Sewing in Translation

March 29, 2025April 3, 2025 Elizabeth E.11 Comments

You know when I stood in the shopping area of Carrefour Quilt Show last September (2024), I wanted to buy up all the fabrics and patterns and everything, but alas my suitcase was small, so I had to limit myself. One of the choices was a series of small pouches from ABCDaires, with a soft velvety fabric with absolutely charming printed designs. I tend to buy something that I won’t see in the States, and this fit the ticket. I bought three: two kits and one that just had the printed fabric.

(taken with permission)

There is a front and a back to each pouch with different designs. One kit was pink with a girl in flowers on the front, and then just the flowers on the back. The colors were rich and saturated, so I was hooked.

However…Note to future self: Just.Buy.The.Kit. For the un-kit purchase, I luckily had a zipper that was a perfect match. However, the zippers in the kit were just a bit heavier duty, plus she included the lining, a waxed lightweight canvas.

But how can I sew it if it is in another language? you ask. Google Translate to the rescue. Let’s start with their website, ABCDaires:

I have the Google Translate in my browser, so I just click on the little icon in the upper right of the search bar; in some reading I did it suggested that now you have to use Chrome as your browser to get that. (I don’t know–do some searching online.) Or you can head to Google Translate and paste in the URL of the page you want to see in English:

This is Google Translate (above). Click on the Websites box, paste in your URL and it should translate most of the language for you.

Now the website is all in English, and you can click around to purchase the little kit you want. Yes, you will still have to convert the metric measurements while sewing. I have a small ruler that I use for just this.

She was very helpful and just lovely and spoke English! They also have a downloadable PDF of instructions on their website. I’ll talk about that in a minute.

This is the smallest of the three I purchased. You can see the little ruler I use that has cm and mm marked on it. The first thing you do it mark off small squares in the corners, but she has two different measurement options. This was the first wrinkle in the translation business. Which one? I tried using my Google Translate on my iPhone. You open up the app, choose PHOTO and hold it over the paragraph:

After a second or two, all the French is in English (I chose the language, but you could choose any). I learned a “coupon” is a “pouch” or maybe “fabric” or not (it’s not always perfect). So I went to the section about the corners, but alas, still couldn’t figure it out. I then went to math, something we quilters are good at. If the fabric measured X by X then I used the larger dimension, and if it was a different X by X, I would use the smaller. I measured the printed fabric, which gave me my answer. (I’m using “X” so I don’t give away her pattern.) I’m just saying, don’t be frustrated, but try another angle to solve your translation difficulty. Onward.

Ends go on the zipper, zipper gets sewn to the fabric…a usual sequence of steps for a pouch.

Since this is a velvet minky, I didn’t want to put a hot iron on it and scorch it, so I found my roller came in handy for flattening the seams. On the pink pouch, I opted to topstitch down the fabric with the zipper (she gives two options). I won’t do that again — in a minute I’ll show you why. [Of course it could be that I’m a dweeb at sewing pouches, and the results have everything to do with that.]

In the first photo, the designer fabric is shown smoothed away to the left, away from the stitching going on on the lining/zipper tape. As usual, when your presser foot approaches the zipper pull, leave the needle in the fabric, raise the presser foot slightly, and move it to the back where you’ve already stitched. This will eliminate bumps in the stitching line.

First one done! She has a clever way to put in the velvet ribbon so it becomes a nice zipper pull on a traditional zipper.

Here we go again. I used a bit of fabric from the stash for the zipper ends. I chose a spotty lining fabric (in upper right corner).

Done! The second one went so much faster, and I only top-stitched on the zipper, not the top designer fabric.

Back designs on both.

Notice how wonky the zipper ending is on the pink? I mean, it’s functional, but not as lovely as the blue zipper. I chalk it up to how the top-stitching impeded the inner seam. (I need to find a cute ribbon for the blue bag.)

UPDATE: I’ve since sewn the last blue pouch, and now I think it was the coated lining fabric “zipper ends” that gave me so much trouble. The fabric “end,” shown above, was much easier to manipulate. So maybe, if you make these, find a coordinating fabric, rather than use the coated fabrics.

