Road to California 2025

January 24, 2025August 23, 2025 Elizabeth E.16 Comments

This is in two parts: the top is the bits and pieces.
The bottom are the quilts. Yes, they are all in one post, so get your popcorn and let’s get scrolling.

Road to California, for me, always begins with this hallway lined with hanging quilts. So many different styles and colors, all from one Guild that is chosen at random from those who enter their names. This was at about 8:30 am. on Tuesday morning, January 21st, and I was there to take the Blackwork Embroidery class from Kathie Kerler.

Her sample is on the lower left. Mine is on the lower right. The room temperature went from freezing-your-hands-stiff to overheated-hot-flash territory. (They did caution us to dress in layers.) My seat mate, Chris, had open her little bag (upper center). I said to her, “That’s my pattern!” Yep, it was my Mini Double-Pocket bag, and we had a good chat–fun to see one out in the wild. I also admired the hoop stands in our class — it seems it would be much easier with one of those.

Souvenirs! I always buy some jewelry from Merry of the Button Box. Contact me if you want her email address. I picked up a few bits of fabric and that freebie yellow stitch-saying bag, posed here once I got home again.

Bob is back, now with YLI Threads (You’ll Love It says Bob), and I was happy to see him, and meet his new wife and chat with them. Quilt shows are ideal for that, especially if you get in before the tour busses and the vendors are just killing time until customers show up.

I bought just a few (haha) colors of their line Elite to try out. It’s a thread similar to Bob’s old Magnifico, which is my all-time favorite thread for quilting. I also picked up some piecing thread; yes, lately I’ve been using polyester thread (fairly fine, at 50 weight) as it cuts down on the lint build-up in my machine. I’ll report in later, after I test them.

Now on to the quilts. I stayed for Preview Night on Tuesday, then went back Thursday morning, before I wimped out and headed home. If you are on BlueSky social media, I have a video of us all lining up next to the scooter carts before it opened — it was a crush! And if you are on BlueSky, please follow me, so we can build our quilting community (#quiltsky) over there.

One of the quilts I always look for, or have for the past 20+ years, is the alphabet quilt from Janet Stone.

She is a master of details and I had fun figuring out that the flowers and the blocks all began with the same letter, indexed around the outside edges of the quilt. Here are some detail shots:

I’ll miss seeing this series. Wonder what she has going on next?

I found the show this year to be subdued, but still — happy to have it here. It feels like they’ve cut down drastically on the number of single-person entry quilts, and they are all crammed together, perhaps evidence that it is expensive to host a show like this? For each quilt, I’ve generally taken three photos: the quilt, a detail and the title card. Click on any of the photos to enlarge.

Amy Pabst is a genius at teensy quilting. Each of those log cabin “logs” is about like a matchstick.

This one was just beautiful.

One of the challenges for photography is the way the quilt show is lit: spots directly underneath the quilts, and NO LIGHTS ON IN THE HALL!! Call you believe it? There’s a pianist on an electronic piano playing lovely music and the first impression is wow. But then you try to actually look at the quilts, and nearly everyone around me is complaining. Or leaving quickly, which was my experience. I usually like to really study and look at the quilts, but seriously? In the dark? It’s fancy, but not functional. Okay, enough whining but now you understand why this is dark on the top and light on the bottom, and that’s even after several different filters being applied at home in my photo-editing program. (I did my best.)

These colors!!

Loved the trapunto flowers.

Although the title card is in Spanish, it’s a tribute to her town. On the back, she’d created her family tree (not shown).

Tough to see this beautifully created quilt (black on black in darkness…).

You can purchase this quilt…

Amazing detail in both the piecing, appliqué and the quilting.

This quilter was standing nearby, but too shy to pose for a photo.

Especially good to remember on this freighted week of Inauguration. My classmate and I carefully talked around the events, trying to figure out if we were a match in current events thinking. We were (whew!). She lived near the fires and told me that her in-laws’ home had burned to the ground with almost no warning. So much damage and so many lives affected by this disaster. [Note: when I came out Tuesday night at 8 p.m. to head home, the whole area smelled like smoke, and I immediately wondered: another fire somewhere?]

A simply drawn landscape, but it was just lovely.

Giraffes! How fun is that?

So that’s the second quilt of Ben Darby in the show — both were beautiful!

Since I should be quilting on my very own New York Beauties quilt, this one below caught my eye.

Just stunning!

One guild had a series of quilts, 100 Days of Tula Blocks, and Tina Curran made this one, in red, white and blue.

Sometimes it’s interesting to see how the quilts are displayed. I showed you this so you could see how tightly they were hung. But Cassandra Beaver always has an interesting quilt to show.

Click to enlarge title card. Really fun quilt, full of bright color. This was a from a grouping in the hallway outside, another guild showing off their quilts.

Cherrywood had a huge display, all along the final back row in this exhibit hall. I think you can tell how dim the lighting was in this photo.

Lots of Flanders Fields themes, and since we’d just been to Normandy, they resonated.

