Two Quilt Finishes, SAHRR, and The Abyss

January 24, 2026January 25, 2026 Elizabeth E.15 Comments

Flowers for Madilyn was delivered to my granddaughter Madilyn this week, so now it can show up on the blog for reals. I love sunset photos, with that golden sunlight. When I get a photo of her with her quilt, I’ll put it up. She’s a charming young woman, nearly graduated from high school, with a life full of adventure ahead of her.

I stitched in some hearts here and there. Hope she finds them!

Thanks to my husband, Dave, for being a Quilt Holder, par excellance! This is quilt #313. If I’d written a normal label, it would have looked like this, but instead I went with a smaller one, sewn near the top.

Stars for Baby • Quilt Two

I mailed this one off in early January, but not like this.

Stars for Baby (quilt #314) went to my friends Camryn and Landon, who are expecting their first child in a couple of months. Camryn and I had planned to get together so I could teach her quilting, but then he got a new job, and it RAINED A TON on the day she was supposed to come, and then Christmas and New Year’s, so we’ll get together after her wee boy comes and we’ll work on the teaching part then.

Because I was thinking of a beginner quilt, I designed this pattern so a newbie could navigate it. In this pattern, they’ll learn these blocks:

a simple border with cornerstones
pinwheel block
nine-patch block
stitch-and-flip block
basic flying geese block
Sawtooth Star block

I also (as is typical) include another option. Since I was writing this during the holidays, it’s a red/green version:

This is where the Stitch-and-Flip corners come in (we used to call them “snowball corners”). I’ve simplified the centers of the larger Sawtooth Star block for this version.

I like to put this size out as a table topper during the year.

It’s a good pattern for teaching, and it makes up quickly if you are an experienced quilter. You can find the pattern already uploaded in my pattern shop on PayHip, and it’s a Pattern Lite.

Those of you who have been around for a bit, know that my Pattern Lite patterns sell for cheaper price than regular patterns. So grab yourself a bargain and make some small quilts, or teach a friend!

I’ve been at Road to California this week, where I saw my two quilts hanging up with a lot of other beautiful quilts. I visited some vendors, and a full write-up is coming.

SAHRR • Round One

Last week, in my Emergency Blog Post, I introduced the SAHRR: Stay at Home Round Robin, and thought I had a month to get the next bit together. Oh, no! This group is really cooking along, so the first prompt (hourglass) already dropped and the next one is a week after that. So you’ll see this SAHRR morph quickly.

I dug though my Orphan Block box and found a handful of hourglass blocks, so that determined the direction I was going to go. And the colors. But I usually like to put a coping strip in between my medallion borders to help stabilize and strengthen the quilt, so I sketched out two more possibilities:

The top one is the hourglass borders sewn right up against the center block. The one just above on the left has a wider coping strip, and the one on the right has two (1″ and 1/2″), in different colors. I studied them for a long time. I liked the top one, with the hourglass right next to the center, as they interacted with each other. The wider coping strip — necessary because the blocks were 3″ finished — looked as if the center was floating, a bit adrift. So I went with the two colors (and my partner-in-crime, my husband, agreed).

Wild, says the husband. Yep, and it will get wilder, says the wife (me). I’m trying to use up the blocks in the orphan box, so here’s the tally so far:

Four blocks: the center
Six blocks: hourglass border, and then I made some more to fill out the border, and now I have five leftover. I’m not making too much progress here.

The schedule:
*January 14: Center Blocks, led by Gail and shared by each co-leader
*January 21: 1st Round: Brenda @ Songbird Designs
January 28: 2nd Round: Kathleen @ Kathleen McMusing
February 4: 3rd Round: Emily @ The Darling Dogwood
February 11: 4th Round: Wendy @ Pieceful Thoughts of My Quilting Life
February 18: 5th Round: Gail @ Quilting Gail
February 25: 6th Round: Anja @ Anja Quilts
[An asterisk *means I finished that section.]

I first wrote this post on Friday, and ended at this point with a cheery and chirpy little bit about what I was looking forward to next week. And then I went to Road to California.

And while I was there on Saturday, taking photos of beautiful quilts and hoping to capture some of them to show you, I accidentally flipped to Instagram and the news of Alex Pretti’s murder at the hands of ICE agents in Minnesota. I went out to the hallway to collect my thoughts (not doomscroll) and remembered the exquisite Cherrywood exhibit I’d seen that morning, an exhibit titled The Abyss.

