Faith Baldwin said that quote, and I’ve saved it for ages, waiting to use it as a quilt title.
I started this with a whole new stack of colors than my last temperature quilt, and then even though I’d been fussing about it since January 1st, the intense sewing really didn’t get underway until about March — I was waiting to see if we would have an interesting year for weather. We did, with snow one day and hail another and many rain storms.
While I didn’t want to replace the earlier version, I did love love that quilting. Jen was able to do the same pattern on this quilt, too. It’s more square, has a temperature quilt key on the back, along with a linen tea-towel calendar to show the year. I also added a square denoting made in California. Which it was.
This is quilt #286, and it’s 61″ wide and 70″ tall. Or long. Or high, or whatever.
No surprise that I chose this title for this quilt, as these patchwork triangles mark the passage of time, and by their very color, alter the face of the quilt top. I’m not sure I’m as generous about the marks time has placed on my physical body, and sometimes the alterations of who I think I am can sometimes be pleasant, and other times, painful. I want just enough spice and change in my life to make it interesting, but I don’t want sustaining relationships to wither or change or wilt. Some you can’t get back, like when my father died earlier this year. Other relationships take a bit more stitching and cutting and late-night sewing to become the beautiful garment (or quilt) they were meant to be. Y’all know what I mean, and I’m guessing the marks time leaves on all of us can be wearying. Or gratifying. Or somewhere in between.
A single day is enough to make us a little larger or, another time, a little smaller, said Paul Klee.
John Lithgow: Time sneaks up on you like a windshield on a bug.
Theodore Roethke, a favorite poet, noted that, Time marks us while we are marking time.
Try pausing right before and right after undertaking a new action, even something simple like putting a key in a lock to open a door. Such pauses take a brief moment, yet they have the effect of decompressing time and centering you, wrote David Steindl-Rast
We’re planning a trip to see the Eclipse in April, and are trying to find those moments where we can pause time, as Stindl-Rast suggests. And hopefully not in dive hotels, or out of gas at the side of a road in West Texas. Seeing the eclipse will, in its own way, pause time, and will make its mark, bringing a fancy bit of stitching to this thing called life.
I hope the Dressmaker-called-Time makes you the finery you hope for–
Sometimes the title for these posts can nudge toward the trivial, but the first thing I want to talk about was anything but trivial.
My family.
Our four children do not live near us, for some, the far-away is very-far-away, and for others, it’s a bit closer. My husband proposed taking me out to dinner for my milestone birthday, but to “prepare for photos.” And “maybe don’t wear your sneakers.” We went to our local Fancy Dining Place, The Mission Inn, which was still decked out in holiday lights. When I rounded the corner to our table, the kids were all sitting there. Oh, My! I was quite touched that they would come to celebrate with me, and they spent the next day with us, too. Quite the loveliest of birthday surprises. By Sunday, they had all gone home, and the house was very quiet.
When an opening became available, I rejoined the Gridster Bee. It was one I’d started several years ago, but I’d bowed out last year. Patti, ever capable, took over and has been a steady hand in keeping it going, as many bees dissolve after a short time. We had our kick-off Zoom call at the beginning of the month (one positive from the 2020 pandemic is this technology):
I loved seeing Carol’s Christmas quilt, one done in an earlier iteration of this Bee.
I finished this. It’s a free pattern, here on the website (keep reading). I’d started writing it ages ago, but who knows where time flies? Inside is the color key for both this 2023 (softer) version of Painter’s Palette fabrics, as well as the (bolder) version used in 2019:
I haven’t yet finished the 2023 quilt; for one, I’m still embroidering the temperature range numbers onto the Circle of Geese block that I’ve used for a key.
And about this geese pattern. It was originally made by Kelly Liddle of JelliQuilts. If I could find her again, I’d link to it. She seems to have vanished without a trace, and it’s a pretty good pattern for this sort of thing. I’ve even written to the last email I have from her, when I paid for and downloaded the pattern: Zip. Nada.
Which brings me to the podcast I listened to this past week, where Ezra Klein and his guest, Kyle Chayka, talk about how the internet isn’t fun anymore. Boring, too. And part of it is what Chayka calls the SEO-ification of the algorithm. Everything resembles everything else, as we use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to get a wider reach. While this can have benefits, Chayka and Klein argue that we seem to be homogenizing our world, as every website looks like another as the robots send you to whatever you’ve liked before, and assume you will like again.
I’m fine with that, especially when I do a search on Temperature Quilts on Instagram. But I’m also not fine with it as it seems to have flattened out what we see. Like hashtags used to be an interesting way to get a range of images, from temperature quilts that began as crocheted blankets to the most recent version of houses, leaves, and birds. Now we just get the “TOP” images. Are they the top “eye-ball-getting” images? The most colorful? The most interesting? And how will we ever know what the robots, aka: algorithm, have come to choose what they are showing us.