Verushka Zarate’s masterpieces were in a special gallery at the front of the vendor’s hall, where they put all the fancy ones. If you’ve never seen one in person, I hope you get a chance sometime. I took her class at QuiltCon Phoenix, the first year after we came back from covid, and I credit her for teaching me once and for once and for all how to do paper piecing.

Here she is with her boys. Again, if you are on BlueSky, here’s a wee video of the entire series of quilts.

Obviously there are many more quilts and lots of vendors, so come on out to California next January and see us.

The show closes tomorrow, and it will be all over for another year….but we’ll be back!

Finger Paints Quilt-A-Long • Painter’s Palette Solids

July 29, 2021September 15, 2025 Elizabeth E.18 Comments

I saw this online and immediately jumped. This was one of my favorite quilts at QuiltConTogether, and yes–I’ll take one for myself.

These two quilts, Finger Paints and Cindy’s Delta Breeze, are definitely cousin-quilts, but oh-so different and I’ve had Delta Breeze on the mind for like a 100 years. And the fabric all chosen and set aside in the cupboard, but I can always use another quilt that combines style and color and cool ideas.

Laura Loewen is a relative to another favorite online friend (the Medallion Queen!). Laura has two versions of this quilt: one made straight up, with rulers, etc. and one that is a bit more improv. I decided to jump on the improv class, so am signed up for August 28, Saturday. If you are in that class, come and sit by me! I’m kind of shy as we’ve been in the house like forever, and I don’t quite know how to deal with real people anymore, but I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.

I’m a Painters Palette Solids gal, and Laura doesn’t list these fabrics, so I set out to figure out my colors. Long ago I grabbed one of Paintbrush Studios’ charm packs with all the colors, broke it apart and wrote the number of the color on the small square. But I also wrote another number: one referring to the column on the fabric swatch chart, so I could find them easily. I never understood everyone who cut up their color charts (I mean, I understood why they said they did it, but didn’t understand how it would be easier to find colors), but this system works for me.

(And you can win a complete set of Painters Palette charm colors at the end of the post, if you are a Painters Palette user, or want to be.)

So here’s three photos, showing my chosen colors. You can’t see the Black, but it’s written in pencil beside it: 004. And a quick tip: if you go to Pineapple Fabrics and want to order your Painters Palette Solids, just type in 121- and then the color number in the search bar. It finds it a LOT faster than wading through their menus. (So Black would be 121-004 in the search box.)

The neutrals. I laid the squares over Laura’s cutting instructions so as not to give away any info from her pattern. Again, if you can’t see the number written on the swatch, most are in pencil beside the colored square in her pattern.

Purple is 080. I couldn’t decide on Fabric C–it calls for a light purple and I have two that could do that: a light pinky lavender (084) and a periwinkle lavender (012). I’m holding off on cutting until I see where they go and what will work. Since I think this is sort of the warm colors, it may have to be 084 vs. 012.

Sorry–navy is hard to read, too: It’s Fabric W: 008; Dark Green is 074. I went back and forth on the navy, as to me that color is a bluey-black, but in her original quilt, the color appears much brighter. (The quilt on the cover of her pattern is made up in different fabrics than her original, shown below.)

This is a screenshot from the MQG Website, showing all the award winners from QuiltConTogether 2021, if you want to go and look at the rest. I love what Laura wrote on her blog about creating this quilt: “I had been in a sewing rut, as many of us found ourselves mid-pandemic, and I knew I needed a splash of color and playing with fabric to get back into sewing. I decided on a simple bear paw quilt block but wanted to put a modern spin on it with improv piecing.”

While I did notice that she pressed open all of her seams, I don’t know if I can follow her down that rabbit hole. We’ll see. I’m a press-to-the-side sort of person, because I like the dimension.

Here’s an IG quick movie to show you my mess when I was choosing. Above is my version of the Painter’s Palette Solids color card. Because I’ve been collecting solids for a while, I only had to buy two more colors from Pineapple Fabrics. Hooray for sewing from the stash. (Hooray for collecting!)

This is my Criss-Cross Color pattern. Obviously I like this sort of quilt! Now to get busy on cleaning up the sewing room. We cleared out a lot of my stuff out of the guest room because — oh, gosh — we had guests, and I need to finish ~~cramming stuff onto shelves~~ organizing to get the detritus off the floor.

UPDATE: Giveway closed. Thanks for entering! ~~If you want to enter the giveaway for the charm-packs-color swatches, mention it in your comment below. (Domestic USA only.)~~

Happy Quilting!

Creating · This-and-That

Color, Venice and Valentino • This and That July 2021

July 18, 2021September 15, 2025 Elizabeth E.7 Comments

“Fashion is not ‘art’, because the latter is sufficient in itself while the former always has a purpose, a function, a use. Recognizing the differences is the first step to instructing mutual listening, made up of curiosity, enthusiasm, and respect. This listening needs time, just like Haute Couture and ultimately also like art. In fact, the maturation of the project was slow, a rhythm perhaps unusual for our world but just and intimate for the world that I would like to.” -Pierpaolo Piccioli (from here)

And if you understood that, then you are more experienced than I in the language of haute couture–the clothing, the dresses, the fashion that is more concept than something you would hang in your closet. But just like the movie The Devil Wore Prada in that withering scene where Meryl Streep’s character critiques Ann Hamilton’s sweater, the fashion houses often tilt us to what’s coming in shape, in color and in what we’ll be wearing post-pandemic when we finally decide to crawl into stores and buy ourselves some clothes.