One image stuck out. That of a young bearded man, sitting slumped over in a sea of deep dark, a small pink butterfly reaching out, perhaps to bring him some light, some hope. I post this now in honor of Mr. Pretti, a bearded nurse who was trying to help a bystander when he was ruthlessly killed. Be skeptical of the narratives you are hearing. Search out the truth yourself; watch the videos if you are able.

I leave you now with three images from the quilt exhibit The Abyss.

I will be figuring out to speak out about the recent deaths in Minnesota, seeking comfort in my home and quilting, and working, phoning, writing in order to extract our beloved nation from the horrific abyss where it currently finds itself.

Stay safe, everyone, and help your neighbors — ALL of them.

Low Hanging Fruit, by Katherine McCormick.
She writes: “This piece is commenting on the ICE raids. Low hanging fruit is the first picked. First they came for…”

300 Quilts · Family Quilts · Quick Quilt · Quilt Finish · Quilts

Quilt Finish: Blue and White Star for David

June 6, 2021October 20, 2025 Elizabeth E.24 Comments

This quilt started on Zoom. Several weeks ago as our family was having their weekly Zoom get-together, my brother hinted (strongly) that he wouldn’t mind having one of my quilts, you know, in blues–lots of them. He just loved blues.

It began with a block writ large. I used a basic nine-patch (see details below) that measured 12″ per block, so 4″ parts. It was a joy to work with blue and white, a favorite.

I have the above blue and white currently on the bottom of my bed, and must admit to having a lot of blue in my stash, so it was easy to pull fabrics for this quilt.

We’re lucky in June, out here in California, to have two flowering trees at the same time: the purple jacaranda, and the yellow Palo Verde. And I wanted photos with both.

My quilt-holding husband obliged. We stopped on the way home from church, and here you can see our nifty quilt-holding contraptions: a clamp duct-taped to a sturdy stick (you could use a dowel).

He received it yesterday and is thrilled to have it.

The Details

The block, pulled from my BlockBase+ software, is the Double Hour Glass block with a bit different coloration. I enlarged it to 12″ size, then went to town piecing it. The quilting pattern is Belly Bop, and my quilter Kelley used a silver Microquilter thread (#7007) on the top, and barely off-white 401 So Fine in the bobbin. Both threads are made by Superior Threads. The batting was Soft and Bright, by The Warm Company.

This is Quilt #249 in my Quilt Index of finished quilts.

300 Quilts · Free Quilt Pattern · Quilt Finish

Is a Tablerunner a Quilt?

May 30, 2021January 11, 2026 Elizabeth E.10 Comments

When you are stuck, it is. I love those houses, but…No.

New favorite. I ordered two more yards.

I love having scraps of batting that are just the right size.

Letting us both rest after a few hours of quilting.

Here come the beauty shots. (Isn’t that little bee with the branch arms the cutest?)

I quilted whatever came into my head.

I haven’t measured it, I haven’t labeled it, but the saga of the Orphan-Blocks-into-Table-Runner is now complete. I’m sorry to say, it didn’t empty out my orphan blocks bin much. Now I have to think up another way to use some of those up. And I have to think up a name. These orphan blocks came from when I taught the First Monday Sew-day class of beginners about Square-in-a-Square, or Economy blocks.

I still love these little houses. Now I have the beginning of another quilt! Get the Pattern Lite here.

Happy Memorial Day Weekend.

Or, as my mother would say, Happy Decoration Day (some fascinating reading in this link). The weekend before Memorial Day, my mother and father would go out and decorate the graves of their grandparents and great-grandparents with flowers, the cemetary made beautiful with pots of mums everywhere. This is the gravestone of my Scottish gr-grandmother. I have two namesake gr-grandmother Elizabeths and I remember them both on this Decoration Day. While the origins of Memorial Day are generally thought to be about the war dead, because of my mother, I remember it also as a day to honor those long gone.

I think we can do both.

In case you need to whip up a flag quilt, here’s a quick free tip sheet to do so!

