Oh, The Places I’ve Been!

January 18, 2014August 17, 2025 Elizabeth E.12 Comments

Well. I’m exaggerating a bit.

I went into Los Angeles to meet my sister, who was accompanying her husband for his treatments here, in the Saperstein Center, at Cedars Sinai Hospital. I’m including this photo so my mother will know what it looks like. It’s a comfortable room, with private bays all along the sides of the main room. My sister and I curl up in the comfy chemo chairs (that aren’t being used, of course) and talk while we wait to visit with him. But this time while he was in treatment and couldn’t be visited, we first went to lunch at a favorite place of mine:

Sycamore Kitchen, which has very inventive and delicious food.

Then to The Grove, where we hit Barnes and Noble because I was looking for Quilty Magazine, because I’d just hit print:

My gingham quilt was featured in “Girls on Film,” paired with Dorothy in the Wizard of OZ.

Here’s a better look at it, and here’s the blog post about it. We didn’t find the magazine; my issue came a couple of days later in the mail.

And then Nordstrom’s where just seeing these makes my feet hurt. The heels on the left remind me of my mother’s “spectator” pumps, worn for years and very stylish.

Better.

Then back to the hospital. We later had dinner at a lovely little Italian place, then it was home for me, as we were both tired and she had to drive to her hotel.

Another place I’ve been is my local community college, where school started. (The white blobs are where I whited out each student’s name.) This ought to give you a representative sample of who is in my classroom. I finally have a great class! (Intro to Literature) and I’m more excited to teach this semester than I have been in a while.

I’ve also found a few minutes to spend in the sewing room. No, I’m not playing in the Economy Block Sew-a-Long. The pretty pink, yellow and chocolate square-in-a-square blocks are for a friend’s baby quilt, and I’ve already sent them to the quilter who is putting it all together. We used Red Pepper Quilt’s tutorial *here.*

I’ve already made a quilt out of the (officially known) Square-in-a-Square block, in my quilt “Into the Woods,” (number 103 on the 200 Quilts list, shown below), so I’m squared out. The block in my quilt above is 9″ square, larger than the baby blocks, and I drafted it in my quilt software, QuiltPro.

This is the block for January for the Always Bee Learning Bee. Toni of Hoosier Toni wants to make Christmas quilts for her children’s bed, and I thought her choice of the SpiderWeb block was great.

This is like the one we made a couple of months ago for another bee; the tutorial is found *here.*

This is for the Mid-Century Modern Bee, for Linda of Buzzing and Bumbling. Her house burned to the ground right before Thanksgiving last year, so we were happy to make her house blocks to help her re-create her life in a new fashion. This is my own design. I’ve got a PDF file of the templates here: *Hyde Park House*, but I have to warn you that since it’s a 12″ block finished, some of the templates “fall” off the page, and you’ll have to figure it out the measurements. What I did was measure the templates, then write the measurements down on the paper. Then I used that as a guide for cutting out the pieces. Somehow I ended up short on the height and had to add another strip of green on the bottom. Just don’t be too precious about this and you’ll get through. Hey, it’s free and untested, so Buyer Beware.

Lastly, my mind has been in Budapest, Croatia and Slovenia, places I hope to go to this summer. The challenge is when you are in lots of places, it’s sometimes hard to figure out where you need to be. Today I needed to be here in my sewing room, finishing up the Amish With A Twist 2 quilt top (next post).

And often when you are too distracted with your head in many places, you fall into the procrastinating habit. I had a student from my last class write to me, as she was worried about trying to overcome her habit of procrastination (although her habit is very slight, truthfully). I told her I sometimes ask myself “What do I want to have done before this day ends?” and sometimes that helps. Other times it is just not wanting to face that dreaded task every day, so you finally find the resources to get it done.

Although you might think this doesn’t really apply to us quilters, I think it does. Sometimes we put off tackling the really hard tasks and instead do our bee blocks (Ahem.) Other times we have sketched out a terrific quilt, but are seduced by the latest trend on Instagram (Economy Blocks) and let that pull us away from doing the hard work of designing and figuring out the quilt in our head.

An article in the New Yorker noted that “The essence of procrastination lies in not doing what you think you should be doing, a mental contortion that surely accounts for the great psychic toll the habit takes on people. This is the perplexing thing about procrastination: although it seems to involve avoiding unpleasant tasks, indulging in it generally doesn’t make people happy.”

So I’m trying to figure out which place I should go next, which direction I should head in my quilting. Shall I fall back on something easier to do than what I have to (“we often procrastinate not by doing fun tasks but by doing jobs whose only allure is that they aren’t what we should be doing”) , distract myself by buying more fabric (judging from the recent Instagram De-Stash, a lot of people have been doing this one!), or simply surf the web some more to get so many ideas, I can’t possibly make them all in my lifetime (“many studies suggest that procrastinators are self-handicappers: rather than risk failure, they prefer to create conditions that make success impossible, a reflex that of course creates a vicious cycle”).

