Polish Pavilion: Something fun for a Wednesday

April 27, 2022September 11, 2025 Elizabeth E.27 Comments

The Venice Biennale, the art or architecture exhibit in Italy, is shown every other year and it just opened. So all the art world has pictures everywhere about what is being shown and who is showing it. This one, using fabric, caught my eye.

Polish-Romani multidisciplinary artist, educator, and activist Małgorzata Mirga-Tas has been selected to represent Poland at the Fifty-Ninth Venice Biennale. Her “Re-enchanting the World” will occupy the Polish Pavilion during the event’s run, from April 23 to November 27, 2022. Known for a practice comprising sculpture, painting, installation, and large-format textiles, Mirga-Tas challenges discriminatory Romani stereotypes and cultivates a positive image of Roma culture. Her work frequently incorporates clothing belonging to friends and family, which she collages into patchwork screens showing scenes of the garments’ wearers engaged in everyday life, smoking or talking or just sitting around.
Art Forum

There are several places in Venice, Italy where the art is displayed, and many nations participate. I grabbed screenshots from the YouTube video for the pictures below, because hey–it’s FABRIC; the video is a three-minute overview of the art.

Britain took the National High Award (a golden lion) for their music presentation Feeling Her Way, by Sonia Boyce. I mention this also because the backdrop for her presentation are walls that look like patchwork and because the video is kind of cool to watch, to listen to.

I took a lot of photograph and digital art classes when I went to college and went through many “evaluations” or “workshops” of what we produced in the dark room/hovering over a computer. So I kind of laughed at one of the paragraphs in the Art Forum review, as it is so very “art-speak.” I propose some minor edits that can describe any of us and our quilts.

Original phrase: “unusually attractive visual form (opening the pavilion to a wider audience) combined with an original and deliberate ideological concept ‘proposing a new narrative about the constant migration of images and mutual influences between Roma, Polish and European cultures.’ ”

My Souped-Up phrase: I use an unusually attractive visual form, combined with an original and deliberate ideological concept of using various geometric and free-form shapes in order to propose a new narrative about the constant integration of images and mutual influences between traditional, modern and art cultures in my quilting.

Like that? You, too, can art-speak!

Happy Quilting!

P.S. I’ve been having some problems with some software changes by the hosting service and WordPress and I are monitoring how comments are emailed to me. If you have a moment and could help us out by leaving some sort of comment (even a word would do, but I read everything) so we can see if this is a bug, or a problem with their new forms, we’d appreciate it.

If you send me a comment, I’ll enter you in a drawing for all my old clothes, so you, too, can enter the Venice Biennale and be world-famous. I’M KIDDING. But if you could leave a comment, that would be great.

Writing Poetry

March 20, 2022September 13, 2025 Elizabeth E.25 Comments

The famous and prolific writer Joyce Carol Oates was once asked,
“What do you do when you finish a novel?”
“I’m spent,” she said. “Can’t write another word of fiction. So I turn to writing poetry.”

Late Friday night, I finished stitching on the final border of the Heart’s Garden Mystery QAL (the slice of pink in the picture below). I sunk down into my sewing room chair, took a couple of photos and went to bed.

The next morning, her quip — about poetry — began boinking around in my head. I started my day by cleaning up my sewing space: emptying bins, throwing away junk-that-accumluates, vacuuming crevices and window frames. Then my husband came in and asked me to go out to lunch with him.

We happened on our town’s Saturday morning market and bought vegetables, a perfect tray of strawberries, and lunch at the local deli.

We ate outside on the plaza, escaping before the BoJangles Man set up with his amplifier, microphone and guitar.

We walked down the pedestrian mall and shared a Crème Brûlée donut complete with a crackling sugar top.

We wandered into Mrs. Tiggywinkle’s shop, and came out with this small Elenor Easterly figurine by Lori Mitchell. I sometimes find that aimless wandering and buying tchotchkes can often help a Mood.

Back home, I finished cleaning up. But I kept thinking about poetry. I used to write poetry, and was once Poet Laureate for University of California-Riverside as an undergraduate. I do have times when I hop onto Poetry Daily and just read for a while, sometimes typing in a search keyword but other times, just reading at random. It’s also great for quilt titles, if you need them.

I think, with poetry, there is an assumed connection between the external life and the interior life–one is linked to the other in a reciprocal relationship. But I feel that as well with creative or quilting projects. How I’m feeling internally will affect what I do externally, and if I’m exhausted or unsettled or wrung out, I have to deal with this. However, sometimes that creative connection is automatic — and I have to try to shut it down to relax (like wanting to take a photo of the table because it looked like it could be a quilt design or something.)

Oates’ poetry allowed her to keep creating, yet still leave the scene of her most arduous work. One example of this that we know all too well is our past two years which has kept us immersed in a strange world; many of us turned to our creative connection to help keep ourselves sane. We have all spent our two years chipping away at the gloom while trying to stay mentally and physically healthy. More than once I’ve wondered how my grandmother got through the 1918 flu, but she didn’t write about it. We’ve obviously found tiny slivers of poems (in the abstract sense) to help us — a child’s drawing, a phone call, or just taking a walk — things that can bring us back to ourself.

