Community • Quilt Finish: North Country Patchwork

June 11, 2023August 31, 2025 Elizabeth E.15 Comments

This is a quilter’s visual paradise: triangles, circles, squares, bits-and-pieces; it’s the Cosmati pavement in Westminster Cathedral, which got a lot of press recently with the coronation of King Charles.

And this is an entirely different view of pieces and fragments and color. These two images remind me of something I’ve been thinking about for a while: the concept and idea of Community. Obviously these two art pieces present different depictions of together, of belonging, of interacting: ordered or overlaid; yet as a whole, the colors and shapes are part of a whole.

The idea of community has many parts, but “first is the territorial and geographical notion of community—neighborhood, town, city. The second is ‘relational,” concerned with “quality of character of human relationship, without reference to location”….[T]he two usages are not mutually exclusive, although….[and often] modern society develops community around interests and skills more than around locality” (from here).

I always imagined community as being a local sort of thing. Quilt Village de Provence, an original quilt made by Frédérique, is a lovely and perfect depiction of that: a beautiful central sun lighting all the town. Her circular quilting reinforces this idea: we are all together in a great, broad and enveloping circle. (She granted me permission to share this.)

Some of this thinking was triggered by the recent events in my own life: of the passing away of my mother, a breaking of one of my most central relationships. I found myself deep in mourning and all its attendant ills and challenges, yet found a community of women who had gone through something similar, and they buoyed me up. I loved the comment by Tina on the last post, who recommended patience with the process, reminding me that “It takes as long as it takes.” So community, in this sense, was like the second definition, above: “interests and skills more than around locality.”

Recently, I volunteered to serve as a website admin/blog poster for one of our local quilt guilds. In diving in to this, I discovered many tightly bound communities in this larger whole, some accepting of a newbie, yet other groups resistant, with the gates shuttered and the drawbridge up. It was an interesting experience and I was surprised by how fiercely some guarded their particular little fiefdom. Community is not new to me; I’ve been a classroom teacher. I’ve been a Guild teacher. I’ve taught in quilt shops. I’ve been a part of a worldwide church community my whole life, and worked locally within that, coming to love friends and neighbors — thankful for those who accepted me with a large measure of grace and patience — yet I also figured out who was prickly and deserved a wide margin. This guild experience was no exception.

I have also loved having a larger quilting community due to social media, making many friendships even though we lived far away from each other. This is not a new concept to any of you. But the final thoughts about people and connections are because of this quilt. It’s my version of an antique quilt from another community, far far away:

Found on Instagram, I loved the red patches floating on the creamy background of this quilt from the North Country of England, perhaps where my great-grandmother was from? I don’t know, but I like thinking that she may have made something like this, so many many miles and years ago.

In 2019, my young granddaughter Dani played with it in her living room, helping me lay out the center. I have carried this with me on trips, and have taken this quilt to my local quilt guild meetings, ready for it to come to its completion, bridging my connection with this young girl to the older British/American quilter sitting next to me, telling me about her connection to King Charles via her church parish from when she was a girl the same age as my Dani.

At the heart of it is this: I cannot live without my community. It’s been a hard slog to feel easy again in a crowd post-Covid, their faces close to mine as I listen to them, share their joys, carry their sorrows. Loneliness has dogged a lot of us, and we are rebuilding. I am admittedly less patient with those who willfully bar the gates to friendship, but I try to offer them a measure of grace and move on, looking for others who want to form connections.

In a paper by McMillan and Chavis, they define a “Sense of community [as] a feeling that members have of belonging, a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith that members’ needs will be met through their commitment to be together” (from here). This idea keeps me going, keeps me making friends (and quilts), and helps me find acceptance, no matter whether we are from the North Country or South Country. No matter what slice of life we are from — old or young, happy or cranky, hesitant or willing — I hope we find community.

Other posts about North Country Patchwork Quilt:

EPPing again with French General (and the printouts for the papers to make this)
Do You Tweet?
First Monday Quilt (where I thought it would only take me two years to finish. Haha.)

Yes, it plays nicely in the kitchen. Quilting by Jen of Sew-Mazing Quilting. I love any version of Baptist Fan!

All but the final border was sewn by hand.

The reverse, a combination of two lengths of fabric. The right side is the same that’s on my sister’s quilt, New Journeys, made from French General fabrics, some years ago. Thank you goes to my wonderful quilt-holding husband.
This is Quilt #277 on my Quilt Index • 66″ x 86.”

