Uncertainty is Wisdom in Motion

February 12, 2024August 30, 2025 Elizabeth E.16 Comments

This phrase intrigued me. It came from a podcast I listened to while out walking, so I’ve been thinking about what happens when we try to learn something new. Or lean away from “what we’ve always done.” Or have to hang out in the middle of a decision, not knowing the best way forward (the temptation is always to force it to a conclusion, apparently, limiting new possibilities). These ideas on uncertainty are from Maggie Jackson:

“Neuroscientists are beginning to unpack what happens in the brain at the uncertainty of the moment, when the realization that you don’t know that you’ve reached the limits of your knowledge instigate a number of neural changes. Your focus broadens and your brain becomes more receptive to new data and your working memory is bolstered. So this kind of rings a bell: you’re on your toes and that’s why uncertainty at that moment is a kind of wakefulness. In fact, Joseph Cable of the University of Pennsylvania said ‘that’s the moment when your brain is telling itself there’s something to be learned here.’ So by squandering that opportunity or retreating from that discomfort, we’re actually losing an opportunity to learn. Your old knowledge is no longer sufficient.”
–Maggie Jackson on the podcast The Grey Area, with Sean Illing

So what does this have to do with quilting?

I recently finished up my pattern of the New York Beauties (more on that in a minute) and decided I wanted to make each block in the quilt in regular intervals, but many of those above are multiples of the same block. So I thought I’d test out using freezer paper, instead of my usual parchment paper, and see how I liked it. (Besides that, my regular 17 lb. parchment wasn’t being made anymore–only the 28 lb. Time for an update!)

And the verdict? I like it!

First, start with this: ChicWrap’s 18″ aluminum foil dispenser. It comes with foil, but I put that back in the kitchen, and slipped in my 18″ roll of freezer paper.

You don’t thread it through that slit, but instead, lift the lid, to set up the paper for cutting.

Pull it out so you have at least 11″ of length. Fold it in half (it will measure about 9″ in width), then take it to your cutting mat to trim it up to 8 1/2″ x 11.” Now you are ready to feed it through the printer. If you don’t have a printer that will allow you to feed it one sheet at a time, you can tape the freezer paper to a piece of heavier paper or cardstock (trim the freezer paper down to 8″ x 10 1/2″) and send that through.

I read about buying sheets of freezer paper already cut, but most of the commenters said it was no sturdier than the stuff we use from our rolls, so I just cut it from the roll, and went with it. After printing, I cut it out around the outlines of the piece I was using. You can experiment with this technique by downloading my free New York Beauties single pattern from PayHip:

Even though I’d already printed out all the regular parchment papers, my brain was saying “there’s something to be learned here.” So here we go:

After cutting out your shape from the printed freezer paper, fold on the first line, and press just this section (Ray 1) to your first piece of fabric (picture 1: muted lavender). Then lay that on top of your second color (picture 2: orange).

Later on, I figured that I should make a crease on all the lines of my section, but for now, I digitally outlined the rays in orange dashes to help you see the shapes.

Make sure there is enough of your second fabric underneath your first fabric. Pin, or clip. Head to the sewing machine, and sew next to that folded edge.

Now to the ironing board. Press, smoothing the fabric away from the seam. Iron only on the next section (Ray 2). Fold back along the line between rays 2 and 3.

At the cutting board, align your ruler for a scant quarter-inch seam, and cut off the excess. If you need to trim at the end of the piece, open up your paper, so you know you aren’t going to cut off something you’ll need later on. Use the edge of the paper as a guide, but rough-cut off the extra. (See picture 12, below.)

Fold back alone the line between sections 2 and 3, revealing the shape of the next ray (shown here in dashed orange lines). Place on your third fabric (picture 5: blue-green). Stitch along that folded edge. Iron Section 3 paper onto the blue-green fabric, smoothing out the fabric underneath.

Fold on the line between sections 3 & 4 (Ray 4 shown here in orange dashed lines). Place until on next fabric (picture 6: tomato red).

Again, stitch along folded edge, shown in pictures 7 & 8. You can also see how I pin — just in that seam allowance. Did all my fabrics have a straight edge, making it easy for me to align (as in picture 6)? No, not always. If not, I would place, trim…and then pin and sew.

You know the drill now: press just that section (Ray 4), then trim at the cutting table, as shown in picture 11.

