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 that gulf between he and Mother — opened up in November of 2022 when she left this earth — has been closed.
I wanted to write about Road to California this year, but aside from some bright moments, I wept on and off all week, probably in anticipation of the news I was to receive of his death. (It’s okay in my world to say death.) We all knew it was close.
So I’m going to pause for a moment before I pick up the strands of my quilting. Since he was an artist himself (and a businessman and a faith-filled scholar and a father-to-seven-husband-to-one), he knew about picking up that brush and getting back to work.
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, for some, the far-away is very-far-away, and for others, it’s a bit closer. My husband proposed taking me out to dinner for my milestone birthday, but to “prepare for photos.” And “maybe don’t wear your sneakers.” We went to our local Fancy Dining Place, The Mission Inn, which was still decked out in holiday lights. When I rounded the corner to our table, the kids were all sitting there. Oh, My! I was quite touched that they would come to celebrate with me, and they spent the next day with us, too. Quite the loveliest of birthday surprises. By Sunday, they had all gone home, and the house was very quiet.
When an opening became available, I rejoined the Gridster Bee. It was one I’d started several years ago, but I’d bowed out last year. Patti, ever capable, took over and has been a steady hand in keeping it going, as many bees dissolve after a short time. We had our kick-off Zoom call at the beginning of the month (one positive from the 2020 pandemic is this technology):
I loved seeing Carol’s Christmas quilt, one done in an earlier iteration of this Bee.
I finished this. It’s a free pattern, here on the website (keep reading). I’d started writing it ages ago, but who knows where time flies? Inside is the color key for both this 2023 (softer) version of Painter’s Palette fabrics, as well as the (bolder) version used in 2019:
I haven’t yet finished the 2023 quilt; for one, I’m still embroidering the temperature range numbers onto the Circle of Geese block that I’ve used for a key.
And about this geese pattern. It was originally made by Kelly Liddle of JelliQuilts. If I could find her again, I’d link to it. She seems to have vanished without a trace, and it’s a pretty good pattern for this sort of thing. I’ve even written to the last email I have from her, when I paid for and downloaded the pattern: Zip. Nada.
Which brings me to the podcast I listened to this past week, where Ezra Klein and his guest, Kyle Chayka, talk about how the internet isn’t fun anymore. Boring, too. And part of it is what Chayka calls the SEO-ification of the algorithm. Everything resembles everything else, as we use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to get a wider reach. While this can have benefits, Chayka and Klein argue that we seem to be homogenizing our world, as every website looks like another as the robots send you to whatever you’ve liked before, and assume you will like again.
I’m fine with that, especially when I do a search on Temperature Quilts on Instagram. But I’m also not fine with it as it seems to have flattened out what we see. Like hashtags used to be an interesting way to get a range of images, from temperature quilts that began as crocheted blankets to the most recent version of houses, leaves, and birds. Now we just get the “TOP” images. Are they the top “eye-ball-getting” images? The most colorful? The most interesting? And how will we ever know what the robots, aka: algorithm, have come to choose what they are showing us.
Chayka says he misses the curated web, where various people wrote random things, like a writer went flying through a rainbow and put the colors up on a blog. A blog!?! Who writes those anymore? Well, I do. Maybe that is why I also write about quilting, but also more-than-quilting, trying to avoid being boring, and maybe to avoid having to clean up my sewing room:
(from 2020, but it still looks the same)
One more thing: this week is Road to California, a local, national quilt show. I’m signed up for two classes: one from Lori Kennedy (FMQ on Monday) and one from Annie Smith (Design Your Own Appliqué on Thursday). I’ll also go one more day, Saturday, so I can stay to get my quilt that is hanging in the show: Aerial Beacon.
I would take a closer photo of this, but it will have to wait until next week, when I get some pictures of it hanging in the show. If you are headed there, find me and say hi!
Here’s the Temperature Pattern download. It will stay here on my website for a bit, then move over to my Pattern Shop on PayHip. Enjoy!
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, too. In some circles it’s called a “chuck-it list,” the reverse course of a “bucket list,” which we’ve all heard of way too much. I’ve also been reading about a parallel concept to FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), which is JOMO (Joy of Missing Out), another way to not plow full speed ahead into Everything. For this is the week that resolutions get made, lists of quilts get written, projects get detailed. I’ve seen Way.Too.Many quilt-a-longs this week, too. Some new quilt ideas are genuinely tempting, like this one:
Lindlee of Plains and Pine has designed this, and it really looks wonderful. So many are doing it, so your feed will be filled with color and beauty all year long. I must resist the urge just this year. I’ve already made up my list for 2024, and am doubtful I’ll even get those done (one of which is one of my own patterns, long-lingering on every list I’ve written these past few years, but I want to make it in a different colorway).
