Carrefour Quilt Show 2025: Intro and Part I

October 27, 2025October 27, 2025 Elizabeth E.12 Comments

I’ve now been to the Carrefour Quilt Show in the Alsace area of France three times, and this is start of my third write-up of that amazing experience. The Carrefour Show is like none other: set in four small towns in France (some with castles, like the above photo), in the Val D’Argent, or Silver Valley, where silver was once mined.

The show draws from all over Europe and the quilts are as varied as the quilters in all these different nations. I am often surprised by what I see. I am never disappointed.

This post covers:

Espace Commercial
Venue 1: Theater with its traditional antique quilts
Venue 2: Carrefour Contest, one of three exhibits in that space

I have a main page where I link all the posts, so you can see the ones from before, as well, and see why I have loved going back over the years. Of course, my husband Dave is hugely enthusiastic, too, and he took many of these photos. This year we were able to spend the better part of two days there, and took a zillion photos. That means that when I post — which I will do sporadically over the next while — there will be lots of beautiful quilts to see.

We lodged this time in Colmar, a lovely town that feels medieval, but has all the comforts (like pumpkins with words).

As always, in many places there are reminders of the Great War (WWII) like a tank in the park which we passed by as we walked to get our rental car. We picked that up early on Thursday morning, September 18th, the day the quilt show started, and drove past the castle in the first photo into the Val D’Argent, stopping for some breakfast croissants on the way (it *is* France, after all!).

After being caught in the traffic, we parked near this very old building (1912), picked up our tickets and walked up into the town, seeing store windows all decorated up with quilts (I know it’s hard to see):

Espace Commercial (Shopping and Vendors)

I knew what I wanted to do first: Shopping Area.

Vendor tents are set up along the pathway to the souvenir stand:

Stickers, pen, exhibit book…they don’t have a bag this year, so in we go to the Espace Commercial.

Click to enlarge any photo.

1-My favorite bag place: ABCDaires. I’ve already made the little orange bag in the far corner (see below).

2- Christine, from Chifonie Studio has really lovely jewelry, made from art clay. She also has lots of buttons, and fun decorative pins.

3- Torneria Germans Castels sells wooden things from Germany. This booth had so many cute wooden buttons and fixings.

4- Le Atelier D’Eoie had so many cute things in their booth (they were so friendly, I took two photos of them). I bought a kit for a stuffed animal and a small quilt.

The other photos are crowd shots; I only took photos where I had permission. Here’s the thing: could I have found some of these things in the US? Possible. But I hadn’t ever seen them before and loved how European everything was (duh) and it — as Marie Kondo would say — sparked joy. (And I just love those orange pouches!)

I also loved the booksellers, and I bought a book in French, because why not? Last year I made a purse from a Japanese book, translated into French and it came out just fine. If you click on that link, you can also see a pouch made from the kits from ABCDaires.

On the side of the Espace Commercial, they had these two wooden cutouts: the one of the left celebrating thirty years of the Carrefour Patchwork Show, and the one on the right, a figure that denotes the Alsace region, and is seen everywhere. Okay. To the quilts!

Venue 1: Theater in Sainte Marie-aux-Mines

In case I didn’t mention it, the main town is Sainte Marie-aux-Mines, and that is where we will start. This year, it was all on the bottom floor and the display was traditional, Amish quilts.

The Carrefour organizers bring in scaffolding and partitions to hang the quilts, as it really is set in an old theater. Below is a series of photographs; click to enlarge. I did try to get title cards for every quilt.

Click to enlarge any photo.

Now a slide show. Click on arrows to advance; unfortunately, you cannot click to enlarge the slideshow photos.

After we finished with the downstairs, we went up…we love this staircase!

Peeking through the glass in the locked doors of the balcony, my husband took this photo of the exhibit below.

Venue 2: Osmont Pavilion

The section of the Pavillion where the quilts are hung is one large space, and the quilts “divide” it up. The contest theme this year was Avant Garde, and here is a slide show, with title cards. (Click on arrows to advance; unfortunately, you cannot click to enlarge the slideshow photos.)

We’ll see more of Tania Tanti’s work in another post, as she was a featured artist, but I wanted to say that nothing on this quilt is pieced. She starts with a white piece of cloth and paints her shapes, then quilts them. Details below; click to enlarge.

I found this one to be intriguing, and moving, as it is a tribute to her husband.

I showed you the cut-out close-up first, then the total quilt.

(I did mean to put all these in the slideshow: technical difficulties!)

The quilting on this was so close together, and it sculpted the cloth, moving the eye over the surface.

A tumble of houses, a view to the landscape.

