Stella di Natale • Quilt Finish

December 11, 2022December 10, 2022 Elizabeth E.25 Comments

I started this quilt as another class sample for the Triad Harmony quilt pattern. The name “Stella di Natale,” is my version of Star of Bethlehem, but it is also a cake and the Italian name for the poinsettia plant. Every time I make a pattern, I try to do them three ways: the way it came to me, one in a completely different style of fabric, and of course, a Christmas version.

Having come home from my mother’s funeral with a roaring cold (no covid!) and Overwhelmed by Everything, I sat down at the Sweet 16 the next day and quilted away while listening to the latest Inspector Gamache novel, by Louise Penny. The label:

Back in October 2020, this is how it started. It all was about those wedges of flying angels, the last bits of a fabulous Alexander Henry Christmas fabric. The first two images are before the Run to the Fabric Store (I was trying to use my really old stash). I like the last one much better after a fabric transfusion.

I made a video of how to construct this for my Guild Workshop, and these are some stills from that video. It’s all explained really nicely in the pattern, too. If you click through to the workshop post, you can see all their versions of this pattern.

I never quilted it up, because I used it in teaching to show the back — how I pressed the seams, and other questions about that center point (just be bold and follow the pattern directions). But this past week, as I thought about my own personal star in heaven — my mother — it just seemed time to quilt it up. So I did. By the way, that first picture of it surrounded by dried leaves is how December looks here in Southern California, when all the leaves of the wisteria vine coat our patio.

Here’s a shot of another quilt, but in a wintry landscape; this was after the graveside service was over with, and our two boys (now, men) helped hold Jingle Bells for a photo.

My mother was laid to rest where she was born: Paradise, in Cache Valley. Yes, it was very cold that afternoon, but the morning services in Salt Lake City were lovely, the talks heartwarming (all seven of us children spoke), and the scenery at her little cemetery was beautiful.

Here’s another wintry quilt. It’s Shine: The Circles Quilt made up in snowman fabrics and with a unique and playful setting, all done by Linda Kucera. I have a closer look at her blocks in an earlier post. Most of the Shine blocks are free on this website, and the index is found above.

And this happened. I entered two, but only Eris will be in the show. Now I have something to look forward to.

I now close a chapter in my life: that of having a mother nearby to call, to talk to, to share something like the good news about my quilt. I’ve observed from many of you that this may be a long transition. On the morning of her service, I sat quietly in the corner before it began, so bereft, so incredibly sad. My niece Melinda sat down beside me and said “I know there will be times you will want to call your Mother. You can call me, instead.” Her words were a treasure, as was the support from my husband, family, sisters. This past month I also have received many treasured messages of love and support from all of you, and so appreciate them. Thank you all for your kindnesses; it has made this difficult road easier to travel.

Stella di Natale • quilt #271 • 34″ wide x 31″ high

Other posts about the Triad Harmony quilts:

Triad Harmony • Quilt Finish

Triad Harmony Workshop

Secret Garden • a Triad Harmony Pattern Quilt Finish

Spectral Light (aka Eris) • a Triad Harmony pattern quilt

Eris • a Triad Harmony Pattern Quilt Finish

Choose Something Like a Star • a Triad Harmony pattern Quilt Finish

Secret Garden • Quilt Finish

August 3, 2022August 3, 2022 Elizabeth E.9 Comments

What is it about Kaffe Fassett fabrics that pulls us in? The rich hues and full range of shades? The interesting patterns, many from old wallpapers and fabrics? I have a couple of stacks of his fabrics and it’s always a delight when I can pull them out from my shelves and start playing.

Secret Garden, quilt number 235, is the original size of my Triad Harmony pattern, measuring 28 1/2″ by 31 1/2″ and was made for a class sample, since my friend Susan loved Kaffe fabrics. She was the program chair and had me teach this class for their Guild.

After several weeks of lallygagging around — or so it felt — this week I put on the binding and the label:

The quilting goes fast with this size! (Click any image to enlarge.)

