Creating

New Year, New Look

Elizabeth E.7 Comments

I played around with some changes to the blog this morning, including a new header.  I like it.  Jump out of your readers to take a look.  I looked at a lot of my quilts trying to decide which to use in the header, and trended toward the ones I’d had a major hand in designing.  There are still some from other people’s visions that I love, like Come A-Round with its dots and circles.  I try to jump out of my reader a lot to look at your blogs as it’s like visiting someone’s home–seeing how they decorate and how they arrange the furniture.  And of course, seeing what kind of chocolate they stock in the private stash!  My current favorites:

and

Suite 88’s dark chocolate with ginger.  Alas, I’m on my last squares and you can only buy it in Montreal!

I had wanted to create a new look for the blog–left it for the Christmas break–and am finally glad I feel like doing something creative.  It’s hard not feeling like yourself.  When I was reading blogs last night from Lee’s WIP, one quilter wrote that it was “her turn to get sick” and she’d posted a photo of herself in her bathrobe, stitching on some applique.  It’s been a bad year for sick–bring on the chocolate–bar, or all frothed up in a steamy mug of liquid deliciousness.  It’s also a strange year for weather–no snow yet in most places in the US.  And down here in OPQland, that is –Southern California, we’ve been having spring since Christmas (guess that means we’ll have a scorcher of a summer).

I added a counter on the side showing the days until Road to California.  That counter may appear and disappear, depending on my mood.

(It’s gone now.)

Creating · Quilts

Quilt Ideas

Elizabeth E.3 Comments

Over at Stitched in Color, Rachel has declared a scrap manifesto: Use Them!

I think that’s a brilliant idea; she’s culled a lot of ideas using scraps to make quilts and has a challenge going to use up our scraps (see her website for more details).  I think the idea, really, is to stash-bust, using up all those bits of fabrics leftover from our projects (or a too-ambitious buying spree).  I’ve been looking for a few of my own ideas on how to use up the stash.  Here’s one, a free pattern from Lila Ashberry, titled Summer House, and you can find the download *here.*

I’m looking for patterns that have a complexity to them, and will use lots of fabric and be quickly put together.

Or how about Mayra Dubrawky’s Sticks and Bricks pattern?  There would be a LOT less angles/triangles in this one, although it doesn’t have that complexity of the other.

Here’s one idea I’ve had in my files for a long time: a scrappy log cabin.

Join Rachel’s “Festival of Scrappiness.” Your finished quilt top is due by the end of March.

WIP

I Am A Work in Progress

Elizabeth E.5 Comments

I hardly know how to pick up a rotary cutter, let alone sew a seam, and find the new thing that I am capable of creating.

I am a work in progress this year.

I just had cancer surgery, a sure-fire way to whack me upside the head and force a look at the musty, over-stuffed closet of a life I’d been leading.  Too much shoved in, with the door slammed shut. A veritable chifforobe of clutter.

I had a birthday–Happy #58 to me, and also to Krista, my microbiologist blog-buddy (although I don’t know how old she is).

While trying to locate the surface of my ironing board today, I found detritus from two recent trips: Montreal in October and New York City in November.

I fell in love with Julia Ritson’s blog, a habit I could indulge while haunting my bed while in recovery, and especially this recent collage she made of a city (I asked for permission to post it here).  I think I could never make something this intriguing with hidden layers, ideas, textures.  I sometimes feel like I’ll never make anything else again. When I feel like this, it’s just empty inside.

My mother consoles me by saying it’s an after-effect of anesthesia (yet I’m ready to be back who I was).  I can feel the pull to colors, shapes, cutting, cloth, but resist.  It takes too much energy, and there was that syllabus I had to write.  Luckily my husband gave me Ringle and Kerr’s latest quilt book, so I consoled myself with their transparency brilliance.

I’m a crazy quilt, a wonky log cabin, a beginner’s Shoo-fly block with points cut off.

Talking exhausts me.

Writing feeds me, but I don’t spend enough time doing that because I’m talking.

A day of quiet restores me.  I hope this quirk doesn’t persist much longer because most everyone I love lives at the other end of the phone line, and talking is the only way we have to keep in touch.

I haven’t bought this year’s diary and my days are slipping away.  I didn’t realize it was Wednesday until I saw Cindy’s post about her fabulous quilt.  (Can I use her Work in Progress for Lee’s blog?  Didn’t think so.)