Patterns by Elizabeth of OPQuilt · Something to Think About

Time Let Me Play

June 1, 2023August 31, 2025 Elizabeth E.18 Comments

I was struck by the idea that: “…all thinking is an act of memory in some form. That includes imagination, creativity, innovation and other variations of ‘new’ thoughts. That means the components of the thought are not new. Only the combination is new.” I read this in an article in the New York Times by Peter Coy titled “If There Are No New Ideas, How Do We Keep Innovating?“

This quote came from Sheena Iyengar who just wrote a new book called Think Bigger: How to Innovate. In the case of this newest quilt top, which I’m calling Time Let Me Play (more on that in a minute), I went smaller in size, but bigger in the idea of it, which is what I think she is referring to. The idea that there is nothing new under the sun is an old one, but I wonder if she’s trying to get at a new way of thinking about creativity, an “act of memory in some form.”

Coy also notes that Mark Twain believed that there was nothing that is truly original when he wrote to Helen Keller:

“It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a telephone, or any other important thing–and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite–that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.”

In this case, the memory came from a photo my friend Lisa had given me, and I went on to make a large quilt in cream and black:

How many times have we quilters seen a new “original” quilt, and recognized a well-loved quilt block? How often has a traditional block been seen in a recent quilt, and the maker claiming it an original creation? I am always trying to spot new patterns, new shapes, new ways of thinking about things, but I do like Iyengar’s thinking that it’s memory driven. This motivates me to fill up that memory: to keep reading and adding new things to the mind’s hallways and closets. Museums, anyone? Books? A moderated dose of social media? Quilt shows? A visit to the mountains?

Iyengar writes that thinking bigger is about assembling old ideas in a new way… [S]he writes that all successful innovators are “strategic copiers,” who “learned from examples of success, extracted the parts that worked well, imagined new ways of using those pieces, and combined them to create something new and meaningful.”
Peter Coy, New York Times

So as I was working on the pattern (coming soon), I first called the cream/black quilt SunShadow. <Bleh.> Then, Starfriends, which is what I called it when I sent it up to my quilter. I’m still not there yet. But the colorful version? Here’s the deal: It’s been a long, long winter over here, with a significant death, the remodel of a kitchen, gobs of rainstorms (which I loved, but the grey skies are not a usual thing), too many small things which added up to bigger things. When we were able to get back into the kitchen, and everything was put away (and the glass lampshade I had accidentally clocked with a pan was fixed), I found a tiny bit of extra energy that no one had claimed. I started playing around with color and put the shape of this quilt into a drawing…

…it was like Time had opened the window a little bit and found time for me to play. Of course, that phrase could also be read as a plea: Time! Let me play! but I prefer the idea of all the tumblers falling into place to let a person find a memory, a space, an interval not yet filled up in order to play.

Last thought from her book: “Henri Poincaré, the great mathematician and physicist. ‘Invention consists in avoiding the constructing of useless combinations and in constructing the useful combinations which are in infinite minority,’ he wrote in 1913. “To invent is to discern, to choose.” So keep trying. That quilt you want to make is almost here.

Our initial run at this photographing this quilt against the mural wall brought the lady out of the office next to us, with the scold “What is that? Some kind of flag?”
“No,” I replied. “I’m a quilter. This is my quilt.”
She went on to say we were on private property and generally wanted us gone. A flag. A flag? I puzzled about that long and hard until Dave made the connection that June had PRIDE connections, and rainbow flags were being washed over every advertiser’s website.
“Oh,” I said. “She thought my quilt was a flag???”

In her forming memory, seeing this quilt meant rainbows meant Pride Month. In my beginning memory, I was standing in a field of flowers, with pine trees ringing the valley with my quilt in the midst of it all.

But after seeing it, I did think it needed a different border, so added one. And we went back for another round, but asked her permission first. The woman is somewhere behind those mirrored windows. I’m sure she thought we were nuts.

More play time that night, pinning the quilt in my new blue kitchen.

In the deepest parts of this hard winter, I couldn’t write, I couldn’t answer emails, I.just.couldn’t. But Time is working its eternal magic on me, helping me heal and recover and find myself again. I think my Mom would like this quilt, with its bright colors, and I hope — if heaven has a window that can be opened — that she could peer down and catch a glimpse of me letting this quilt top wave to her. Thank you to all who have reached out and understood, thank you to all who have had patience with me.

Now, let’s go play!

Mini-quilt · Something to Think About

Flashback

May 18, 2023August 31, 2025 Elizabeth E.9 Comments

Occasionally I attempt to clean out my emailbox, which is a vain and futile attempt to generally keep my life organized. But in this round, I found several stacks of emails regarding Quilt Swaps, a thing we did in the quilt world for a while. Some of my quilty swaps:

And here’s one I received:

I had drafted this pattern for her in my then-used QuiltPro software, because — as she wrote to me — she could see what she wanted to do in her mind, but couldn’t get there. I sent it off to her, and she swapped this back to me. If you need a town square quilt, I have a version of this for sale on my PayHip shop, but it’s more colorful as I used a different source for inspiration.

