Summer Flowers • Quilt Finish • Etc.

October 11, 2025 Elizabeth E.12 Comments

The title of this quilt pattern is Posh Penelope, and as one commenter said, “That is a name that needs to be changed.” So I did.

Summer Flowers is quilt #307 and measures 80″ tall by 69 1/2″ wide.

At first we tried this building for the photographs (click to enlarge). Love the building, but it’s not really working. And I had my QHH (Quilt Holding Husband) grab it by the side. Whoops! (This is how I knew the label was sewn on sideways.)

It only took me seven pieces of fabric to audition for the binding, and I sewed it on by machine. There are times when you just have to get it done.

We got the direction correct on this photo. Even though I sewed the label on the wrong way, I’m not changing it. So, this is finished!

You are all aware, no doubt, of the corrupted digital files saga in my life (see the highlighted pink, above.) After multiple calls to Tech Support, I have resigned myself to the fact that all the files with little down-arrows are pretty much gone, and these date from last month to way back into my history of making little digital files.

So when I’m on Low Energy (lately, that’s been a lot), I sit and go through them, dumping them one-by-one, then when the trash on my computer gets filled up, I dump them. Gone. Never to be seen again.

It looks like I’m fully in the Age of Subtraction, my Dad would say. For years I created and compiled and wrote. Now I’m dumping all that unceremoniously. I lost about half of my journal files. The ones I could recover, like when I had four teenagers in the house, were hard to read, frankly. They were filled with sturm und drang (aka “storm and stress”), and nobody wants to remember that time of life. Reading backwards into my life has triggered some realizations.

One: I chose well in deciding to be someone who makes things, if that can be a choice. I have donated dresses I made long ago, but they served their purpose and maybe someone, somewhere is walking around in them. My family now runs when they see me coming, but I have managed to give away quilts, too. That work lives on until it doesn’t, but at least I won’t have to be the one dumping them in the trash.

MFA graduate picture and a post with some reflections on my life

Two: I also chose well when I decided to chronicle my life in writing, which is a choice. You are perhaps used to my public-facing writing from reading this blog, but I have come to learn that personal writing is something done just for yourself. That in this kind of writing, we struggle on the page to capture an event, and to write it for our future selves, or for our families, if they don’t throw it all in the trash (just trying to be realistic here). And now that I’m way beyond the baby-toddler-children-teenager stage, I’m glad I have some writings to remind me of how busy a mother of one (or few) can be. I’m glad I have some written evidence of that to which I gave several decades of my life.

taken at a time when I started doing Zoom workshops

Three: Taking photos has surpassed the writing. Is it because we always have our phones on us? When I first started shooting photos of my life as a young mother, it would take three months to use up one roll of 24 shots of film. That was by design, as film was a cost, and developing was a cost, and I was always broke. Now we can capture 24 images on a walk around the park in the morning and compile thousands of photos in our digital drives. Interestingly, I didn’t lose any photographs in this Great Subtraction, as they were not part of the save-to-drive-that-may-have-been-corrupted-which-was-then-uploaded-to-the-cloud-which-was-probably-a-faulty-process-in-itself.

Four, and last: Quilts last. Scrubbing the house doesn’t. Laundry doesn’t. Our digital lives won’t. Our real lives will someday end and fade away, but a grandchild or someone who is the recipient of our charitable work can wrap themself in a quilt and know that someone’s hands made this, a transfer of self via cloth and stitches.

Keep quilting–

Too Many Other posts about this quilt:

Road to California 2022 • Part I
Writing Poetry
Incomplete
Don’t Ask Me — they all just crept in!
March 2025 This and That
If I Do This, Can I Do That? April 2025
Flying Through Rainbows
This and That: No June Gloom, please.
The Zeigarnik Effect: the Power of the Unfinished
Summer Flowers (aka Posh Penelope)

Thank you, dear!

300 and Beyond · New York Beauties · Patterns by Elizabeth of OPQuilt

New York Beauties • Quilt Finish

September 7, 2025September 7, 2025 Elizabeth E.11 Comments

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.

Take a look!

300 and Beyond · Quilt Finish · Quilts · Something to Think About

Duck Creek • Quilt Finish

February 17, 2025August 23, 2025 Elizabeth E.9 Comments

Duck Creek • quilt #302

I know you are really here to see the info on this beautiful mural. It’s by Rosy Cortez, and was done under her guidance by a team of helpers. (Links point to her Instagram page as well as to the website for the mural.) I really love that it’s three different ages/stages of women, honoring our local native tribes. I’ve been two of these ages, and am now in the third (hint: I’m not pregnant).

Sometimes the title of this mural, We Are Still Here, reminds me of all my quilter friends. We cut and piece and hang out in our sewing rooms, studios, basements, garages, spare bedrooms. Every once in a while we pop up with another quilt top finished, the binding on another, and still another in stages of quilting. Dedicated, we follow in the way of artists everywhere: we have the vision. We have to see it through.

Recently an article titled “The Art of the Steal,” discussed the number of original book plots possible. In 330 B.C. Aristotle thought there might be just two: “simple (change of fortune) and complex (in which the change of fortune is accompanied by setbacks and reversals)” (by Emily Eakin, link above should allow you to read the entire article). By 1892, Rudyard Kipling thought there were 69 plots. Between Kipling and our current day, the number fluctuated, and by 2004, Christopher Booker proclaimed there were just seven: “the quest, vanquishing the monster, rags to riches, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy and rebirth” (Eakin, ibid). Not to let the number lay there, another group used a computer in 2016, and proclaimed that the “world’s stories boiled down to ‘six basic shapes‘ (Eakin, ibid.)

