Zooming into 2020

July 23, 2020July 24, 2020 Elizabeth E.8 Comments

By now we all know what a Zoom conference is, we know not to angle the phone so people see up our noses, we know not to have a crunchy three-course meal on the Zoom chat, and we have learned the importance of the Mute button. That’s the participant side. This month I’ve been trying to learn what to do on the presenter’s side, getting ready to take my regular In Real Life (IRL) program to Virtual.

First up, gather a bazillion pictures of quilts and plop them into a PowerPoint slide program.

Secondly, do you-don’t-know-what and lose the last half of the slide program.

Third, re-construct what had been started and save it in TWO different places this time. It’s all a big fat learning curve. I did watch several different groups of people talking about going Virtual, and one common theme was the idea that when invited, they said “Of course, that sounds great! It’s very do-able!” Then the admission to those of us watching, was that they really had no idea what to do.

I can relate.

Here are some of the things I’ve been doing the past two weeks:
PowerPoint Slide program — luckily a lot of the graphic arts skills I’d picked up this past year while learning Affinity Photo/Designer/Publisher carried across onto this platform.

Buy a ring light and tripod. Figure it out. That’s me trying out light levels and light settings: White, Warm Yellow, Warm White. Or as I like to say, Death, Near-Death and Jaundiced.

In this view, there is a green border around the slide.

You can find that in the Advanced section of the Slide Share tools in Zoom. What that does is put a border around what the people on the other side of the screen can see when the desktop is shared. You can keep all your notes in a Word Doc if you want (see below).

Write notes for the program and rehearse. I did that last night, ring light on, running through the program, recording myself. With the ring light on, practicing looking at the camera, and trying not to freak out, I have to say I did okay. My husband is continually encouraging me onward; he used to coax his grad students through this ordeal. And by the way, the recording will be deleted, never to be seen again, but I’m glad we purchased a Zoom Pro account, so I can rehearse. I’ll make another one tonight, just to keep practicing.

Last tip: I set up another screen right in front of me when I was rehearsing (an iPad will do) so I could see what others could see. I doubt I’ll do that when presenting (I want to focus on looking at the camera), but it was helpful when figuring out how all the parts go together.

If you are a Guild, there are an equal number of tasks for you, too. In working with the current guild, the Program Chair has been terrific, as we worked to move this forward. Not only do they have to worry about getting the Speaker situated with Zoom codes, timing, technology, they also can’t just hand them a check when it’s over; payment has to be worked out as well, and not everyone has a PayPal or Venmo account.

And getting the patterns to them is also a challenge, because of that “not everyone has a PayPal account” thing. My patterns are digital downloads from PayHip, which requires either a PayPal or Slice Account, which has been a trouble for some of their members. So we worked out that the member would give a check to the Guild, the Guild would alert me and give me the guild member’s email address, and then I would send them a “how-to” PDF document and a code to enter to get their pattern. I plan not to do this again, if I can help it.

The contracts have to be re-written, or an addendum provided. I ended up scanning in the originals, adding the addendum and emailing them over. Some of the language I used in the addendum is in the “Zoom Explained” document below, available for download.

All of this post is to say, that we are headed over a cliff into the digitalized 21st Century, and we have to be our own superhero and figure it out ourselves. I plan to do that Lecture next week, the Workshop the next day (more on that, later), and keep going. I plan on my vehicle sprouting wings so I can zoom out over the landscape, and enjoy the view.

Nuts and Bolts of Presenting

After reading extensively, I wrote up a document outlining how I wanted to work my virtual teaching and presenting. You can download it below.

Zooming Explained_OPQUILTv2 Download

There are plenty of sources out there for the physical space you’ll need to set up. At the very least, invest in a ring light so it will throw an even cast of light across your face. Others have fancier set-ups. Try not to be overwhelmed.

In working with my fantastic Program Chair for the upcoming Guild, I thought it might be helpful if they had a checklist they could consult to make they had all their ducks in a row. You can download it below.

Checklist for Zoom Visit v2 Download

I have so much to learn, as do we all. But I’m actually pretty excited to go forward. In putting together my presentation I could include lots of views of my quilts in the slide show, things I normally wouldn’t be able to show them (like mood boards, quilts in settings, interim steps). There will be good and hard things about our quilting lives in the next two years. Let’s make getting together one of the more lovely things!

