-
First Monday Quilt
In December 2019, a few young friends had wanted to learn to quilt, so we met together in a group we called First Monday Sew-days. It was a short-lived enterprise, collapsing into covid in…
-
Renewal
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” TS Eliot, Four Quartets Where I started…
-
Thieves Meet Old Woman
At least that’s what Google Translate said it meant, when I typed in… …which is the newest song for the newest dance craze, introduced to me by my daughter on Instagram as well as…
-
Thoughts on Constructing a Quilt Block
Note: This post has been updated (March 2024), with notes on the pattern and the quilt. See below. Recently I had a chance to do some beta-testing on BlockBase+, which is a revised version…
-
Book Reviews & Giveaway
The linking went like this: teaching at Surfside Guild –> looking at their website to get to know them –> finding their Block of the Month page –> jumping up and down because now…
-
Memorium: Speech Acts for a Dying World
Speech Acts for a Dying World19″ high by 20″ wide I thought a long time about whether to alter this quilt’s perfect original symmetry of twenty inches square. The design, by Yvonne Fuchs, called…
-
Rounding the Corner into Spring: This and That for March 2021
I’m leading with this photo, the green leaves just beginning to bud out on the airy branches at the park where I walk most days. It’s three laps, 2.2 miles, almost 4 km, then…
-
Wealth of Days • Quilt Top Finish
As a culture we are in danger of falling out of touch, not only with objects, but with the intelligence they embody: the empathy that is bound up in tangible things….A well-made object is…
-
This and That • February 2021
Little three-year-old Gio came to live with my son Chad and his wife Kristen last year, and when this February rolled around, I decided that he had become, in effect, my grandson, and in…
-
Picties and Verities • Quilt Finish
Finally! This baby has a new name: Picties and Verities. What, you ask? Well, that phrase was in a poem I read about a thousand years ago, and I liked it and wrote it…
-
Postcard from Burano
Over the space of several years, I tried three times to get to the small island of Burano, just a vaparetto ride out of Venice. And when my husband and I finally made it…
-
California Bear • collage quilt finished
California Bear, a collage quilt started in a class with Laura Heine at Road to California 2020, is finished and hanging on my sewing room wall. (It just seems pretentious to call it a…
-
Making a Curve for the Dungeon of Cute • Affinity Designer Tutorial
Yes, I’m going to talk about making curves, but it’s part of a path that began after I finished the Bee Happy Quilt. You know what comes next: either get it quilted by check,…
-
I Hear America Singing
I finished the red, white and blue version (top only) of Shine: The Circle Quilt and I did it by the time of the Inauguration of our new President, my goal. This is not…
-
January This-and-That
To start us off right for January, Carol of the Gridster Bee chose Lori Holt’s Tall Pines Quilt Block, part of her Sew Your Stash series, found on YouTube. I lost my mind and…
-
The Last of the Shine RWB Blocks: 22
Happy Birthday to this blog!Fourteen years of blogging: writing, sewing, quilting, venting, writing-back-to-you, reading and I still love writing this. I still love reading your letters and with a few exceptions was able to…
-
Happy New Year with Shine Block 20
This is the second of the three last posts for the Shine quilt done in red, white and blue, and these last three are all new blocks, found in the Nine More Blocks from…
-
Happy New Year with Shine Block 21
Something short and sweet for you today: how to make block 21. I’m posting these last few blocks of Red, White and Blue SHINE in quick succession, so others can these posts for references.…
-
Happy Old Year Ending • 2020
I just had to lead off this Happy Old Year Ending Post with one of my favorite memes from this year. So it is with fervor and conviction that I say: Happy Old Year…
-
Dave’s Cozy Quilt • Quilt Finish 2020
My husband takes walks. Daily walks where he brings home dozens of flower and leaf photos. He specializes in color, in contrast, in finding whatever others pass over as they zip by in their…
-
Christmas * 2020
Merry Christmas, everyone! Elizabeth will be closed for a few days while she tests out her new Christmas Present and thoroughly makes a mess of her sewing room. She will emerge, eventually. Thanks for…
-
Sawtoothmania • Reflections on Fertile Ground
All the signatures of the Gridsters, who contributed blocks to the quilt top. All photographs above by my husband or I, taken from a frontage road on the 680 freeway, to the west of…
-
Criss-Cross Color • Quilt Finish
The quilting by Kelley of Wolf Girl Quilts really looks lovely in this light. IKEA fabric, from back in the day: a series of numbers. It was what I had. All photographs above by…
-
Christmasy Shine Blocks • Gloria in Excelsis Deo!
Okay, you just have to see the creativity of my friend who pattern-tested all the later Shine blocks — the last few I’ve been talking about. The originals, you are familiar with. Now I’m…
-
SHINE: The Circles Quilt with QuiltMania • Final Group
My original Shine quilt had sixteen blocks, done in multi-color fabrics, a bright and sunny quilt. I built them one-by-one, drawing them on paper at first, and had them free here on my website.…
-
Pomegranates • Giveaway
Where does inspiration begin? Does it start here? How about both places? Today is a pattern announcement, a quilt top done announcement and the best part: a giveaway! My friend, Kenna Ogg of Madison…
-
Weary | Hopeful
Blog-writing for other organizations can sometimes make me weary. I’ve been the blog-writer for a local guild here, and the other day — Blog Writing Day, as I like to call it, when everything…
OccasionalPiece--Quilt! 