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Build Me a Cabin • Quilt Finish
I hate cautionary tales, but this quilt is certainly one of them. I mean, it wasn’t meant to be — I just wanted a clean-lined easy-to-stitch quilt, with a bit of impact, but then…
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New York Beauties: Old Friend
New York Beauties is like an old friend: we’ve hung out together, we’ve been sad together, happy together, goofed off together, and are now celebrating together a milestone: this flimsy is finished. I cut…
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Double Header for New York Beauties: Remembrance (6) and Waking (7)
Okay, think on that quote for a while. Found while doomscrolling (is that one word, or two?) on Instagram, I wanted to read the whole article, but then I’d have to buy a subscription…
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Blooming • Block 5 • New York Beauties
I don’t know. Maybe she’s right. Annie Dillard, in The Writing Life, says “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and that…
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New York Beauties • Block 12 • Hopeful
Are we there yet? millions of traveling children must have asked, as the miles piled up. And maybe you are asking if we are done yet with these New York Beauties blocks. Not yet,…
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Invention/Re-invention
I received the sweetest letter this week from Laurie, who makes regular quilts as well as paints barn quilts. She chose my Home, Sweet Home pattern to make her design, and thoughtfully included a…
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Mercato Square • new pattern
Mercato = market = me thinking about Italy, and really how fun the market squares are wherever you are, but especially in Italy. Okay, and maybe in France. Couple this with needing a block…
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Vespers, NYBeauties Block 10
Is it a hard-to-make block? Not at all. But it kinda broke my brain a little. This picture illustrates my vexation. On the left, and using the color swatches in the top row, is…
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For the Beauty of the Earth: Quilt Finish
For the Beauty of the Earth • Quilt No. 287 Just a little postscript to what I’ve been working on lately, and you’ve seen it all before.Thank you all for noticing my little corner…
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Cereus: New York Beauties Block 9
If you say “Cereus” it sounds like “Sirius” which is a legit star in our heavens. And if you spell it slightly differently — like Cerus (which I think it was started out to…
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A Basket/Quilt of Fruit for Mother’s Day
All the fruits are finished, and applied to the background this week. I tried three different centers, from white daisies on red (no), a double plaid (no), a beautiful radish print (no). Dots. That’s…
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Collage: My Sewing Desk is a Mess!
(And some other stuff) I’m not by nature a terrifically tidy sewer, preferring to let my (ahem) creativity spill all over when I stitch. But doing one of those collage quilts where you iron…
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Happy Valley Quilt Finish • This and That April 2024
Need some insight into my quilting? Here it is: the “Insight Table” for the HandiQuilter Sweet Sixteen. This table was purchased in another life, in January of this year. I had avoided trying to…
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Small Steps: Push-Pull
I’ve been thinking a lot about Push, and Pull. The terms are popularly used when discussing how we interact with the internet. We receive Push Notifications, which means that someone, somewhere is sending us…
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Eclipse Road Trip 2024
This is a picture-book post of our recent trip in the Southwest of the United States of America, partly to see the total eclipse (it was cloudy where we were, but we made the…
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Radiate • New York Beauties Block 3
Radiate: “emit (energy, especially light or heat) in the form of rays or waves” (from the Oxford Dictionary) — OR — “(of a feeling or quality) emanate clearly from, as in “leadership and confidence radiate from…
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Quilt Your Life, Quilt Your Stuff
For most of her life, Jessie Homer French worked without much expectation or hope of attention or sales or critical acclaim. In a recent article, she said “I paint my life, my stuff. I…
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Cool Rays • New York Beauties Block 2
After leaping around the line-up, we return to Block #2, but instead of the more traditional sew-it-in-rip-it-out, it’s made with freezer paper. Apparently this method is the hot new tutorial/class/method, and you could do…
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Time is a Dressmaker • Quilt Finish
Faith Baldwin said that quote, and I’ve saved it for ages, waiting to use it as a quilt title. I started this with a whole new stack of colors than my last temperature quilt,…
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Shimmer: New York Beauties Block 8
This is not Shimmer‘s first rodeo. It first started as “Dazzle” and I liked it, but then I was playing around one night and came up with that bias-stripey-trim on the outer ring, and…
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February 2023 • This and That
I finished all the tendrils and vines and flowers and now just have the center circles to appliqué and so I started thinking, what’s next? A border with leaves…with flower buds and occasionally not…
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Aurora: New York Beauties Block 11
Yeah, I promised I’d do these blocks every two weeks, but it was a day I wasn’t weeping over Dad and stuff, and I could breathe and the sun was out and the white…
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Uncertainty is Wisdom in Motion
This phrase intrigued me. It came from a podcast I listened to while out walking, so I’ve been thinking about what happens when we try to learn something new. Or lean away from “what we’ve always…
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Filling the Days…with Quilting
I have treasured all your messages to me, and have read them over and over. Thank you for all your kind words on the occasion of the loss of my father. I will miss him greatly. I…
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Pause
This is the other bookend to my life this past fourteen months: my father died Monday afternoon. He was 98, a wit, a smart man with grand ambitions, most of all for his children. Finally…
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This and That • January 2024
Sometimes the title for these posts can nudge toward the trivial, but the first thing I want to talk about was anything but trivial. My family. Our four children do not live near us,…
OccasionalPiece--Quilt! 