I love how the bag color blends into a second color for the base.

Baby Molly and St. Patrick Day Girl posing with the pink bag. (You know I have to put Molly in here somewhere.)

Now, a caveat. This was an easy translation task, relatively. The company had an English download for the instructions, and I already had the Google Translate installed in my browser. I was also familiar with how the iPhone’s Google Translate worked too, having tried it out on an earlier trip to Japan, where I found out that my breakfast roll was made with the “breath of heaven.” (Okay, so it doesn’t always work so well with idioms, but I took that to mean it had flour in it.) The app has improved greatly since then, I assume because of a a positive use of AI in our lives.

I struggled more on this project, made from a book I’d purchased at Carrefours and also published in French. The trip-up came because it was a JAPANESE bag, translated into French:

I did use a lot of “how to sew Japanese bags” searches on the internet, with questions like “Do I trace the pattern off the pattern sheet in the back of the book?” (yes) and “Are seam allowances included?” (no). This required a huge MIND shift, and aside from sewing the bottom to the top edge of the bag, I made it. (That’s why it looks upside down, ahem.) I did a lot of improvising, but I also love it, too.

I guess what I want to say is that it is a big world of quilting out there and we can always stand to have our horizons enlarged and widened, helping us to bridge all the acrimony and bitterness that can sometimes be found around us. I am in minor grief just about every day with the parts of what I once held dear being taken apart and sold for dross. So I’ve stepped up and purchased another subscription to a news organization, donated to three different local public broadcast stations, apologized to my Canadian friend Kaylie for who I’ve made two baby quilts, apologized to some scientists I know who won’t get funding for their research saving crops from pests (I do like to eat). I guess I’ll soon be apologizing soon to Greenland, too. And Mexico. And Europe, where I’ll be this year — I hope they let me in. I hope America lets me back in, and lets me have my phone after going through customs. I remember traveling in Italy when Hilary Clinton was running for President and the taxi driver went on and on about how her opponent was like Berlusconi, a real rat, he said. I assured him that she would win. Haha, spoke too soon.

I guess I just want to say that make friends with our international neighbors, sew their projects, buy American products (so they can survive the boycotts from other nations), but mostly just sew. I could go on and on, but I have many friends who are very happy right now, and I love them too. Mostly I just try to translate my complicated feelings and make the results come out with a bit of peace, a bit of kindness and a lot of forbearance.

Sort of like sewing with beautiful fabrics from a lovely French shopkeeper–

Update: I had some questions about what kind of fabric this was. After reading this post, I’d say it hews closer to a product similar to Celosia Velvet, as the back is very sturdy and is not stretchy, nor drapable.

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!

300 Quilts · Creating · Totes and Purses

Keep Kalm-a-La and Carry On-A-La

November 10, 2024August 30, 2025 Elizabeth E.13 Comments

Well, my candidate didn’t win.

However, I was making this bag the whole last week of the election, and because I was inadvertently using the Keep Calm and Carry On (only it was Press On, Quilt On, etc.) and they had a skit on Saturday Night Light Live with Maya Rudolf and Kamala Harris that had a lot of joy and lot of play on words (including the title of this blog post), you really can’t blame me for merging it into the effort, can you?

I say it’s okay to name things after current events, as I’m just fitting in with my quilting ancestors (thinking of all the quilts I saw in the DAR exhibits while I lived in DC that were named after election things like the Henry Clay Campaign Quilt or the Fort Sumter Flag Quilt and such). Really I just call it the Black and White and a Pop of Color challenge project for my guild, and I’m done a full 6 weeks early, for which I am celebrating! And no, no one from my Guild ever reads this blog, so I’m safe to write about it.

This took me ton of time, because of all that cord-loop business inside.

The pattern came from a book I picked up in France, which was all in French, but it was a Japanese designer, and yes, I made some shortcuts and mistakes and no, we aren’t going to talk about those. But thank heaven for Google Translate. Isn’t that colorful one on the cover a lot of fun?

