Blog Index

  • Mercato Square • new pattern

    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…

  • Vespers, NYBeauties Block 10

    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…

  • For the Beauty of the Earth: Quilt Finish

    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…

  • Cereus: New York Beauties Block 9

    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…

  • A Basket/Quilt of Fruit for Mother’s Day

    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…

  • Collage: My Sewing Desk is a Mess!

    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…

  • Happy Valley Quilt Finish • This and That April 2024

    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…

  • Small Steps: Push-Pull

    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…

  • Eclipse Road Trip 2024

    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…

  • Radiate • New York Beauties Block 3

    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…

  • Happy Easter, 2024

    Happy Easter, 2024

    Sunny Flowers for an Easter morning!

  • Quilt Your Life, Quilt Your Stuff

    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…

  • Cool Rays • New York Beauties Block 2

    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…

  • Time is a Dressmaker • Quilt Finish

    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,…

  • Shimmer: New York Beauties Block 8

    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…

  • February 2023 • This and That

    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…

  • Aurora: New York Beauties Block 11

    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…

  • Uncertainty is Wisdom in Motion

    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…

  • Filling the Days…with Quilting

    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…

  • Pause

    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…

  • This and That • January 2024

    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,…

  • Reverse Course

    Reverse Course

    Wait. I thought we had just gotten started on this New Year’s thing, you say, and now you want to reverse course? Yes, because I am saving you from taking on too many things. And saving me,…

  • Happy Old Year Ending: 2023

    Happy Old Year Ending: 2023

    We can’t change the past. Matthew Potts’ book Forgiveness: An Alternative Account holds this thought up to the light so the rays shine through in a multiple different ways, but the premise is always…

  • Merry Merry

    Merry Merry

    You don’t have much time right now. You have too much time right now. You can’t think of what to do next, the choices being: sew the quilt on the wall together, work on…

  • Merry 2023 • Quilt Finish

    Merry 2023 • Quilt Finish

    Quilt Finish #284 from a kit, which means it sewed up lickety-split. And my quilter… …let me pick it up in Utah when I was there last month. Jen did a very cool pattern…

  • Santa’s Night Ride • Quilt Finish

    Santa’s Night Ride • Quilt Finish

    This quilt has been on quite a ride. A Santa’s Night Ride, to be exact. It has flown over to France, to the QuiltMania people, who publish three fine magazines: QuiltMania, Simply Moderne and…

  • A Wild Night, A New Road • Quilt Finish

    A Wild Night, A New Road • Quilt Finish

    Emily Dickinson’s phrase, Dying is a Wild Night and a New Road, accompanies me at times in my life. Dickinson first said it in a letter: “I know there is no pang like that…