Lorraine Woodruff-Long: Quilting Through Fog

My quilt guild hosted this quilter last month and I have been thinking about her work ever since. On the 4th of July she announced her new portest project, which is related to the 27 Grievances in the Declaration of Independence that the colonists leveled at King George III. They sound eerily familiar to the fascism of today's GOP, which has allowed for the stripping away of many basic human rights protected in hte Constiturion. She is a clever quilter when it comes to protest and she has a foot firmly in the traditional quilting camp, which I very much like. The quilt pictured behind her here is a great example, where her commentary on climate change and the melting of the polar ice caps is dramatic and subtle at the same time. I look forward to continuing to be inspired but the ideas of others and nurturing a more creative me.

Forbidden Words Quilt Project

I just heard Lorraine Woodruff-Long speak about this project, which has been completed and is a quilt that is going on tour. Quilters have always been political and in the current climate, we are starting to feel like screaming is appropriate. Here is the background for this project from their website: A growing list of words and materials is being scrubbed from government websites and documents and flagged for review by federal agencies in an attempt by the Trump administration to remove all references not only to diversity, equity and inclusion, but also to climate change, vaccines, and a host of other topics. PEN America initially compiled a list of more than 250 words and phrases reportedly no longer considered acceptable by the Trump administration, from “abortion,” to “women,” and including “disability,” “elderly,” “Native American”and, unsurprisingly, the “Gulf of Mexico.” The list has now expanded to 384+ words and phrases, encompassing even desirable goals like “safe drinking water,” the mention of which can now result in research grants or other agreements with the federal government getting nixed. Some agencies ordered the removal of specific words from public-facing websites or the elimination of other materials (including school curricula) in which they might be included. In other cases, federal agencies used key words to flag materials for further review or asked staff to limit or avoid their usage. FORBIDDEN WORDS QUILT PROJECT Throughout the Fall 2025, they reached out to quilters, creators and makers to create blocks that will be sewn into a quilt featuring the words/phrases compiled by PEN America that are being flagged by the U.S. federal agencies to ban, limit, or avoid. Text will be created using fabric, letter templates and fusible, and cut out by hand and ironed onto a fabric block. Blocks will be cut from repurposed shirting, ideally from thrift and reclamation outlets or from your own home. THree quilters in my own guild (that I know of) participated in this amazing project. More to come.

Cheryl Arkison: Improv Is My Love Language

I very much enjoyed this talk by a Canadian quilter who spoke to the Sew Squad that is hosted by the incompable Libs Elliot. She talked about the kind of quilter that she is and then went on to explain what it is about Improvisation that really speaks to her. Improv is definitely not my love language, but as she went through the various sorts of quilters it gave me some time to reflect on what kind of quilter I am. The list is as such: 1. Quality Control 2. Replication 3. Artisanal 4. Expressive 5. Improvisational The quality control quilted is all about the control. The seam ripper is always at hand because this quilter is acutely aware of the mistakes and is obsessive about fixing them. They are pinners. They have great pride in the craft of precision quilting. This is decidedly not me--I am attracted to gluing and I do occasionally pin. I also seam rip with more frequency than I would like to admit, but it is needs must, not fixing something that is a tich off. The replication quilter finds kits very appealing. They cannot imporvise even if they run out of fabric. They look for the exact fabric that is pictured in the pattern. While I am a big fan of a pattern, this is decidedly NOT me. I love doing a different color way, and if I run our, or as happened recently, the kit didn't have enough fabric, I just winged it and the other kit I bought I am already planning substitutions for my next one. I am surprised to find that Artisanal is my jam--handwork gets me excited! I love hand dyed and woven fabrics. They warm me. I do have a comfort with wonkiness that is part of improv, and I want more access to that, but I am not there yet, and I am also working on expressive, where I am getting to a point of view and how to tell the story. So her lecture taught me a lot about myself as a quilter.

Libs Elliott and Rebel Tech Quilting

What an amazing quilter, and I recently heard her speak about her process for design. Libs Elliott is a quilt artist renowned for blending computer algorithms with traditional crafts. Her random generator design uses Processing—an open-source coding language—to algorithmically randomize geometric shapes, block rotations, and color palettes.

The Generative Process that she uses, which is open source code, is something that she took our guild behind the curtain and showed how it could work for us. First there are Algorithmic Layouts: The code randomizes variables like block orientation, color distribution, and scale. It outputs endless unique compositions, which she then filters and selects for her designs. Each design is unique--it can be saved as a PDF (which she does, thousands of times over), but once you click on it again, it is not coming back. You can add a lot of elements, like how much of each color you want represented, and and what elements to add, and how much rotation you want, but then it is randome. Then comes the Human Element: Once a digital pattern is finalized, she uses it as a precise map to cut and sew fabric, introducing beautiful "human" imperfections into the mathematically driven design. She may use only a small portion of the pattern to make a quilt, and she may change things, it is really more of a starting place than the destination, but it is so cool. Now I have to get this pattern and see for myself.

Kaffe Fassett In The Studio

Ok, the writing in this is maybe not five star material, but it is very good, and the book goes about descibing in pictures and in words the life work of Kaffe Fassett and it does a spectacularly beautiful and broad sweeping job of it. I am taking a class which takes you into his home and studio through Quiltfolk--until I signed up for it, I did not realize just how actively he travels and teaches. He is basically a giant in the area of textile arts. He is an iconic fabric designer, and he works in needlepoint, knitting, and quilting. He has been a working artist for over 50 years and has been a prolific author as well. In 1988 he became the first living textile artist to have a one-man show at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. The exhibition attracted such crowds that the Museum doubled attendance figures during the run and the exhibition toured to nine countries afterwards. This book takes you through his living space, which is one of the things I love to see--where people lived and worked. When I am on the road, those are intentional stops for me. Carl Larssen is a Swedish painter known for painting his family, and his home is adorned with painted doors and walls that are evocative of his work--the same can be said for Fassett's home. He worked on this book during the pandemic, when we were all home more or less, and has an intimate feel to it, maybe aided and abetted by the amount of time he spent there that year. If you are a fan, do not miss this--he even manages to include a few patterns, even though that is not what the book's primary aim is, and if you aren't, take it out of the library--you might become one. His fabric isn't exactly my cup of tea, but it is vibrant, distinctive, and I have used small bits of it in quilts to add pop and color. Truely a one of a kind artist.

