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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…
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Happy Old Year Ending 2019
I am a firm believer in making lists. There are Best Seller Lists, To-Do Lists, Grocery Lists, Honey-Do Lists, in short, lists for everything. A grand event in my world is making a list…
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Christmas Gifts
Since all the recipients of my handmade Christmas gifts have received — and opened — their presents, I can now share what I made for my four children. Gifts for adult children and their…
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Guatemala Fabrics, Sights and Scenes
I figured in December that a post about High Productivity and Strenuous Piecing and Hours of Quilting might better be replaced with something of lower impact. So, let’s go to Guatemala, look at fabric…
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Oh My Stars Where Have I Been?
I could say to the moon and maybe to the stars, and back. I could say Guatemala, but you already know I’ve returned home from there. I could say sick, but now I’m better,…
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My Small World Top • flimsy finish
It’s done! I decided to forge with ahead My Small World because basically, nothing else in my life was getting done with that mess in the sewing room, and I wanted to be finished…
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Sing for Joy • Quilt Finish
Sing for Joy • Quilt #226 This is the second of my Three Hard Quilts to Make for 2019. It’s a lovely day now that Sing for Joy is finished. Here was my recipe in…
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My Small World • Section 3 & 4
I know you are thinking, no — praying — that someday soon I will be through with This Quilt, and believeyoume, you are not the only one hoping and praying that I can add…
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Making: Another view
Recently I attended a lecture by David Taylor (at PIQF), which was humorous and interesting. One interesting fact was, that while he did these incredible quilts with very detailed applique and quilting — most…
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Citrus Belt Quilters Guild Visit • October 2019
The Citrus Belt Quilters Guild offered their members one of my Two-for-One Classes this week, and since it was October, several of the workshop members went for a Halloween themed mini-quilt. We worked on…
OccasionalPiece--Quilt! 