It’s also very likely that we’ll be seeing some influences on the colors we use in our quilts, or maybe even the shapes we’ll experiment with (if you are a half-way, non-traditional quilter). Or not.

So I was pretty amazed by the colors put together by the designer for Valentino, Pierpaolo Piccioli, and while I can’t pretend to really absorb what he said (above), I do speak the language of color, and thought you might like to see some of his designs, shown recently in the magical city of Venice, Italy. The contrast between that very old city with its own recent struggles with over-tourism, pollution and dwindling residents is a perfect contrast and foil to the glamorous, hand-sewn clothing made with extraordinary precision with pricey fabrics.

As Vanessa Friedman of the New York Times wrote: “[The designer Piccioli] has been conversing with contemporary artists — about their work, sure, but mostly about life in general, process, emotion, what turns them on — thinking about how to integrate their points of commonality in cloth…The result — shown at sunset beneath the brick arches of the former shipbuilding yard of Venice, with water lapping at the edges of the runway…was as powerful an argument for the interconnectedness of time, human connection and creativity as anything fashion has produced. The lushness of Mr. Piccioli’s palette — as a designer, he is the best colorist since Yves Saint Laurent — was on full display; so was his throwaway elegance, and his generosity. Not just to his atelier (his show notes name-checked the individuals who sewed each garment [italics are mine]) but to the bodies that will wear the clothes.”

So, what do I see?

In the above image, I see scale: large shapes on a larger garment, then those same large shapes on a more narrow profile of a dress. The designer plays with scale in many of his other pieces, using different shapes to emphasize different parts of the body, and different lines (like those flowing hats!).

I also see a lot of color blocking: large swaths of color against slivers of color (a bit of scale, again), causing each to accent the other. This collection is not about fussy little prints. Mostly I see lush, elegant and rich, deep colors:

This palette is missing the mint of the shirt. Sure, it’s a metallic shimmer of color and hard to catch, but that really makes this grouping, in my mind.

In this one, the palette generator is capturing a lot of the background, but it’s that’s slice of bubble-gum pink against those deep coral trousers which really caught my eye. The grey isn’t those flat greys we are used to seeing in our quilting fabrics, but a soft mellow gray, warmed up slightly, but not heading towards taupe or green-gray — maybe a deep off-white?

Orchid appears to be heading our way, but a vivid hue of that color, especially when paired with bright jungle green.

While the palette generator captured a lot of the background (I don’t see that pinky brown anywhere on the model), this palette is a “be-still-my-heart” series of shades for me as I love aqua blue. But it’s a new take on that–a refreshing deeper shade.

Now to shift gears from haute couture to the nuts and bolts of my life lately:

How about some velcro bolts? This is the boot they gave me to wear while my ankle heals. I hate it for a variety of good and not-so-good reasons (would it kill them to add some color?). The doctor okayed my getting around the house without it, so I’ve just decided to ace-bandage-wrap my ankle for protection, stay off it, and stay home. What’s four more weeks of pandemic quarantine?

Very proud of this: I drew the spools up by hand. Well, digital hand. Yes, it’s in my favorite color (aqua blue). I have found lately that getting the hang of a few tools in my Affinity Designer has opened up new worlds for me in terms of satisfaction with my work; it was a bit of a struggle at first, but a bit smoother sailing now. And why did I make these?

Pattern Shop Refresh!

I didn’t like the nuts-and-boltsy (notice how I’m stretching the metaphor) look of BEFORE as it was too chunky and disparate. I also wanted something as well that would indicate degree of difficulty at a glance. So, I made spools. And I like how the shop looks now.

This is the new display pattern front. I still have a few things left to do, but have finished most. PayHip upgraded some of their marketplace tools, so I thought it was a good time for me to fuss around a bit, too.

Quilting SeaDepths (a variation of Azulejos) in spurts, while listening to this:

I like how the themes overlap: the ocean in Harper’s book with the theme of SeaDepths on my newest quilt. I can hardly wait to go upstairs and quilt. I’ve listened to two of her others: The Dry and The Lost Man and loved both of those. I will reserve my review on this until I finish it (5 more hours). While I listen, I think of Susan of PatchNPlay, and her trip to Tasmania. I can’t wait to show off the backing I chose for this quilt.

Lastly, there seems to something in the zeitgeist here, but truth! Patti chose this without knowing all the other watery connections I’ve just mentioned. If you jump on this link, you can see a lot of the blocks she’s received, all laid out together. I love how nice they all play together.

And that’s it for today. Happy July, Happy Not Wearing My Boot, and Happy Quilting!