New York Beauties took a long time to get here: about three years. Started in 2022 from the spark of an idea, with a pillow of four New York Beauty blocks, it quickly morphed to quilt size, with a series of block tutorials. Then it moved from there to the new rage of freezer-paper piecing, tired as we were of ripping off papers from the back of our precision piecing.
While that took some time, to get all those blocks designed and drafted, then figure out a tutorial, then make the required number — it seemed to take longer to quilt it myself. Every block called for a new idea, a new way to outline the rays, or fill in the backgrounds, or sculpt the arcs. Many times I seriously doubted I was up to the task.
I unpicked some areas and re-did them. I’m still not sure about some of them, but it’s time to let this rest.
Quilt #300 Started June 2022 • Finished September 2025, with the label being sewn on this afternoon.
I’ve learned a lot about what colors are my favorites (butter yellow seems to be right up there, along with a bluey aqua).
I found out my machine’s limitations. Neither it — nor I — are high-precision longarm machines, although we do our best.
I remembered that sometimes simple borders are best, and that a ruler and a disappearing marker can get those designs sewn into cloth.
I thought about my very own New York beauty, born in the Empire State. She has fallen in the love with the Big Apple (New York City’s nickname) and tries to go there often. This quilt is for her….
…from me, her mother.
I was stitching the binding down while we were at her house this past week, so yes, you do see little binding clips. Kinda’ adds to the color, don’t you think? But I didn’t want to leave without a picture of her with this quilt, since the full title is:
Usually I do a round-up of blog posts at the end of a Quilt Finish, but this time I’ll just send you up to the New York Beauties page with everything listed, including a free block or two. The rest of them are in the pattern, found in my pattern shop on PayHip.
I will say that the border was cut 5″ wide, then mitered on. I will probably update the pattern at some point in the future, complete with new photos, etc. If you have purchased it, you can re-download it. I’ll announce it on here.
Lastly, I am now working on a visual index for my quilt blog. It’s called Blog Index, and it’s up at the top.
Since today is the 30th, I slid August’s This and That right under the wire.
For those who are new here (and thank you for subscribing) I often do a “This and That” post that contains a lot of small bits, updates on projects and pieces that don’t warrant their own post.
In other news…this is post number 1300. I started writing this blog in January of 2007. Thank you all for reading. And for your comments. And for being a part of my life for many quilty projects!
First up, on America’s Labor Day Weekend (Happy Labor Day, everyone!): a cool and calm photo my husband took near our home. He has a fascination for the flight of herons, and I loved this one, with all its blues.
I made my July block (churn dash, lower left) and August (star), both in this month. I’m using all my collected Sherri & Chelsi fabrics, some from her first lines. Sherri has started putting her quilt together, but I’m not sure how I’ll want to do mine.
I saw this while scrolling through some reels. As she tells it, when you turn 50, you are assigned a hobby.
I am so glad I was assigned Quilting, although I’m getting more and more interested in Geneology. And that group about travel actually sounds sort of interesting.
I went through my house and packed up four boxes of quilt books to send up to the Utah Valley Quilt Guild. My friend Lisa is the Librarian, and she said they’ll keep some and put others up for sale in their fundraiser.
Happy to for them be put to a good use.
And I’ve been putting these up for far too long. With this last one, I am at the end of the quilting on the center. And this is what I’ve sketched out for the borders of this New York Beauties quilt (yellow thread on the yellow border): We’ll see.
I’m sure I’m not the only person in the world that decides to (1) clean out a drawer or (2) lay on the sofa or (3) start a new project or just (4) doomscroll when there is a task awaits that is larger-than-my-tiny-brain-can-handle. After running out of things to procrastinate with, I finally started quilting the border this week. Big sigh, big relief.
I created a new page dedicated to this quilt so its easier to find the free patterns to make this. You can see “Economy Quilt” in the header, above.
Now here’s a random topic for you. I’ve been reading a lot about AI, and present here some clothing examples of bad photos, with arms that look like they were cut-out paper dolls, weird colors of skin, same model in same pose, clothing that fits oddly around the neckline. This is what they call AI Slop.
“Slop, at least in the fast-moving world of online message boards, is a broad term that [is] in reference to shoddy or unwanted A.I. content in social media, art, books and, increasingly, in search results,” wrote Benjamin Hoffman in a recent article in the New York Times.
While that article focused on searches done on a search engine, I found Kristian Hammond’s comment interesting: “You search for something and you get back what you need in order to think — and it actually encourages you to think. What it’s becoming, in this integration with language models, is something that does not encourage you to think. It encourages you to accept. And that, I think, is dangerous.”
Like we’re supposed to accept that this illustration above is a quilt? Hardly.
