Sunny Flowers for an Easter morning!
Happy Easter, 2024
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 really, really care about the painting turning out. I’m really upset when it doesn’t. But I don’t feel any need to communicate. I’m sorry. That’s not the point.”
What a refreshing change from the inundation of famous film stars and celebrities and all those fascinating things on social media, which — in the end — draw us away from our quieter lives, or as Homer French says, being “a regular ordinary painter who hangs out in her garage, and desperately tries to make something that she likes.”
While she made this “mapestry” with thread, cloth, and embroidery, her paintings are what she’s known for:
This scene is up in the mountains above Palm Desert, Southern California area. I don’t know why this bio on her drew me in so much. Maybe it was the barren landscapes that she paints, or her focus on her creating, whether in cloth or with paints. And maybe like the stack of paintings that piled up in her garage, sending her out to find a gallery that would sell her paintings, I feel we quilters often toil quietly, with our cloth and thread, imbuing what’s in our hands with our life, our stuff.
Here’s some of my recent work:
Bit by bit, Twilight Garden is taking shape. It’s going to be a hand-work project now.
On the first day of Spring it was warm enough to set out lunch on the patio. Our conversations seem to unfurl at a slower pace out there.
We had our wisteria trimmed; the squirrel’s perch is right outside my sewing room window.
I’ve been photographing my Mother’s few journals. She was too busy to write much, ever, so they are brief and don’t cover much time. But reading them is like having a good conversation with her.
I went on (another!) trip to Utah to see this tall granddaughter come home after an 18-month mission to Argentina.
And to have lunch with my father’s sisters.
My father gave me this book many years ago, and I pulled it out this week. I found little notes tucked in addressed to me, instructing me to place some newspaper clippings he’d sent, into the back of the book. It was poignant to see his handwriting again.
It’s a weighty book, one man’s year of mourning for his father. I’ll have to take it slow, but right at the beginning this caught my heart:
“And when grief is gone? Still one may not speak of one’s parents baldly. After the twelve months of mourning, the rabbis continue, one must accompany the mention of one’s dead father or one’s dead mother with the words, ‘May his memory be a blessing for life in the world to come.’ Modern Jews have abridged this locution of piety. They speak of their dead and say ‘May his memory be a blessing,’ and they mean a blessing here, upon us. But the rabbis meant a blessing there, upon him….I can believe that the memory of our dead is a blessing here, upon us. Can I believe that it is a blessing there, upon them?”
I can only hope so. Really, I want both. As I think about my mother and father, feeling grateful at this Eastertide for their influence in all ways, I hope their memory is a blessing for them, together. And with my needle and scissors in hand, their memories and these blessings help me pass some really long days.
Quilt your stuff, everyone. Quilt your life.
Happy Easter Week!
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 a search to find a class if you want, but I still think that first block I did with freezer paper will help you get started. And more tips are on the second block I tried, too.
The Bizness: Since I’ve had this quilt in mind for a few whiles, the whole gamut is grouped together under the New York Beauties tab, above, and that’s where I’ll put most things. The pattern, however, resides at my pattern shop, as does the free handout that lists all the colors of Painters Palette that I used (it’s called the “Preview” on my pattern).
For Cool Rays, I decided to do a gradation of color (popularly called “ombré” these days) in the background behind the rays, so I picked out a range of greens, trying to keep the color changes smooth and in the same color family (a more yellowy-green than a bluey-green).
I used the method of trimming a sheet of freezer paper (off the roll) to about 8 1/4″ by 10 3/4″ and taping it to a piece of cardstick, or equivalent heavier paper. Then I sent it through my color printer, using the rear feeder for a glide path that doesn’t ask the paper to double-back on itself. Cut the pieces out, and you are ready to go. I can get five uses out of one pattern-printed-on-freezer paper, but for this block you only make four.
Hand-crease on all the lines, working from the printed side, then re-crease them from the back.
Keep trimming those seam allowances to slightly less than 1/4-inch. Again, refer to the blog posts linked above for a more detailed step-by-step version of how to use freezer paper.
