Crossed Lillies, Riverside Sawtooth, and Halloween

October 31, 2021October 30, 2021 Elizabeth E.7 Comments

Although the title has three subjects and in a particular order, I’m going to reverse them, starting now.

We need a Halloween quilt and this one, made by Tracy Cox using my Sun and Sea Pattern, catches the mood of the day. I love her use of spooky prints! I have corresponded with her for some time, and met in person at PIQF held before the world shut down. She lives near my old stomping grounds in the Bay Area, so it was fun to hang out with her and admire her prizewinning blue ribbon quilt.

Here’s my version of this…of course! you say. I remember. It’s just so different in different fabrics, which is one of the magic tricks we quilters do. We are really good at this particular trick and don’t even need a magic wand, unless that’s what you want to call our rotary cutters.

The next one is Riverside Sawtooth, a quilt that was featured in QuiltMania in issue #163 (July/August 2020). It’s finally time for it to hit the pattern shop!

I was asked by Brenda if she could purchase the pattern, and I realized I hadn’t put it back up when it was time to do so. And then it was revise revise and spruce up, because I’d also made it in the Before Times — before I knew sort of what I was doing in Affinity Publisher. Both the program and I have made strides, so I updated what I could. It’s for sale in my pattern shop.

Lastly, it’s Crossed Lilies. This is probably the most complete pattern of my Pattern Lite series, and could probably sell for more, but it’s the same price as all the rest: less than a bag of Halloween Candy, less than an upscale chocolate bar when you are sick of eating all that candy, and way less than the price of a good rice bowl, when you are totally sick of eating sweets.

I had many inspirations, but mostly this stems from the pillow series I’ve been doing this year. You know I wasn’t that keen about October’s pillow kit that came in the mail, so I made Mister Pumpkin. And then I kind of liked this month’s kit, but it was a pumpkin (again), so I had to do something different.

I like the mixing of the fall tones with the deep aqua blues, and these pillows are all fun to quilt, before I back them and bind them. This pattern is also for sale in my PayHip shop, if you need a fall pillow.

But I could wave my quilter’s magic wand, spend an afternoon, and have something completely different for spring, or Christmas, or in red, white and blue for summer.

The magic is all up to you, my pretties!

Happy Halloween!

Other posts about Riverside Sawtooth:
Finished Quilt Top
Finished Quilt, binding and all

300 Quilts · Patterns by Elizabeth of OPQuilt · Publications

Made to Withstand the Proof of Time

July 12, 2020July 13, 2020 Elizabeth E.22 Comments

As quilters, we have an relationship to time. We begin something, knowing it won’t be done for days, or months or even years. We work towards a daily or weekly goal of finishing the quilt, even though we might sometimes abandon the effort. But there is always this gap from beginning to end.

I started this quilt in December 2015, the design inspiration taken from an antique red and white quilt I’d seen in a quilt show. I couldn’t figure out how that quilting sister from 150 years ago put her quilt together, so I modernized it, and then in January 2016 sent the instructions to a bee I was in, asking them to make some blocks. Then I made more blocks, thinking about how that woman so long ago might envy our ability to have such an array of fabrics, to sew like the wind on our modern machines, to have such a distant circle of friends still gather together in a quilting bee.

I wrote about the finished quilt top, and then it sat. Time passed.

I wrote a pattern, but when QuiltMania accepted the quilt for publication, I took it down from my PayHip shop.

Time passed. And then some more time.

This week I received this picture in an email, along with the picture of the cover:

From December 2015 to August 2020 is nearly five years. In that time I’ve counted off changes in our family, health issues, deaths in our family, births and birthdays, personal highs, and personal challenges, a pandemic and now extremely grateful to have a quilt published in a respected quilt magazine. And to quote a common phrase seen in our quilty culture: I have #allthefeels.

Which brings me back to that photo at the top of this page. Several designers and architects were asked to “reflect on a changing world, their creative process, and the future of design.” I enjoyed reading their thoughts, as they echoed some of my own feelings about the creative life. Here’s two:

Pierre Yovanovitch (Provence, France) said: “I try to look at the silver lining and see this as an opportunity for a creative reset, taking a pause from our overly scheduled lives to tap back into what inspires us.”

Milanese designers Laura Sartori Rimini and Roberto Peregalli, who designed the room of plates at the top of the post:

“Regarding the future effects of this pandemic, on one hand it has been recognized the importance of the house as a center, a place of the soul in people’s life. On the other hand, the inevitable economic impact that will follow this situation will, we hope, generate among people the idea that the house isn’t just an object that follows the trends to be discarded and replaced for the next upcoming thing. You should aim for an object of beauty, made to withstand the proof of time.”

I guess that’s why we quilters are willing to start a quilt in December and nearly five years later, see it completed. That’s why we pick out fabrics and squirrel them away, knowing that sometime in the future — maybe even in a pandemic — we will pull out the projects we’ve collected and start the long process in the midst of the distraction, the sorrow, the uncertainty.

And as always, we will send our quilt out into the world as a veritable declaration of hope, our handiwork created to withstand the proof of time.

Happy quilting. Yes, especially now.

