Why do I do this? • February 2025 This and That

February 2, 2025August 23, 2025 Elizabeth E.5 Comments

BlueSky comment: “What a great hobby (and don’t be upset if it’s more than a hobby). These quilts are beautiful. Quilting is fascinating to me.”

Hobby. Hmmm. (This person obviously doesn’t know quilters.) I did hit a goal of mine on BlueSkySocial, but that’s not really what I’m looking for on there. (And if you are trying to learn this new space, the advice I got on Reddit was to skip the on-the-phone-app and go straight to the computer, as it’s easier. They were right.)

I’m looking for more of a retreat from Instagram/Meta/Facebook conglomerate, accelerated by logging into Facebook and checking the following:

Off-Facebook Activity, or in other words, all the info from OTHER businesses, not Meta. They funnel my data to Meta to build my profile; I had about 25 different entities who were sharing my info with Facebook. From following the instructions on Facebook, I learned I could download what Meta knew about me, etc. which was kind of interesting and scary all at once.

They believed I wanted to see posts about dogs, sports, cars, cars and trucks, types of sports, and I stopped reading there. A few of my friends have close relationships with *their* pets, so maybe that’s why on that one. But trucks?

Apparently I speak English, Spanish, French, Swiss (I assume that’s zh?), have no idea what “pt” is (Portuguese?), Italian, and Korean. One of my “Locations of Interest” is Melbourne, Australia. (Hi, Susan!)

This is my earliest Instagram profile. My first Instagram comment was in May 2012, to my friend Krista, as it was she who got me started on social media in the first place.

The real treasure was a huge file of all my Instagram posts (images and caption). I’ve been trying to build some Chatbooks, but apparently that company doesn’t talk to the Instagram code like they used to, so it’s been just me, filling the pages of my books slowly. This will help me go much faster to get them produced and printed. I saved that file on my photos drive, and have promised myself I will be checking that Meta setting again sooner, rather than later. Note: This above info is only the data from the Meta bunch. I wonder what I would have found if I’d downloaded everything from everyone (shudder).

A few photos from this week, beginning Monday, ending Saturday:

Final series of blocks, cornerstones and sashing. The center of the quilt is Cat’s Cradle blocks, sashed with cornerstones and pieced rectangles. Quilt design: Lisa Alexander & Susan Ache

I still have to do the borders. In the fourth photo, I am auditioning fabrics as I was running out and was determined not to buy more (can’t, really, because most of our fabric shops have closed down in our town, anyway). I went through everything, and found a few strips in my string-piecing bin, some other contenders deep in the stash stacks. So tonight while I listened to The Thursday Murders Club, Book Two, I finished piecing this section. I hope there are no mistakes.

Just in case you need this info.

Back to the quilt. I’m a person who generally averse to buying pre-cuts of any kind, but then had to ask myself as to why I hadn’t done something with what few bundles of fabrics I had? The collection of grey-green-cream was probably eight years old, with some fading along the folds (but it didn’t seem to affect how it looked, once cut up into all those wee triangles). I wanted to finish the bulk of the piecing in one week. Many reasons for this, mostly because I remembered when I used to crank out these heavily pieced quilt tops. Could I still do it? And then I ran across this quote:

I do not believe there is an artist in history who hasn’t asked themself — at least once — “Why do I do this?” The designation of “creator” may make for a glorious calling card, but as an occupation, it involves a disproportionate amount of spirit-crushing struggle and relatively few rewards.
–Mary Gabriel

Current Events (you know we talk about most everything on here)

A word or two about January’s Current Events: Many of us on Instagram & BlueSkySocial have been writing about our “spirit-crushing struggle” this week. My feeds have been filled with memes:

I knew there would be a transition between President Biden and President Trump, and I expected some chaos, given how things were the last time he was president. But I didn’t expect what we’ve had, and the plane crash after all the firings of the air safety personnel was really hard to take. But many people I know and love voted for him. I will do my best to give grace, because of them.

However, I will continue to monitor the situation where DOGE was given full access to the federal payment system (confession: my hair is on fire over this one). I can see the irony in my fretting about what Meta has on me (above), as compared with what the government has. I don’t think there is anywhere I can petition and download a file to see what personal information is being given to the owner of Twitter, a platform I quit because I didn’t trust their ability to keep my info safe and secure.

In a book I read this week, I found this: “Good work is a stay against despair” (Terry Tempest Williams). I need to work. I need to create. And even though it can make me wonder Why Do I Do This? once in a while, I still want to pull fabric from bins and stacks, cut it all up and put it back into a new order.

I’ll leave you with some pretty blooms from my February garden.