First Monday Sew-day · Free Quilt Pattern · Gridsters

Basic String Piecing • First Monday Sewday Lesson (and a few other things)

July 19, 2020January 4, 2025 Elizabeth E.14 Comments

This month’s First Monday Sew-day Lesson was on teaching the newbie quilters about String Piecing, or Strip Piecing, or whatever you want to call it, but it involved laying out a shape on paper, arranging fabric and stitching through the paper. Foundation Paper-Piecing? except that we are using long strips of fabric. So I’m going with String Piecing. And the block I chose to teach was a traditional Spider Web Block.

For the handout for the Making a Spider Web block, click to download a PDF file:

firstmondaysewday_7_2020 Download

It’s bit longer this time: multiple pages instead of just one sheet. There were a lot of illustrations for teaching this, like this one:

Since it is free, please don’t distribute — send your mom and your kid sister and your friends here to download the handout. (If you are a quilt shop or quilt guild, and need a virtual activity, please ask first before distributing.)

So this was my final block, taken at night, when all the lighting is really mellow. I chose low-volume prints for the centers, a deeper blue for the first strips near the center, and then circus-circus after that.

I did a virtual layout after that, trying to approximate how interesting this block can be in a quilt. More discussion of this is on the handout.

My “string bag” was left exploded on the floor after all this mucking around, but I just wadded everything back into it and threw it back in the closet.

I also made two sets of Gridster Bee blocks: first one was for Mary, for June. She requested a whole lot of little houses, and we used the free download pattern from Moda.

Kelly was up next, and for July she chose to miniaturize a flag, using the Grand Ole Flag handout from Pat Sloan as a starting point. These are tiny little things, finishing at 4″ x 7 1/2.”

Here’s a whole slew of them, all laid out together.

I was tipped off to two new mask patterns, and the Creative Grids mask template also arrived at my house. Updates are on my Face Mask Info Post, up there under Projects for 2020 tab at the top of the blog.

So this was interesting to see all week. Mancuso Brothers surprised me by using my Ladybird quilt in all their advertising for their online show in August. I had entered Ladybird in their Pacific International Quilt Festival, held in Santa Clara, California last fall. The picture they are using is my image, I must assume, as the lighting is good and the colors are bright (the lighting in that show was problematic). Most of the time my name and the name of the quilt were attached, but often I saw it with the orange lower banner chopped off, so no accreditation whatsoever.

Should I be honored and flattered that someone wants to take my artwork/quilt/work and use it for their ad campaign without asking permission or offering some compensation, like a teaching spot or something? (The real irony is when they use my quilt to announce another teacher.) I am very happy that, most of the time, my work is acknowledged. Should I just let this roll on by, knowing that I get “free publicity” — which is always what is said — although I don’t have a pattern for it, and I’m not teaching it anywhere, so it’s hard to know what good the free publicity does.

It’s a tricky proposition. I am not angry. I might be perplexed. Mostly I don’t yet know how I feel about it, but I do think it would be nice to be asked. I’d be curious to know what you all think. (Leave your comments below.)

Thought I’d show you the Betsy’s Creation quilt on the bottom of my bed for July. The smaller one is hung in the downstairs hallway. That pattern (which includes both, and really more like a handout) is free, found here. Hope your last few days of July find you quilting!

300 Quilts · Patterns by Elizabeth of OPQuilt · Publications

Made to Withstand the Proof of Time

July 12, 2020July 13, 2020 Elizabeth E.23 Comments

As quilters, we have an relationship to time. We begin something, knowing it won’t be done for days, or months or even years. We work towards a daily or weekly goal of finishing the quilt, even though we might sometimes abandon the effort. But there is always this gap from beginning to end.

I started this quilt in December 2015, the design inspiration taken from an antique red and white quilt I’d seen in a quilt show. I couldn’t figure out how that quilting sister from 150 years ago put her quilt together, so I modernized it, and then in January 2016 sent the instructions to a bee I was in, asking them to make some blocks. Then I made more blocks, thinking about how that woman so long ago might envy our ability to have such an array of fabrics, to sew like the wind on our modern machines, to have such a distant circle of friends still gather together in a quilting bee.

