This and That for JulyAugust 2026

August 16, 2026August 15, 2026 Elizabeth E.13 Comments

Can I just get this off my chest? I am not a fan of AI, even though — it appears — that we will all soon be swimming in it if we aren’t already. This ad is from a prominent mail-order quilt shop. Love the three parts of the glasses in the front: the lenses part, the eyeglass arms…and the other eyeglass arm, sticking out from the right. Every fat quarter fabric is a perfect shape-replica of the one underneath it/above it.

And then there’s this:

Should I be honored that the Giant Vacuums of AI have hoovered up (if you know the reference, you are showing your age) my blog, the thing that I’ve spent years writing and creating and making quilts and talking and thinking up? And if they’ve come for mine, they’ve come for yours, as well as the text in your gmails, the fun stuff on Instagram and Threads and anything that is online. And now, to make money to pay their data center loans, they are selling MY content back to the world?

Yes, I’m a bit ragey when I think about this. In my last post, I wanted to grab a picture of a baby crawling. Fifteen years ago, that would have been no problem. I was happy to share my images with others, and they shared their with me. But now every illustration is AI. I don’t want to put AI on my blog — I want it an AI-free zone. So I went back in my personal photo archives and pulled up a picture from long ago of my child, knowing that by putting it on my blog, I was now subjecting it to the Giant Vacuums of AI (I should copyright that phrase) and now it will also become AI by the very fact that it’s been published online. All my quilts are not now “my” quilts. And if you’ve posted online, yours aren’t either.

Ok, rant over. Sigh. Do I feel any better? Please be assured that I don’t use ANY AI to generate any writing either here on the blog, or in the emails I type back to you.

Moving on…A random shot from Moda’s display at Market a couple of years brings joy to my heart: look at these amazing (mostly) two-color quilts! We generally think in red/white, or blue/white, but definitely I want to make a periwinkle/white quilt now! (Add it to the list, she hollers!)

For a mere $5,000, you, too, can wear a Gee’s Bend Jacket made out of old jeans. Don’t forget your $3,000 tote bag!

In a recent social media post about screaming children on airplanes, I read this:

“Inside thought just broke containment,” may apply to those paragraphs at the beginning of this blog. I apologize.

Recently an artist covered the Pont Neuf Bridge in Paris in order to make it look like a big mountain.

And inside, you could walk through tunnels to some interesting soundscape music. Please click on the Instagram of @kristinetghardeberg to listen. And thank you to her for posting!

This is why that is so fascinating to me: here’s the guy sitting at his (industrial) sewing machine, cranking it out. Oh, I’m sure those belts and geegaws also played a part.

I don’t know about you, but this is more my speed this summer. I did finish up a couple of quilts, but the energy overall has been so incredibly low, for some reason. Good thing I make quilts to nap with! And of course, that’s a screen shot from somewhere and I don’t know who to give credit to. When I did a Google Search, a whole lot more really fun “confetti” quilts pop up. Now I have lots more ideas of what to do with all those leftovers squares from my Oh! Granny quilt.

I don’t know who Poliana Araújo is, but really? She spent “so long picking out these green and blue prints?”

And even though I have this declarative statement on my website? Happily my wonderful readers saw the stolen quilt images and connected it to this one that Riley and I made some years ago, and called her out on it. Hmmm. Is this the early version of the Giant Vacuum of AI? Link to her ill-gotten Facebook post.

BACKGROUND UPDATING IN PROGRESS!

Apparently the “Classic Block” is being phased out. So I’ve been busy updating all my posts to the recommended “Block” style. Besides working on that, I’ve also been working on updating the Blog Index that shows a photo from every blog post, as well as a little bit of the writing.

Here’s a video showing a page from far back…and right in the middle of it is Riley, making his quilt! (Sure hope this works on your computer/browser/whatever.)

These represent the blog Four-in-Art blog on Blogspot/Blogger, as well as the Mid-Century Modern blog. I was supposed to delete them several years ago, but just now (sadly) said good-bye. Here’s a record of the quilts I made in the Mid-Century Modern, as well as other bees. The Four-in-Art quilts are scattered through the Quilt Index, above, or you can do a search by typing that phrase into the cute little box, above right.

