Archive

One thing about growing up in a small town where your next door neighbors were your grandparents, you had 5 sets of great aunts and uncles within a few blocks and countless numbers of your mother’s cousins spread throughout the town; you really couldn’t get away with much. By the time I made it home […]

It’s kind of nice to have an excuse to go back home every now and then. This weekend I went back home to get some paperwork for the move. (Over Labor Day we went back to CT to do the same for Paul and had a nice visit.) While I was at my mother’s visiting […]

Some block patterns are interesting in and of themselves, others only take on their true character in interaction with other squares. Irish Chain, the pattern I’m working now, is certainly interesting on it’s own but becomes far more dynamic and complex in a set when you see how it interacts with the squares around it: […]

When I work on the squares for these quilts I follow a very simple process. I cut out squares of interfacing that have an inch overlap (for these 9”x 9” squares I cut out 9 roughly 11” x 11” squares of interfacing). I stack the interfacing out on the table next to the pile of […]

I figured out the shapes and numbers for the pieces for the quilt for Elsie. Cutting out the pieces is always tedious and difficult, but tedious and difficult in a good way. I’ve always enjoyed geometry, it’s part of what I love about traditional block quilts. I get to get out my rulers, protractors and […]

There was only one thing that Elsie loved more than the Red Sox and that was her family. Elsie lived just down the street from the house that I grew up in in Veazie, from the house that she grew up in, with her husband Tex and her daughter Holly. Elsie was the type that […]

With my great-aunt Elsie it wasn’t Tom Gordon but Dennis Eckersley that she was in love with, but no one ever wrote a book about The Girl Who Loved Dennis Eckersley, even if he did have, as Elsie claimed, the best hair in baseball. I finished up Lib’s quilt. I really enjoyed finishing up the […]

Had a wonderful week of printmaking. Since I knew I wanted two sets of 7” x 7” of monoprints I decided to use an 8” x 8” inch aluminum plate that I had to make things a little simpler for me. (Aside about printing plates: In traditional printmaking a plate is the matrix, often metal, […]

I’m finally over the head cold from hell! I finished the whipstitching around the edge of Nan’s quilt this week. Done and Done. This part is always slow going. I fold the interfacing under and whipstitch it down by hand. It is a very slow, meditative process. I rather like it, it allows me the […]

The trim pieces are all prepared and I removed all of the old ones from the quilt. I did a test with one of the new and improved catalog pieces and found that they are now strong enough to hold up to having the ribbon woven through them. I had to give some thought as […]