200 Quilts · Mini-quilt · Quilt Patterns

Summer 2016 Goals

May 20, 2016May 17, 2016 Elizabeth E.12 Comments

To introduce my newest goal, I need to talk about my new pattern covers. I made them in a new software I’m trying to learn, Affinity Photo, fearful that any day my upgrades on my Mac will render my old copy of Photoshop more obsolete than it already is. And no, I don’t want to pay a monthly fee to use their software (are you listening, Adobe?) I just heard that Affinity Photo is launching a beta version for PC users, too, although it was developed as a Mac software. So this is the first of my summer goals.

They also have Affinity Designer, which I’m also trying to learn, but since I don’t know Adobe’s Illustrator very well, it’s like banging my head against a wall. When my friend recovers from getting her daughter married off, I’m going to ~~bug~~ ask her to teach me a few things.

To keep reading is another summer goal, and this was the latest book I finished, while quilting up a few things for my Riverside Sawtooth post. It set me down so carefully in time and place. No, it’s not a grip-you-by-the-throat novel, but a quiet one, filled with well-drawn characters from a time in our past. I listened to it on Audible, which I would recommend, as the narrator really gets the sound of the voices and it adds another dimension to the story, I think.

Can I mention Summer Events? Here’s about the only political statement I’ll make on this blog: we recently (and sadly) lost our ability to have a primary election here in California. We’d all been so excited, actually asking everyone “who are you going to vote for?” and really getting interested in politics in general. We are one of the final primaries on the Presidential Election Schedule, and for once, we were going to Have a Say! Except now we aren’t, because of the recent events (which has made great theater, I have to say). So, hope everyone else in the United States had a great time voting–as usual, our votes won’t count. H o w e v e r. . . I will be watching the conventions. After teaching Critical Thinking a few years, and having my students watch the conventions and have them analyze the speeches, the rhetoric, looking for the logical fallacies and spotting all the weakness in candidates’ arguments, I wouldn’t miss it for the world. It’s going to be a long, hot summer out here, and hey! we need something to compensate us for not getting a Primary Election.

And it that’s not enough excitement (!), we can always watch the Brazil Summer Olympics, although with all the talk lately, it may end up being like our primary. Click on the link at the end of the post to see this colorful Olympics design in action.

In other news, my garden is growing well, I’ve got a few more projects in the pipeline, but my main quilty goals this summer are as follows:

1. Finish My Small World.

2. Quilt Shine: The Circles Quilt

3. Quilt Riverside Sawtooth

4. Keep working on this quilt. Remember this? It was one of the units in the New Hexagon Millifiore Quilt. I’m halfway through, and my friend Laurel is all done with hers. And her quilt is gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous, so I need to perserve and Be A Finisher. (However, notice I didn’t say “finish this quilt,” but instead wrote “keep working on this quilt.” I am reasonable.)

5. Finish this quilt top, and if possible get it quilted, too.

6. And… this one, too.
I am all done with the hand-stitching. Now just to figure out the borders, and get it quilted.
Easy, peasy. We are coming right along in our Quilt-a-Long, with Step 5 coming up on June 2nd.

Other summer goals:

7. Be a good citizen and follow the national political process. Every other week ought to be about right.
8. Visit my kids and their kids. And my parents. And my husband’s family. That’s about eight car trips right there. I’d better work on #4–if only to have some hand sewing for car travel.
9. Celebrate my one-year anniversary of recovering from my surgery. I think a night in front of the TV would be appropriate, in my nightgown with hand-sewing on my lap, to memorialize where I was last year at that time.

10. And oh, yeah. Vote in California’s Primary. I’m so excited, yes yes yes.

200 Quilts · Quilt Patterns

Riverside Sawtooth, a finished quilt top

May 7, 2016May 2, 2016 Elizabeth E.17 Comments

Riverside Sawtooth, the name I’ve given for this original block of mine, has been finished — or at least the top has. It is a compilation of bee blocks from the Mid-Century Bee, as well as several of mine. I started making these in the Alison Glass blues fabric, but trying to describe what color of blue that was to people all over the United States was a challenge: I finally settled on “painter’s tape blue.” I like this quilt not because of that color and that block, but also because it’s a scrappy two-color block. Have a bunch of greens, or pinks, or reds that need to be gathered together into a quilt? This would work great.

Through the process of arranging and cullling and making more blocks to balance colors, I had enough blocks for another small mini.

The genesis came from seeing a similar antique quilt, but that maker had done a more traditional construction (and sorry–there was no name on that old quilt). I wanted to see if I could make it as a block, the sawtooth incorporated into the construction process. It took me several weeks of working on it, then testing it. I wrote up the pattern and sent it as a test block out to my beemates and incorporated their tips and tricks into the pattern wording. Now thoroughly tested, I tweaked the pattern and at long last, have it available for download in my shops at Craftsy and PayHip (for EU customers). The pattern includes lots of detailed photos and walks you through it the process, so it’s good for anyone’s set of skills, beyond the what-is-a-rotary-cutter-and-how-do-I-use-it barely beginning level.
Riverside Sawtooth_small2

Here’s another mini full of full dotty blocks. I loved working in this tonality of blue — hey, I love blue in any tonality — but the inspiration of Alison Glass’ fabrics kicked me into finding blue fabrics that coordinated with hers. The large quilt (72″ square) is in the line-up to be quilted, and then I’ll probably label it and get it up on the 200 Quilts list, but for now, I wanted to make it available to you, if you want to try your hand at an updated fun version of a block.

I’ve been working on a few more patterns and I’ll roll them out one by one over the next several weeks, as I get the typos expunged, the photographs completed and then uploaded for purchase. Riverside Sawtooth_small4