home in California), and on the other side of him was an Astronomy teacher from Murrieta (about 45 minutes away from our home). I did a roll call video, as people were stationed all around the sports park in Beaver, Utah. Near the end of the eclipse, the car just beyond Colorado (they were from Hurricane, Utah), opened up two portable burners and invited us to have tacos with them, since two of their group were having birthdays. When the moon was exactly in the center of the sun, cheers erupted around the park. It was wonderful.

Oh, and here’s an earlier trip to an eclipse in Utah.

Other than that, what have I been doing? Quilt-prepping. Watching news. Struggling with social media. But first, some quilts.

I fell in love with a Quilt Kit for a quick Christmas Quilt, although as usual, I changed it up, leaving off the word Christmas from the front. I just wanted a nice TV quilt, and didn’t need the drapey-wordy-thingie across the front, although it would be cute if you were hanging this. And I am quite fond of this designer’s fabrics. I finish up a quilt top and I think, oh good! I’m done! but I’m not. These are steps I go through to prep it up for Jen, my Longarmer.

Lay out the batting on the top of my bed, and cut the batting 6″ larger all the way around. I have a roll of my favorite batting, and Jen is okay to use what I like. The Eclipse quilt is waiting ~~in the wings~~ on the pillows.

I smooth the quilt back up on the design wall and construct a backing that’s 6″ larger all the way around. On the right, I climbed through the stash and cut-and-sewed to create a back. The blue swath is fabrics concerned with planets, moons, outer space and rabbits. When you are shopping the stash, you get what you get, even if it means rabbits.

I do a sheet like this for every quilt. It travels with the quilt, but it is also a record for me. It took me ages to pick out the panto for Merry (my title). My long armer has some good sources on her website, but often it’s just me clicking through a site. For this one I chose “Boujee” from Intelligent Quilting, designed by Melissa Kelley.

So I make the background transparent in my Affinity Photo program, then copy and paste it onto the quilt image, enlarging it or smallerizing it until it’s how I like it. This panto reminded me of stained-glass windows from France, and I thought it might work. I like SoFine thread, and I have a thread card (and many spools) so I can tell her what color I like.

Eclipse was a bit harder, because I have that yellow and orange and then the dark blues and black. So I spooled off some thread over the top, letting it fall over the areas to see how it will look. I’ve also heard of others who sew a bunch of different scraps together and then stitch down the pieced strip with different thread to see how it will look.

Finally the parts are ready. I sometimes will wrap up the parts for a quilt together, as the batting isn’t labeled. I do put little signs at the TOP of every piece, so that if I have a certain direction I want the top to go in, Jen will see that. (She always sends the little signs back to me.)

Then it’s find a sturdy box, put in a giant plastic bag, placing the quilts inside the bag. I include a paper with both of our addresses, and then tape the label on the outside of the box. I re-use bags, keeping them in my quilt closet so I know they haven’t held the lawn clippings from outside. Kidding. We recycle our lawn clippings. And our table scraps. And our cardboard, bottles, etc. And I reuse a lot of my quilting scraps and make Frankenbatting, so I’m good on that front, too. Geesh, I sound like I live in California, or something.

Recently the news came out that QuiltMania magazines (shown above) won’t be on newsstands for you to snatch up and enjoy. If you want to get their fine publication, you’ll need to subscribe. I’m writing this everywhere (on our local guild blog, too), with links to QuiltMania, Simply Vintage and Simply Moderne, so you can welcome this subscription into your home. We let our beloved Quilters Newsletter slip away from us; let’s keep these magazines around. I love that I get a glimpse of various quilt shows, how quilters around the world are doing, and different trends that can only come with a global viewpoint.

On the left is my very first Instagram post, on June 8, 2012. On the right is a screenshot of how Instagram 2012 really looked, with those blue banners. This is a screenshot of a quilt from QuiltCon, in 2013, and it’s when the power of this app sort of came alive to me–I could see all these quilts at a show where I wasn’t. I don’t remember much about comments early on, although clearly we could make comments. I remember that we mostly concentrated on how many heart-likes we received. Many months later, one quilter that I followed was diligent in replying to each and every comment, and I remember thinking: “We’re supposed to do that?”