I used some handles I’d purchased ages ago in Japan at Yuzawaya (and attached with little cloth loops), but it took me numerous shopping expeditions both at brick-and-mortar stores and ETSY, to even get something resembling the cord I needed, and I raided another bag for the clasp. Like I said, if I were in Japan, all these parts would be at the local Yuzawaya store. I still think I need to order thicker cord for the right look, but oh well.

Side, side, and bottom. Since it took me as much time as some of my quilts, it has a number (293) and is indexed in my Indices, above. I do think it’s clever how the cord draws up the bag to give it shape, but just don’t know if it will work long-term. At any rate, the Guild Challenge is due in December, and I’m DONE!

While I was out shopping for cording — in early November — Christmas music was playing. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. November is a time for gratitude, fall colors and fall quilts.

*Autumn: The Chestnut Gatherers, 1894* by Georges Lacomb. Seen at the Norton Simon Museum.

*Autumn Leaves*, original design More autumn quilts seen here.

Why do I bring up autumn quilts? Because we’ve all seen these blocks from the #sweaterweathersampler2024 in our Instagram feed, an offering from some very talented women. I like the 2024 quilt offering better than their 2023, but they are fun to see pop up (check out this exhibit from some quilters in Germany). The one above is from Iva Steiner, an incredibly talented longarmer and quilter.

But, given the general season of thankfulness and thanksgiving, I’m happy that I like the autumn quilts that are in my house.

Given the general anxiety we all felt the past two weeks, I’m glad that the election is over and I don’t want to hear anymore about it for a long, long while. I was also feeling anxiety over quilting a very organic quilt that I’d made, and all my usual doodling wasn’t cutting it. My husband suggested just going with the flow, meaning following the lines of the organic fabric.

I guess I knew that in my heart, but it took my sweetheart to state the obvious: all those fancy geometric designs I was familiar with in my usual fmquilting just weren’t going to cut it with this one.

The back, a conglomerate of leftover fabrics. I have great light in my bathroom, so I take progress shots in there a lot.

Even in the border, I went organic, like blocks of waving grain, or striated boulders, or I don’t know what. Full reveal after I get the borders on.

I only have three hours left in this novel. I almost can’t stand to stop, but this morning I’ve got a lesson to teach to the church ladies, so things will slow down on the listening for a while.

But a good book can really get me to sit down and get the quilting done. I’ve got my eye on getting this one and this one quilted up and finished, too.

We’ve spent so much time in the last few months looking ahead, so I thought I would leave you with this quote, from Adam Miller from his book Original Grace: An Experiment in Restoration Thinking:

“Creation unfolds exclusively in the present tense. Nothing is created in the past—though the past was once present. And nothing is created in the future—though the future will eventually arrive.”

This quote has made me think, and ponder a lot. When our Instagram feeds are blitzed full of other people’s achievements and when we are battling one demon after another, it can make us long for days when we used to be super-charged in making, or looking forward to days when we can get to the machines and roll like crazy. But, as Miller notes, creation unfolds in the present. All that we take in now will be fuel for the creativity when we sit down and enjoy the stitching in a present-not-here-yet. We need days when we can stop and notice the autumn colors. Or take a few days to practice forgiveness. Or linger on some days to fill our heart with thanksgiving.

Happy Autumn, y’all!

100 Quilts · Totes and Purses · Travels

Dumplings

September 16, 2023August 31, 2025 Elizabeth E.17 Comments

Not *this* kind of dumpling!
Yes, these are dumplings, but it’s not the kind I meant. However, if you want the recipe, I describe it here (but the NYTimes Cooking website is the original source). It’s soooo good for an end-of-summer recipe.

This is the Dumpling I was thinking of — a sweet little zippy bag. It’s a design by Michelle Patterns, and she has a great tutorial and a free pattern at her website. I’ve made many, and use them for little things in my purse, I use them for travel (it carries my tiny portable phone charger/battery/thing). They hold lip gloss, lipstick, treats — all kinds of stuff.