Chayka says he misses the curated web, where various people wrote random things, like a writer went flying through a rainbow and put the colors up on a blog. A blog!?! Who writes those anymore? Well, I do. Maybe that is why I also write about quilting, but also more-than-quilting, trying to avoid being boring, and maybe to avoid having to clean up my sewing room:
(from 2020, but it still looks the same)
One more thing: this week is Road to California, a local, national quilt show. I’m signed up for two classes: one from Lori Kennedy (FMQ on Monday) and one from Annie Smith (Design Your Own Appliqué on Thursday). I’ll also go one more day, Saturday, so I can stay to get my quilt that is hanging in the show: Aerial Beacon.
I would take a closer photo of this, but it will have to wait until next week, when I get some pictures of it hanging in the show. If you are headed there, find me and say hi!
Here’s the Temperature Pattern download. It will stay here on my website for a bit, then move over to my Pattern Shop on PayHip. Enjoy!
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.
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…
Hurricane Hilary is streaming towards us, so we spent most of Saturday morning doing something that East-Coasters have memorized: make sure we have water, food that can be prepped w/o power, and have sandbagged potential flooding areas. We put in French drains ages ago, but our up-above-neighbor’s water always pours into our yard (unhappy face, here). He’s a nice guy, but we have to prepare against his run-off, so my husband did something we’d never done before: went and got sandbags.
I cleaned out the garage, sweeping it clean and propping up all cardboard boxes off the floor, just in case the water runs through the back door. We then loaded all the patio furniture (even the BBQ) into the extra space. I think we are ready. The humidity is off-the-charts, and the storm hasn’t even arrived yet. (And in case you are wondering, that is a 30-year old wisteria vine on the patio cover. I planted it when we first moved in and I hope it all survives the predicted winds.)
But that’s not the only weather on my mind. On this day as I sewed the squares for January 2023 together, I was thinking about how cool the weather was at that time (yes, we even had a few nights of freezing, which would explain why our jacaranda tree is currently toast — we have hopes it will come back), and how many rainy days we had. When I sewed March, we had one day of 10 minutes of snowflakes (it happens in Southern California), and a third of the month were rainy days.
I mentioned how I was needing a month identifier block, and I decided to use whatever colors were in the mix at that month. So for January, they are pinned above the beginning of the month. I sewed two of the triangles together, then added another:
Then trim:
Now I have a month block. Of course, I can’t do them ahead of time, but that’s okay.
This is how my cutting space looks. It’s getting quite cramped. The box with all the colors-in-bags is next to the yardage. I purchased 1 yard of all the Painters Palette solid colors. In front, the construction/cutting zone, which I clear away and then set up again, as needed.
And here I’ve pulled all the “highs” for that month, and have written the dates in the seam allowance. Yes, please, do this.
Do I just sew them together randomly by date? Yes, I do them by date, but first pin them up to see how they relate to the other blocks around them. If the temps are lower than the day before, the angle is down to the right. If the temps are higher, angle up to the right. Of course, the first couple of rows, I just sewed, but now it’s a pattern game: what will I see when this one is next to that one. This is the fun part of it all, and I’m enjoying seeing what these HSTs make. (And the temps are getting warmer, shown by the pinks.) I pin the loose ones together:
Then I sew them together. I press one row going down, then the next row going up, so they will nest together and I can sew them together (albeit a bit more slowly) without needing to pin them. If you are a “press-open” sort of sewer, have fun pinning those seams.
Then I got up early Saturday morning, before the work of the day (moving stuff into the garage — even the gazing ball is now tucked away) and take a photo. I just turned the corner on the month of May, so I’m catching up to August. Now I’m thinking I need to make a different color band for our hurricane. Yes, I know it will be a tropical storm by the time it hits us, but wow–this is definitely something I’ve not experienced in Southern California living. Ever.
My Quilt Journal
Now I have a question for you. Have you ever journaled about your quilts? If so, have you tried any of these techniques?
Blog, then print the book
Blog, with no printing
Instagram, with/without printing
a notebook, where I paste in my photos, and write about my quilts
no Quilt Journal
just photos in an album
I’m thinking of proposing to our Guild that we have a Quilt Journal night, prompted by this article in the NYTimes, where Laura Rubin believes corporate American could benefit from the practice. But why not quilters, too? She says that “journaling works. It gets you where you need to go,” but in my life, it’s also a way to collect what I’ve done, to not lose my life in the details.
And do you:
use a pre-designed quilt journal, like the ones available on ETSY?
make your own from a blank spiral-bound book?
Buy a bound book?
Write just about the nuts and bolts of creating that quilt?
Or do you take time to write the inspiration, the story of the quilt, and why you chose the title?
Does it include photos? Fabric swatches? Sketches?
So, anything you have to add about the idea of quilt journaling, leave a comment, or an idea.
The storm is still not here, and we are all in anticipation. It’s killing us, smalls. We’re used to earthquakes, with no advance notice. Boom, and you are shaken. I just came in from outside, the twilight sky is dark and deep, with a thick layer of clouds overhead that deaden all sound. Eerie. Guess I’d better quilt before we lose our power, right?
…who is looking to survive Hurricane Hilary!
First ever appraisal of a quiltOur poor, nearly dead, jacaranda tree.
OccasionalPiece--Quilt! 