Trim around the completed section, around the freezer-paper pattern. You’ll be left with four stacks of rays. Seam them together, matching up the red dashed lines. It helps me to line them up in the way they’ll go (on the right).
After using the tip of my iron to press in the marks of where to line up my pieces, I lay them out.
Pinned and ready to sew.
I pressed away from the light center quarter-circle on this one. On other blocks, I’ve pressed the seam allowances toward the circle, for more definition from the front. Experiment with what you like.
And By The Way Department: I’m so tired of that argument about pressing seams open or pressing seams closed — I just saw it again on another website, and I’m like Leave.It.Alone. There is no right or wrong, but only personal preference. Unless you are making for a group, or in a Bee and the Queen Bee wants it a certain way. Then do it her way.
All four blocks done! Now that I look at them like this, I wish I had swapped two of the greens. Sigh. I can’t even imagine remaking it just for that. The quilt will be fine.
All four blocks with my line of Number Bears, made for when toddlers lived here and I had to keep them quiet in church. The bears all snap together. The guys on the left have “casts” made out of more felt, as one of my kids ripped their hands off with too vigorous effort on the unsnapping of the colorful conga line. (This was in the those old days of mending and repairing.) This hangs around my sewing room, because I can’t bear to get rid of it. My youngest is old now, but I still keep it.
Progress so far. We’ve been making a block about every other week, so far, but the upcoming Eclipse may throw us off.
This website has an interactive link that really zooms in to show granular detail of how many minutes it will show totality in your location. After having done the Annular Eclipse in Utah last year, I know how quickly 4 minutes can pass while you are looking at this marvel. Maybe that’s why I’m doing this quilt? Because it looks like the sun in some ways? I do know that’s why I named the blocks the way I did.
And here’s what I like seeing the best: Status Report, with four blocks finished. The list is on the main New York Beauties page.
Happy Sewing!
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, and then even though I’d been fussing about it since January 1st, the intense sewing really didn’t get underway until about March — I was waiting to see if we would have an interesting year for weather. We did, with snow one day and hail another and many rain storms.
While I didn’t want to replace the earlier version, I did love love that quilting. Jen was able to do the same pattern on this quilt, too. It’s more square, has a temperature quilt key on the back, along with a linen tea-towel calendar to show the year. I also added a square denoting made in California. Which it was.
This is quilt #286, and it’s 61″ wide and 70″ tall. Or long. Or high, or whatever.
No surprise that I chose this title for this quilt, as these patchwork triangles mark the passage of time, and by their very color, alter the face of the quilt top. I’m not sure I’m as generous about the marks time has placed on my physical body, and sometimes the alterations of who I think I am can sometimes be pleasant, and other times, painful. I want just enough spice and change in my life to make it interesting, but I don’t want sustaining relationships to wither or change or wilt. Some you can’t get back, like when my father died earlier this year. Other relationships take a bit more stitching and cutting and late-night sewing to become the beautiful garment (or quilt) they were meant to be. Y’all know what I mean, and I’m guessing the marks time leaves on all of us can be wearying. Or gratifying. Or somewhere in between.
A single day is enough to make us a little larger or, another time, a little smaller, said Paul Klee.
John Lithgow: Time sneaks up on you like a windshield on a bug.
Theodore Roethke, a favorite poet, noted that, Time marks us while we are marking time.
Try pausing right before and right after undertaking a new action, even something simple like putting a key in a lock to open a door. Such pauses take a brief moment, yet they have the effect of decompressing time and centering you, wrote David Steindl-Rast
We’re planning a trip to see the Eclipse in April, and are trying to find those moments where we can pause time, as Stindl-Rast suggests. And hopefully not in dive hotels, or out of gas at the side of a road in West Texas. Seeing the eclipse will, in its own way, pause time, and will make its mark, bringing a fancy bit of stitching to this thing called life.
I hope the Dressmaker-called-Time makes you the finery you hope for–
(XOXO Thanks, my love )
P.S. Other posts about this quilt:
Temperatures are in the News!
February 2023 • This and That
Filling the Days…with Quilting
This and That: October 2023
…and other posts on Instagram.
OccasionalPiece--Quilt! 