I started to notice a trend in looking at all these quilts from Days Gone By: strong, bright colors with faded backgrounds, what we often called “low-volume” backgrounds. And lots of solids, or fabrics that read as solids. Maybe that’s why the little quilt at the top of the post felt so familiar to me when I was making it?

And in that mess of emails, I found a link to a post from Never Just Jennifer, detailing a “Round Trip” quilt swap that she was participating in (which is where I found links to these photos; I hope she never takes the post down). Be still my heart! Leaves! New York Beauties! Letters! Flying Geese! Low-volume backgrounds! It checked every box. But wait, here’s the quilt, a tribute to New Hampshire, at the next round, with Trees!

Yes, this was in the day before Design Walls and all that, when we just flat out quilted for fun, exploring new ideas, laying our quilts out on the floor before packaging them all up and sending them off with a book to chronicle our progress. I love that last row for the quilt with Foundation Paper Piecing!

We didn’t seem to worry about coordinated fabric lines, influencing, posting-with-polish-hoping-for-likes. We borrowed. We imitated. We sewed.

In that vein, after the final workman left the kitchen and I was waiting for kitchen-drawer organizers to arrive, I pulled out a stack of cream and black prints, and inspired by this photo from my friend Lisa from easily a decade ago, I got to work.

I remembered the tip from Yvonne, about placing your ruler perpendicular to the seam when making hourglass blocks. And yes, if you want a pattern, it’s drafted with two different versions, and I’m testing and it’s coming soon. But I did want to sew again with that delicious feeling of just making. Of just sewing.

You know what I mean.

Rolling Rainbow Star, and all the minis

Rainbow Gardens

Quilt Finish · This-and-That

Quilt Finish: Blossom and This & That for May 2023

May 5, 2023August 31, 2025 Elizabeth E.17 Comments

I’ve been storing up some This-and-Thats, so buckle up, here we go.

First up is a quilt finish. I started this in June of 2021, and finished it today. I was teaching classes about this to Guilds and thought I needed to make up a sample. Or two. Or three. But finally, the genesis of all the samples is finished. I promised it to my sister, who always impresses me with her ability to adapt to whatever the world throws at her. She told me it will probably hang in her soon-to-be-finished basement (she lives in a colder climate than we do).

I quilted the petals simply, and the surrounding area and little more densely. It’s made of all Anna Maria Horton fabrics, from a wide range of her collections.

I seem to be going through irons like water lately. That means that this last one only lasted a few years, instead of decades. We’ll see what the new Shark one does. I’m sort of over name-brand irons. I look for the vent holes and if it has a ton of places for the steam to exit, I usually buy it.

Thought you’d like to see the full branching of that Mother of Pearl plant I showed you last week. These colors!

This popped up on Sherri McConnell’s Instagram today, and I love them. You’ve got to keep your eye on Sherri. She is Industry personified, and always has such fun things to share. So head over to her blog to see all her talents as well as links to the download. The free downloads for this block can also be found at Fat Quarter Shop, as they are building a Charity Quilt with delightful blocks.

Continuing with the flower theme, the geraniums on the left are from our front yard, and have just thrived in this cool, rainy weather we’ve had. The flower on the right is from our Chinese Fringe bush in the side yard. I love how they uncurl like they are strips of paper (like quilling? remember that?).

We’re three weeks into the garden, and so far we haven’t killed anything. The bare-limbed jacaranda took a hit this year from all the cold weather and the jury is still out on whether it will come back to life. Once the heat lands, we spend all summer trying to keep the vegetables alive, working hard to get our proverbial “64-dollar tomato.”

Why yes, I will be up early to watch all the Pomp-and-Circumstance, especially the bagpipers. I already purchased my souvenir, but it won’t be here for a couple of weeks:

I plan to use this when I inaugurate my kitchen. If you want to have your eyes glaze over, a lot of it is on Instagram under the hashtag #itsnewkitchentime2023 but that does not mean I’m doing this in 2024, or 2025, or ever again. I’m weary of not being to cook normally, although we are getting good at soaking our pasta to make dinner. And I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I made a pan of brownies:

That Breville oven has saved my sanity during this past eight weeks. The tile went up today on the backsplash, and as I type this, our contractor, Saintly Dennis, is installing the drawer/door fronts. Okay, hang on. We are almost finished.

Did you see the costumery of the 2023 Met Gala? This outfit above wasn’t one of them, but it was waaaay better looking that most of them, and this Rainbow Woman is completely covered, unlike a lot of what was worn at the Gala. Geesh. It had such potential.

Two sides of motherhood (in advance of Mother’s Day):