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!

Creating · Free Quilt Pattern · Patterns by Elizabeth of OPQuilt · Quilts

This and That: No June Gloom, please.

June 15, 2025June 16, 2025 Elizabeth E.11 Comments

First off: Happy Father’s Day to the men in your life, and especially the men in mine: my husband, Supreme Quilt Holder, three sons, and one son-in-law, then a gang of grandsons. Here’s a early photo:

(Missing: three more grandsons, three more granddaughters. I just love all those little girls in their beautiful dresses.)

There’s this phenomena about June of every year, when the deserts heat up, drawing cool, moist air further inland from the coast. The locals have a name for it, which I hate. I just call it Reprieve from the Heat for Another Month, or something. because I do love the cool mornings. Yes, I do.

My friend Mary gets too much of this cooling layer and we are always mentioning it in our correspondence, me complaining about the coming heat, and her bemoaning the too-cool summer. Welcome to Sunny California.

So here is my first Posh Penelope for June: all sunny and bright, in a good kind of way.

A little less sunny, but still bright.

Full out fog in these, with all those blues. I’m going to have to ramp up with brighter colors next go-round, but I do like those toothbrushes on the blue fabric.

Here’s the group so far. 41 blocks are planned, and I’ve made 27, more than halfway. But I probably said that last time. You should see Carol’s stack — they are wonderful!!

Here’s Sherri’s Block of the Month for June. It’s a fun series and I’m using all her fabrics (picked up one more new last week). But alas, the Friendship Star and I are NOT friends. Nor do I like these stars:

I also don’t like sour gummies or the smell of coconut shampoo, but I don’t think that has anything to do with quilting.

So I substituted this: I have no idea what Sherri has planned next, so I may be moving other centers of hers around, but since I’m allergic to the star she chose, here’s my spool of thread.

And here’s the back of it. It’s fast: sew the sides on, sewing only between the dots. Then sew from the dots to the corners.

And yes, here’s your free PatternLite. And you’re welcome. Click below the spool to download.

Six-inch Spool_OPQuilt Download

Here are the six I’ve made so far:

This is me, making a mess. It’s good to document messes once in a while. I was learning a new way of making circles. (Last post) I know these photos drives one of my friends crazy; she is a very tidy sewer, but her sewing room is also about 4x as big as mine; a lot of stuff gets piled up in mine. I have learned to focus and ignore the periphery, a skill I learned when I had four small children and had to get the quilt done:

Like this one, from the Early Years. My son Chad now has this Sunshine and Shadow quilt — somewhere, he says — but even if it’s lost in his attic, I still have photos. Machine-pieced, hand quilted with a layer of flannel inside…not batting.

For a fun click, head to this write-up of the kimono exhibit at the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia. The article shows both traditional and more modern kimono.

I think I kind of jumped the shark a couple of posts ago, writing about sewing nightgowns and stuff, but things are going better this week. The New York Times must have known I needed a creative tune-up, and published a five-day “Creativity Challenge.” (If you don’t subscribe, here’s a link to the first article.) In it they note that “Research links creativity to happiness and well-being, and a 2021 study found that older people who participated in creative activities showed less cognitive decline than those who did not” (Passarella, NYTimes).

In an earlier missive, Elizabeth Passarella, the writer, said “You are all creative in some way. There’s a definition of creativity that researchers use: generating something novel that is also useful.”

Generating something novel that is also useful. I need to print that out and tape it to my sewing machine. The first exercise was doodling:

We had to begin with a circle and go from there. I’m do not consider myself a hand-drawing-artist, so I did the best I could with a screen and a mouse. Don’t know where that second drawing came from–maybe from the state of politics in our nation today (doesn’t it make you crazy, too?).