It also helped to get back into a Guido Brunetti Mystery, after a long time away.

Here’s another scrappy version.

And a bigger version, Eris.

And the first in the series in Jennifer Sampou’s ombré fabrics. I put them all together in a reel on Instagram. (See my tip in my next post for how I deal with that app.)

Triad Harmony and her sisters. One more is coming…

300 Quilts · Patterns by Elizabeth of OPQuilt · Quilt Finish

Eris • Quilt Finish

May 22, 2022May 21, 2022 Elizabeth E.13 Comments

Eris • Quilt #265
54″ wide by 48″ tall

photos taken at the California Air Resources Board, Riverside, California
sculpture is titled: Spatial Echoes of Breath, by Tomás Seraceno, 2021

Title of Sculpture: There Are Many Idioms About Breathing And Yet
by Kameelah Janan Rasheed, 2021

Since this photoshoot was at a facility that studies the quality of our California air, it was fitting that the idea of breath, or breathing, or air, was prominent in their public art all around the building. We toured the building, picked up the swag from the vendors and displays in the parking lot, the solar panels overhead shading us from the sun. Rasheed’s artist’s statement includes this line: “As a meditation on pacing and temporality, the artwork is a form of preparedness for the hard work ahead.”

Pacing — a steady pace? Don’t overreach? Don’t run faster than you have energy for? Keep up the pace?

Temporality— the state of existing within or having some relationship with time. Lived time (as opposed to clock time or objective time). Temporality is a term often used in philosophy to express the way time is understood, often as a straightforward procession of past, present, and future.

Some background: Love us or hate us, we here in Southern California are keenly aware of our air, and the effects that pollution has on our health. Too many of us live in communities polluted by automobile exhaust that combines with the moist air that comes in off the ocean: smog. Some communities are polluted by idling train engines. We have seen a distinct uptick in air pollution due to our online shopping habits from the pandemic. An increase of warehouses built at the eastern edge of our city, only a few miles from our home means the freeways are now clogged with semi-trucks bearing goods from the ports to the ocean of warehouses that have been built in this area in the last few years.

I have an asthma inhaler in my bathroom drawer; today in the exhibits in the parking lot, one vendor displayed about 10 of these devices, encouraging us toward cleaner driving, cleaner air, and an awareness of our temporality. Keep up the pace. But maybe…move a little faster.

About a year ago, I felt as if I were drowning. I couldn’t keep up the pace. I felt disconnected from time, certainly an effect of the pandemic in our lives. I know I wasn’t alone in these feelings. I tacked a giant calendar on the wall of our garage, and took to marking it off one day at a time. Keeping track. I pared down all interactions and responsibilities to almost nothing. I was choking in sadness, bad air, political pollution, weary to the bone. I am usually the biggest Pollyanna you’ll every see, but at that time there was no breath in me.

When we are stressed, we often say Breathe in, Breathe out. Take in good, let go of that which is exhausted. Find fresh, expel the stale. I decided to make space for new things (Heart’s Garden?), to re-examine what I had in my life, and what I could let go of. I have taken steps to regain my health, and finally feel as if I’m making my way back to myself.

I also found my way back to this quilt. It has been a satisfying period of finding quilts made in a rush, and now taking time (pacing?) to sit with the quilt, find the way to quilt it, to finish it. My husband Dave always finds great places for us to photograph, and willingly holds the quilt, a support in all ways. So it was fitting to photograph this quilt at a place which is concerned with breath, with air. The title, Eris, was a parallel to my inner world last fall, and the discord seems to continue into this year as well, with its Ukranian war, the J6 Committee findings, the ongoing pandemic (and now we are returning to using our masks).

But I worked in Harmony. I appreciated the safety of Order, the constraints of Geometry, the goodness of Grace. But most of all, I acknowledge the gift from the One who loves us all: Creativity.

Take a breath!

Other posts about this quilt:

Pattern is found in my PayHip shop and includes two different sizes.