I’m in pretty good spirits today as I went to Target for a shower cap, Michael’s for medium treat bags, and Costco for dinner rolls.  They didn’t have the rolls done yet (“40 more minutes”) and I suddenly realized that I was crashing into a wall of tired, so pushed my empty cart back out into the parking lot, drove home and took a nap.  Even though I feel like a pathetic dishrag at times, I am making progress in recovery not only from the cancer blippiness but also from the bronchitis and double ear infections.  “Sick, sick no more” should be a slogan on my T-shirt.

I’m a riddle, a collection of wishes, a basket of fears, and a quilt without her borders.

Things I’m Working On (Quilt-wise):
(I would have photos, but the camera batteries died.  In all three cameras.)
Getting the borders on the autumn quilt
Deciding whether or not to take all the Christmas quilt squares off the wall, or to try to sew them up.
Figuring out how I want to spend my Fat Quarter gift card from my son
Lollypop Trees
Friendship Quilt

Getting the stitches out of ME–this Friday.  The margins are clear.  All is well.  Now to find the brain cells.

And that beginner’s block?  It was my mother’s, when she was a girl and it’s about 75 years old.  It’s one of my treasures.

Many thanks to Lee, who threw me this lifeline of a deadline today.  Check out her lovely bee block!

Happy Old Year Ending (Wrap-up) · Something to Think About

Happy New Year 2012: List of Plans

Elizabeth E.6 Comments

I don’t do New Year’s Resolutions.  I figure if January was the only time I turned over a new leaf, I’d be in trouble.  I like to think about things in a new way all the time, which gives to a very big habit of blog strolling to see what other new things are out there.  Or like my daughter said to me today, “Now that you’re still convalescing from your surgery, it’s time to do Pinterest!”  I think that might be a hole I’d never climb out of as it would be way too alluring.

But January is my birthday month (as an adult, as a mother, you are allowed a whole month) so I would like to Make Some Plans.  Not resolutions.  For if these plans don’t come to fruition, my pride won’t be wounded.  Like those stand-by passengers on airplanes today, any unfinished plans will just be carried forward to the next List of Plans.

Some Quilting Plans for 2012

1. Make some Cross-X Blocks. I want to do wordy fabrics in the backgrounds somewhere, in order to take advantage of my stash of wordy fabrics. (Photo from janejellyby.)

2. Basket Blocks.  I collected, in my earlier days, an entire group of food fabrics.  (That’s the first batch of selvages I cut off and sent to Cindy of Live a Colorful Life.)  My goal has always been to make a quilt of basket blocks with these fabrics. (Photo from Gray Cat Quilts.)

3. Get back to work on my Lollypop Tree blocks.  I started them last year, and should have followed the advice I saw on several blogs, which was to lay out all the fabrics for each block all at once.  Then I could be sewing them all year long.

4. Get the borders on this harvest/autumn quilt before autumn comes again.  I need need need to get that stack of fabrics tucked back up on the shelves and I won’t as long as the border isn’t on this one.  Like most things quilty, I am over-thinking these borders, but I don’t feel like a plain 4″ all around would suit this quilt.

5. Play around with the QR code quilt idea.  Don’t know if it will pan out into anything, but I just like thinking about it.

5. Spend the Fat Quarter Shop Gift Certificate my son and his wife gave me for Christmas.  I have this in mind, although any colorway will do:

6. Leave time to quilt and listen to audio books in between work (grading & teaching), church service, spending time with friends and family.  I read a piece by Pico Iyer today in the New York Times and he talked about the necessity for quiet space, free from distractions, away from the constant flow of noise and information.  I think many of us struggle with the demands of the things I’ve listed above, plus trying to be a thoughtful and interesting blogger as well as a good member of the blogging community, in responding to our favorite blogs.

It sometimes can be too much, can’t it?  When this happens, I try to get around to comment on those bloggers who I have a special connection to, whose ideas have really sparked me to be a better quilter.  I also try to include a few new ones occasionally in order to keep my ideas fresh, and to sample what’s out there.  I can’t comment on everyone’s blog, although at times I have left the quilting behind in order to attend to the rigors of commenting.  Not a good trade-off, as the comments get more and more brief and tend to be “drive-by” blurbs that don’t really show my appreciation for what I’m reading, and for the creativity I do want to notice, and to allow me to create my own online community with those who interact with what I’m doing.

It’s a balance, and Iyer quotes Marshall McLuhan: “When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.” Here’s hoping this new year allows us all to enjoy the fruits of our labors,  allowing us to fully reconnect with who we are in the process of quilting.

Happy New Year!