Olga Stang’s work, Monet’s Pond, intrigued me, because of the construction of all those little two-sided squares.

Then they look to have been laid on another cloth, and folded to mimic petals, or vegetation on the Monet’s lily pond. Tiny beads are placed at the intersections.

She believes we’ll all be doing more recycling in the future, and if it turns out like this, it will be a good goal.

As always, I owe a lot of these photographs, as well as the ability to take this trip, to my husband Dave; I’m most grateful to him. There are two more exhibits in this venue, but that will be on the next posting about Carrefour. I’m just now starting to process, to revisit the photographs, to think about my visit. Watch for the next one!

Summer Flowers • Quilt Finish • Etc.

October 11, 2025 Elizabeth E.12 Comments

The title of this quilt pattern is Posh Penelope, and as one commenter said, “That is a name that needs to be changed.” So I did.

Summer Flowers is quilt #307 and measures 80″ tall by 69 1/2″ wide.

At first we tried this building for the photographs (click to enlarge). Love the building, but it’s not really working. And I had my QHH (Quilt Holding Husband) grab it by the side. Whoops! (This is how I knew the label was sewn on sideways.)

It only took me seven pieces of fabric to audition for the binding, and I sewed it on by machine. There are times when you just have to get it done.

We got the direction correct on this photo. Even though I sewed the label on the wrong way, I’m not changing it. So, this is finished!

You are all aware, no doubt, of the corrupted digital files saga in my life (see the highlighted pink, above.) After multiple calls to Tech Support, I have resigned myself to the fact that all the files with little down-arrows are pretty much gone, and these date from last month to way back into my history of making little digital files.

So when I’m on Low Energy (lately, that’s been a lot), I sit and go through them, dumping them one-by-one, then when the trash on my computer gets filled up, I dump them. Gone. Never to be seen again.

It looks like I’m fully in the Age of Subtraction, my Dad would say. For years I created and compiled and wrote. Now I’m dumping all that unceremoniously. I lost about half of my journal files. The ones I could recover, like when I had four teenagers in the house, were hard to read, frankly. They were filled with sturm und drang (aka “storm and stress”), and nobody wants to remember that time of life. Reading backwards into my life has triggered some realizations.

One: I chose well in deciding to be someone who makes things, if that can be a choice. I have donated dresses I made long ago, but they served their purpose and maybe someone, somewhere is walking around in them. My family now runs when they see me coming, but I have managed to give away quilts, too. That work lives on until it doesn’t, but at least I won’t have to be the one dumping them in the trash.

MFA graduate picture and a post with some reflections on my life

Two: I also chose well when I decided to chronicle my life in writing, which is a choice. You are perhaps used to my public-facing writing from reading this blog, but I have come to learn that personal writing is something done just for yourself. That in this kind of writing, we struggle on the page to capture an event, and to write it for our future selves, or for our families, if they don’t throw it all in the trash (just trying to be realistic here). And now that I’m way beyond the baby-toddler-children-teenager stage, I’m glad I have some writings to remind me of how busy a mother of one (or few) can be. I’m glad I have some written evidence of that to which I gave several decades of my life.

taken at a time when I started doing Zoom workshops

Three: Taking photos has surpassed the writing. Is it because we always have our phones on us? When I first started shooting photos of my life as a young mother, it would take three months to use up one roll of 24 shots of film. That was by design, as film was a cost, and developing was a cost, and I was always broke. Now we can capture 24 images on a walk around the park in the morning and compile thousands of photos in our digital drives. Interestingly, I didn’t lose any photographs in this Great Subtraction, as they were not part of the save-to-drive-that-may-have-been-corrupted-which-was-then-uploaded-to-the-cloud-which-was-probably-a-faulty-process-in-itself.

Four, and last: Quilts last. Scrubbing the house doesn’t. Laundry doesn’t. Our digital lives won’t. Our real lives will someday end and fade away, but a grandchild or someone who is the recipient of our charitable work can wrap themself in a quilt and know that someone’s hands made this, a transfer of self via cloth and stitches.

Keep quilting–

Too Many Other posts about this quilt:

Road to California 2022 • Part I
Writing Poetry
Incomplete
Don’t Ask Me — they all just crept in!
March 2025 This and That
If I Do This, Can I Do That? April 2025
Flying Through Rainbows
This and That: No June Gloom, please.
The Zeigarnik Effect: the Power of the Unfinished
Summer Flowers (aka Posh Penelope)

Thank you, dear!

300 and Beyond · New York Beauties · Patterns by Elizabeth of OPQuilt

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!