In picture 12, I show how I open up my paper, so I can cut off the excess at the base of the B1 section. Then I fold it back down and trim that scant quarter-inch at the crease of the paper (between Rays 4 and 5). In picture 13, I fold it back down, and lay it on the next fabric, using the shape of Ray 5 to check you have enough fabric. Those orange dashed lines are a visual guide: I do have enough. Stitch along the folded edge.

Yep–you know: press only the Ray 5 section of freezer paper onto your fabric. Back to the cutting mat to trim at a scant quarter-inch, then repeat with your final ray (picture 15: a happy orange for me). Press that freezer paper to your final ray. It should look sort of like the image in picture 16. Set aside, and start on B2.

Following the numbers, and using the same technique, stitch all the rays for B2. Trim carefully around the edges of both, neat and clean (picture 17). Peel back the papers for those edge-rays with wrong sides together and pin, aligning lower and upper edges of B1 and B2. Take to sewing machine. I found I had to peel back even a little more. Stitch, then carefully peel off the freezer paper. When you take it to your ironing board, press that last seam the same direction as all the rest (you’ll figure it out).

Charging right ahead, press a center mark in the A Outer Corner, the B1/B2 piece, and the C Center. Don’t press down through the whole piece — just the tip of your iron is all that’s needed. Pin the outer edges of the A Outer Corner and the center marks, and head to the sewing machine.

In picture 22, I sewed the A Outer Corner to my rays, PUTTING THE LARGER OUTER CORNER TO THE BOTTOM. This is different than you usually see. Please take it slowly, no rushing, keep aligning as you go from pin to pin to pin (there are only three).

In picture 23, after putting in my three pins, I sewed the C Center to the rays, WITH THE RAYS TO THE FEED DOGS. Again, take it slowly, and keeping aligning the fabric. You can pull it toward you a little as you stitch, because those curves are bias. By elongating them (by stretching them out), it may help them to line up a little easier. But not a big pull, not a big tug. Little adjustments. You are the tug boat, getting that steamship into port — little by little. (Okay, enough bad metaphors.)

Press. Usually you are pressing away from the rays.

Now to trim up. I gave you extra on the A Outer Corner so if your block went askew, it wouldn’t be a tragedy (just another way I show my love to you in my patterns — I make the mistakes so you won’t have to). Align the corner of your ruler so the 1/4″ line is right at the Outer Corner fold, as show in picture 24.

Then check the opposite corner, lining that 9 1/4″ mark at the folded edge. It’s not rocket science, meaning that it most likely won’t be exact. Get as close as you can. Trim, then turn the block, lining up the 9 1/2″ line with the trimmed edge, and slice off whatever is left (not much on this side).

Done! Wild Sunflower block is complete. Now, if you are going for the full quilt, the pattern says to make a total of three. So will the freezer paper keep sticking?

Ray Two is finished, and I’m plowing again into Ray Three, and yep — it’s still sticking. For one of the blocks you make it five times. I’ll be interested to see how that goes. And overall, I felt like using this method is faster, always a plus.

Just like I used a weekly goal to help pull me out of my sewing slump last summer, I’ll be using these New York Beauties to get me going for this year. If you want to follow along, I have a coupon for you to use, if you want to purchase the pattern. (I’ll probably do this every two weeks, so don’t panic.)

Just head to my quilt pattern shop, and when you check out, type in this code (note the three capital letters at the beginning). You’ll get 20% off the pattern. It expires on Leap Day! (February 29)

All of this can be found on the Master New York Beauties page, on the tab above. When the coupon expires, I’ll take it down, but a listing of the blog posts will be linked there, if you want to refer to them.

What we ate for the Super Bowl (no, we did not watch it): Homemade Focaccia

Just before kick-off, Camryn and Landon (he, of Focaccia fame) stopped by to visit, then took off again to their Super Bowl party. Later that night, we blanked out by watching the movie Dune on Netflix, understanding about 60% of it. If you’ve seen it, what was your percentage?

Happy Old Year Ending: 2023

December 31, 2023August 30, 2025 Elizabeth E.12 Comments

We can’t change the past.