As I’m starting to distribute my quilts more frequently now, I *need* this label! Clever way to tack down a binding, too.

As my husband and I are taking a trip to Scotland soon, I’ve been looking at what connections I can make there with quilters. I’m a bit too late for this one!

However, I did find a quilt shop in Edinburgh, as well as a tartan shop (or twenty).

I was named for two “Elizabeth” great-grandmothers. One of them was my great-grandmother who came from Haddington, Scotland. (The other great-grandmother was born in England). Because of this, I’m figuring out bus routes and times, so I can pay a visit to that village, as my mother did when she visited Scotland some time ago. My husband’s forebears also immigrated from the Edinburgh area, so we have another small village to visit for his relatives, too.

I’ve been doing my searching on Family Search, an online archive of lineage and memories. You can find your relatives, too, by going there and setting up an account. I’m not a genealogist, by any stretch, but my friend Dayna is and she’s teaching me how to use it. I’ve got so many things I want to upload on my relatives’ pages, to “make them known to their grandchildren,” as Dayna says. Maybe I’ll bring back a photo or two of her Scotland for her page?

Lest you think I’m a total slacker, this has been patiently waiting for me while I run around like a chicken with her head cut off…wait…wrong image…while I laze around like a woman in August, trying to beat the heat and keep her sanity. (Better.)

Remember these? It’s the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the Indian’s quilt-a-long for our 250th celebration. I made their August 2026 block:

I liked it. I just didn’t love it. So I combed the artist’s Instagram account, looking for other motifs I might like better.

And this was it. I widened the strips, made a different motif for the center. As a quilter, I’m always considering how the subsequent blocks in a quilt-a-long will play with the first few blocks. I feel like this will play a little bit better, to my way of thinking. I may end up using both? Stay tuned.

Here’s the free PatternLite Handout of what I did. I’m calling it Sunrise on the Prairie. Please don’t sell, don’t steal, and if your pals want one, send them over here to download their own from my website. That is very appreciated. And please don’t tell AI this is up here (haha).

Sunrise on the Prairie_OPQuilt Download

I hope for you gorgeous sunsets at the end of the day, or sunrises at the beginning.

(In honor of the recent eclipse)

300 and Beyond · BlockBase+ · Quilt Finish · Quilts · Sawtooth Stars

Four Planes of Connection

August 11, 2026August 11, 2026 Elizabeth E.7 Comments

Not airplanes. More like what’s demonstrated in the above photo, if you can figure it out.

Math-type planes, like angles and parabolas and spheres and not only those, but rectangles and triangles and hallelujah, now we’re talking quilter language. Right? Well, it gets trickier when you are in Mathland.

The circle above is the Klein Quartic. No, please don’t ask. Just enjoy the colors and shapes. On the right is the Klein Quartic that’s quilted, a structure by Elisabetta Matsumoto, showing how this works. No, I don’t know how it works either.

After I’d finished my quilt with the four houses, I went looking for something “four-ish” so I could give it a name and fell into this article, from the 1860s…

…which had the quilt title phrase in the article. Good thing, because all that about nodal and zomal is way above my quilty pay grade.

There are all kind of “fours” in our world.

Crawling on all fours.

Four points of the compass. Four elements. Or the Montessori delineations. Or the anatomy descriptions of Planes of the Body. And if you are willing to wade through AI slop when in an internet search, there is all sorts of mumbo-jumbo about matter-life-mind-culture.

It’s purely coincidental that the rocket-ship-math-fabric was grabbed in this photo. Actually, I was thinking more about family relationships.

Our four children. My four sisters. Four grandparents.

All of us with planes of connection through shared memories, good days, bad days, sorrow, joy…many more than just four ways to connect. It could be a neighborhood of friends that come in and out of our lives. But when I look at these houses, I see family most of all, which sometimes can be as tangled as a Klein Quartic.

One of my books notes that “The basic relationships governing planes are relatively few in number. Much of the problem of using these relationships is determining just where and how to use them.” **

Boy, howdy.

After a long hot summer I must admit I often struggled with some of those planes of connection. Relationships and relating to each other can be a challenge as well as a delight. However, our lives hold good, our lives hold the awful, and we build a multi-faceted experience just by living in this real world of ours.

