Things Didn’t Go As Planned

December 27, 2025December 26, 2025 Elizabeth E.13 Comments

Or, We Stayed Home This Christmas.

It certainly wasn’t intentional. We’d been planning this year-end trip with our son for four months. He and his lovely wife Kim were taking their four daughters (and one new son-in-law) to three European cities and invited us to come. Oh, boy, we were thrilled! However, two days before Thanksgiving the Scooby-Doo muscles in my husband’s shoulders (or whatever they’re called) went on strike and he could hardly move. We cancelled our Thanksgiving plans. I forbade him to get out the Christmas boxes. We visited the ER, our doctor (twice), had an MRI, and now he’s in PT. But still, the Christmas trip was a go, albeit tentative.

Here we are, the pose at the beginning airport.

I had my squircles–I was ready!

Here we are at the connecting airport. Still excited, still ready to go with our little passport pouches and all, posing by a nutcracker. Having stayed out of airports for Christmas for many years, I have to say, it was lovely to see all the nice decorations.

We found our gate, sat down just as the airline cancelled the flight to Amsterdam at the gate next to us, and a whole planeload of people went streaming towards the Help Desk, long lines forming. Glad that’s not us, we said, and of course, after two posted delays (mechanical problems), it was us. We went streaming towards the Help Desk at the far end of the terminal, but that only got you a chance to scan the QR code to see the agent (one of three). We grabbed a cup of soup, and after some more time, we were at the top of the list. The options were not good. Because of the Amsterdam cancellation, flights were already full that were leaving. After some time, I looked at my hurting husband, and we both realized we couldn’t complete the trip, given the new (possible, but certainly not probable) itinerary. So much was up in the air, and three hours later, we were too, returning home.

I spent some time looking out the window, the trip so close, yet so far. The plane trouble was “hydraulic problems,” which of course, would cancel the flight.

We welcomed photos of our son and his family as they hit the sights. We went to church two days later and I wept through the service, so incredibly disappointed in missing out on creating memories with this part of our family. We’ve been to all these cities before, but it was the time and experiences with these lovely four young women we would miss.

I have a great church community. By the time we left Christmas Sunday services, we had three invitations to dinner, to help fill this lonely week.

The first was an outside movie night with lots of friends: The Muppets Christmas Carol, one of my favorites. We stayed for a while, grateful for friends and laughing children and pizza, then I took my husband home.

I found this kit I’d purchased some time ago, and thought: no time like the present. I had lots of time, so started cutting. My sisters and daughter began calling me every day.

One of those days in there, I opened up the 2026 calendar book, and started getting that set up. [After my regular calendar planner stopped publishing, I tried out Golden Coil last year and liked it. I made some tweaks to this year’s layout, but am using it again.] I backed up our photo libraries onto a new drive, doing my squircles while I waited. My husband used the heating pad and tried to get better. We talked out what we went through, only now considering options we couldn’t see that night in the airport.

I left the calendar notice on my Phone, but what you can’t see is the word Cancelled after the Ellipsis. And yes, we went to the Dillman home for dinner one night, for a delicious meal of pork roast and potatoes (I brought rolls) with their two young boys, our “adopted” grandsons since our family lives so far away.

More calendar prep, with stickers from my sister Susan. My old calendar had monthly tabs and this one doesn’t, so I add them (click on the right photo to see the tabs).

I went to Michael’s on Christmas Eve to see the new “JoAnn’s stuff.” Waste of time. I did post about it on Instagram where people definitely have something to say.

We stayed in the rest of this day as the rains arrived — something we’ve needed all fall. I made Creamy Tortellini Soup, and we had a quiet night. I figured if I could make it to Christmas dinner at our friends, I might probably stop being weepy.

We head out on a walk on Christmas morning, our neighborhood washed clean by the rain, where I say hello to the lovely Grevillea ‘Superb’ bush. This is at the halfway mark, and it was about now that I stopped aching, knowing my disappointment was but a small thing. Time and perspective help: we have each other and will have other Christmases.

The Giffords host us, two new faces folded into their family table of children and grandchildren; I’m incredibly grateful for this kindness, and they make us feel welcome: no strangers at this meal. We enjoy the true spirit of Christmas as envisioned by Dickens in his Christmas Carol, and as preached in the gospel of Luke.

I finish up the cutting of the quilt later on that night.

Every night I enjoyed the smiles of my family on their trip.

The day after Christmas, another morning walk, then I’m back in the sewing room. I’d cleaned it up, cleared it up before leaving, but now it was time to mess it up again with scraps of fabric, bits of pattern directions pinned to a quilt over my cutting table. Time to thread the machine, plug the iron back in and fire it up.