Ultimately, it comes down to Getting The Work Done: “Since open-ended tasks with distant deadlines are much easier to postpone than focussed, short-term projects, dividing projects into smaller, more defined sections helps.” And aren’t most of our UFOs the result of procrastination?

So get yourself a notebook, break down the quilt you want to make into smaller steps, and check them off as you go. It also helps to set a deadline–try the Finish-A-Long if you need a little help with that; because of that I finished several dead-in-the-water quilt tops, surprising even myself with twenty-four completed quilts in 2013. Not all of these were begun and finished in that calendar year, but that’s when they came alive. I’ll close with some lines from one of my son’s favorite books, “Oh the Places You’ll Go,” by Dr. Seuss:

On and on you will hike
and I know you’ll hike far
and face up to your problems
whatever they are.

You’ll get mixed up, of course,
as you already know.
You’ll get mixed up
with many strange birds as you go.

So be sure when you step.
Step with care and great tact
and remember that Life’s
a Great Balancing Act.

Happy Quilting!

100 Quilts · Quilts

Harvest Weekend

November 9, 2013January 10, 2026 Elizabeth E.12 Comments

With pumpkins and tawny hues and brown grasses prevalent in the colors at this time of year and in the Northern Hemisphere, falling temperatures, it triggers the idea of harvest: cutting the wheat, gathering the last of the fall vegetables, All Is Safely Gathered In, and that sort of thing. Well, what constitutes a harvest?

It all starts with seeds, a planting of an idea, a sowing of labor with the yield some time off in the future. An idea, like beginning to learn how to make Amish quilts from a book, as I sat in the scorching heat of a Dallas Texas summer many years ago, sweat running down my back reading Roberta Horton’s Amish Adventure.

I had escaped to the back porch for three minutes peace from the marauding hordes of hot tired children in watching some movie on the VCR, steeping my mind in the stillness of these stunning quilts.

Strong graphic design and the muted, yet brilliant, colors enticed me, and I began small, with doll quilts, experimenting in the shapes, the colors. At that time the best we could hope in terms of solid fabrics was a mix of cottons and polyester-cottons. Purists would gasp now, but we had just barely graduated from using cardboard templates with taped edges to cutting out the lids of margarine tubs to use instead.

Roberta Horton’s book, first published in 1983, rocked my tiny isolated world of quilting.

I moved from doll quilt-sized quilts to a larger wall quilt, still unfinished. And then to a larger quilt, laid out in rows in the corner of my bedroom for weeks, while I refined the gradations of color.

I had drawn out Sunshine and Shadow on graph paper, trying to figure out the coloration, mimicking what I saw in fabric. This was early in my quilting career: all of my quilts on this post are numbers 10 and 11 quilts on my 100 Quilts list. I also made a faceless doll to match what I’d heard were common in the Amish country. And then, Amish Quilting was the first quilt class I ever taught, in a small shop in Arlington, Texas, now defunct, and yes, we made a doll quilt, and yes, we used Roberta Horton’s book.

Back to the Sunshine and Shadow, I figured out the borders, sandwiched with flannel (as she noted that Amish quilts were flatter than our fluffy renditions) and I began quilting it by hand, criss-cross, and then cut paper patterns for a twined-vine border design.

The seed planted by Horton and her quilts and her book is now in a second harvest, if that’s possible. Last summer, C & T Publishers put out a call for Amish quilts of all types to be considered for a new rendition of An Amish Adventure. I submitted my photographs and had one quilt accepted. The book has now been released and is titled Amish Quilts–The Adventure Continues, and it as much a celebration of that first book in C & T’s publishing history as it is the style and cultural contribution of the Amish quilt–certainly a forerunner to today’s modern quilts.

Here’s my doll quilt, made so many years ago. I now consider it as an entry in the first round of strong bold graphic designs and solid fabrics. In the book, mine is right next to Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr, of the Modern Quilt Studio and Craft Nectar blog. I certainly did do a happy dance in the kitchen as I opened up the package.

You can get the book from the C & T Publishing website and from Amazon.com. My mother already has her copy, so I know it is shipping. If you haven’t had a chance to make yourself an Amish quilt, perhaps now is the time, before too many more harvests stride past.

I like to think about harvests, as to me it always indicates a leap of faith somewhere. At some point I made a quilt, and now can “raise the song of harvest home.”

Quilts

Quilting. . . and a Sticky Question

September 15, 2013 Elizabeth E.13 Comments

It begins here. I printed off a picture of my quilt, then took a fine-point sharpie to “quilt” in the designs I thought I would do.

Then this happens. Over and over, on each row. For every hour quilting, I spent half an hour unpicking. Wrong color thread. Wrong pattern. Wrong shape. Wrong style.

Finally, things start working.

I admit it. The last row got stippled, as I was pretty tired and my shoulders hurt from quilting.

I put it up on the pin wall, but something’s not working.

I pin up different centers–hard to see on this small picture, but I know it’s the center. I call in my resident quilt expert. “Looks nice,” he says, in the same tone of voice as when he answers the question “Does this make me look fat?” I know now what is wrong, but I am loathe to admit it. I turn out the light and go to bed.