This is why I made them: my granddaughter’s wedding had champagne and beige and cream and white for her wedding, and my daughter — the designer — had used chiffon and satin ribbons everywhere. So I grabbed some of the ribbons when we were cleaning up and brought them home.

I pulled all the tones of the wedding I could find in my stash, cut 2 1/2″ squares and sewed them together in rows. Then I backed them with batting and fabric, did a random wavy pattern for quilting, and cut out the dumpling bag shape. It goes together really quickly. I sewed a clump of ribbons onto the zipper pull and sent them off!

Glad they like them! A little momento of a big day.

And what else have I been doing? Mending quilts. If you’d told me I’d be mending quilts decades after making them, I wouldn’t have believed you. The Christmas quilt (since passed down) was ripped, but luckily I had the fabric. Watch the little movie here. But the other was an earlier quilt of mine.

This is how it — and we — looked in Road to California in 1998. I’d seen a Wheel of Mystery Quilt in a National Quilt Show in a city close to ours (the only time I can remember one coming that close). I didn’t have a template and can hardly remember if 25 years ago we were using rotary cutters, but I’d sort of figured out the pattern and made a template from a Crisco shortening container lid, and used that to draw all those circle-y shapes.

I purchased just about every color way in the pansies fabric, and used solids to coordinate. It took me about 3 years to make this, and yes, it was hand-quilted, on a small hoop stand that was in the corner of our dining room.

Last night, Dave held it up for me in our back yard, another sun-going-down photo.

The back. This is Quilt #25, in my Quilt Index. Unbelievably, that’s 254 quilts ago.

The label on this well-loved quilt reads:

I SEND thee pansies while the year is young,
Yellow as sunshine, purple as the night;
Flowers of remembrance, ever fondly sung
By all the chiefest of the Sons of Light;
And if in recollection lives regret
For wasted days and dreams that were not true,
I tell thee that the “pansy freaked with jet”
Is still the heart’s-ease that the poets knew.
Take all the sweetness of a gift unsought,
And for the pansies send me back a thought.
Poet: Sarah Dowdney

I used the phrase “heart’s-ease” as a title on another quilt, but this one is just all Pansies. And yes, that label is all reverse appliqué –I slid the hand-written poem underneath a pansy rectangle, and edged it with a border of pansies. I cut out and appliquéd more pansies around the edges.

Why was I mending it? The binding had worn right along the edges (we used it on our bed for many years). Because I had made a double-width binding, and because I didn’t have any more of that fabric, I pulled off the binding, pressed it, and cut it down the middle, tossing the worn side, and saving the “underneath” side:

I did a double-fold binding, sewed it on, then trimmed away excess before I folded it back over the raw edge and hand-sewed it down.

That’s what talking on the phone is for: put in earbuds/put on headphones and talk and sew. It’s already been claimed by one of the children, and I’ll deliver it to him in the next couple of weeks.

*Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer)* by Claude Monet (1890-91)

In last week’s poem, I mentioned “ricks” and found out they were haystacks. Well, this past week I was in Chicago (my husband was at a scientific meeting) and I spent two of those days at the Art Institute of Chicago, even becoming a member. And here they were, these piles of hay as described by Dylan Thomas: “hay / Fields high as the house” and “the nightjars / Flying with the ricks” as painted by Claude Monet. There were multiple images of these haystacks, and lots of beautiful Monets.

(Above is a video, if technology is working for me. )
I hope that wasn’t too fast, but you get the picture. Multiple pictures. And a patchwork Rail Fence floor.

When I left to Chicago, I determined I was not going to seek out quilts, or fabric stores, but instead accept whatever Chicago was going to give to me. It gave me so much: time away, time for walking, time for seeing pattern, time for seeing art, time for resting. It also gave me a chance to see many interesting things, catch up with some friends, go to church with a different congregation, and stay in a grand old hotel where I didn’t have to clean and I didn’t have to cook one meal all week, and where they claim the brownie was invented.