Would I ever have a chance like this again?

A chance to say to my husband, you are the most important thing in my life and if we need to stay home, we will? A chance to feel the goodness of our friends as they welcomed me into their homes, living the gospel that the Christ child came down to earth to teach? A chance to take a walk in a freshly-washed world and see the amazing beauties all around me?

I hope so.

So often life is not what we expect, and between you and me, it can be hard to shift gears, especially after thinking and dreaming about something for four months. But thank heaven for angels all around me, for creativity which pulls me forward, for counting my blessings which ground me.

I hope you had a Merry Christmas. In the end, I did too.

Haha. This was in one of the airport gift shops.

Quilts

Merry Christmas 2025

December 24, 2025December 24, 2025 Elizabeth E.

Adoration of the Child
Gerrit Van Honthorst (Utrecht 1590-1656)

And here’s your Christmas quilt, Stella di Natale:

(original post and info)

I hope you have a lovely and merry Christmas!

Carrefour IV: Shin-Hee Chin, Tara Glastonbury, and Janet O’Dell

December 21, 2025December 21, 2025 Elizabeth E.8 Comments

This post covers:

• Venue 7: Église Ste. Madeleine, with Shin-Hee Chin
• Venue 8: 86 Wilson, with Tara Glastonbury
• Venue 9: Chapelle St. Joseph, with Janet O’Dell

I have a main Carrefour Quilt Show page that lists all the posts of all the meetings I’ve gone to, and includes the posts from this year too. If I haven’t mentioned it before, you might enjoy these posts more if seen on a desktop computer or even a tablet. Cell phones re-format the layout and can sometimes do strange things to how it looks on the screen.

If you are interested in going to Carrefour, I wrote two posts for them about our travel, and how we put the trip together. You can find them here and here. Their main website is HERE, where you can subscribe to their newsletter (scroll to the bottom).

Venue 7 is the St. Madeleine Church.

Inside, the organizers set up a metal scaffolding framework to see the quilts. The lights are strong and the quilts are well-lit (sometimes with shadows, but we tried to work around them). I appreciated the effort they made for us to see the quilts. Sometimes, we’d have to walk down the bench to see details, which is what you see going on here with people moving in, then back out to the main aisle.

Okay, here we go with Shin-hee Chin.

She was born in Seoul, and earned her BFA/MFA from Hongik University and an MA in Fiber Arts from Cal State Long Beach, in California. She is now a professor at Tabor College (Kansas), where “her work explores identity, hybridity, and belonging through feminist traditions and spirituality” (from catalogue). The catalogue goes on to say that her work also “honors the deep bond between humanity and nature. Through meditative hand stitching, she reflects on our share facility and interconnectedness. Each stitch connects with nature’s rhythms, creating texture and depth to celebrate the patterns that sustain life.”

Now here’s the surprise. Perhaps you glimpsed through the threads a different quilt.

She uses quilts and blankets as the basis for her thread work. This caught me by surprise, and at first I didn’t know how to think about it. We quilters get our knickers in a twist if people make coats, etc out of old quilts. How do we feel about someone obliterating the quilt with their own work? Well, generally that is one reason that I come here: to have my eyes opened to what else is going on in the quilting world. I just needed to accept this artist on her terms, and look at her work. We all have seen quilts at guilds and local shows that surely might be well-suited to a second life (I’m looking at you, pre-printed panels!), and what an impressive life they would have with this quilt and fiber artist.

(Click to enlarge the photos.)

Confession: somewhere along here, I lost track of which quilt belonged this title card (sorry).

Fronts of quilts…

…and the backs of the quilts.

A quilt from her nature series, a collection up on her website. One of the reasons I was interested in this was because her materials: a thick thread with little squares attached, which I’ve seen knitters use to make decorative scarves.

Her work appears literal, like — yes, this is a reflection of tree branches — but then you get closer, and the thread stitches and tangles add another dimension.

The tiled floor, of course.

Last look: the interplay of the church’s stained glass with Chin’s threaded images.

As we walked to the next site, we loved the brilliant yellow against the wood-carving on this small house.

We notice the quilts in all the windows around town. We’re headed to Venue called 86 Wilson, which is really just a street address. It’s where Tara Glastonbury is exhibiting, another quilter from Australia.

The view across the street.

Now do you recognize her work? She has a pattern line, as she has “a background in graphic design, and a long history in textile crafts” (from catalog). She titled her exhibit “Balancing Act,” as it “explores her evolution as a design-led modern quilter through her use of bold color and striking geometry.”

