Mini Quilt – OccasionalPiece

Eric Hodel, a scientist and writer of The Intrinsic Perspective substack letter, described a breakthrough by AI this week. It involves the above image, which was the answer proposed 80 years ago by mathematician Paul Erdös to the question “If you place a set of nodes down on a plane, how can you organize this set of nodes such that as many pairs of nodes as possible are an exact fixed distance apart?”

If you are a quilter, like I am, you looked at this and thought, Can I make a quilt out of this geometric design? for that’s what we are all about; that’s what caught my eye. Do I understand the above mathematical question? Not in the least, but here’s the new answer, courtesy of machine learning:

Nature magazine’s headline reads “AI cracks 80-year-old mathematics challenge — researchers are astonished.” The first drawing looks like that string art we made in grade school, where there are all these nails driven into a board in a grid. That was as far as we could see, as much as we knew to do at that early time, and we put our heads down and concentrated and wrapped our string around the nails.

Years go by, we get busy, advances in science and in life are made and we get older, we realize the wisdom in the old adage my mother used to say about keeping your eye on the sparrow: paying attention to what’s important. I could say something here about AI and its intrusion into our lives: some of it helpful, some of it not. However, I’d rather pay attention to the things I can make with my hands, keeping my eye on things I can discover myself, building relationships with the humans around me.

I made baby quilts for all of my grandchildren. This is Alex’s and I used one of my favorite block at the time: a nine-patch. This little boy turned 22 last week, I say with some shock.

That year I was teaching Creative Writing while finishing up my MFA. I sewed very little for two years. It felt like forever.

But it did end, here, with my parents and family in a jubilant day. They — and the grading and the teaching and the going to classes and the little first grandchild I held in my arms — are now gone or grown. Did I keep my eye on the sparrow? The answer is obvious on some levels: the university gave me my degree. But my eyes are not everywhere, nor can they be. And we move on, hopeful for forgiveness for what we miss, or cannot yet see.

And here I am now. I do not teach, whether it be in a classroom full of 20-somethings, or in a Guild workshop, which I also did for a while. I still collect interesting quotes (see the Steinbeck, below). I live a relatively quiet life, as our children are all grown, the grandchildren nearly so. How to keep my eye on these sparrows, now that they have flown away?

I do what I can, keeping in mind my mother’s advice, but also realizing she said it for herself. The small quilt is titled His Eye is On The Sparrow, and it comes from the song that continues, “and I know He watches me.” And so I depend on others. I let a lot more things go, I get a lot less done, but it is still a gratifying life: this making quilts and writing about it…and seeing the sparrows when they fly home for a visit.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for keeping your eye on this sparrow–

Postscript: As a thank-you, I gave my grad advisor a quilt I’d made in a Mystery Quilt Along before I started grad school. Besides Alex’s quilt, this is about all I sewed during that time.

We work in our darkness a great deal with little real knowledge of what we are doing. ~John Steinbeck

The quote on the blackboard (chalk! how quaint!): I wrote a quote on the board every day, and had them free-write for 5 minutes in their journals to loosen up their writing hands and minds.

Alex’ baby quilt was Quilt #55. My grad advisor’s quilt was Quilt #56. The sparrow is a free mini-quilt pattern, available in an earlier post on this blog.

California Bear, a collage quilt started in a class with Laura Heine at Road to California 2020, is finished and hanging on my sewing room wall. (It just seems pretentious to call it a “sewing studio” so I persist in calling it a sewing room.) This is a fused collage quilt, and I wrote about it a year ago, when I first began.

As usual, I did multiple permutations moving butterfliers and flowers around until I decided I was done messing with it. The perfect is the enemy of the good…and the done, as I always say. More info our on California Bear is here, if you are interested.

I hung him across from my fancy new calendar from The Dolphin Studio (I saw my sister’s and just had to have one), and he’ll stay there until he walks on to somewhere else.

I finished fusing him into place Friday afternoon, then quilted it in a tiny grid all over, thoroughly gumming up a needle, but it got the job done. After that, I my husband, Dave, and I went out to get stretcher bars (we are double-masking now) and a burger, and then we sat in the parking lot afterwards eating our hot french fries and Habit burger. Later, he helped me staple it into place; I cut out Laura’s name from one of the selvages and fused it onto the back. I’ll make a label later on, but I wanted it up on the wall before January ended.

I went walking this morning and it was California cold. Not as cold as some of the weather in other parts of this wonderful state (we have twelve “Fourteeners” in our state–that is, mountains over 14,000 feet, so you know they have snow). But here in Southern California, an hour east of Los Angeles, well…this is kind of cold. All around our geographical basin the mountains were touched with snow after our last storm. Pretty fancy for us.

And here’s a photo of my quilt holders: two clamps duct-taped onto some molding strips that I found in my garage, but you could use dowels. Really high tech. Oh, and here’s a photo of the Quilt Holding Husband using the Quilt Holders:

We just clamped them onto the corners of the quilt. If you are a short person, like I am, then it makes it easier to hold up the quilts. Later on, we switched, and I held the quilt for while, as seen in this post (in front of the colorful wall). I haven’t yet tried them on a quilted-with-batting quilt, but soon I will and I’ll let you know how it works.

That big-skirted lady is for a quilt, coming later on in the year, and the ABCs and other fabrics are part of a quilt for a grandchild who is having a birthday soon. I use my design wall as a bulletin board sometimes.

I’m making progress on this (binding on and clipped down, reading for hand-sewing). I’ve also come up with a name. Coming soon.

I recently freshened up my blog header, switched up my blog theme (the other one wasn’t supported any more) and am working on the commenting problem some of you have had. I think I’ve solved it, but will know when you tell me. I always ask for your name and your email, as I like to answer my comments privately. If you can’t comment on the blog, you are welcome to email me at opquilt [at] gmail [dot] com.

Happy Quilting!