Why am I strolling down memory lane? Because Instagram did this to my account:

And they aren’t kidding. The “Tell us” button is bogus. It does nothing. So I’m back to a decade ago, liking things, posting things, but unable to have a conversation. If I really need to get through, I send a DM. It’s kind of weird, but also very freeing — meaning that while I miss our little conversations we had every day — I’m not included in the IG universe for a while. I don’t really know how to describe this, but it feels very much like how I felt at the beginning. And now this little meme is how it feels now (watch out, there’s one bad word), and it takes a minute to figure it out, but it’s so good.

Couple that with the warning I saw last week that if we have any Jewish or Palestine feeds, we should stay off Instagram for a while, as the Hamas terrorists are plan to air videos of those they took hostage, and it won’t be good. The whole incredibly horrendous attack on Israel has me aware, but admittedly, hiding. I know what’s going on and am not turning a blind eye to the suffering, but I am careful where I click, what I watch, all the while keeping the prayers going, and wondering which charity to donate to to help. Our church partners with many non-profit organizations around the world, and I know that soon we’ll find our avenue of action and a way to help. As Elizabeth Spiers wrote for the New York Times, “Sitting with uncertainty is hard.”

I imagine you are all in the same boat I am. So I write seemingly blythe posts like this one, but know that’s all I can do at this moment. I remember that even Christ was “troubled in spirit” as he contemplated what would befall him, when he considered the betrayal that would come. And the children in that area of the world, and their families, have certainly been betrayed. Wherever you find solace, I wish that for you, because for many of us, “peacemaking means that we resist the impulse to respond and instead…remain quiet” (from here). This does not mean quiet forever, but actively looking for the right moment, the right time, and in the right way. During this time of waiting, I will continue to post about quilting, and my life and the things that infuse joy, working to steadily to loosen the roots of evil where I can.

So, last quilt to report on. Progress on the temperature quilt for 2023, as I’m pretty much caught up. It’s a whole different color scheme than my first one, and the jury is still out on whether or not I like it. And yes, speaking of juries, I was summoned to Jury Duty for this next week, but since I’m going to be here…

(from here)

…I moved my summons day until after Christmas.

See you when I return from our trip–

300 Quilts · Patterns by Elizabeth of OPQuilt · Something to Think About

Crossroads

July 9, 2023August 31, 2025 Elizabeth E.12 Comments

What is the difference between achievement and accomplishment? asked Adam Gopnick. That question has set me thinking about it ever since. We quilters work hard to get our quilts finished, our patches pieced and all the little scraps of fabric marching in order toward our vision. Are we achieving? Or are we accomplishing?

“Achievement,” writes Gopnick, “is the completion of a task imposed from outside — the reward often being a path to the next achievement. Accomplishment is the end point of an engulfing activity we’ve chosen, whose reward is the sudden rush of fulfillment, the sense of happiness that rises uniquely from absorption in a thing outside ourselves.”

“Our social world often conspires to denigrate accomplishment in favor of the rote work of achievement,” write Gopnik, and many of us are “perpetually being pushed toward the next test or the “best” grammar school, high school or college they can get into.” The result of this is that we drive the young (and maybe ourselves) toward achievement, toward “tasks that lead only to other tasks.”

Our Guild recently handed out their yearly challenge fabric, chosen by someone who loves purple:

While the challenge (due in September) is divided up into four categories (wallhangings/runners, quilts, wearables, bags/totes), for me the real challenge was working with this fabric.

Challenge accepted. When I was in Utah, I stopped by The Quilters Lodge and they helped me pick out some hues not readily observable, as well as a bold and sassy turquoise polkadot. Was this merely another task that led onto a task, “the point of it all never made plain,” as Gopnik asks?

I remember that Bonnie Hunter, master of the scrap quilt, always said that if a fabric is ugly to you, then you haven’t cut it up into small enough pieces. I didn’t find the fabric ugly — no Philip Jacobs fabric ever is, to my way of thinking. But the colors were definitely a challenge. So…I cut it up small. I chose one of my older patterns that I’d had previously published in Simply Moderne to be my guide through this. It has never been published as a stand-alone pattern, and I knew it was really versatile and strong enough to handle any fabric thrown at it. And it was fast and easy…also a requisite for this Guild challenge, to my way of thinking.

This could have been a series of exercises, dictated-from-the-outside, as so many guild challenges are. I’ve seen some so constrained that it really is ridiculous: how many of you have done the “crayon” challenge, or the “scraps in paper bag” challenge, or the “page number in a magazine” challenge? (However constraining, I happen to like that one.)