So take a listen to Amie McNee if you need a shot of “why should I create.” Her TEDx talk was something I happened on this week, and I found inspiration in many things she said [words in brackets are mine]:

We need to be at the piano [or the sewing machine] making our art more than ever as we navigate these incredibly difficult things. Art is not just for kids; art is not just for adults…we need it now. [One reason is that] creativity is the missing pillar of self-development. [Another reason is that] when we create, we have agency.
Another beautiful reason to create is because it reclaims your most valuable resource…our attention in a society that profits from you being stuck on your phone. We are a culture of consumption and we’ve forgotten how to make. We need less consumption, more creation.

The act of making art is inherently generous.

I’ve been slowly working on this. There are a lot of thread changes, and some unpicking, as it’s been a while since I was at the quilting machine. I don’t quilt every day, so I like to keep track with the labels.

That plastic bag in the Messy Room photo? I pulled it off this pile of gorgeous goodness from Stash Fabrics. I wish I could say I was influenced by all the pansies I saw in Krakòw, but the truth is I ordered these before I went. But maybe I could see into the future?

In the NYTimes creative series mentioned above, I especially liked how they talked about a form of daydreaming:
“You’ll be more likely to capture original ideas if you’re in “atypical salience processing mode,” which is a fancy term for a state in which you’re focusing on the unconventional. Look at a piece of abstract art, or stare out your window in a way you usually don’t, paying attention to the space between buildings or the shadows formed by trees.”
(You can read the article with this gift link: here)

Happy Day Dreaming!

Layer your summer salad into a bowl:

Cook a cob of corn in the microwave, wrapped in wax paper, for 4 minutes. Run under cool water to cool it down then slice off the cob.
Tomatoes (smaller and flavorful like Campari tomatoes)
Romaine lettuce, sliced
Bit of arugula
Radish chunks
Cucumbers, cut in half lengthwise, then sliced 1/3″ thick
Chunks of rotisserie chicken
Focaccia (my favorite recipe is here — I make it every other Saturday night (10 minutes to whip it up in the evening and in the morning, 10 minutes to prep for the baking, plus rising time).
Drizzle Lemon Vinaigrette over everything.

Anywhere you travel in Europe, they call arugula “rocket” for some reason. Here’s a little joke for you from the internet.

300 Quilts · Something to Think About · Totes and Purses

Don’t Ask Me — they all just crept in!

January 12, 2025August 23, 2025 Elizabeth E.15 Comments

It’s traditional for everyone on the planet, not just quilters, to make a list of projects they want to complete in the upcoming year.

No, it’s not.

The rest of the world makes resolutions. However, we quilters make lists of things we want to make but knowing we can’t possibly get them all done. But still. We do it anyway, as it’s not something we can really help. This year I thought I’d try something different. Smaller bites.

The first one up is a Block of the Month from Sherri of A Quilting Life. This way, I reasoned, I can still list a project but since she only releases the block once a month, I’ll never be behind.

Now, stop that laughing.

Here’s the fun thing. I DO keep a The Master List of Quilts I Absolutely Must Make and “Make a quilt with Sherri’s fabrics” has been on there for several years running. Above are my fabric options for this quilt. Bingo!

I chose Clover Hollow, a stash from way too many moons ago, largely because it had a jelly roll and in her cute demo she mentioned that she’d used one. (But — um — not the grey bits.) If you want to make this quilt, here’s the link.

I picked up these cute project bags at Target for $3 for the duo, and in went my project.

The next one happened when Carol was cleaning out and suggested to me that we do a quilt together, since we’d enjoyed our last one. She went through a couple of her options, and I leapt on this one. Again, finishing this (from a class I took at Road to California in 2020 and we all know what happened to THAT year) is on The Master List of Quilts I Absolutely Must Make. Bingo, again! Carol and I have a goal of 1 block per week or 4/month, and I’d already made four in that class I took, so I’m running ahead for 2025, but just for a minute.