Tara and her mother sat inside, just a bit away from the front door, in front of a sunny window lighting the space. She had copies of her newsletter and patterns (yes, I bought one). The atmosphere was genial and happy.

I struggled to get the right color balance, because the lights cast a really warm light.

I love that she had tote bags that echoed her quilts.

Two quilts that I don’t have title cards for are below, but you can find them in her pattern shop.

I love that she “jazzed up” her Log Cabin with some triangles.

See her card (below) for a truer representation of the colors. It’s such a terrific design.

Tara’s penultimate quilt:

She uses small pieces of fabric in an interesting way. Scrappy-not-scrappy, but more ordered.

Last one from Tara:

We jumped in the car and drove to Venue 12, passing another house with a carved wood exterior. We’re skipping Venue 11 for now, as it’s not on the way. After finding a parking place around the corner, we arrived.

Venue 9 is a tiny little church where we saw the European Bobbin Spool Invitational Quilts last year. What will it be this year? Again (you’ve heard me say it before), I am always just blown away by the diversity of quilts and quilters at this quilt show — it really pulls me out of the US manufacturers/quilters/design loop and makes me think and appreciate the diversity we have. I hope these posts help you see your quilting and creativity with new eyes, or maybe spark a new idea.

Photo of stained-glass taken by my husband. As always, we both took lots of photos, so many of the images in these Carrefour posts are his.

This time, we will meet our great-grandmothers of quilting.

Not in the flesh, but in the work they left behind, courtesy of quilt collector Janet O’Dell, from Australia. She (as the catalogue says) “is a keen collector of antique quilts. Her collection of hexagon and medallion quilts has been built up over the past 25 years from a variety of sources. All have been chosen because they appeal to her personal taste.”

And the one quilt that I will flood here with photos and which I loved-loved-loved, I did not get a photo of the title card. Interestingly enough, it was inspiration for another quilt in Venue 12, from Fiona Lindsay (a future post). Okay, back to Janet O’Dell’s quilts.

Here’s the one I loved and I’ll intersperse my comments with the photos. Just keep remembering. These are OLD.

So, the Big Picture, to closer-up, and then to these hearts with their worn spots.

This block, with its free-form cut “corners” of minty blue-green, the broderie perse flower in the center, and those random circles was another favorite. It was interesting being in that space, with these very old quilts. People were quietly moving around them, and then taking a minute to sit and gaze. In so many other venues, we are dashing to take it all in, but here, sitting with the quilts was the point.

Okay, maybe I was just tired.

Or maybe I was fascinated with their technique on their appliqué stitch, each bit of thread taking a bite over the top of the shape, so different than how I do it now: trying to come out on the fold so you don’t see my bits of thread.

And the back — it didn’t appear to have any batting at all in the quilt, so they must have just done the stitching over two layers of fabric, then did a “quilt-as-you-go” to get those flat-fold seams on the back? I’m not usually that over-the-moon about antique quilts, but for some reason I really liked these.

I read a piece this past week about how difficult it is for us to go back in time and really know how people 100 years ago thought or felt or processed image or feelings — or, since most of these quilts were from around 1830, nearly 200 years ago. And we are so “feeling-centric” these days that we even use the term in all our phrases, such as I felt you might like this — or–I felt badly for you, and so on. Did fatigue register the same way for them, or were they always tired (thinking of their housework)? Did that feeling we all have of a lovely quilt finish, register on this quilter the same way? I’d like to think that this woman, as she put the last stitch on that now-worn red zig-zag binding and unfurled it onto the bed, had a sense of satisfaction over the many years it took to stitch.

(If any reader sees this post, and has any information about this quilt, please leave me a comment. Thanks.)

Love that border print! Click to enlarge the title, which is Wood Hey, from the country of Wales. It was made in 1833 and displayed at the National Eistedfodd of Wales in 1933. It’s hand-pieced, with appliqué and is unquilted.

In case you can’t read the title: Sailing Ship & Manor House, from Pays de Galles in Wales, c. 1833. Check out the sailing ship, below.

This quilt was another stunning example of applique, and I love the title: Animal, Vegetable, & Mineral. It’s appliqué and unquilted and was made c. 1842 in England.

Check out this type of appliqué! Criss-cross, a type of tailor’s stitch; I learned this in my clothing and textile classes when I was a freshman, and have rarely used it since. There is a smaller bite of fabric on one side, and then the needle travels before taking the next stitch, and you are stitching backwards, from left to right. I don’t know what the “official” name is, I just know we used it to tack down our wool jacket facings.