So after thinking about it, here were my poems for today:

I created a clean space.
I admired the completed quilt top Heart’s Garden on the design wall.
I created a space for me to listen the jet that roared through the skies, shaking our home, its contrails like two steaming taillights.
I opened the window to feel the breeze.

I let myself rest.
I let myself empty out.

Saturday afternoon, I sat at my neatened desk and read poetry, then copied and pasted two poems in below; hope you have time to glance at them.

And…I have already found two quilts that intrigue me, here and here.

I took a look at the quilt I started at Road, and thought I’d like to make some more blocks. I do have one extra pattern from that day, and will send it to someone, if you are interested. To enter to win the pattern, please tell me what your “poetry” is when you are wrung out–how do you restore yourself…to yourself? How do you replenish that creative urge? How do you find your way back to creating again after a long project?

Leave me a comment below!

Happy Quilting!

Links, etc.

That’s a statue of Eliza Tibbets up there in the collage, with her skirts flowing. Tradition has it that when the first batch of navel orange seedlings arrived in the United States from Brazil, she persuaded the Plant Importation Program to give her some. They sent two, and they flourished — so the story goes — because she watered them with her dishwater. (She really didn’t look like that, but I still love that statue.)

Poetry Foundation, where you can read poems daily, and from where I pulled the following two poems.
I also like Poetry.com for reading poems.

My mother has gone blind over the last decade, but she sewed intricate needlepoint canvases. All three of my sisters and I worry about losing our sight. After reading this poem, I should probably take up crocheting.

poem is from the September 1918 issue of Poetry, *from here*

This poem is haunting, reflecting our world today, but instead of pink roses, we stitch blue and yellow patchwork. Armistice Day for World War I was a month later: November 11, 1918.

Leave a comment about what your “poetry” is, to enter the giveaway. Thanks!

Heart's Garden · Something to Think About

Adding To Do Items onto a To Do List

March 5, 2022September 13, 2025 Elizabeth E.12 Comments

So many organizational systems do not account for a trip to the fabric store, where immediately I have to reshuffle, re-prioritize not only my To Do List, but also my sewing room. I have five red tabs in my Get To Work Book and they read To Do 1, To Do 2 and so on to the fifth one. I have half-filled lists in my quilting planner. A lot is crossed off using my yellow highlighter, but when your organizational lists get out of control, how do you organize and get things done?

Research: I read this article which suggests compiling four different types of lists: Master, Monthly, Weekly, Daily (he describes them on the site). Lisa Jackson recommends a service called WorkFlowy under the post title of A Tool for Organizing Your Brain. Bette has declared this the Year of Focus and has organized segments of the year dedicated to her sewing goals. Sherri of A Quilting Life has a good planner for quilting goals.

And here’s my classic Goals List from over two decades ago. I should frame this–what an ambitious woman I used to be! (I’ve abandoned housework, physical fitness goals and scrapbooks — but did complete most of the quilts in the list. I also got the children raised.)

As we’ve noticed, our lives have shifted underneath us. We kept going, but perhaps our outlook changed, our friendships dwindled or expanded. I liked Brad Stulberg’s article, where he writes:

“Many of us felt seen when, last April, the organizational psychologist Adam Grant wrote of languishing, “a sense of stagnation and emptiness … as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield.” There was a relief in having a name for our experience, and a kind of solace in realizing that we weren’t alone in experiencing it. But now, nearly a year later, as with just about everything related to Covid, we’re sick of languishing too.”

Perhaps that’s why when I went to QuiltCon in February, I tried to find things to give me a spark. I loved my two classes from Cassandra Beaver and Verushka Zarate, and enjoyed the lectures. It was fun to see people again in the wild, but there were some interesting moments of confusion in identifying people because we were all masked. And perhaps that’s why — when I went into a real-live quilt shop in Phoenix, and maybe because they gave QuiltCon-ers 20% off, I snapped up a range of beautiful colored semi-solids. Some one in line asked me what I was going to do with all those, all I say was, “We’re supposed to have a plan before we buy?”

Perhaps I was exhibiting Stulberg’s mention of “behavioral activation…based on the idea that action can create motivation, especially when you’re in a rut.” He writes:

“The challenge with behavioral activation is mustering enough energy to start acting on the things that matter to you: Make that phone call, schedule that walk with friends, write that email, get off social media and start on the creative project you’ve been procrastinating on. This may sound simple, but when you are languishing, simple does not mean easy.

“But a mind-set shift can be a powerful tool. When you feel down, unmotivated or apathetic, you can give yourself permission to feel those feelings but not dwell on them or take them as destiny. Instead, you shift the focus to getting started with what you have planned in front of you, taking your feelings, whatever they may be, along for the ride. Doing so gives you the best chance at improving your mood.”

So To Do lists can sometimes become exercises in bloodless planning, an attempt to get organized (which is why my planner often has blank spaces). But walking into a fabric shop now becomes behavioral activation. That, we can all get behind.