And a wonderful conversation with Peter Brown, the man who wrote The Wild Robot. (illustration from here)

Road to California 2025

January 24, 2025August 23, 2025 Elizabeth E.16 Comments

This is in two parts: the top is the bits and pieces.
The bottom are the quilts. Yes, they are all in one post, so get your popcorn and let’s get scrolling.

Road to California, for me, always begins with this hallway lined with hanging quilts. So many different styles and colors, all from one Guild that is chosen at random from those who enter their names. This was at about 8:30 am. on Tuesday morning, January 21st, and I was there to take the Blackwork Embroidery class from Kathie Kerler.

Her sample is on the lower left. Mine is on the lower right. The room temperature went from freezing-your-hands-stiff to overheated-hot-flash territory. (They did caution us to dress in layers.) My seat mate, Chris, had open her little bag (upper center). I said to her, “That’s my pattern!” Yep, it was my Mini Double-Pocket bag, and we had a good chat–fun to see one out in the wild. I also admired the hoop stands in our class — it seems it would be much easier with one of those.

Souvenirs! I always buy some jewelry from Merry of the Button Box. Contact me if you want her email address. I picked up a few bits of fabric and that freebie yellow stitch-saying bag, posed here once I got home again.

Bob is back, now with YLI Threads (You’ll Love It says Bob), and I was happy to see him, and meet his new wife and chat with them. Quilt shows are ideal for that, especially if you get in before the tour busses and the vendors are just killing time until customers show up.

I bought just a few (haha) colors of their line Elite to try out. It’s a thread similar to Bob’s old Magnifico, which is my all-time favorite thread for quilting. I also picked up some piecing thread; yes, lately I’ve been using polyester thread (fairly fine, at 50 weight) as it cuts down on the lint build-up in my machine. I’ll report in later, after I test them.

Now on to the quilts. I stayed for Preview Night on Tuesday, then went back Thursday morning, before I wimped out and headed home. If you are on BlueSky social media, I have a video of us all lining up next to the scooter carts before it opened — it was a crush! And if you are on BlueSky, please follow me, so we can build our quilting community (#quiltsky) over there.

One of the quilts I always look for, or have for the past 20+ years, is the alphabet quilt from Janet Stone.

She is a master of details and I had fun figuring out that the flowers and the blocks all began with the same letter, indexed around the outside edges of the quilt. Here are some detail shots:

I’ll miss seeing this series. Wonder what she has going on next?

I found the show this year to be subdued, but still — happy to have it here. It feels like they’ve cut down drastically on the number of single-person entry quilts, and they are all crammed together, perhaps evidence that it is expensive to host a show like this? For each quilt, I’ve generally taken three photos: the quilt, a detail and the title card. Click on any of the photos to enlarge.

Amy Pabst is a genius at teensy quilting. Each of those log cabin “logs” is about like a matchstick.

This one was just beautiful.

One of the challenges for photography is the way the quilt show is lit: spots directly underneath the quilts, and NO LIGHTS ON IN THE HALL!! Call you believe it? There’s a pianist on an electronic piano playing lovely music and the first impression is wow. But then you try to actually look at the quilts, and nearly everyone around me is complaining. Or leaving quickly, which was my experience. I usually like to really study and look at the quilts, but seriously? In the dark? It’s fancy, but not functional. Okay, enough whining but now you understand why this is dark on the top and light on the bottom, and that’s even after several different filters being applied at home in my photo-editing program. (I did my best.)

These colors!!

Loved the trapunto flowers.

Although the title card is in Spanish, it’s a tribute to her town. On the back, she’d created her family tree (not shown).

Tough to see this beautifully created quilt (black on black in darkness…).

You can purchase this quilt…

Amazing detail in both the piecing, appliqué and the quilting.

This quilter was standing nearby, but too shy to pose for a photo.

Especially good to remember on this freighted week of Inauguration. My classmate and I carefully talked around the events, trying to figure out if we were a match in current events thinking. We were (whew!). She lived near the fires and told me that her in-laws’ home had burned to the ground with almost no warning. So much damage and so many lives affected by this disaster. [Note: when I came out Tuesday night at 8 p.m. to head home, the whole area smelled like smoke, and I immediately wondered: another fire somewhere?]

A simply drawn landscape, but it was just lovely.

Giraffes! How fun is that?

So that’s the second quilt of Ben Darby in the show — both were beautiful!

Since I should be quilting on my very own New York Beauties quilt, this one below caught my eye.

Just stunning!

One guild had a series of quilts, 100 Days of Tula Blocks, and Tina Curran made this one, in red, white and blue.

Sometimes it’s interesting to see how the quilts are displayed. I showed you this so you could see how tightly they were hung. But Cassandra Beaver always has an interesting quilt to show.

Click to enlarge title card. Really fun quilt, full of bright color. This was a from a grouping in the hallway outside, another guild showing off their quilts.

Cherrywood had a huge display, all along the final back row in this exhibit hall. I think you can tell how dim the lighting was in this photo.