So how many original quilts are there in our quilting world? Like the novelists, do we have just six basic shapes?

Two of these are triangles, the rectangle is just a stretched-out square, and the curved wedge is just a segment of a circle. We have rectangle triangles, skinnier triangles, ray-shaped triangles. You’ve used them, I’ve used them. Are we like novelists then? Taking a few basic shapes (boy meets girl, etc.) to make our quilts? I have a child who really likes triangles. Another of mine just likes big quilts, bypassing design altogether. Another likes red quilts, and the last child just wants them all (bless her).

I can satisfy all their requests, for sure. And like my children, some of us are attracted to medallion quilts (my hand is the air), others like samplers, and still others would be happy making intricately pieced quilts for the rest of their lives in a blissful sort of who-cares-about-shapes-let’s-throw-them-all-in-at-once attitude, and come out with spectacular pieces of art. The reality is we take, we borrow, we steal, we adapt, we climb on top of, we turn it around, and then make it ours. Here’s one of my recent favorites, from Linda Hungerford, of Flourishing Palms.

*Feelin’ Groovy*, by Linda Hungerford (used with permission)

So the bottom line is for me, at least, I think there may be very few original quilt designs. No one gets to claim copyright on a triangle, or a circle; we all know that. But where our creativity comes in, and why we are still here, sewing machines humming, has to do with how we use those shapes, those fabrics, and how big we make it and how small we make it.

I have two copies of Barbara Brackman’s Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Shapes, and I also have her version of that for Appliqué. Sorry to say that I feel the same about appliqué: most of us are imitating the vines, swirls, flowers, stars and animals of the appliqué world that we’ve seen before. I have twice had famous quilters threaten me with a lawsuit because they believed I was making money off their designs (seriously?). One was well-known for pinching other people’s designs, too. I pulled that pattern, and have made it free for those who are interested, for who needs a lawsuit? The other quilt I never went far with, but I’ve seen variations of it. One last episode of being accused of plagiarism left me shaken, and I lost a good friend over it, even though the design was available freely online. I really hate run-ins with famous territorial quilters, as most of the time I’m just in my tiny world, doing my thing.

The Duck Creek quilt is made of Cat’s Cradle blocks, sashed with cornerstones and pieced rectangles, and it is the design of Lisa Alexander & Susan Ache, from their book Celebrate with Quilts. I saw this pattern at our Guild night, when Char brought her book to show a couple of us. I was hooked on this design, bought the book and went for it.

The subtitle of the Times’ article has the phrase “Copy that” as in, we get it. But sometimes we quilters seem to be the least able to “get it,” I think. I have seen some incredibly original and interesting quilts this last year, and yes, most all used the shapes above. But they are originals because of the way they used the shapes, colors, negative space and so on; maybe we don’t need to get so territorial about our shapes? We quilters can be “original” even when working with those basics, like Linda’s amazing Feelin’ Groovy.

Nobody can “copy that!”

Keep making, keep quilting, keep being here–and have fun at QuiltCon this week, everyone!

UPDATE: Some truly unique and original quilts were hanging this year at QuiltCon 2025. Here’s a post that will show them off. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here.

300 Quilts · Patterns by Elizabeth of OPQuilt · Quilts

Turning of the Year

December 8, 2024August 23, 2025 Elizabeth E.12 Comments

Thus times do shift, each thing his turn does hold;
New succeed, as former things grow old.
Robert Herrick, from Ceremonies for Candlemas Eve

I don’t know how many more turns this life does hold, but I’m getting better at recognizing them. That’s what living for a while will do for you: give you practice at the painful, help you recognize delight, and deliver the ability to watch calmly as another year turns.

We get our fall this time of year, here in Southern California. We pretend to have colorful autumn arrive with the Northern and Eastern States, putting out our russet and pumpkin and burgundy decorations all through October and November, but really our trees don’t have their turn until December. I gather up a few to rest on my dashboard as I drive around (for we also do that in Southern California), and celebrate the colors.

I made the top to this quilt in December 2020, so it’s appropriate that I finish it when we have turned away from the pandemic, its memory triggered only when we find our cloth masks in the sock drawer, or the junk drawer, or realize that a box of N95s has taken up permanent residence in our hallway closet, a talisman to ward off the unthinkable.

It’s nice to be able to crunch around my “walking” park, the leaves crisp underfoot, finding places that echo the muted tones of this quilt, Pomegranates.

Many of our leaves go from green to brown, a dimming of our usual colorful landscape. It’s as if they say, we gave it all for the year and now are tired, just needing rest. I can understand this. I have times of dimming, as well as times of bright.

Herrick reminded us that “each thing his turn does hold” and I don’t have to have only one season of quiet and rest. I have had many years to watch the days grow shorter, the nights grow longer and then again, and decades to watch the reversal of it all.

I’m lucky that way. Hopefully, so are you–

Quilt # 298 • 42″ square, with a simple single-binding
No label, as I’m sending this off and think they may like the backing of this quilt (a treasured piece from Alexander Henry) as well as the front.

Another post about this quilt

Yes, it is up in my pattern shop and for December, you can choose your own discount if you want to stash it away for New Year’s sewing (another turning for all of us).