Matthew Potts’ book Forgiveness: An Alternative Account holds this thought up to the light so the rays shine through in a multiple different ways, but the premise is always the same: “Even if we could completely undo the effect of what has been done, we cannot make it so that “the thing that was done never happened” (Jankélévitch, quoted in Potts, 77). That fact of the deed, and the impact of that fact if not of its effects, shall remain absolute and eternal.”

We can waste years of our lives angry at others out for all the wrong they have shown us. We can castigate ourselves for our personal failings (we all have our own list of them), vowing never to repeat them. We often struggle.

Potts’ answer? Bring in the principle of forgiveness: “Forgiveness seeks to live in the wake of loss. It accepts that what has been lost cannot be restored, and then it aims to live in and with the irrevocability of wrong” (23). He goes on to say that: “forgiveness also accepts that past as unalterable and so imagines what possibilities for the future its battered history might bear” (24). In other words, forgiveness is future-facing. “Whatever the past has been or the future may bring, we can begin, and begin again” (94).

I cannot quote enough of his book here to show you his extensive thinking around this idea. But I sometimes wonder — if we can not turn back time — why do we all turn our head to look behind us? Like how I started this post? These three quotes address this:

“As soon as you have a language that has a past tense and a future tense you’re going to say, ‘Where did we come from, what happens next?’ The ability to remember the past helps us plan the future” (Margaret Atwood).

“One faces the future with one’s past” (Pearl S. Buck).

And finally, to bring it full circle: “Nothing we can do can change the past, but everything we do changes the future” (Ashleigh Brilliant). I liked Buck’s idea, that the lenses with which we view the future are colored by our past. Atwood is more tactical, encouraging to use what we’ve learned to plan our future. Brilliant, whose cartoon is above, cautions us not to waste our energy dwelling on mistakes.

I hope that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t tackle some of our UFOs, as I noticed that most of the quilt finishes (above) were pulled from my stack of UFOs. However, to think kindly about them, it’s like my past self left them for my current self to finish up (thank you, Pearl Buck). So, instead of rueing that new ideas in 2023 were sparse, I’m grateful that I had something to turn to to keep myself busy. I’m also trying to apply the ideas in Mr. Potts’ book to keep myself forward-facing. I’ve written up list of quilts I want to make in 2024, and I have already started on the first, sewing my way into this new year.

While I have a whole new year coming up in which to finish Potts’ book (and make quilts), what I’ve learned so far is this:
Evaluate where you are. Move on from failures.
Forgive, and then forgive some more.

Happy Old Year Ending–

Eclipse • Quilt #285 • my final finish in 2023

P.S.In a combination of satisfying, yet somewhat unhappy goodbye to 2023, our local quilt shop (Bluebird Quilts) decided to close, and I picked up several lengths of fabric for backings for these planned 2024 quilts. It was sad to say good-bye to the place where I started teaching; her reasons for closing are varied, and I wish her well.

P.P.S. If you are new here, you can always revisit some of my Happy Old Year Ending posts, where I re-introduce myself to my readers. And maybe give an observation or two. The one from 2019 is a classic.

*by Sharon Nullmeyer (@Nullsie on Instagram)*

300 Quilts · Quilt Finish

Time Let Me Play • Quilt Finish 2023

September 4, 2023August 31, 2025 Elizabeth E.11 Comments

Last night we had smoke from fires somewhere, but I never could figure out where. And so I gave up, because that’s what you do at the end of summer: you play it easy, play it nice. You take a breath. You don’t work too hard to find out things that don’t really matter. For nearly a week the temperatures here have felt like end-of-summer, with highs in the 70s and at night, lows that allow the window open.

This quilt is Time Let Me Play, the line taken from “Fern Hill,” a poem by the esteemed Dylan Thomas, where he describes his childhood from the vantage point of a grown man. He looks back, riffing, remembering and describing how he was king of the hill, lost in the verdant landscapes of his childhood Wales. I especially liked the repeating of the center lines of several stanzas:

Time let me hail and climb / Golden in the heydays of his eyes, /
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
Time let me play and be / Golden in the mercy of his means, /
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman
And playing, lovely and watery / And fire green as grass. / And nightly under the simple stars / As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away

Who is this personage that he refers to? It is Time, which gives him a chance to be “green” and “golden” — a reference perhaps to being young like a growing sprout, but also as a golden, or fair-haired and favorite child. The child is the “prince of the apple towns” and lord of the trees and leaves. He repeats “Time let me play” only once, but does refer to that necessary activity of youth, over and over.