And for me, August brings a remembrance of one of those happy experiences.

Glad our planes connected–

**Book was found in a library discard cart and is titled Graphic Science and Design, by Thomas E. French and Charles J. Vierck.

The Friction of a Hawaiian Quilt Block

July 12, 2026July 10, 2026 Elizabeth E.8 Comments

Occasionally in Adam Mastroianni’s substack there are these fascinating-makes-me-think-or-go-aha sorts of observations. His missive this week happened to coincide with two other events: a couple of days at the beach and the making of a Hawaiian quilt block.

First, the quilt block. I posted I was starting this Hawaiian style of quilting and immediately a couple of quilters commented that it was a total fail for them, didn’t like it, tried and never doing it again. But it was Block Two of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the Indian quilt-a-long and since I already had finished the first block, I was determined to try the second. I also have never attempted a Hawaiian Block.

Second, the days at the beach came about because one of my sons was bringing his family to Oceanside, and I asked if my husband and I could tag along for part of their trip, and then the other son, who lives in the area, also joined us. Their dog Misa is above; she hated their pool when they first moved in to their new house, but now, she loves it. (Misa, too, is a part of this.)

Back to Mastroianni. He writes “The internet gives every social trend a pair of rocket-powered roller skates, speeding it toward its…final form. On Twitter, for instance, memes go from punchy to passé in a matter of days rather than decades. But if we could play culture on 1x speed rather than 10x speed, if we had time to screw around with different strategies before the game reached its cutthroat stage, we might have discovered different paths entirely….Instead, in a hyper-competitive marketplace of ideas, we end up with the same few memes, all done to death” (source is above).

We quilters have also been subjected to this rocket-powered roller skates. How many rainbow-ordered quilts have you seen in the last few years? How many quilts have you seen that really don’t need a pattern because they are so simple — but somehow they are everywhere and we all make one? Sometimes it is because we all read the same Instagram posts, or that the pattern writers are counting on the viral effect of social media to send sales skyrocketing. Fair. It’s a marketplace. But I can’t tell you how many guild show-and-tell nights I have sat through where every quilt somehow resembles the one before it, or the one before that.

Mastroianni calls this “de-frictioning.” He describes it like this: “We’ve forgotten how much time people in the past spent consuming content that they didn’t actually want to consume: the unskippable clunker of a song that came in the middle of an album, the late-night infomercial that you sat through because there was nothing else on, the magazine you read cover-to-cover in the waiting room….Each new media technology reduces this friction…they all allow us to spend more time with the content that we supposedly desire. And what happens when this friction goes away?”

Two Russian artists, Kolmar and Melamid, decided to find out, and interviewed people in many countries about what their most wanted painting was, and what was their least wanted painting. Here’s USA’s (source via Mastroianni):

If you were to interview quilters what their most wanted quilt block was, and what their least, what would we see? We would probably see what they were seeing the most. If they saw a lot of printed panel quilts, they may be looking for their favorite panel. If you were at a modern guild, you might get something abstract or perhaps boldly colored. We tend to go with what we see, what we are used to.

The weird thing was that so many people’s “most” pictures were similar, but their “least” pictures were quite different and interesting. Mastroianni notes that “people are capable of acquiring more interesting tastes, if you give them the chance. This is the work art does for us—it stretches our desires, rather than merely satisfying them.”

And this is the work that the little bit of friction of a new project can also do.

So what to do when a quilt-a-long comes into your view and it is a Hawaiian quilt block? Or you are moved into a house that has a swimming pool and you have never been in one before?

Or you go to the beach and get out of your regular routine and you see a group of beginning surfers feel the friction in the few inches of whitewater high up on the shore?

Then instead of sitting there like a lump, you reach into your bag and carefully pull out the pinned Hawaiian block, and really get going on it. No, it’s not perfect. You probably won’t make it again. But you don’t want to read the magazines you brought, the family is all at lunch and you are guarding their stuff, so you thread your needle and get going, and by the end of the day, and after good conversations and an occasional walk on the beach, the block may have a certain coconut suntan-lotion fragrance and perhaps some sea salt spray, but it’s mostly finished.

Another deviation from my usual.

