Travels

A Pattern Language

November 1, 2023August 31, 2025 Elizabeth E.13 Comments

“Every society which is alive and whole, will have its own unique and distinct pattern language; and further, that every individual in such a society will have a unique language, shared in part, but which as a totality is unique to the mind of the person who has it. In this sense, in a healthy society there will be as many pattern languages as there are people–even though these languages are shared and similar.

“…patterns are very much alive and evolving.”

from A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander, et al.

Santo Stefano, Bologna, Italy — dating back to the 5th century

I’ve been in another’s society’s pattern and language for the past week, and every day I felt as if there were a little pop! in the brain when I’d see something familiar…but not quite knowable. When the brick above resembled what I know as quilt block shapes, but I’m guessing the people of Italy didn’t have quilts like the ones we make in the fifth century. So what were these?

This sidewalk pattern reminded me of what Yvonne has done in her recent quilt. I was reading her posts on Instagram and every day I’d think of her as I walked by this pattern.

I definitely recognize the hexie-flower pattern, seen on a shop floor.

So recognizable, but with a twist of unfamiliarity. Here’s a 4-inch version of the center block, called Arrowhead:

Arrowhead 4″ templates Download

It wasn’t until it rained (darker area) that this tile underfoot because interesting. When wet, it looks like seed stitch punctuated by French knots.

I definitely recognize the chick wearing the spool of thread. Now these things are definitely in my territory.

Would we ever see a thimble and spool of thread in a high-end, fancy-schmancy store on a swanky retail avenue? Not likely. But here they honor the “art of craftsmanship,” and yes, I know, that referring to quilting as a craft can be a nails-on-the-chalkboard experience for some. But here, when it’s related to way-pricey bespoke shoes, I’m okay with the connection.

So the cream of all patterns — when in Florence — has to be in the Piazza del Duomo, with its cathedral, baptistry (front left) and bell tower (right). I wanted to take photos of every band, every design. I was in pattern heaven:

It also helps that we were waiting in line, held captive by the tourist experience, so I had the chance to study the designs a lot.

If I turn this screen pattern on a diagonal, it resembles the quilting pattern I chose for my new Christmas quilt.

If you have ever traveled to a pattern-rich place, do you do the same thing that I do? Try to figure out what patterns are workable, and which ones you could cart back in your memory or camera to try to spark what you are working on?

Or do you just let things empty out of your brain, letting things fall out and leaving them behind at home, and then slowly allow what you see to filter in? I’ve done it both ways, notebooks filled with sketches and cameras filled with snapshots. Some become quilts:

from the tiles of one of Gaudi’s houses in Barcelona, to my quilt Annularity.

While other things I see are just parked in the brain somewhere. (Do those side guards look like rabbits to you?)

The first thing I bring home with me is a way of cooking, like this bruschetta. It was not on the menu at the local trattoria, but we saw it served when the local postman sat down at the table next to us. The next day, my husband ordered it for lunch. Now you can bet I’m trying to find a good focaccia recipe. I have already purchased the tomatoes. And when my jet lag eases up, I’ll be in business.

Given my experiences with the moon lately, I so want to do something with these ideas that made my brain pop a little bit. Maybe that family who designed a crest also had an affinity with the heavens?

So welcome home to me, with a brain full of patterns, ideas, new sights, jet lag (which makes this post drift a little), food ideas, and hunger for Bologna’s own Majani chocolate. I’m sad to leave Florence and Bologna behind, yet happy to be back in my own bed, in my own place, back to my own pattern language.

A bit of Bologna’s porticos, a World Heritage site.

We tagged our trip #ramazzinidays2023 on Instagram, if you are interested. It’s a long story why. Catch me at a quilt show and I’ll explain.

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–

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.

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.

Giveaway · Travels

Happy Days and Giveaway

October 10, 2021September 13, 2025 Elizabeth E.139 Comments

If I unrolled a jelly roll and placed the strips end to end, would I make it from my house to my friend Sherri’s house? Um, nope. There’s more to this story, but first, some tourist photos:

A tiny cave on the left, and some petroglyphs on the right. The Valley of Fire State Park is not a huge place, but we arrived about an hour before sundown, and enjoyed all the glowing red rocks. Visiting here led to Sherri’s house, which led to her handing me a jelly roll of her newest line so I could do a giveaway of this bright and cheery line of fabric. See? I connected all the dots! And now some more tourist photos:

Okay, we ate right through the peaches we bought at a fruit stand in Santa Clara (recommended by Sherri’s husband), and then bought more of them when we were in Northern Utah. Happily the border checkpoint didn’t take them away when we came home with them. And now…more tourist photos:

We live in area that doesn’t get fall color. Around January some leaves on the liquid amber trees might change colors but the rest of the trees stay green, or might turn brown and drop their leaves. So if we want to see color, we have to go north, and we hit it just right this year. Above is the view from the Mt. Nebo Loop, Utah.

Apparently heading down into Payson, the cows are all over grazing, but there were only about three cars we saw the whole time. It was lovely. The last photo, of the yellow aspens and the green pines is from Millcreek Canyon, near Salt Lake City, where we stayed (visiting relatives).

We had such “happy days” driving through such beautiful country, and above are the fabrics in her line (photos courtesy of Sherri, from her terrific blog A Quilting Life). We also had happy days in being able to meet my daughter and her family at Orson Gygi, a giant cookware place:

On the left is Barbara‘s article about color in Orson Gygi’s fall publication, and on the right is the cookie cutter wall. We also saw my son and his family, all of us enjoying dinner together that night. All the wee grand-toddlers of long ago are grown into teenagers!

Sherri is also a fabulous designer, and all of the above quilts were designed for this fabric line; patterns available at Fat Quarter Shop, or on Sherri’s ETSY Shop (all photos used with permission).

UPDATE: Giveaway is closed. Thank you to all who entered!

So, to enter the giveaway for a jelly roll of Happy Days from Sherri and Chelsi, ~~please leave a comment~~ telling me of a recent happy day. Or days! Giveaway is limited to those who live in the USA, but please do leave a comment even if you are far away. We love to hear about happy days.

And now I leave you with one last photo, a typical Utah flower of a hollyhock. They were everywhere when I was a child living there. I found these right downtown one evening so had to take a photo: such old and dusty and cherished memories.