What is driving this focus? My Index of Quilts: I’ve made 285 quilts. I count only the ones that are completely finished, which slows the pace a bit. But I’m really close to 300 quilts which is where I turn into a pumpkin, or something. (Stay Tuned.) But in order to get to that 300, which probably shouldn’t be a goal, I have to edit My 2024 List pretty tightly, not letting in other great ideas until I’ve reached that number.
I say this with some caution, knowing that “Focusing on pursuing our goals often leaves us running on a treadmill of desire and frustration,” as Valerie Tiberius writes in her article, “Why you should swap your bucket list with a chuck-it list.” She goes on to say, “Discarding goals that we really care about is difficult; failing to complete them can elicit sadness or regret.” Like me, with the above Temperature Quilt.
If I hadn’t just finished this one, there’s no way I wouldn’t be jumping in. (But there is always 2025.)
And I pinned up this appliqué mid-December, and have finished the two sides. Now to tackle the middle, with those vines. The dots were a birthday gift in 2022, and it’s taken me this long to figure out what I wanted to do. Working Title: Twilight Garden. So right there, there are two projects on my New Year’s List, along with seeing the Total Solar Eclipse in Texas (April), a trip to La Jolla, California (end of this month) with my three sisters to celebrate my recent milestone birthday, traveling with my DH this fall, and a list of quilts to be considered.
In days long past, I’d splash those goals up here — a way to keep “myself accountable” — or something like that. But given the tight real estate on the birthday cake (more candles than cake to hold them), I’ll politely decline that course of action. I’ll consider the best days the ones where I can work happy and contented, able to call out across the hallway to my husband, answer a phone call or take a walk, or pause to watch the bees attack the wisteria blossoms with gusto just outside my sewing room window — interrupting all evident progress.
Sometimes reversing course is the best way forward–
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 the same: “Even if we could completely undo the effect of what has been done, we cannot make it so that “the thing that was done never happened” (Jankélévitch, quoted in Potts, 77). That fact of the deed, and the impact of that fact if not of its effects, shall remain absolute and eternal.”
We can waste years of our lives angry at others out for all the wrong they have shown us. We can castigate ourselves for our personal failings (we all have our own list of them), vowing never to repeat them. We often struggle.
Potts’ answer? Bring in the principle of forgiveness: “Forgiveness seeks to live in the wake of loss. It accepts that what has been lost cannot be restored, and then it aims to live in and with the irrevocability of wrong” (23). He goes on to say that: “forgiveness also accepts that past as unalterable and so imagines what possibilities for the future its battered history might bear” (24). In other words, forgiveness is future-facing. “Whatever the past has been or the future may bring, we can begin, and begin again” (94).
I cannot quote enough of his book here to show you his extensive thinking around this idea. But I sometimes wonder — if we can not turn back time — why do we all turn our head to look behind us? Like how I started this post? These three quotes address this:
“As soon as you have a language that has a past tense and a future tense you’re going to say, ‘Where did we come from, what happens next?’ The ability to remember the past helps us plan the future” (Margaret Atwood).
“One faces the future with one’s past” (Pearl S. Buck).
And finally, to bring it full circle: “Nothing we can do can change the past, but everything we do changes the future” (Ashleigh Brilliant). I liked Buck’s idea, that the lenses with which we view the future are colored by our past. Atwood is more tactical, encouraging to use what we’ve learned to plan our future. Brilliant, whose cartoon is above, cautions us not to waste our energy dwelling on mistakes.
I hope that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t tackle some of our UFOs, as I noticed that most of the quilt finishes (above) were pulled from my stack of UFOs. However, to think kindly about them, it’s like my past self left them for my current self to finish up (thank you, Pearl Buck). So, instead of rueing that new ideas in 2023 were sparse, I’m grateful that I had something to turn to to keep myself busy. I’m also trying to apply the ideas in Mr. Potts’ book to keep myself forward-facing. I’ve written up list of quilts I want to make in 2024, and I have already started on the first, sewing my way into this new year.
While I have a whole new year coming up in which to finish Potts’ book (and make quilts), what I’ve learned so far is this: Evaluate where you are. Move on from failures. Forgive, and then forgive some more.
P.S.In a combination of satisfying, yet somewhat unhappy goodbye to 2023, our local quilt shop (Bluebird Quilts) decided to close, and I picked up several lengths of fabric for backings for these planned 2024 quilts. It was sad to say good-bye to the place where I started teaching; her reasons for closing are varied, and I wish her well.
P.P.S. If you are new here, you can always revisit some of my Happy Old Year Ending posts, where I re-introduce myself to my readers. And maybe give an observation or two. The one from 2019 is a classic.
OccasionalPiece--Quilt! 