But on the other hand, says Gopnik, we’ll head towards accomplishment by looking at this big self-assigned task and “breaking it down into small, manageable tasks” that later lead to the final result. This experience of breaking down, then building up can also inform later professional work, even leading to a vocation. And my guess is that Gopnik meant these as self-directed tasks, with enough time and little enough direction, so that we can roam far and wide and back again in order to find that accomplishment.

“Self-directed accomplishment, no matter how absurd it may look to outsiders or how partial it may be, can become a foundation of our sense of self and of our sense of possibility. Losing ourselves in an all-absorbing action, we become ourselves.” (from here)

I spent the better part of a day cutting, arranging, sewing, finishing the top in a short amount of time. I recognize that I now have the opportunity to do that, and the support of my family. It was not always so easy, and when I was in graduate school (can we say “outside task” to “outside task” to “outside task”?) trying to get a degree so I could launch my professional life, I didn’t sew or quilt for two years. But I returned to it, and when I retired from teaching, my days of quilting — coupled with my education — allowed me to move into teaching Guilds, and writing this blog (“inside” tasks).

“Pursuit of a resistant task, if persevered in stubbornly and passionately at any age, even if only for a short time, generates a kind of cognitive opiate that has no equivalent. There are many drugs that we swallow or inject in our veins; this is one drug that we produce in our brains, and to good effect. The hobbyist or retiree taking a course in batik or yoga, who might be easily patronized by achievers, has rocket fuel in her hands. Indeed, the beautiful paradox is that pursuing things we may do poorly can produce the sense of absorption, which is all that happiness is, while persisting in those we already do well does not.”

So what is achievement? What is accomplishment? Maybe the words don’t fully articulate the slender difference, but we know it when we push through something hard, to end with something beautiful. We know it when that pursuit doesn’t end, although we may leave and come back to it after a time. We know it when we finally finish the quilting or the binding or the label, having worked our way through color choices and fabric choices and design and cutting and stitching, and hang up that quilt and stand back to look.

We most certainly know it then.

Time Let Me Play

June 1, 2023August 31, 2025 Elizabeth E.18 Comments

I was struck by the idea that: “…all thinking is an act of memory in some form. That includes imagination, creativity, innovation and other variations of ‘new’ thoughts. That means the components of the thought are not new. Only the combination is new.” I read this in an article in the New York Times by Peter Coy titled “If There Are No New Ideas, How Do We Keep Innovating?“

This quote came from Sheena Iyengar who just wrote a new book called Think Bigger: How to Innovate. In the case of this newest quilt top, which I’m calling Time Let Me Play (more on that in a minute), I went smaller in size, but bigger in the idea of it, which is what I think she is referring to. The idea that there is nothing new under the sun is an old one, but I wonder if she’s trying to get at a new way of thinking about creativity, an “act of memory in some form.”

Coy also notes that Mark Twain believed that there was nothing that is truly original when he wrote to Helen Keller:

“It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a telephone, or any other important thing–and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite–that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.”

In this case, the memory came from a photo my friend Lisa had given me, and I went on to make a large quilt in cream and black:

How many times have we quilters seen a new “original” quilt, and recognized a well-loved quilt block? How often has a traditional block been seen in a recent quilt, and the maker claiming it an original creation? I am always trying to spot new patterns, new shapes, new ways of thinking about things, but I do like Iyengar’s thinking that it’s memory driven. This motivates me to fill up that memory: to keep reading and adding new things to the mind’s hallways and closets. Museums, anyone? Books? A moderated dose of social media? Quilt shows? A visit to the mountains?

Iyengar writes that thinking bigger is about assembling old ideas in a new way… [S]he writes that all successful innovators are “strategic copiers,” who “learned from examples of success, extracted the parts that worked well, imagined new ways of using those pieces, and combined them to create something new and meaningful.”
Peter Coy, New York Times

So as I was working on the pattern (coming soon), I first called the cream/black quilt SunShadow. <Bleh.> Then, Starfriends, which is what I called it when I sent it up to my quilter. I’m still not there yet. But the colorful version? Here’s the deal: It’s been a long, long winter over here, with a significant death, the remodel of a kitchen, gobs of rainstorms (which I loved, but the grey skies are not a usual thing), too many small things which added up to bigger things. When we were able to get back into the kitchen, and everything was put away (and the glass lampshade I had accidentally clocked with a pan was fixed), I found a tiny bit of extra energy that no one had claimed. I started playing around with color and put the shape of this quilt into a drawing…

…it was like Time had opened the window a little bit and found time for me to play. Of course, that phrase could also be read as a plea: Time! Let me play! but I prefer the idea of all the tumblers falling into place to let a person find a memory, a space, an interval not yet filled up in order to play.

