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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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Shining my way through this season
This is my reaction to the election fol-de-rol. Actually it’s my granddaughter Maddy’s, when she was just born (she’s soon to be 12 this year!). I’m totally patriotic (witness all my RWB blocks) and…
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Sweet November 2020 • This and That
Okay, I love giveaways but I hate choosing the winner. So many of you had the best Christmas wishes, from fabrics to new sewing rooms, to visiting your left kidney (thank you Allison in…
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Giveaway! Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns
The new edition of this classic — which every quilter should have on their desk — is a quilter’s dream come true. It has clean illustrations of the blocks, as well as a depiction of the…
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Triad Harmony Workshop
A song from my childhood always pops into my head when I start my Zoom classes, bright and early, on Saturday morning. It’s something about “bright, smiling faces” that are “all in their places,”…
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Spectral Light
My husband is a photographer who specializes in small landscapes: detailed shots of flowers that he finds around our neighborhood. Since we live in a climate that is temperate, we have plants from Brazil,…
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Choose Something Like a Star: Quilt Finish
Choose Something Like a StarQuilt #23829″ high by 33″ wide Biography of this quilt Titles consideredChoose Something Like a Star (from a poem by Robert Frost)Playful Star (from a haiku by Tada Chimako)Double StarBinary…
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SHINE: QuiltMania Collaboration, part 2
When I searched this morning in Google for how many days until the United States Presidential Election, the questions it prompted me for were these: So, if we are going to have a zombie…
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stars shining brightly
This is the second sawtooth star quilt top I made during the Time of Covid, but that first one is still awaiting quilting. One night, dragging around, looking for something to do besides all…
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This and That: Pattern Release, Quilts, and Variations on the Puss-in-the-Corner Block
Recently QuiltMania Magazine and I entered into a collaboration — one of those collaborations that finds you in the middle of the night cleaning out the front closet, or tidying up the bookcase in…
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Creatives Talk
Somewhere between the shock of a pandemic shutting the entire world down and its ripple effects, and this month’s realization that this quarantine stuff — if everyone plays nice — will probably go on…
OccasionalPiece--Quilt! 