In the morning, I pick up my seam ripper. Unpicking dense quilting gives you a chance to think. A lot. Here comes the sticky question, but first the set-up. I own a good-quality Viking/Husqvarna sewing machine, but it was purchased before we all started quilting so much on our quilts, even though it is called the Quilt Designer. After three tries, I finally found the foot that works for me, the tension, the everything to allow me to quilt on my machine. But my quilting doesn’t look like Judi Madsen’s on The Green Fairy, or on other blogs that I haunt. And I know why: my domestic sewing machine, without a stitch regulator, cannot compare to what a long-arm can do. Or even a baby long-arm. It’s just me and the thread, me and the pedal, my hands moving supposedly in sync with the speed of the machine.

But it’s not enough anymore, is it?

What was wrong with the middle was my quilting. The shape of the fern, the stitches that hover near even, but occasionally veer into very small or a bit-too-big, the whatever–it was just wrong. Free-Motion Quilting — the REAL free-motion quilting, has its warts, showing the artisan behind the tool. But that’s not what we are after anymore, is it? We want perfection: no bobbles, no wobbles.

So after three hours of unpicking, I am back here. And the reality of where our industry is heading today is that if I want a quilt that I feel I can enter in a show, or display wherever, I’ll have to step up on the quilting front, because no matter how you look at it, the ones with the bigger, more extensive machines with stitch regulators will always have it over me on my little domestic machine. Because of the limitations of my tools, I don’t know if I can make it right.

But I’ll try.

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Quilts

From Baskets to a Museum–more quilts in Utah

September 13, 2013September 10, 2013 Elizabeth E.1 Comment

While visiting relatives in Utah, just before I tucked into the new semester of teaching (which would explain why I have been AWOL for a couple of weeks), my husband and I headed to Salt Lake City’s newest museum: The Natural History Museum, high up above the University of Utah. It is a gorgeous museum, complete with artifacts, history and dinosaur bones.

But I was more interested in the woven baskets in the Native People’s exhibit. I guess I’m fascinated by color and pattern, in all forms.

Which is why I found this piece of art, in the Millcreek Library so fascinating. That library, where my sister-in-law Annie works, has a Senior Citizen’s center, a gym, a cafeteria and of course, art.

This appears to make of some sort of plasticized material–almost like a thin linoleum, cut and sewn in quilt patterns. I loved it.

I had brought up my Polaroid Quilt to show my mother, and my dad held up his finger as if to signal a pause and came back carrying this: a genuine, bonafide Polaroid camera. Of course, there’s not any film to be found for it anymore, but I thought it deserved a picture with the quilt.

On the way home, we headed to the Springville Art Museum, which hosts a quilt show every August. I snapped a lot of photos, but here are just some of them. This one is titled Juxtaposition and is by Marilyn Landry Toone, and was inspired by her daughter’s choice of fabrics from her “fabric stash of 40-plus years.”

I’ve Had the Blues is made by Jacque Thompson and quilted by Kim Peterson, and was made “entirely out of scraps using one-inch strips.”

Detail of the beautiful quilting.

Kristen Roylance’s quilt Posy Patch was made using a modified disappearing 4-patch block, and was quilted by Molly Kohler. The dimensional flowers were charming.

I snapped this one without noting who made or quilted it–it’s really beautiful and detailed.

“Look, honey,” I said to my husband. “A Dear Jane quilt!” “Dear what?” he said. The title of this one is Dear Jane Invites Hannah for a Dutch Treat, and is made and quilted by Shirley Olsen. It was a masterpiece and earned an Award of Excellance from the judges.

Marion McClellan’s Bottle Cap Bangles is a fun use of hexagrams and fussy-cut fabric. She also quilted her piece.

This quilt, Zinnia Basket, was made and quilted by Patti Jacobs, from a Kim Diehl pattern. Apparently she used to think that quilters were nuts to “spend time doing hand appliqué when you could sew the pieces on with the sewing machine,” but now is a dedicated lover of appliqué.

I really liked the border.

Kaye Evans quilt, Just One Weed, is named for the dandelion hexagon in the middle of the quilt. It was quilted by Sue McCarty.

The quilt display was merged with a display of giant critters made out of auto body parts, springs, doodads and whatevers.

I liked Tim Little’s Camera Bug the best.

My husband knows just what to do at a quilt show: become like a camera bug and start taking photos. Many of these photos are his–he’s a delight, but was probably relieved that there was no vendor mall here.

Ladies of the Sea was made by Karin Lee Crawford and quilted by Judy Madsen. It was a pattern from Sue Garmen depicting famous rigged sailing vessels from around the world.

Detail. I have to assume that the quilter is really Judi Madsen, of Green Fairy fame, but I could be wrong. It was gorgeous in both the making and the quilting.

And to finish up this little quilt show, a Log Cabin quilt. Megan Christensen made the quilt, but didn’t identify the quilter. The title is A Good Use of Scraps, inspiring us all to get going on our scrap baskets!