I did finish something:

A Totoro Bag! (L: the front. R: the back, but I changed the tail) And yes, this was also on The Master List of Quilts I Absolutely Must Make. (I do not discriminate. I include quilty bags on that list.) I purchased this in 2019 from a vendor at Road to California, and I knew that if I toted it in, they’d take my photo for their Instagram feed. If they come this year, that is. We’ve had a few fires (ahem) and so many are impacted by the horrors of this. I watch the news daily, and even the diatribes that come from people who have never been in a fire driven by 100-mile-an-hour winds. Folks, there is almost no chance at fighting those — the firefighters have to get creative and try other methods. I hope they never see some of those posts on social media criticizing them. Or as one commenter called it:

I wish I’d had this term when I was raising children.

The wind pushed all the smoke out to sea, but when it stopped blowing, and the firefighters could use their air drops, the smoke came our direction. We live inside the white circle in the image just above, so we are in no danger, but that doesn’t stop us from checking our news feeds to see how things are going. They are going sadly, for so many people.

Maybe we are this stage, already?

I celebrated another run around the sun by buying my birthday cake at Costo, then being taken out to lunch by my husband, accompanied by Donald Duck. Just kidding about that. DDuck was leftover from the Christmas decor at a local Peruvian restaurant. We went to a Peruvian restaurant because I lived in Peru with my family when I was twelve, and they make the best chicken ever, along with the yummiest Pollo Saltado. If you don’t know what that is, it involves the said chicken and french fries. Go get some.

And lastly, time for some real life. I generally always keep the area around the sewing machine straightened up, but the photo below is of The Other Side. There are multiple reasons for this. We’re coming up on the first anniversary of my father’s death (on National Polka Dot Day, no less), and I realized that a block of two years was taken out of my life as I attended to mourning for both my mother and my father — thank you all for your words of wisdom and kindness on this. This mourning was pretty much a huge job (it’s just how I’m put together). Some health struggles also popped up here and there (of course). And many times, I just didn’t have the energy to even walk in there, let alone deal with the mess. I have many more apologies I could make, to friends I just didn’t have the energy to call, or letters I didn’t write. But I’m approaching the other side of this experience and I know that from what you’ve told me, I will always miss my parents. However, I’m catching glimpses of a more engaged life, and I want to head that direction.

It’s good to document stuff like this once in a while (click to see another one).

But the GOOD NEWS is…it’s now fashionable to have messy rooms! Or so says an article in the New York Times, titled “In Defense of Messiness, “written by KC Davis (and you can read it for free with this link). I love this paragraph:

“I’ve been preaching my gospel that being messy is not a moral failing for years now. But I want to take it one step further: Messiness can be a good thing. All communities should have some messy people. We are not all meant to be Joanna Gaines. Some of us are Molly Weasleys, our homes bursting with the cozy chaos of a loving family and cabinets packed full of odds and ends. We cannot be Martha Stewart because we are Thoreau, so consumed by capturing Walden Pond’s essence that we need someone else to bring us meals and do our laundry. And try as we might, no amount of clutching our items to see if they spark joy will turn us into Marie Kondo’s closet, for we are Albert Einstein’s desk.”

I like tidiness, I really do. But if I waited to clean up my mess, I would never sew. And the world would be poorer for not having one more Totoro tote bag. Right?

So I’m launching myself into not ONE, but TWO monthly projects, and at this point, I’m in good shape. Happy Messy rooms. Happy Polk Dot Day. Happy 2025!

( a snowy Elizabeth, because we’re supposed to be in winter, not in raging infernos)

A photo of Albert Einstein’s office – just as the Nobel Prize-winning physicist left it – taken mere hours after Einstein died, Princeton, New Jersey, April 1955.

And you can now find me on Bluesky. Come on over!

300 Quilts · Happy Old Year Ending (Wrap-up) · Patterns by Elizabeth of OPQuilt

Happy Old Year Ending 2024

December 29, 2024August 23, 2025 Elizabeth E.15 Comments

Can I squeeze just one more quilt in here?

I’ve made several quilts with prominent flowers in my tenure as a Quilter Who Just Keeps Making. Scroll quickly and you’ll have a flower show in deepest December.

Daisy Star Quilt (#76) Whoa, that is Early Days (2009). Fabric from Lakehouse inspired this one.