Lots of Flanders Fields themes, and since we’d just been to Normandy, they resonated.

Verushka Zarate’s masterpieces were in a special gallery at the front of the vendor’s hall, where they put all the fancy ones. If you’ve never seen one in person, I hope you get a chance sometime. I took her class at QuiltCon Phoenix, the first year after we came back from covid, and I credit her for teaching me once and for once and for all how to do paper piecing.

Here she is with her boys. Again, if you are on BlueSky, here’s a wee video of the entire series of quilts.

Obviously there are many more quilts and lots of vendors, so come on out to California next January and see us.

The show closes tomorrow, and it will be all over for another year….but we’ll be back!

300 Quilts · Something to Think About · Totes and Purses

Don’t Ask Me — they all just crept in!

January 12, 2025August 23, 2025 Elizabeth E.15 Comments

It’s traditional for everyone on the planet, not just quilters, to make a list of projects they want to complete in the upcoming year.

No, it’s not.

The rest of the world makes resolutions. However, we quilters make lists of things we want to make but knowing we can’t possibly get them all done. But still. We do it anyway, as it’s not something we can really help. This year I thought I’d try something different. Smaller bites.

The first one up is a Block of the Month from Sherri of A Quilting Life. This way, I reasoned, I can still list a project but since she only releases the block once a month, I’ll never be behind.

Now, stop that laughing.

Here’s the fun thing. I DO keep a The Master List of Quilts I Absolutely Must Make and “Make a quilt with Sherri’s fabrics” has been on there for several years running. Above are my fabric options for this quilt. Bingo!

I chose Clover Hollow, a stash from way too many moons ago, largely because it had a jelly roll and in her cute demo she mentioned that she’d used one. (But — um — not the grey bits.) If you want to make this quilt, here’s the link.

I picked up these cute project bags at Target for $3 for the duo, and in went my project.

The next one happened when Carol was cleaning out and suggested to me that we do a quilt together, since we’d enjoyed our last one. She went through a couple of her options, and I leapt on this one. Again, finishing this (from a class I took at Road to California in 2020 and we all know what happened to THAT year) is on The Master List of Quilts I Absolutely Must Make. Bingo, again! Carol and I have a goal of 1 block per week or 4/month, and I’d already made four in that class I took, so I’m running ahead for 2025, but just for a minute.

I did finish something:

A Totoro Bag! (L: the front. R: the back, but I changed the tail) And yes, this was also on The Master List of Quilts I Absolutely Must Make. (I do not discriminate. I include quilty bags on that list.) I purchased this in 2019 from a vendor at Road to California, and I knew that if I toted it in, they’d take my photo for their Instagram feed. If they come this year, that is. We’ve had a few fires (ahem) and so many are impacted by the horrors of this. I watch the news daily, and even the diatribes that come from people who have never been in a fire driven by 100-mile-an-hour winds. Folks, there is almost no chance at fighting those — the firefighters have to get creative and try other methods. I hope they never see some of those posts on social media criticizing them. Or as one commenter called it:

I wish I’d had this term when I was raising children.

The wind pushed all the smoke out to sea, but when it stopped blowing, and the firefighters could use their air drops, the smoke came our direction. We live inside the white circle in the image just above, so we are in no danger, but that doesn’t stop us from checking our news feeds to see how things are going. They are going sadly, for so many people.

Maybe we are this stage, already?

I celebrated another run around the sun by buying my birthday cake at Costo, then being taken out to lunch by my husband, accompanied by Donald Duck. Just kidding about that. DDuck was leftover from the Christmas decor at a local Peruvian restaurant. We went to a Peruvian restaurant because I lived in Peru with my family when I was twelve, and they make the best chicken ever, along with the yummiest Pollo Saltado. If you don’t know what that is, it involves the said chicken and french fries. Go get some.

And lastly, time for some real life. I generally always keep the area around the sewing machine straightened up, but the photo below is of The Other Side. There are multiple reasons for this. We’re coming up on the first anniversary of my father’s death (on National Polka Dot Day, no less), and I realized that a block of two years was taken out of my life as I attended to mourning for both my mother and my father — thank you all for your words of wisdom and kindness on this. This mourning was pretty much a huge job (it’s just how I’m put together). Some health struggles also popped up here and there (of course). And many times, I just didn’t have the energy to even walk in there, let alone deal with the mess. I have many more apologies I could make, to friends I just didn’t have the energy to call, or letters I didn’t write. But I’m approaching the other side of this experience and I know that from what you’ve told me, I will always miss my parents. However, I’m catching glimpses of a more engaged life, and I want to head that direction.

It’s good to document stuff like this once in a while (click to see another one).

But the GOOD NEWS is…it’s now fashionable to have messy rooms! Or so says an article in the New York Times, titled “In Defense of Messiness, “written by KC Davis (and you can read it for free with this link). I love this paragraph:

“I’ve been preaching my gospel that being messy is not a moral failing for years now. But I want to take it one step further: Messiness can be a good thing. All communities should have some messy people. We are not all meant to be Joanna Gaines. Some of us are Molly Weasleys, our homes bursting with the cozy chaos of a loving family and cabinets packed full of odds and ends. We cannot be Martha Stewart because we are Thoreau, so consumed by capturing Walden Pond’s essence that we need someone else to bring us meals and do our laundry. And try as we might, no amount of clutching our items to see if they spark joy will turn us into Marie Kondo’s closet, for we are Albert Einstein’s desk.”

I like tidiness, I really do. But if I waited to clean up my mess, I would never sew. And the world would be poorer for not having one more Totoro tote bag. Right?

So I’m launching myself into not ONE, but TWO monthly projects, and at this point, I’m in good shape. Happy Messy rooms. Happy Polk Dot Day. Happy 2025!

( a snowy Elizabeth, because we’re supposed to be in winter, not in raging infernos)

A photo of Albert Einstein’s office – just as the Nobel Prize-winning physicist left it – taken mere hours after Einstein died, Princeton, New Jersey, April 1955.

And you can now find me on Bluesky. Come on over!

Quilts · Something to Think About

Last I checked, I’m still here

January 4, 2025August 23, 2025 Elizabeth E.13 Comments

I was supposed to be on a road trip to see art and family. We were going to duck in to a wintery state on a week that was forecast to be freezing cold (to us Californians), but we hit a fork in the road, and so stayed home.

A passage from a book I’ve been reading (Niall Williams’ This Is Happiness, p. 50, Kindle edition) springs to mind:

He believed that human beings were inside a story that had no ending because its teller had started it without conceiving of one, and that after ten thousand tales was no nearer to finding the resolution of the last page. Story was the stuff of life, and to realise you were inside one allowed you to sometimes surrender to the plot, to bear a little easier the griefs and sufferings and to enjoy more fully the twists that came along the way.

Fork…twist…schmist. A new story where the old one had been planned, and obviously abandoned.

So now you are subject to one of those wearisome Year-end Wrap-up posts, usually posted in December, but January is how things are going around here, so here we are. My 2024 visual history:

There. I’ve time-date stamped my creations of this past year, which of course doesn’t include the ones in process. One year I had 24 quilts in my wrap-up post, and I must say I hardly recognize that person who cranked out two dozen in one calendar year (another arbitrary, but useful measurement of time and progress). But the fascination with measuring progress is strong with me, as strong as the habit to open a brand-new calendar/planner/book every January and start predicting The Future: birthdays and doctor appointments, which, at the right moment, will turn into The Past, glittering as we pass over them. Why note them at all?
Why?
To record a life.

It seems to me the quality that makes any book, music, painting worthwhile is life, just that. Books, music, painting are not life, can never be as full, rich, complex, surprising or beautiful, but the best of them can catch an echo of that, can turn you back to look out the window, go out the door aware that you’ve been enriched, that you have been in the company of something alive that has caused you to realise once again how astonishing life is, and you leave the book, gallery or concert hall with that illumination, which feels I’m going to say holy, by which I mean human raptness. (ibid, page 73, Kindle edition)

My sewing room is still in a disaster zone from when two quilts ago I was on the hunt for the binding for the pomegranate quilt, and as I excavated the dungeons in my closet, I discovered a stack of Kona fat quarters. I knew who those should go to, and they did. But I never did find the batiks that matched the quilt, discovering only later, that they went off somewhere else a year ago, and this is just the closet we’re talking about, and I have even’t enlightened you on the cupboards or the area under the ironing board, or drawers in my sewing desk.

January is when we clean out, set straight and while I used to believe in that in my earlier days, now I’m mostly amused by the industry and energy we expend to Set Things Straight. I still think it’s a quality worth striving for, if you are into striving, but currently I am not. Mostly I’m enthralled with what Williams alludes to above, which is being astonished by life. I can watch the sun rise out our office window every morning and notice the shape of the clouds or the hue of the different grays being woken up by the sun around the corner, checking it every other email, until the sun is up and it’s time to leap out into the day, to discover what lies ahead.

My children astonish me, though they are enmeshed in their own lives.

My grandchildren astonish me, though I never see them enough (classic grandma refrain).

I have friends who send me short texts that read like novels, and they astonish me, as do phone calls, emails, visits, and all interactions that are alive and illuminate. Perhaps our forced fast of each others’ company during the pandemic is echoing in the back hallways of my musings, but here we are again in January, going forward, making plans whether they be forked or twisted, but always with hope, moving into the future.

Happy 2025, everyone.