I wrote about the finished quilt top, and then it sat. Time passed.

I wrote a pattern, but when QuiltMania accepted the quilt for publication, I took it down from my PayHip shop.

Time passed. And then some more time.

This week I received this picture in an email, along with the picture of the cover:

From December 2015 to August 2020 is nearly five years. In that time I’ve counted off changes in our family, health issues, deaths in our family, births and birthdays, personal highs, and personal challenges, a pandemic and now extremely grateful to have a quilt published in a respected quilt magazine. And to quote a common phrase seen in our quilty culture: I have #allthefeels.

Which brings me back to that photo at the top of this page. Several designers and architects were asked to “reflect on a changing world, their creative process, and the future of design.” I enjoyed reading their thoughts, as they echoed some of my own feelings about the creative life. Here’s two:

Pierre Yovanovitch (Provence, France) said: “I try to look at the silver lining and see this as an opportunity for a creative reset, taking a pause from our overly scheduled lives to tap back into what inspires us.”

Milanese designers Laura Sartori Rimini and Roberto Peregalli, who designed the room of plates at the top of the post:

“Regarding the future effects of this pandemic, on one hand it has been recognized the importance of the house as a center, a place of the soul in people’s life. On the other hand, the inevitable economic impact that will follow this situation will, we hope, generate among people the idea that the house isn’t just an object that follows the trends to be discarded and replaced for the next upcoming thing. You should aim for an object of beauty, made to withstand the proof of time.”

I guess that’s why we quilters are willing to start a quilt in December and nearly five years later, see it completed. That’s why we pick out fabrics and squirrel them away, knowing that sometime in the future — maybe even in a pandemic — we will pull out the projects we’ve collected and start the long process in the midst of the distraction, the sorrow, the uncertainty.

And as always, we will send our quilt out into the world as a veritable declaration of hope, our handiwork created to withstand the proof of time.

Happy quilting. Yes, especially now.

Patterns by Elizabeth of OPQuilt · Red, White and Blue · Shine: The Circles Quilt

Happy Seventh of July Block!

July 7, 2020July 5, 2020 Elizabeth E.7 Comments

Yes, it’s Happy Seventh of July!

On this day in 1928, sliced bread was sold for the first time. What other significance does this day hold? It’s National Chocolate Day! I could just stop this silliness there, but it’s also National Strawberry Sundae Day. The moral of this is if you don’t have sliced bread, you can head to chocolate or strawberry sundaes. Or chocolate-drizzled strawberry sundaes on top of sliced bread.

I don’t have a back of this block to show, but the title of this block is Provoslavni Park, named for where that beautiful church was located in Ljubliana, Slovenia.

Here’s the back of the 6th of July block, shown yesterday.

My mother always says that doldums come predictably after Christmas: in January you can expect a little mopiness as you clean up the glitter and tinsel. It’s just that living such a sustained high — in terms of activity and expectations and hopes and fun and parties — will inevitably result in a series of days where you can hardly drag yourself around.

So what are we to expect after having a series of days, in this Covid-time, where we have covidistraction, covidsludgenergy, or general covidecline–what can we expect after that?

I know we all looked forward to the 4th of July with all that hullabaloo, but given our numbers, if you stayed in the house and didn’t breathe you were to be commended. So that’s why I thought a little silliness these past few days might provide an occasional snort at a bad joke, a roll of the eyes, and yes, I do want to see pictures of your chocolate-dripped strawberry sundae on sliced bread.

And as usual, Pattern Coming Soon. Stay Sane.

The Original Shine: The Circles Quilt, just hanging out.

And that’s it for the Shine re-do-up-do for a while, while my fingers catch up on the rest of the blocks. Happy July, everyone. Only two more years of — what my science-y friends call — mitigation (masks, etc.)! By then this pattern will be out and I’ll have the quilt made, with any luck.

Stay safe and figure out how to do a social distance gathering, so you won’t feel so isolated as we wait out/suffer through this pandemic. And please keep the parts of the country that are exploding in cases in your hearts, and if you are so inclined, in your prayers. And please wear your masks. We’re all in this together by ourselves, Lily Tomlin used to say.

Never truer.