Childhood’s Wide Avenues

November 1, 2013November 1, 2013 Elizabeth E.20 Comments

4-in-art_3

Childhood’s Wide Avenues is a quilt about memory, of fixing in time a place and a feeling. I grew up in the mountain west, in Provo, Utah, a town laid out in a grid of wide avenues, criss-crossed with streets that seemed to me to be wide as the sky, although I’m sure if I went back there now, they would be reduced in size and dimension. But that feeling that I could ride my bike to the top of the street near our house and see all the way down to my elementary school, or across the valley, or to the other side of the world has remained in my memory.

The possibilities were infinite.

A few weeks ago, as I was thinking about this quilt and how to express the theme of Urban/Maps, I found myself traveling down another very wide avenue through the middle of a town very unlike where I grew up: San Bernardino, California. But the boulevard was so wide and so straight and I could see it head in a straight line for miles, up into the foothills, that I felt as if I had been transported in an instant back to an earlier place and time. But it seemed impossible, until I learned that Mormon pioneers, a branch off the same tree that laid out Provo, had also laid out the wide avenues of this town two states away, in the early 1850s. Asked to settle this place far from their original homes in the Utah valley, they laid out a grid of wide avenues, and gave them names like Salt Lake Street, Kirtland Street, Nauvoo Street, and Utah Street. These have all been renamed, but those early pioneers left their stamp on the valley not only by naming the cemetery Pioneer Cemetery, but by etching long, wide avenues into the landscape.

I had heard about memory being triggered by sounds, and by smells, but never had experienced memory being triggered by a sense of space, of a geographical series of landmarks making headway into my childhood memories. For days afterward, I thought of the family I grew up in, and found pictures to place on my quilt that evoked a sense of that time (that’s me, above).

Who populates these fictional houses on my quilt? The large pink house is my parents’ and the block below contains houses for my husband and I, and our four children and their families, while the blocks surrounding that central block are where my sisters and brothers might live. And because all of their spouses will want their own families, I scattered the grid of avenues with more houses, so that the circle of family would have place and space. A dream, of course, as none of our children, nor any of my family live near us. But in my world, in my memory, we are all there: gathering Easter eggs on the front lawn, jumping in piles of leaves, finding tarantulas in the fissures in the hillside, cracking open walnuts, and smelling the lilacs at the end of the driveway — lovely, amber-colored scenes.

Tomorrow I’ll deconstruct the quilt, describing the technical side of how I put it together. But for now, more quilts depicting this theme of Urban/Maps can be found at:

Leanne of She Can Quilt

Rachel of The Life of Riley

Betty from her Flickr site

Amanda of What the Bobbin?

Nancy of Patchwork Breeze

Anne of SpringLeaf Studios

Carla of Lollyquiltz

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This is a finished goal on my Quarter Three of the 2013 Finish-A-Long, hosted by Leanne of She Can Quilt.

It is also Quilt # 124 on my 200 Quilts List.

Quilts

Santa So Far

October 28, 2013October 28, 2013 Elizabeth E.18 Comments

I received two more blocks from my bee-mates today, and it was a good conclusion to a Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day in class.

One boy cried, but not because of anything I said or did (horrors! how could he let English interfere with what he was thinking about as he sat in my classroom?) Thirteen of the seventeen students that managed to come to class were unprepared, madly trying to finish up their assignment as they smiled and looked at me. Four students were perfect. I love them. Three had emailed me that they couldn’t come to class with the following reasons: “I have a migraine and don’t feel so well,” “My mom’s stew didn’t sit so well and I don’t want to be running out of class all the time,” and “I have to be somewhere at 3.” (Our class begins at 3:00.)

After trying for nearly an hour to get the class off the ground, I made everyone sit down from where they were crowding around my desk, seeking help, and said, “You aren’t prepared. Is it my fault? Shall we postpone the next essay?” And then I had what one of our teachers calls a “Come to Jesus” moment, when we re-acquaint them with the Truth, which is that not only does the teacher need to be prepared for class, but the students do too. “And today, you are not prepared,” I said, calling for a break to clear the air, dismiss the crying young man (family problems), and figure out where to go next.

So it was lovely to to come home to the two newest blocks, and I arranged them up on the wall, along with the one I’d made to replace Linda’s. She gets a Full Pass on making quilt blocks because three weeks ago her home burned to the ground. They escaped with their cat and their hard drive and not much else. I’ll think of her every time I look at 54-40, or Fight. Makes a bad day at class look pretty trivial, doesn’t it?

Maybe my bad day really began last night as I worked on the block? Don’t worry. I “un-stitched” it, flipped around the row, and put it back together properly.

I can only write about this now because a good colleague interrupted her grading to listen to me whine all the way home.