This quilt had a working title of Spectral Light.
I write about the fabric in this post, stars shining brightly.
There are other, smaller versions of this quilt: Choose Something Like a Star.
Some of the quilting was written about in this post.
The original Triad Harmony Quilt Finish (quilt #234).
I taught a workshop for Coastal Quilters, and they produced a lot of amazing Triad Harmony quilts.

You’ll probably see this design again. I made a total of five different quilts for teaching, and have quilted three of them.

Covid-19 Times · Live-Online Classes · Patterns by Elizabeth of OPQuilt · Zoom

Triad Harmony Workshop

October 18, 2020November 6, 2020 Elizabeth E.8 Comments

A song from my childhood always pops into my head when I start my Zoom classes, bright and early, on Saturday morning. It’s something about “bright, smiling faces” that are “all in their places,” and when you see that class portrait where I cue them all to look at the camera and smile, it certainly resonates. (I like to do a class portrait, giving the students time to compose themselves, so as to avoid that strange deer-in-the-headlights-slightly-tipsy portrait that can happen when we try to freeze a video feed with a snapshot.)

The portrait above is the Coastal Quilters from Santa Barbara, one of those Guild engagements that morphed from in-person to Zoom. Again, I have to say I’m really loving teaching this way, with everyone in their own spaces with their own equipment and fabrics. (Do we have to go back to the other way?) I did teach one Zoom class once where they all gathered in the back room of a quilt shop, masks in place, but there wasn’t the interaction; I really missed the individual conversations that the traditional Zoom set-up allows.

And this is what a busy workshop looks like in reality. Everyone is on task (since I took this unannounced, I have blurred out any faces), working hard at creating their own versions of Triad Harmony. This is later in the afternoon and they had all made incredible progress.

Something I do — which I think is unusual — is a Follow-up Workshop Session, one week later. It’s one of the best parts of the class, in my opinion.

In this Follow-Up class, the students send me photos of their quilts the day before, and I put them up into a slide show. This is my view from my computer, and we all engage in discussing the quilts, the fabric choices, successes, and challenges. It’s a lovely time to hear from the quilt makers, the quilters involved at a granular level in creating these masterpieces. It’s not often that we get to talk like this, and it’s a treasured time.

I wish I could have had you all there. More than once, someone said, I was scared to work with this precision, but it went together really well. Or they’d say, they had a stack of triangles cut and changed out. At that point, several people picked up their stacks and flashed them at the camera. A couple of people had theirs already quilted, some were still finishing up borders, and one quilter had printed off onto paper an image of the fabric she was missing in order to show us how it should look. All in all, the follow-up class motivated them to work hard, and finish up as much as they could.

Enjoy the show!

Sue K.
(*The black is for display only.*)

I try to give something a little extra to each class, and for this class I included four different videos they could watch, with different tips and instructions for making the quilt, as well as a line drawing for use in coloring in preferences.

I also included pattern pieces that would make a larger size, shown here for comparison. I’ve updated the pattern in my PayHip shop, and the pattern now includes the larger size. The fabric line I chose for the larger size is Geo Stones, by Riley Blake.

Thank you all, Coastal Quilters, for a lovely experience!

Behind the Curtain · Patterns by Elizabeth of OPQuilt

Spectral Light

October 14, 2020October 15, 2020 Elizabeth E.19 Comments

My husband is a photographer who specializes in small landscapes: detailed shots of flowers that he finds around our neighborhood. Since we live in a climate that is temperate, we have plants from Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, and even Madagascar, and he finds and captures them all in their exquisite tiny details. The plant above is called Mother of Millions.

But sometimes when you step back, the plant just isn’t quite so lovely. And so it is with quilts.

I had challenged myself to make a larger version of Triad Harmony, which — when it’s figured out — will be added into the first pattern. I had spent hours drafting patterns, printing them out, perfecting them, and finally it was time to try it in cloth.

Fail.