Family Quilts · Gridsters · Quilt Finish · This-and-That

This and That • February 2021

February 14, 2021January 11, 2026 Elizabeth E.17 Comments

Little three-year-old Gio came to live with my son Chad and his wife Kristen last year, and when this February rolled around, I decided that he had become, in effect, my grandson, and in my world grandchildren get quilts. I rustled up a stack of Hungry Animal Alphabet fabric by J. Wecker Frisch, figuring that my daughter-in-law was probably working with this little guy on his alphabet.

Kristen and Chad had first taken Gio’s mother under their wing some years ago (a complicated story), but soon Gio’s mom decided to go out on her own; it was heartbreaking. Fast forward two years, and Chad and Kristen got a call to come and get this cute energetic little boy. Without a moment’s hesitation, they did, and now he is in a secure home with a family that loves him.

This past Thursday, I had hit the Pandemic Wall, (and here, too) so we grabbed the quilt and jumped in the car and headed to the beach to take some photographs. Let’s go places, indeed.

Of course, this is my favorite block. That’s totally me, there, eating raspberries with racoons and a quail on my shoulder and a quilt on the table.

The back is an alphabet toss of black letters on white. I quilted it in a meandering stipple, bound it in red (Gio’s favorite color), and signed the back and sent it off that afternoon. Gio’s Quilt is quilt #244. It measures 45″ wide by 55″ high and I hope it makes Gio smile.

from Surfside Quilters Guild website, February 2021

This past week I was also able to present and teach at Surfside Quilters Guild, out of San Clemente area (California).

I recently got a new laptop and am now able to use virtual backgrounds when on Zoom. I used to have to set up a quilt stand and clamp on a quilt as my backdrop, and one afternoon when I was auditioning backgrounds, Dave magically appeared. I ended up using the lower image with Plitvice and the backdrop of California poppies. I still think my hair looks like –and moves like — a bowl of Jello when a virtual background is used, but it’s easier than setting up quilt stands.

Surfside Quilters Guild is a collection with many powerful, talented and well-known quilters. I fall in love with every guild where I go and teach, but it was fun to circle back around to this one, and have Nancy Ota in my class (I took one from her when I first moved to Southern California). Nancy mentioned that she’d just heard news of the death of Roberta Horton, a silver star of a quilter. (I wrote about Roberta Horton here.) In 2019, when I’d gone to PIQF, I saw Roberta and she graciously agreed to a photograph together. The news of her death blew me away, much as the news of Gwen Marston’s had done a couple of years earlier.

Horton’s books: I have all but the Stained Glass Quilting Technique.

Roberta Horton is one of a collection of BIG quilters, meaning Before Instagram. Before Facebook and before social media. You learned about these quilters — Roberta, her sister Mary Mashuta, Gwen Marston, Nancy Ota, Ruth McDowell, among others — by reading magazines, seeing which quilt shows where they would be teaching, and then trying to get there. The edges of our quilting universe seemed a lot farther away then and I was a roaming fangirl. I learned a lot from the women in that cohort, who, regretfully seem invisible to this new crop of younger quilters, quilters who somehow believe they sprang fully formed out of the social media earth without any quilting mothers. I have always believed that we quilters are richer for our heritage, and hope we won’t forget these giants.

Because Surfside began in 2009, and because their website is a strong compilation of their history as a guild, I had fun exploring their Blocks of the Month. I chose their Freddy Moran Garden Lady block (2012-2013) for my block this year for the Gridster Bee, and hope to make many of the accompanying sewing-related BOM blocks for a quilt in 2022. [Freddy Moran is another heritage quilter, seen here and here.]

This block, however, is not from Surfside, but is the block one of my beemates chose for her turn as Queen Bee, and is a free pattern from Heidi Staples of Fabric Mutt. I am doing all my blocks for the above quilt with red backgrounds, so tried it out in the block you see above.

These are what I made for Susan. The scissors are there for scale (blocks finish at 3 1/2″).

And last but not least, here are some textures drawn by Mother Nature and her helping flock of seagulls, seashells and edges of waves. If you need more beach, I put a Beach Highlight on my Instagram; make sure the sound is on for full effect. I plan to keep my finger on that play button often in the next few weeks, trying to get through pandemic life, and as I get my second dose of vaccine this morning.

It’s nice to feel a bit of hope again around the edges of life. I wish this for you, as well.