Last thought from her book: “Henri Poincaré, the great mathematician and physicist. ‘Invention consists in avoiding the constructing of useless combinations and in constructing the useful combinations which are in infinite minority,’ he wrote in 1913. “To invent is to discern, to choose.” So keep trying. That quilt you want to make is almost here.

Our initial run at this photographing this quilt against the mural wall brought the lady out of the office next to us, with the scold “What is that? Some kind of flag?”
“No,” I replied. “I’m a quilter. This is my quilt.”
She went on to say we were on private property and generally wanted us gone. A flag. A flag? I puzzled about that long and hard until Dave made the connection that June had PRIDE connections, and rainbow flags were being washed over every advertiser’s website.
“Oh,” I said. “She thought my quilt was a flag???”

In her forming memory, seeing this quilt meant rainbows meant Pride Month. In my beginning memory, I was standing in a field of flowers, with pine trees ringing the valley with my quilt in the midst of it all.

But after seeing it, I did think it needed a different border, so added one. And we went back for another round, but asked her permission first. The woman is somewhere behind those mirrored windows. I’m sure she thought we were nuts.

More play time that night, pinning the quilt in my new blue kitchen.

In the deepest parts of this hard winter, I couldn’t write, I couldn’t answer emails, I.just.couldn’t. But Time is working its eternal magic on me, helping me heal and recover and find myself again. I think my Mom would like this quilt, with its bright colors, and I hope — if heaven has a window that can be opened — that she could peer down and catch a glimpse of me letting this quilt top wave to her. Thank you to all who have reached out and understood, thank you to all who have had patience with me.

Now, let’s go play!

Mini-quilt · Something to Think About

Flashback

May 18, 2023August 31, 2025 Elizabeth E.9 Comments

Occasionally I attempt to clean out my emailbox, which is a vain and futile attempt to generally keep my life organized. But in this round, I found several stacks of emails regarding Quilt Swaps, a thing we did in the quilt world for a while. Some of my quilty swaps:

And here’s one I received:

I had drafted this pattern for her in my then-used QuiltPro software, because — as she wrote to me — she could see what she wanted to do in her mind, but couldn’t get there. I sent it off to her, and she swapped this back to me. If you need a town square quilt, I have a version of this for sale on my PayHip shop, but it’s more colorful as I used a different source for inspiration.

I started to notice a trend in looking at all these quilts from Days Gone By: strong, bright colors with faded backgrounds, what we often called “low-volume” backgrounds. And lots of solids, or fabrics that read as solids. Maybe that’s why the little quilt at the top of the post felt so familiar to me when I was making it?

And in that mess of emails, I found a link to a post from Never Just Jennifer, detailing a “Round Trip” quilt swap that she was participating in (which is where I found links to these photos; I hope she never takes the post down). Be still my heart! Leaves! New York Beauties! Letters! Flying Geese! Low-volume backgrounds! It checked every box. But wait, here’s the quilt, a tribute to New Hampshire, at the next round, with Trees!

Yes, this was in the day before Design Walls and all that, when we just flat out quilted for fun, exploring new ideas, laying our quilts out on the floor before packaging them all up and sending them off with a book to chronicle our progress. I love that last row for the quilt with Foundation Paper Piecing!

We didn’t seem to worry about coordinated fabric lines, influencing, posting-with-polish-hoping-for-likes. We borrowed. We imitated. We sewed.

In that vein, after the final workman left the kitchen and I was waiting for kitchen-drawer organizers to arrive, I pulled out a stack of cream and black prints, and inspired by this photo from my friend Lisa from easily a decade ago, I got to work.

I remembered the tip from Yvonne, about placing your ruler perpendicular to the seam when making hourglass blocks. And yes, if you want a pattern, it’s drafted with two different versions, and I’m testing and it’s coming soon. But I did want to sew again with that delicious feeling of just making. Of just sewing.

You know what I mean.