I really thought it was a loser. I had great fabric, Gem Stones by Riley Blake (shown on this post). I thought, well…every quilt starts out as spindly Mother of Millions plant, with their virtues disguised in the making. I wondered if this smaller quilt just couldn’t scale up to the larger version. So I stepped away for a day, a bit grumpy about the whole thing. But I just needed to look at the details.

And the details came down — as so often it does — to contrast. The second tier of triad blocks needed contrast from the outer heavens in which this star lives. I needed to change out some pieces, but now I think it’s on track. I will soon get the borders on, then take it off my design wall to quilt it. The moral of the story? Keep working, make changes and soon the quilt will show itself.

In other news, I had a wonderful class last Saturday with the Coastal Quilters from Santa Barbara, a Zoom class of 19 students. We have our follow-up session this coming Saturday, and their quilt pictures have been coming in. I am most excited about this–this follow-up session is such a wonderful time where we talk about quilts. That write-up is coming soon, as is a giveaway for the new Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns. So stay tuned!

About the name: I had originally wanted to name this quilt Spectra, as that is plural for spectrum, or an array of light. But when I found out that it is the brand name for a breast milk pump (?!?), I quickly changed my mind. I read that car manufacturers go through this on a large scale, as not only do they have to check English, but the car’s name in many other languages as well.

And now, a little light reading:

Happy Quilting!

P.S. Did you notice I changed this triad piece, too? I subbed out the lightest piece for a really dark one — you know, more contrasting — and then I rotated it to put that darkest piece at the lower edge.

300 Quilts · Quilt Finish

Choose Something Like a Star: Quilt Finish

October 4, 2020October 3, 2020 Elizabeth E.

Choose Something Like a Star
Quilt #238
29″ high by 33″ wide

Biography of this quilt

Titles considered
Choose Something Like a Star (from a poem by Robert Frost)
Playful Star (from a haiku by Tada Chimako)
Double Star
Binary Star
Twin Stars
Eclipsing Binary (I really fell down a rabbit hole on this concept)

I don’t often give individual titles to quilts made in a series, but all of the Triad Harmony quilts have such a different look, that I wanted to distinguish them by name.

Fabrics used
All from the stash

Batting
Soft and Bright polyester. I buy it by the roll and cut off what I need for each quilt, but this time I made a “frankenbatting,” pieced together from scraps. This post talks about how I do that.

Thread used in piecing
Masterpiece, by Superior Threads Color: Granite #156 Sometimes I use other threads. As long as it is good quality (not the cheap stuff from the sale bin) I’m happy with it. I am, however, incredibly specific about what I quilt with.

Thread used in quilting
Magnifico, by Superior Threads, various colors (top thread)
So Fine, by Superior Threads, (bobbin thread) coordinated to top thread

Quilting Patterns
After racking my brain, and browsing all the patterns in Lori Kennedy‘s books and my saved Instagram posts, I went with loops in the stars, ruler work in some of the triangles, and a wonky starry border pattern (which doesn’t really show up, which is fine). Choosing a quilting pattern is always a challenge. I have to repeat to myself: The perfect is the enemy of the good. Seeking for the perfect can also be the enemy of the done.

Binding Method
Single fold binding method I did use the glue stick method: after ironing it into place, I stroke it with a school-supply glue stick, pressing it to distribute the glue. Then I topstitch it with some Magnifico thread, matching it to the binding/border.

Label
Put through EPSON inkjet printer, then bordered

Book listened to while I worked
I am working my way through the series by Julia Spencer-Fleming, featuring the Reverend Clare Fergueson and the police chief Russ Van Alstyne, solving mysteries, and set in a small town in upstate New York. These were recommended to me by my friend Bette.

Inspiration
Desire for a cousin to Annularity, to make a smaller version that can be used for workshops.

As you can see, it takes a village to make a quilt.

I still like the name Eclipsing Binary. Below is a sketch of this effect, of one star eclipsing another.

Other Triad Harmony quilts:

Pattern can be purchased on PayHip. Thanks also to my angel friends from Berlin, for holding up the quilt for me. I turned off the comments, as this is just a biography post.