Only at the end does Thomas allude to the ephemerality of what he has just described, when he says that Time held him both “green” and “dying,” giving hint to the arc of a day, of a season, the arc of a life.

And while I could go on forever, pulling out the ideas from this rich poem, I want to say tonight that I slipped out the door just at sunset, the sun climbing down from its throne in the sky, soon to slip down over the horizon. I had the quilt in my hands, and quickly clamped it up to the sprawling woody vines of our wisteria. I stepped back and took pictures as the golden light lit up the quilt.

The shadow of the leaves were soft smudgey shapes, a contrast to the crisp angles and simple lines of the quilt. The sun moved quickly and so did I, turning the quilt over to snap an image of the label, sewn on this afternoon.

I felt caught on the edge between day and night. And I am also caught on the edge of another shift of time: I am no longer that young child, climbing trees, playing as if it were the only thing to do in summer, drinking in the richness of clouds and dew and green and gold. But with cloth in my hands, I can still play once in a while, as that pure essence of a quilt — of color and line and shape and imagination — will still let me wander.

Time, let me play.
Again and again and again.

Quilt Details

Quilt #279 in my Quilt Index • 53″ square
Painters Palette Solids are from Paintbrush Studios
Magnifico thread is what I used for quilting, and that is made by Superior Threads
Designed, pieced and quilted by Elizabeth Eastmond (me!)
Pattern can be purchased in my Pattern Shop

Fern Hill

by Dylan Thomas, 1914 – 1953

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
     The night above the dingle starry,
          Time let me hail and climb
     Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
          Trail with daisies and barley
     Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
     In the sun that is young once only,
          Time let me play and be
     Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
          And the sabbath rang slowly
     In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
     And playing, lovely and watery
          And fire green as grass.
     And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
     Flying with the ricks, and the horses
          Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
     Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
          The sky gathered again
     And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
     Out of the whinnying green stable
          On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
     In the sun born over and over,
          I ran my heedless ways,
     My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
     Before the children green and golden
          Follow him out of grace,

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
     In the moon that is always rising,
          Nor that riding to sleep
     I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
          Time held me green and dying
     Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Last words about the poem: I searched to understand what a nightjar was (found it), but that flying rick? Well, a rick was a name for a tall haystack, and I suppose the child falling asleep at Fern Hill might dream of flying nightjars and haystacks, just as the “owls” might “bear the farm away.”

300 Quilts · Quilt Finish

Amarysso • Quilt Finish

August 6, 2023August 31, 2025 Elizabeth E.14 Comments

I never hold my own quilts, preferring to be the one behind the camera, taking the shots. But we had a photo shoot for Amarysso, my latest finish, and we traded places. Here’s some more photos, next to two wonderful murals in our mid-town area. Okay, now Dave will hold it:

The back is a random print from the stash, with a rod pocket of Tula.

What does amarysso mean? It means “to sparkle.” It’s one of the root words for Amaryllis, the name of the fabric used for our quilt guild challenge, designed by Philip Jacobs.

Now me:

And we’ll give Dave the last shot:

My husband is a mural-and-art spotter for our town. He has a blog with lots of posts of murals and sculptures and interesting art, and was written up in our city’s newspaper. He started this project after he retired, and it just sort of morphed into his site Murals and Art. The thing that is keen about this is that whenever I need a backdrop for a quilt photo, I just go to his blog, point, and say, “Take me There.”

Thirty-four years ago, I pointed to the future and said “Take me There.” And he did, me and my four children, now *our* four children. This past weekend, we went to the wedding of our granddaughter, child of the little girl you see in the photo. In June, we went to the marriage of our grandson, child of the boy with the black tie on the left. We have a granddaughter on a mission for our church in Argentina, and yesterday, she just turned 20. And I wish I knew where that pink ribbon sash was that’s hooked around my waist (when I had one). I sewed it out of imported French ribbons, to accent my dress, also handmade. And where did the time go?

I’ll celebrate that evening by meeting with the Creatives, my name for our little group that gets together monthly for crafting, sewing, talking, sharing, whatever. It had gone defunct right before covid of its own volition, but we think we want to get together again. It will probably be a different, smaller bunch than who was here last go-round, but under the alchemy of Time, things do change.

We live in the now, framed by the past, and guided by the future.
Just like my Dave and I.