When an AI visual-creation platform first landed in 2022, I tried to tell it make a nine-patch block (on the left). That was a joke. I wrote in the email to my friend; “My first one was pretty weird, but I tried to improve my text commands, and the illustrations got a bit better.” My commands are in the text box, above. I tried it again this week, even though I’m sort of basically opposed to the use of AI these days (keep reading). The command was “nine-patch quilt block.” The results:
AI-generated
Nope. Couldn’t find one nine-patch in the mix. This is a serious illustration of AI Slop, which is pretty ubiquitous these days.
AI-generated
Like what is this??? (Also from my “nine-patch” prompt.) Love the “quilting needles.”
According to Natalie Fear, “A Google image search screenshot has ruffled feathers online after it showed more AI-generated results than real-world examples of baby peacocks…[T]he screenshot has sparked mass debate online, with many creatives calling for stricter rules for AI-generated search results to mitigate the spread of misinformation.”
This was published last year, and it’s only gotten worse.
Because of AI slop, I rely less and less on Google search, and type in -ai at the end of my search query quite often. I don’t want to be just “accepting” what is served up to me. And I use DuckDuckGo a lot more now, and even Reddit, as search engines.
Again, use -ai if you want a cleaner search.
Commenters on Reddit had this to say about AI Slop: 1) Slop is just a slur that you say after “AI” to show that you don’t like AI. 2) [Slop] refers specifically to AI generated creations that are clearly low effort engagement-farming spam. 3) Some people call everything that’s AI-generated “AI slop” as an insult, while many other people only use it to describe low effort, low quality content.
And lately, we’ve been hearing more and more and more about the downsides to AI.
The problem is that AI, a general term, is integrating itself into our world.
For example: • I like the clean-up tool on my iPhone photos. Is this AI? • Doing a search on a search engine. Is this AI? (It is, if you don’t type the three digits -ai after your search terms.)
• Reading on social media and liking that picture of a young woman at a sewing machine. Is this AI? (from here. Be sure to read Weeks and Ringle’s text on this Instagram post.) I think AI will slide in all around us, whether we are cognizant of it or not, and whether we need it or not. And might make mistakes that could be hard to fix. I love Kyla Scanlon’s recent post about how people feel about AI.
For me, it’s mixed.
Is AI all bad? Perhaps not. Genealogy research is putting it to good use. Here in the quilting world, we already have an “AIQuilter.” I enjoyed reading Sherri’s take on this subject, on her SherriQuiltsALot blog. Julia Wachs, on her website, also does an analysis of a few AI “quilts” and how to avoid purchasing AI-generated quilt patterns, which are sketchy at best in the instructions aspect. But to balance it out, this blogpost goes all in on the AI-design concept.
I just know that when I sit down to design, when I open up my Affinity Designer software, I’m not using 10x energy. Or 10x water.
Finally, Lastly, CanWePleaseStopTalkingAboutThis, my favorite definition of AI’s LLM (Large Language Models, such as ChatGPT) is that it’s “just a bag of words,” so no need to make it your friend, or take it seriously. I’m sure it does have its benefits, which we will discover as time goes on, because whether we like it or not, AI is here to stay.
When my brain is futzed out from all of this, I return to earth, to retreat to the fascinating brilliance of this real world. I return to the human level of making. Like quilts.
Or like a dress, or something. My sister’s been hot on this clothes-making for some time (inspiring me) and you know I’ve been sewing, too. But now I have a couple more pieces of fabric and want to make something else. Oh, what to choose? Hart’s Fabric has an extensive pattern collection, as does Oak Fabrics in Chicago (plus they both have fabric). Another place for both fabrics and patterns is Harmony, a fun shop in Provo, Utah.
Or a piece of writing for the Carrefour Quilt Show? It is being held next month in the Alsace region of France. This year is their 30th Anniversary, and since I’d written about it here in this space, they contacted me to see if I’d like to write something for them. I would! and I did. You can find the first post on their blog.
It’s in English, as well as French and German.
Maybe I’ll see you there?
In the meantime, I’ve got a border to sew, squircles to prep, and everything in between. And I’m not using AI for any of it.
Happy sewing!
NOTE: None of the illustrations or photographs you’ll find on this blog are AI, UNLESS I LABEL THEM AS SUCH (like the silly raccoon, above). None of my quilt designs or patterns are AI, either. It’s all home-grown, here!
This is Posh Penelope’s birthday: I’m thinking somewhere around the 19th of January in the Time of the Masks, aka, 2022. We slid Road to California under the 2020 wire, then it was cancelled/online/whatever in 2021, and in 2022, we all showed up in our masks, terrified of anyone coughing. But we’d had two vaccines by this point, and so our confidence was high.