It appears they went over a raw edge. I’ve seen variations of this animal-vegetable-mineral quilt pop up every once in a while. Lovely to see it here. Note the pieced backing, even though it “reads” as a whole piece of fabric. Would we add “digital” to the categories? And how would we depict that…with images of our hardware?

So, a form of offset nine-patches? With a spacer?

Normal quilt show pose.

That is a lot of quilting!

Who was M.A.R? and what was the world like in 1818? (You do realize this quilt is over 200 years old, right?) Some notable events (just to get you in her head, and which maybe she never knew about?) are listed below.

Historical Events when this quilt was made:

Official reopening of the White House
Netherlands and England sign treaty against illegal slave handling
First steam-vessel to sail Great Lakes launched
49th parallel forms as border between U.S. and Canada
1st known Christmas carol (“Silent Night, Holy Night”) sung (Austria)
Handel’s Messiah, U.S. premieres in Boston

I love the name of this. Apparently BallyGawley is a town in Ireland, north of Dublin, so perhaps the quilt came from there?

Last one for this post.

This is Broken Dishes Square, and from the United States, c. 1830. It is hand-pieced and unquilted, in the medallion style. These fabrics are so interesting, so busy and I love the bands of color in between each section of the triangles. Some woman spent hours and hours piecing this quilt.

I’m really grateful that the organizers of Carrefour Patchwork Show arranged with Janet O’Dell to have these brought to the show. As always, this show has something interesting around every corner!

Like this replica of the Eiffel Tower, stuck in some sort of a construction yard. We saw it last year in two pieces, so we’re happy it was put together this year.

More Carrefour Patchwork Show posts to come!

300 and Beyond · First Monday Sew-day · Quilt Finish · Quilt-A-Long · Quilts · Something to Think About

Gathering Up All The Fragments • Quilt Finish

December 14, 2025December 14, 2025 Elizabeth E.14 Comments

The etymology of the Economy Block is — as are many popular quilt blocks — complicated. According to Barbara Brackman’s Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns, it’s titled Economy Patch by Carrie Hall and Rose Kretsinger around 1935. It’s also called the This and That block, in the Kansas City Star around 1944 (you know this is a favorite phrase). And more recently, it’s been known as the Thrift Block as when Taryn of ReproQuiltLover hosted the recent #scrappymeetsthriftchallenge. I have mentioned before that this year I had been making things that helped me make things: quilt-a-longs, Block of the Month, group projects, and so forth. And so this one joined the line-up, and I finished it this week.

I needed a title for this quilt, and since in early 2020 I had taught it to a small beginning quilt group as the Economy Block, so I went with that name (although many now call it Square in a Square).

Full quilt title: Economy: Gathering Up All The Fragments.

Economy, as we think about it, means thrift. Saving. Making do with less. The exchange of goods. A dollar is worth something and everything is for sale (as the old saying goes). But the idea of economy, says one wag, is really an enigmata**:

Enigmata refers to things that are puzzling, mysterious, or riddles
OR, a puzzling or inexplicable occurrence or situation
OR, a person of puzzling or contradictory character.
OR, a saying, picture, etc., containing a hidden meaning; riddle.

The title of this quilt comes from yet another riddle: the poet Emily Dickinson’s punctuation and shape of her small poems. Some think it began with this:

“‘Preserve the backs of old letters to write upon,’” wrote Lydia Maria Child in The Frugal Housewife, a book Dickinson’s father obtained for her mother when Emily was born. It opens: “‘The true economy of housekeeping is simply the art of gathering up all the fragments, so that nothing be lost. I mean fragments of time as well as materials.’” (from a review by Jen Bervin, titled Studies in Scale).

Like a star is small…but it is its own world.
Or an atom is small… but contains worlds.
Or fragments of fabrics are small…but put them together and they make a quilt.

In pulling fragments for this quilt, I opened bag after bag of small scraps from a decade ago, cut into 2 1/2″ squares or 3″ squares, as it had been recommended to me to do that in order to “use up your scraps.” Finally, I was using them up, so this quilt is as much a record of an era, as it is a complication of “gathering up all the fragments.”

Backing/binding is fabric from Tula Pink, and the quilting is the Continuous Baptist Fan, by Urban Elementz.

Quilt-making is an enigmata, isn’t it? We take our scraps, our fragments, cut them smaller, sew them back together to make something that expresses an idea or a sentiment. And we quilters do it over and over, saving scraps, repeating the process “so that nothing be lost.”

This is Quilt #312, and the last for 2025, as there are no more fragments of time to add to the calendar. I will, however, try to get up another post or two of the beautiful Carrefour quilts, but no promises.