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MetaStructure/Metaesquema
Recently our Inland Empire Modern Quilt guild had a challenge that required that we use at least 4″ square piece of classic blue fabric, that any one side be no longer than 24″ and…
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Repeat/Augment
For some reason this morning, the fog cleared, the brain snapped to, I thought: “You have got to finish something today!” And so I did. A low-energy-COVIDistraction-day back in May got me started on…
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Buzzing
Let me start with the easy stuff, the stuff that’s in my hands all the time: cloth, needle, thread, shapes, stitching. While I’ve called this the #dungeonofcute on Instagram, I am happy that I…
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9-Patches and Churn Dashes • First Monday
So what if you were trying to think of the basic blocks for beginning quilters? What would you choose? So far in our First Monday Sew-Day series, we’ve done four-patches and square-in-square and half-square…
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Some Thoughts on Our Nation’s Milestone
For several months, I’ve awoken every morning, and looked at this map. I remember when not every state had COVID-19, I remember when New York started spiking, I remember when we started our stay-at-home…
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Sawtoothmania!
Sometimes I get an idea, and it becomes like a dividing cell: one idea becomes into two, then four, and in this case, 23. Sawtoothmania, the idea I am referring to, began about six…
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Returned Samples
I didn’t want to open the envelope when these teaching samples came back, even though I’d been expecting them. The Guild Program Chair wrote me a lovely note telling me they’d never had to…
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First Monday Sew-Day • May 2020
All these Log Cabin Quilts were hanging in a special vintage exhibit in a quilt show some years back, and I think I photographed them all. And while there are a lot of images…
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Leisa and the Sawtooth Star Quilt
Back in the day, Leisa and I were always hanging out at quilt shows. But now, she spends a lot of her getting chemo treatments, dealing with ALLeukemia, and hanging out at UCIrvine, where…
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Bee Happy in April 2020
While I titled this Bee Happy in April 2020, part of that is a statement: I’m working on my Bee Happy Quilt, started at least a year ago. But part of that is also…
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Economy and Rough Drafts
I help teach a group of beginning quilters, and we call ourselves First Monday Sew-day, and yes, I know it’s not the First Monday today, but it’s COVID-19 season and nothing is normal anymore.…
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April Flowers
We had our April showers this week, and while the verse says that the flowers aren’t supposed to show up until May, Nancy of Patchwork Breeze, our Queen Bee for the Gridsters this month,…
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The Times We Live In
I was going to post a follow-up to the last post about masks, and I have (scroll down), but I wanted to write about my very first group Zoom meeting ever. It was with…
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COVID-19 Face Masks
NOTE: There are some updates to this post below. (Sunday, April 5, 2020) Our Inland Empire region of California hit print yesterday (New York Times), when speaking about the many quilters and sewists who…
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Quilting in the Time of Covid-19
Like so many of you, my life feels right now like this sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, placed in the American Wing; we seem to take a photo (or five) of it…
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The Ides of March • New Design Wall 2020
When I was in high school, the incredibly dweeby drama kids would go around campus on the 15th of March saying “Beware, beware the Ides of March!” and it took the rest of us…
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Orange County Quilters Guild Visit • March 2020
All the news is filled with Social Isolation and Keeping Your Distance due to the Covid-19 (Novel Corona Virus). Yet before they lowered the boom on small gatherings, I was able to visit the…
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First Monday Sewday for March 2020
We had our First Monday Sewday this week, and the little group grew by two new participants. For those who don’t know about how we started, it began because a young woman in our…
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Golden California (Small World) • Quilt Finish
Golden California (Small World)Quilt #229 • 55″ wide by 36″ high I mean, you already know what this quilt looks like, having seen various permutations of this on my blog, on the web, on…
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Azulejos • Quilt Finish
Azulejos • Quilt #22761 1/2″ wide by 75 1/2″ long It was a rainy, wet day in Lisbon, and we’d made our way by bus to the Lisbon National Museum of the Azulejo, or…
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Scrappy Quilts from Road to California 2020 • Road to California, Part II
Road to California had several special exhibits and the array of quilts in Sisterhood of Scraps reminded me of what the great architect Mies van der Rohe so exquisitely said: More is More. Oh…
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Road to California 2020
It’s here! It’s here! Road to California is finally here! Or was there…because I’m writing about this event and it’s in the past, as is typical with reporting on news. The bag this year…
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Sawtooth Mania • Queen Bee February 2020
I sat down one day to draw up a simple sawtooth block. Thirty-five variations later, I got up. Really, it’s all the same 8-inch block, but it is what’s inside that 4-inch square in…
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Fabric Collage at Road
Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593) was an Italian painter best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of such objects as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish, and books. He painted representations of these objects on the…
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Tiny Envelope & More Blocks
It all started, this idea of Tiny Envelopes, when a) I came down with a bad cold and everything I’d ever done in the world seemed lame and stupid, and b) Carol, our Gridster…
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Temperature Quilt Top • January 2020
One-thousand-ninety-five triangles along with six rectangles make up the face of this heat map quilt, cataloging the temperatures and rainfall of Riverside, California in 2019. I have no plans to make another, but I…
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It’s that New Year Stuff
When I’m deep in the tired mind blahs, mindlessly wandering through my Feedly list can sometimes yield nuggets that flash in my brain and perk me up. I follow Zen Habits, and this week…
OccasionalPiece--Quilt! 