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.

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.

Of course, I saw the grid — and quilts — in everything, everywhere–

Title: For the Pansies, Send Me Back a Thought
My quilting has evolved and changed, but I still love this quilt.