Of course, she took my side. (Thanks, Judy.) And doesn’t Santa look great, surrounded by lovely quilt blocks made by lovely friends?

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Four more days until we reveal our Four-in-Art Quilts. Come back and see the art on November 1st.

200 Quilts · FAL · Finish-A-Long · Quilts · Schnibbles

Pacific Grove Blues

October 25, 2013 Elizabeth E.13 Comments

Oh, yes, you’ve seen this before, but only (as the Australians say) as a flimsy, a quilt top. So I needed to get a few projects done and finished and this was next on the list. I was originally going to name it Sand and Sea, but changed my mind to keep it fresh.

This is the block, made in fours and arranged into the quilt. The original post has more information about the pattern, if you’re interested.

I call it Pacific Grove Blues, because of the time we spent in Northern California last month walking along the coastal path in that very interesting town. I don’t have the label for this quilt finished yet, but will, soon. Of course, I visited the fabric store that was there, Back Porch Fabrics; look for the review of that in an upcoming post.

It also hearkens back to an earlier quilt, titled The Blues of Carmel, made from a fat quarter purchased there, and homage to my mother’s blue blue eyes.

We watched these waves every morning, trying to get to the walking just before sunrise. A peak experience, as my Dad would say.

It can now join my growing stack of Schnibbles on top of the guest room armoire. My husband keeps asking me what I’m going to do with all of these little quilts. I really have no idea. Table toppers for holidays (especially the last one, that’s all patriotic)? Doll quilts for the granddaughters? (But I’ve already made them all doll quilts.)

What would you do with a bunch of little quilts? Any ideas, besides stack them up and enjoy them? We’ve all heard quoted a million times that factoid from the book by Malcolm Gladwell about how it takes 10,000 hours of practice to get really good at anything. I figure by cranking these out, I’m keeping those 10,000 hours of practice alive and going. I don’t really know how much longer I will continue to do these Schnibbles, but I have to say that Carrie Nielson of Miss Rosie’s pattern company always has solid designs and colorations, and I can always keep learning something new about how to piece something, or put a combo together, or be exposed to a new block and its possibilities. I like keeping my options open.

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This is one completed project from Finish-A-Long, hosted by Leanne of She Can Quilt, Quarter 4 of 2014’s goals.

This is quilt number 123, on my 200 quilts list.

Quilts

America Is A Tune: October Schnibbles Quilt

October 20, 2013October 19, 2013 Elizabeth E.11 Comments

America Is A Tune (it must be sung together)
finished October 2013
Quilt #122 on my 200 Quilts List

I was making this quilt all during the recent embarrassing shut-down of our country. It was embarrassing because I’d been thinking about the ideals that began our nation, and I felt that no matter what your political persuasion, the sacrifices of those early leaders would pale in comparison to the sacrifices being made by those now congregating in the halls of Congress. And perhaps because they made those sacrifices, maybe those early leaders recognized the fragility of the nation, and worked hard to get it going and keep it going. The title of this quilt is from Gerald Stanley Lee, a clergyman writing at the time of World War I, and I think it kind of expresses what I would hope we, as a county, could embrace again: working together.

Okay, enough on that, but I am really happy the shut-down is over.

Clover Schnibbles

Sherri and Sinta chose Miss Rosie’s new pattern, Clover, for our Schnibbles this month. I couldn’t face making all those teensy blocks, so this was my plan:

So I cut the center “flower” blocks 3” square (finish at 2.5″). Then cut a bunch of 1 3/4″ squares and sewed them into a four-patch, which would finish at 3″ square, too. I randomly picked these measurements, and so also include how I constructed the side setting triangles and the corner triangles.

And although it happened again: this pattern included no cutting instructions for those of us who don’t buy gobs of Moda pre-cuts, this brilliant design is all Carrie Nielson, from Miss Rosie’s Quilt Company, so get the pattern before you start.

What prompted this was a visit from my son, who is a political animal–eats, drinks and sleeps politics. Somewhere in a chest of drawers out in the garage was a little T-shirt I’d bought for a grandchild at the Senate Office Building when we had our sabbatical in Washington DC. And when looking for that to give to him (so his daughter could wear it), I found this tea towel, with some of Washington DC’s landmarks.

My favorite one, the World War II Memorial isn’t on here, nor is the World War I memorial, which is hidden off to the side of the Lincoln Reflecting Pool (on the left, as you face Mr. Lincoln).

The backing fabric is an ancient fabric from Susan Winget. I’d been saving it for a patriotic quilt, and it now has found its home. I quilted it in a cross-hatch design, while listening to The Light Between Oceans, by M.I. Stedman. I have three hours to go and I’d better get going on quilting last month’s Schnibbles, so I can finish the book and talk to my mother about it.