Here’s that block now.
Stained glass version.
I finished piecing the top August 11th at 8 p.m. in the evening. No masks. Just me and my DH, who was downstairs watching some shows, but I felt like staying upstairs and pushing through to the end.
Some seams matched up very nicely. And some did not, but I’m not reworking it.
I went hunting today for ideas on:
a) Do I want borders?
b) Do I want to send this out to be quilted?
c) Can I tackle this FMQ by myself, since I have the rulers?
d) How long do I want this quilt hanging around unfinished?
I found this anonymous block and my heart went out to this quilter. This can be very tough to piece together.
Answers: a) not particularly; a bound edge is just fine b) most likely c) Yes, but then you-know-what will freeze over before I finish d) Kind of want to get this one wrapped up, yes, I do.
This is what it looked like on the morning of August 12th, up on the pinwall in my sewing room. My Polish floral headband is hanging up over another relic of the Covid-era.
And since I finished the top in August and this thing needs a new name, going forward it will be called Summer Flowers. And here’s a little doggerel for you, from M. M. Ballou (aka Maturin Murray Ballou):
Sweet letters of the angel tongue, I’ve loved ye long and well, And never have failed in your fragrance sweet To find some secret spell,– A charm that has bound me with witching power, For mine is the old belief, That midst your sweets and midst your bloom, There’s a soul in every leaf!
Other Posts about this Quilt: (Given how many there are, it’s really time to get this one finished!)
Maybe. Maybe Victor Vasarely got there first in the art world, but I’m guessing the origin of circles on squares, or even squircles on squares, may have come from all the mending the first woman did on her children’s clothes. Just a hunch. I really have no way of knowing this, but when my friend Dot mentioned the artist Vasarely as being reminiscent of our #backtosquircles project, I believe she was on to something. Have fun looking at his art.
My Tips and Tricks
Caveat: If you would rather fold laundry or scrub out the bathroom than do hand appliqué, I have a post on how to do nearly invisible appliqué on machine, using monofilament thread. It’s quick! It’s easy!
Back to the method I used *this time.* (I might change it next time.)
To cut out the shape: I would often iron on my freezer paper version of the pattern (I just printed it directly from the pattern). Other times I would just use a pin. Always I used my rotary cutter to slice around the fabric, and usually I was working with four layers of one polkadot fabric. (I learned in this project how many many many polkadot fabrics I have.)
In my past appliqué lives I have always cut out a bunch of the shapes out of freezer paper and pressed the fabric onto that. I would place shiny side up, and nudge the edges onto the shiny stuff and they would generally stick. When it was cool, I would take the pattern out and use it again.
This time I tried Old School Methods: spray some spray starch into the lid, and using a small brush, stroke it around.
Like this.
You can just see where it’s damp from the starch. Don’t use too much. I always lay down a piece of cloth on my ironing board to catch the dribbles.
Place a template (here I used mylar and punched holes in it — more on that later), pressing the corners and sides up over the template. The starch should dry and hold it in place. Let it cool, then remove the template. Duh.
I finger press some marks at the centers.
Then I arrange the cooled, pressed squircle by eye and pin it down. Sorry if this is repetitive for you experts — feel free to leave a comment if you have more tips; this is always helpful!
Sometimes you’ll get a little bump out. That just means underneath the seam allowance has its knickers in a twist. As you stitch along to this spot, with your needle, sweep the seam allowance away from the bump (in the directions of the arrows) and it should ease up and smooth out.
Sometimes I just put four pins.
Other times that squircle isn’t going anywhere.
I use the Thread Conditioner from Riley Acres, and I like the Super Bobs Bright Thread Collection. Rachel uses her own bees’ beeswax to make the conditioner, and I like how it feels, and it never gets hard.
I’ve sort of started evaluating my polkadots for this project. The ones on the left are rejects. The ones in the middle I was thinking about, but in the end, I only used the ones on the right: regularish-shaped dots, with not too much else going on.
Twenty-two done. I’m ahead of schedule, happily.
I made you a chart to keep track of our squircles. I added it to the pattern, and tweaked the pattern a bit, if you want to download it again:
The mylar sheets can be found on the Great Store in the Sky, and I just slipped the pattern underneath and traced it off with a fine Sharpie marker. The Mylar cut easily with scissors. I punch holes in my Mylar so the steam doesn’t build up and warp the template. Although with the starch, I didn’t use steam this go round.
This little project will sink into the background for a while, so I promise, no more squircles posts for a while. But the pattern (free!) and the tips and tricks will stay here on the website for your use.
keyword search term on this site: squircles hashtag on Instagram: #backtosquircles
OccasionalPiece--Quilt! 