Clothing · Free Download

The Dress Does not Make the Quilter

July 20, 2025July 21, 2025 Elizabeth E.12 Comments

Well, actually Rabelais said “The dress does not make the monk,” but since I’m not a monk like Rabelais — although I do sit monk-like day after day at the sewing machine — I prefer my variation for the title of this post.

There comes a day when an occasion arrives and even though Thoreau cautioned us to “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes,” it was time for a new dress for a granddaughter’s wedding, even though I’m aware that I’ll be mostly on the sidelines as this newer generation Does Things Differently so I need to get with it and adjust. But still, maybe it’s that I wanted a new dress? And that my sister had been making a lot of outfits from Merchant and Mills patterns and I Wanted In On The Fun.

*The Beautiful Bride, from her IG account. Her mother is a photographer, so they snapped the bridal portraits early.*

IDK how you feel about me sliding a dress post into a quilting blog, but this is what I’ve been doing with my sewing machine and time. The idea was to make a wearable toile out of each of the three patterns I was auditioning. Which meant that the dresses made from the flat folds picked up for cheep at M & L fabric shop probably wouldn’t fit me as well as I would want them to, which is why I’m not modeling them in this post. I also remember why I leapt over to quilting long ago: The Fitting Question. I remember at age 20 feeling like I was as large as a barn. And at 30, I thought I was zaftig. Oh, honey, I now want to say. You looked fabulous. The problem is that I was trained to sew on that 20/30-yo person, and now this person (some years down the road) is not who I know how to sew for. But I’m trying.

Dress Number One

I need to take out most of the extra ease I put in, but I wore it out anyway, along with beads from a quilt show. Jewelry rights a lot of wrongs.

Dress Number Two

Again, I put too much ease into this wearable toile (again, struggling with fit), and if I choose this one to make for the wedding, I’ll make it more like the pattern. I got all my patterns from Hart’s Fabrics in Santa Cruz, California and they came lickety-split, especially considering that Merchant and Mills patterns are from England.

In five years of owning my sewing machine, purchased in December 2020, I’d never used my buttonholer. I had to watch a video online to figure out how, but it worked like a charm the other night.

Dress Number Three

I’m still in the middle of Dress #3. It’s a Simplicity pattern I’ve had forever, and is a plain-Jane shirtwaist dress. I found two lengths of this blue-and-white fabric in my stash. Guess I forgot and ordered it twice, but it came in handy when I needed to make one more wearable toile. I’ve re-cut the sleeve piece twice; I like my sleeves a little longer — like to my elbow — but we’ll see how this turns out.

Pockets

I don’t know about you, but to me a good pocket is mandatory. I traced off an old pattern to make myself a basic pocket pattern, and here it is for a Free Download:

OPQuilt Pocket_Pattern Download

It basically looks like what’s in the photo, above. I used fat quarter-inch seam allowance on the outside edge, but you can cut it larger, if you want.

For placement on your dress, when holding up the main section of your pattern to your body, bend your elbow and figure out where you’d like your hand to slide in. Think also about where the bottom edge will be; you don’t want to be reaching down to get the car keys out of your pocket. Then mark that.

I sew the pocket onto the side of the dress in a 1/4-inch seam, press to the pocket, then serge that section only. After pinning the side seams/pockets together sew about 1″ below the top edge of the pocket piece, then all the way around the pocket, then to a point on the seamline and then down the seam to the hem. Like this:

Serge or zig-zag the raw edge. Or as Merchant and Mills patterns say, “Tidy up the edge.”

You can also stabilize the pocket by sewing it into a waist seam. To adjust for that, grab a pencil, like the one from your Dad’s art box, and draw a curvy line upward. Try to make it match your waist seamline. This is the cheesy way. Watch the following Video (That May Confuse You or Help You) to see it done more professionally than just a pencil line: How to sew a waist-anchored pocket (this also helps you draft your own)

What else?

Whichever one I think will work best will get sewn up into a light blue linen print I’ve been hoarding for a couple of years. Then I think I’ll sew a skirt or two when I return. I’ve seriously neglected my wardrobe the last few years, and I generally hate all clothes in the stores. (Or maybe it’s just trying them on that I hate.) Thankfully my sister is cheering me on, and my husband is an angel and has learned to say nice things about my wearable toiles, such as “You’ve never looked better,” and tries not to choke as he delivers his scripted lines.

I’m skipping my A Quilting Life QAL update post this month, mainly because I haven’t yet worked on it. I’ll just do both July and August together, after I return from the wedding of this lovely grandchild #3. And then I’ll launch back into some of my Economy Block sewing, too, as well as some quilting on the New York Beauties. Oh! and seaming together my Posh Penelope. August will be busy!

It’s heating up here…enjoy your July–