So my To Do lists are more random. This was going to be my year of Focus, a la Bette, but then I started the Heart’s Garden Mystery Quilt-A-Long, which I had all sketched out. And which I totally scrubbed after Step One and rebuilt it anew. Which was no where on my Yearly To Do List. Here’s my first sketch:

Yep. Pretty hideous, excepting those EPP circles. I even got the birds around the border, but they look more like quail, than sparrows or finches. I’ve been working on writing up Part 3, which is coming next week, and part of that is making birds over and over, as I perfect the pattern:

blue and yellow blocks, for Ukraine *(from Hearts Garden pattern)*

So I write — and cross off — “sparrows” on my To Do List, and wander back into the sewing room for some pleasant Behavioral Activation. I wish the same for you.

Happy Quilting!

PatternLite · Patterns by Elizabeth of OPQuilt · Something to Think About

Autumn Leaves • PatternLite

November 21, 2021September 13, 2025 Elizabeth E.11 Comments

Confession: I got caught up in Fall Color. A few particular trees in Southern California and even the leaves on my wisteria arbor are turning yellow, getting ready to drop. In addition, we put together another round of Gridster Bee, and those of us who were experienced thought we should get sample blocks up on the spreadsheet as an example.

I have been hanging on to this screenshot (see how old those IG icons are?) for some time, as I’ve always wanted to do it in a bee. The pattern is a variation of Maple Leaf:

To be precise, it’s Maple Leaf–Brackman #1740, which originally debuted in Aunt Martha’s booklets in the 1930s. Like the Flickr group, above, I changed out the stem so it could be pieced. And is my wont, I wondered if anyone else was interested in this block. I certainly I had a few words to say about how to make up a leaf in autumn colors, so I put it all into a PatternLite, and then up in my PayHip Shop. I also included how to make a Four-at-a-Time Flying Geese block, giving away the secret formula, freeing you from charts forever.

PatternLite Patterns, if you are new here, are not-quite-all-of-a-pattern, for not-quite-all-of-the-price. They are less than a fancy pink drink at Starbucks. They are cheaper than a slice of pizza from that place around the corner from you. They are for those quilters who can see a block and take off with it in their own way, and don’t need comprehensive instructions on construction. But I did do up a couple of sketches for what can be done with this block:

How about a table runner for your holiday table?

Or a quilt? It’s there now in the shop, if you want to grab it.

I had some other ideas, but I will let time work them out for me, or sleep as John Steinbeck noted:

“It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.”

This may take me more than a few nights, I think.

And then there’s this, that’s been rattling around in my head:

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.” (Steve Jobs)

Lately, I’ve been concerned with sameness, or the inability to make connections between two different things, because so much is all the same.

If we are mostly in our houses, with our same stashes, in the same room, making those same projects we dreamed up some time ago, where are the differences that allow us to make connections? I think many of us get it through social media, but beware:

*from a recent Honors symposium my friend attended*

I had been sort of dependent on my Instagram feed for variety and for seeing new things, until I realized that over time the random things I had selected had become more of “the same”–repeating back to me the images I had selected precisely because they were new and different. What with the algorithm changing how we interacted with that media, and the selectivity with which it feeds us our friends’ posts on our feed, what had once fed my need for new and novel things just came unraveled.

When you are traveling in a new space, trying to juggle all that’s coming at you, you make new connections. Perhaps you discover a different way to think about a dilemma, or even how to navigate physical space:

I did eventually make it to TechnoPark-ro, and enjoyed all that I saw. This has been on my mind because of what I’ve noticed in my correspondence, that there’s been a refrain of not feeling enthusiastic about what you used to do. Some describe it in that time-honored way of “lost my sewjo.” I could also describe it as longing for the thunderbolt of a new idea, one that just grabs you and has you on the run to try to express it.

Because I feel like drowning in sameness is a situation to escape, my tactic of late has been to look for old quilt blocks to explore in new ways (hence, Autumn Leaves). I also like seeing new fabrics, other than the same three designers carried by my quilt shop, so recently I went to Fat Quarter Shop to their pre-cuts and read ALL 38 pages of it, learning about what’s coming. I vary my walks around my neighborhood, cook new recipes:

What I call Sushi in a Bowl: sushi rice, salmon, cucumbers, slaw, avocado and dressing

Three reasons why people are motivated to be creative: 1) need for novel, varied, and complex stimulation; 2) need to communicate ideas and values and 3) need to solve problems. A scholarly listing of thoughts about creativity can be read here.

Right brain? Left Brain? Anna Abraham begs to differ: “The brain’s right hemisphere is not a separate organ whose workings can be regarded in isolation from that of the left hemisphere in most human beings. It is also incorrect to conclude that the left brain is uncreative. In fact even the earliest scholars who explored the brain lateralization in relation to creativity emphasized the importance of both hemispheres.” A high level Q & A with her is here.

“As strange as it sounds, creativity can become a habit,” says creativity researcher Jonathan Plucker, PhD, a psychology professor at Indiana University. “Making it one helps you become more productive.” Read about it here.

A quote from an article from my favorite resource, 99U: “Creativity is a skill that allows you to draw understanding of the world around you, connect those observations to your existing knowledge reservoirs, and imagine new applications of your knowledge on the world.” Read it here.

Keep at it, find the new and novel, and keep quilting!