And here’s where I got my quilter roller skates on and skated right into the sameness, but this time, happily so. More info here, and how to get her free pattern. Audrey is looking for more, so make one and send it off!

300 and Beyond · Free Download · Free Quilt Pattern · Quilts · Red, White and Blue

The Betsy Ross Quilt • Quilt Finish for America250

June 28, 2026June 27, 2026 Elizabeth E.14 Comments

It’s a big, fancy year for the United States, this 250th celebration of those men in white powdered wigs slaving through the heat of Philadelphia in 1776, trying to figure out how not to have a king, but something else. As Honest Abe Lincoln described it 87 years later, we wanted a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” The three documents that were eventually crafted, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are known collectively as the Charters of Freedom. And so we celebrate this beginning.

We’ve done this celebrating before.

The first one I remember was in 1976, and it was the summer of the Bicentennial (200 years). This is about all I can recollect: a picnic with my toddler.

This year, the Semiquincentennial (250), that son will be celebrating the 4th with his family of five in another state, and hopefully they will remember more than a picnic.

When starting a government, or a marriage, or a school, or any great endeavor, there might be some failures. According to noted historian, Joseph J. Ellis, author of The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding, there were “two unquestionably horrific tragedies the founders oversaw: the failure to end slavery, and the failure to avoid Indian removal” (Kindle, p. 8). Ellis’ book discusses these contradictions, and we are still grappling with these today. Between 1500 and 1800, while “five times as many Africans as Europeans were carried to the New World” (ibid., 13), only a small portion of that diaspora was carried to North America, making us a predominantly white nation of interlopers on the Native Americans who lived here.

Those aren’t the only mistakes we’ve made.

Thomas Jefferson declared in The Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” This year, we celebrate that, but I do keep wondering: are we moving towards that beautiful idea, or away from it? And with all the examinations and navel-gazing, maybe we can acknowledge that we aren’t perfect as a nation, but that we generally are pretty amazing?

While I try to hold all these disparate thoughts in my tiny brain — for this 250th celebration, I made a quilt.

My childhood nickname was Betsy, so of course I loved this panel for the back.

This is Quilt #317 and many of the details are on the label. I actually had a different title, but this week decided I wanted to call it The Betsy Ross Quilt. So I made a new label and took off the first one:

(Photography location scout and quilt holder is my saintly husband.)

So this year it will be probably a more contemplative celebration, given the tensions in our national dialogue. I like people on both sides of that dialogue, but my overriding desire is to see how we can care for each other — the people — rather than just going for power or for ruling over the populace. There’s a reason why those Founding Fathers eschewed the idea of a king, and I kind of think they knew what they were doing. The dialogue — fraught as it may be — will continue.

Samuel Adams, 250 years ago this year, was on to something:

Freedom of Thought and the Right of Private Judgment in Matters of Conscience, direct their course to this Happy Country.

While I don’t have any great answers about how we make our way to that Happy Country, I just know I want us to keep trying. As a quilter, I honor that spirit of making mistakes, recognizing them and unpicking a few stitches in the process, so I’ve put out all my red, white and blue quilts around the house to jolly things up over here. To celebrate well.

I hope you do too.

Happy 250th Fourth of July!

Information on some of the Quilts

• The large quilt with EPP circles is I Hear America Singing. Most of the circles patterns are free here on the website.

• Tiny Star free download of pattern (and instructions) found here: https://opquilt.com/2018/07/03/happy-fourth-of-july-2018/

• The post about Betsy’s Creation, my version of the flag quilt, talks about America (of course), with a link to free download and instructions to make the quilt.

• Blog post about the star quilt (with flags in jars on top), has instructions and free download for that mini-quilt.

Monuments and Sights in Washington, D.C.

My husband once had a year-long sabbatical with the Department of State, and I got to know that beautiful city well. Here’s the George Washington Monument in November, when the late fall sunlight turns it golden, taken from the World War II Memorial.

This quote, on the side of the Supreme Court, gets at that delicate balance between just being right vs. recognizing that our liberty needs to be guarded by justice.

My favorite memorial of all was the Lincoln Memorial, especially when I could catch it at odd times, when all the tired tourists had gone home.

Below are some paintings on the ceiling of the Capitol Building (in addition to the Samuel Adams quote, above) that remind me how we stitched our country together: