Last I checked, I’m still here
Quilts · Something to Think About

Last I checked, I’m still here

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.

I don’t have cats. I have Mollys. (I was going to take hexies on the road trip.)

Happy Old Year Ending 2024
300 Quilts · Happy Old Year Ending (Wrap-up) · Patterns by Elizabeth of OPQuilt

Happy Old Year Ending 2024

Elizabeth E.15 Comments

Can I squeeze just one more quilt in here?

I’ve made several quilts with prominent flowers in my tenure as a Quilter Who Just Keeps Making. Scroll quickly and you’ll have a flower show in deepest December.

Daisy Star Quilt (#76) Whoa, that is Early Days (2009). Fabric from Lakehouse inspired this one.

Lyon Carolings (#88) which is kind of flower-like.

Colorwheel Blossom (#140) where I totally riffed on a popular image (on our phones).

Tell me this little quilt (Eclipse, #189) doesn’t look like a giant sunflower…I think it does. But after it was pointed out to me once, I can never not unsee the pair of eyes in the upper right staring out at me.

And then I went big:

Annularity, #203, with rainbow petal-like structures around the outer edge.

Serious little dainty flowers in #217: Field Flowers.

Okay, maybe this is technically not a flower (not even the title says so), but with those yellow petal-like pieces on the outside, I’m going to slip it in here. Choose Something Like a Star (#238) is held by a couple of angels from Berlin.

Sunny Flowers (#246) is still a favorite.

Heart’s-Ease #52 (went backward for this one). Made in a Ruth McDowell class, and if you know who she is, you are fortunate.

Heart’s Garden, #264, from 2022, when I ran a Mystery Block on here, because we were all going stir-crazy from being shut in for a year or two from covid. No worries, we are almost done with the flower show.

Blossoming, which I take naps under because it is just the right size (#267).

Sunflowers for Kim (#268) –guess who that is?

A pattern from Yvonne, which I titled Primula Ballerina (#274); made to keep me sane while we remodeled our kitchen.

Blossom (#276) but you also have to see all the variations together for a class I taught on Zoom, during the pandemic:

I think all of these have been given away.

Lollypop Trees are definitely floral, with all those Kaffe fabrics. This is #132, from 2014.

Coquelicot (Poppy) which is #290, and has an earlier variation in just a simple layout.

Twilight Garden (#292) which I stitched while on the Total Eclipse Trip.

And now, of course, the last flower quilt in the parade: Giant Flowers, #299. It’s about 52 inches square.

I had a fun time quilting this, moving from the radiant design I talked about here, to the lattice work of the garden fence, and then I got stuck on that outer border. I had something really ornate planned, but in a conversation with Yvonne I mentioned that while looking at #fmq and #customfmquilting and other tags, my eyes began to glaze over. I can quilt a thick carpet of flowers and vines and whatever on a quilt, but on that afternoon, considering this quilt, it all just seemed like #toomuch. So I paused. While in a church service a few days later, I began studying the carpet (tell me you’ve done this). I did listen, but was also trying to figure out how to replicate the flower-structures. Here’s my drawing, from when I got home:

Yes, it’s still dense, but it’s a different visual than the tightly packed swirly vines and petals in the interior white section. I like the larger scale, but it was a bit of a leap for me. I have to ask: if our quilts aren’t a place where we can experiment and try something new, then why are we making them?

Giant Flowers, showing its checked backing, is quilt #299. I wanted to make it to three-hundred quilts this year, but didn’t quite hit it. Looks like I have something to look forward to at the new year.

I’ve been playing around with this one on the Affinity Designer artboard. Maybe this piece has legs, and can go the distance? I first heard that saying from a professor, when he commented on my short story we’d just discussed in class. I was getting my undergraduate degree in Creative Writing. That short story, turned into a novel, which is now hidden in my bottom drawer after my father said: Don’t Write About Me.

But we writers mine our lives for ideas, for stories, for the beginning strands of a narrative which will take us where? we don’t know. I should have said to my Dad, if you don’t want to be written about, don’t hang out with a writer, but he was my Dad and it wasn’t a command so much as a wish, so I listened. In the end, it turns out maybe I didn’t have the nerve to bring all the bits and pieces of my life — even if disguised — into a novel. Some of my classmates did, and I admired them. But writing can be hard work, and as you saw from the beginning of this post, I’m very happy to take a walk among flowers.

I can do it literally, or just in pieces of cloth and color. The title of this blog tries to capture this idea of staying curious and seeing where dabbling in pieces will lead: it could be a short story or a poem, or a quilt block, or a quilt.

Yes, I make all sorts of pieces, occasionally.

Happy Old Year Ending!

All of my patterns live on PayHip.

Getting Unstuck • This and That December 2024
Christmas Quilts · Gridsters · This-and-That

Getting Unstuck • This and That December 2024

Elizabeth E.11 Comments

What do sunflowers have to do with getting unstuck? And why on earth does the term “Fibonacci” sequence come into play?

I happily pinned up this quilt, finding some cheerful plaid backing in the never-ending stash closet. I rolled it up, set it on the machine and…then what?

I printed off the quilt in a 50% saturation, and started doodling. Some ideas came right away, but I became stuck on the petals right away, finally breaking through those with the sketch in the upper right (“yes”). But those giant centers!

So I decided to go to the source: the sunflower plant. And on the way I found out the official name (Helianthus annuus, L.) and then I added the search term Fibonacci to the mix, and found myself deep into mathematics. This site, which combines sunflowers and coding, had some beautiful arcing designs of the path of the sunflower seeds. And the picture above came from a website called Synchronicity, which was a fascinating read. When I watched the video explaining this principle, I learned a lot, getting only a little bit lost at the end when square roots entered the picture. That I didn’t get more befuddled is a tribute to my high school math teachers.

I went into my Affinity Designer program and using their spiral tool, I drew this. And when you know, you know. I think I will add a little bit of arcing grid at the tops of the petals (shown in the sketch, above), but we’ll see. Sometimes Mies van den Rohe said it best: Less is more. (Also said by Robert Browning, apparently.) So now I can get going, after being stuck. Sometimes it just takes a bit of time to figure things out, and while I am certainly One Who Likes a Project, I’m thinking maybe I had too much going on at this time.

Like the church Christmas breakfast that I agreed to be in charge of. Our church had always done nighttime parties, but this year we tried something different, asking the members to gather Saturday morning at 9:30 a.m. Here is the church hall night before, as we finished decorating and setting the tables. The real Christmas miracle was that we handed out the recipe for 14 breakfast casseroles and all they all came in looking the same, save one (they’d used a tin foil pan, rather than a glass pan).

Again, if you know, you know. That so rarely happens!

On our way there, we picked up the cinnamon rolls/sticky pecan rolls from our grocery store (Ralph’s). Thank you, Ralph’s, for your baking. We served the casseroles and sweet rolls with fruit salad, orange juice; we entertained people with a coloring contest and a piñata. We all had a great time.

I finished off my time in a bee with an old favorite: the Block Lotto birds blocks (she asked for three).

We did some decorating with nutcrackers, little figurines and quilts. Yes, that’s our “tree” there on the center small table.

Molly Christmas has joined the guardians of Christmas: an angel and Santa. They are in my office during December, keeping it festive.

One morning while my husband was out, I felt like making hummus. In he walks a few minutes later with the freshest pita bread I’ve ever tasted. Good karma, I’d say.

Go to Trader Joe’s right now. You NEED these.

We made a stop here, too, at See’s Candies, looking positively celestial.

Screenshot

Thought this was a nice pairing. If I manage to get out of my pajamas yet only go walking for 30 minutes a day, I evidently leave some benefits on the walking trail. Is less…more…in this situation? And who dreamed up that chart on the left anyway?

One nice thing about darkened skies/shorter days, is lighting candles, with the tablecloth from your mother and your Christmas dishes on the table. And soups seem to be on the menu a lot. Above, my husband made Creamy Spicy Pumpkin soup (topped with squares of ham and peanuts), which we served with baked puff pastry squares, topped with roasted fennel bulb and brightly colored persimmon wedges.

The next day I chopped up all the fennel stalks and treated them like celery, in making a mirepoix of onion, fennel stalks, carrot and a bit of garlic, with a wave of kosher salt and a grind or two of pepper. Cook on low heat in 3 tablespoons butter and a wave of olive oil until the vegetables are translucent but not browned; then add in 2 quarts of chicken stock, a teaspoon of fines herbes, and a shake of celery seed. Simmer for a bit. I then added half of a chopped yellow bell pepper, 8 ounces of pasta, and one more carrot, thinly sliced. Simmer until pasta is done, then add a squeeze of fresh lemon juice.

Last thing: my daughter (who was baking for the thousands this week) called up to ask if my recipe for cheesecake had sugar in the crust. It took me a while to find it as I hadn’t made it in years. It came out of this bible of cooking, the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook, which I bought when I was in college. Click on the recipe to get the whole thing.

Happy mid-December!