Lyon Carolings (#88) which is kind of flower-like.

Colorwheel Blossom (#140) where I totally riffed on a popular image (on our phones).

Tell me this little quilt (Eclipse, #189) doesn’t look like a giant sunflower…I think it does. But after it was pointed out to me once, I can never not unsee the pair of eyes in the upper right staring out at me.

And then I went big:

Annularity, #203, with rainbow petal-like structures around the outer edge.

Serious little dainty flowers in #217: Field Flowers.

Okay, maybe this is technically not a flower (not even the title says so), but with those yellow petal-like pieces on the outside, I’m going to slip it in here. Choose Something Like a Star (#238) is held by a couple of angels from Berlin.

Sunny Flowers (#246) is still a favorite.

Heart’s-Ease #52 (went backward for this one). Made in a Ruth McDowell class, and if you know who she is, you are fortunate.

Heart’s Garden, #264, from 2022, when I ran a Mystery Block on here, because we were all going stir-crazy from being shut in for a year or two from covid. No worries, we are almost done with the flower show.

Blossoming, which I take naps under because it is just the right size (#267).

Sunflowers for Kim (#268) –guess who that is?

A pattern from Yvonne, which I titled Primula Ballerina (#274); made to keep me sane while we remodeled our kitchen.

Blossom (#276) but you also have to see all the variations together for a class I taught on Zoom, during the pandemic:

I think all of these have been given away.

Lollypop Trees are definitely floral, with all those Kaffe fabrics. This is #132, from 2014.

Coquelicot (Poppy) which is #290, and has an earlier variation in just a simple layout.

Twilight Garden (#292) which I stitched while on the Total Eclipse Trip.

And now, of course, the last flower quilt in the parade: Giant Flowers, #299. It’s about 52 inches square.

I had a fun time quilting this, moving from the radiant design I talked about here, to the lattice work of the garden fence, and then I got stuck on that outer border. I had something really ornate planned, but in a conversation with Yvonne I mentioned that while looking at #fmq and #customfmquilting and other tags, my eyes began to glaze over. I can quilt a thick carpet of flowers and vines and whatever on a quilt, but on that afternoon, considering this quilt, it all just seemed like #toomuch. So I paused. While in a church service a few days later, I began studying the carpet (tell me you’ve done this). I did listen, but was also trying to figure out how to replicate the flower-structures. Here’s my drawing, from when I got home:

Yes, it’s still dense, but it’s a different visual than the tightly packed swirly vines and petals in the interior white section. I like the larger scale, but it was a bit of a leap for me. I have to ask: if our quilts aren’t a place where we can experiment and try something new, then why are we making them?

Giant Flowers, showing its checked backing, is quilt #299. I wanted to make it to three-hundred quilts this year, but didn’t quite hit it. Looks like I have something to look forward to at the new year.

I’ve been playing around with this one on the Affinity Designer artboard. Maybe this piece has legs, and can go the distance? I first heard that saying from a professor, when he commented on my short story we’d just discussed in class. I was getting my undergraduate degree in Creative Writing. That short story, turned into a novel, which is now hidden in my bottom drawer after my father said: Don’t Write About Me.

But we writers mine our lives for ideas, for stories, for the beginning strands of a narrative which will take us where? we don’t know. I should have said to my Dad, if you don’t want to be written about, don’t hang out with a writer, but he was my Dad and it wasn’t a command so much as a wish, so I listened. In the end, it turns out maybe I didn’t have the nerve to bring all the bits and pieces of my life — even if disguised — into a novel. Some of my classmates did, and I admired them. But writing can be hard work, and as you saw from the beginning of this post, I’m very happy to take a walk among flowers.

I can do it literally, or just in pieces of cloth and color. The title of this blog tries to capture this idea of staying curious and seeing where dabbling in pieces will lead: it could be a short story or a poem, or a quilt block, or a quilt.

Yes, I make all sorts of pieces, occasionally.

Happy Old Year Ending!