Gradients in Quilting

Johanna Masko talked to our guild about how to think about, design, and operationalize gradients in our quilting. Use of gradation is a prominent part of modern quilting, and there are a lot of ways to think about it. One is the paint chip aisle at the hardware store. There each individual chip shows a particular starting color, and then what happens when you add more and more white to it, or conversely more and more black. This is a familiar and maybe one could say conventional way to look at gradation. Masko advocates thinking about it more broadly--she uses gradents in the background of this quilt, which moves across a large area, and then in each of the dresden plates, she uses it more subtly. I really like the details of her design process, and what she thought about as she was designing this and other quilts that she has made. A couple of take aways from her lecture for me was to use the color apps that are available in order to better train my eye to correctly identify the gradient--so if I want to incorporate it that I can do it right. The other was that when developing a quilt, to think about if this will be a part of the design or not, to think more intentionally about design, and to figure out not only where you are going, but where you want to go. Once again, I feel like the more I learn the less I know--that I figure out more of what I didn't know but am also more aware of the vastness of what there is to know.

Robert Bosscher: Pushing Boundaries

I am a bottomless pit when it comes to watching lectures on quilting in general and modern quilting specifically. This speaker is a frequent flyer at QuiltCon and several of my guild mates recommended him--I saw him in conjunction with Libs Elliot's Sew Squad. There were two main points that he covered--the first is what is modern quilting. You have to have a working definition of it before you can talk about pushing the boundaries of it. As you might imagine, there are a lot of ways to look at it, going all the way from close to traditional quilting, with some modification in pattern and fabric, all the way to pure are quilts. Then he launched into some of the artists that he enjoys following. My favorite amongst them that I know was Bisa Butler, which he calls an artist working in fiber rather than a quilter, which I agree with, and the favorite that I was unfamiliar with was Kaitlim Rim, who does exploded blocks in a whimsical manner. He is well worth checking out if you get the chance, and he talks about a lot of different things in the modern quilting realm.

Andrea Tsang Jackson: Transparency

I watched a lecture given by this artist, who trained as a gemologist, and who has translated that into quilt blocks for all 12 of the birth stones--using just 5 fabrics to create the gem effect--reallt remarkable, but that is not all. She does large public art instillations that are quilt inspired, and the lectire I listened to was one where you use on like color tools to get a transparenct effect, which was mind blowing. When I see those quilts in the transparency category at QuiltCon I thought they did it themselves, and maybe some of them do, but you do not have to guess--you can feed in the two colors that will cross paths in your quilt and it will tell you the color that would result in sucha a mixing. More on that later when I play with it a bit. More on this artist first. This is her artist statement: Andrea Tsang Jackson is a Canadian-born textile artist of Chinese descent based in Kjipuktuk / Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her work takes the traditional craft medium of quilting and applies it to a contemporary context, often using bright hues and bold graphics. She abstracts intentionally accessible imagery, inviting points of connection from the viewer to spark discussion and inquiry. Clean and crisp, vibrant but not loud, Andrea’s work uses solid-coloured commercial fabrics, found textiles, hand-dyed and painted fabrics, and more recently Tyvek. Andrea’s work often celebrates community and collaboration, and explores ideas of home and belonging. The rich history of quilting also heavily influences her practice; she sees it as an extension of community across time. Andrea strives to push the limits of the quilting medium — and other textile media — by exploring scale and dimension and moving traditionally domestic objects into the public realm. Through her public art in recent years, Andrea’s work has explored the translation of textiles into other media – drawing, architectural mesh, and acrylic carving. This act of translation continually poses questions of what textiles mean to us as communities and how textile work exists outside the home. The boundaries around folk art, fine craft and fine art are a continual source of enquiry in her practice as she operates within all of these areas.

Laura Hartrich: Liner Notes and Labels: Learning to Love Quilt Documentation

This artist presented her case for upping your documentation game to my quilt guild, and she made a great case for both why you should do it and how you can do it. I took a class with her at QuiltCon 2025, jusy monthd after one of her children had committed suicide and her quilt about them was in the show. So, emotionally complicated and she did not hide behind the messiness. Instead she disclosed, talking about how she was struggling with it. She is a storyteller and no all stories have hsppy endings. She taught me about more than a fast way to embroider letters that dat.

Laura Hartrich is an award-winning quilter who lives in Oak Park, Illinois, just outside of Chicago, with her family, and she graduated mid-career from a master’s program in occupational therapy. Her work explores themes of reflection, acceptance, time, and memory, and is driven by a deep love of color, texture, and meaning. A documenter of her life from a young age, she immediately connected with the tradition of labeling quilts and has been a dedicated labeler ever since. When she speaks about quilt labels, she emphasizes motivation over technique, believing that while many strong techniques exist, labels are often neglected without the right mindset. She is passionate about sending her quilts out into the world with their stories firmly attached, an idea that resonates deeply with many other quilters. Her key is to journal. She likes to do it long form, but you can do virtual, but the key is excessive documenation and then translating some of to the quilt label.

Ramble

This is month three of the Ramble quilt block of the month club. I have really been enjoying Tara Faughnan's instructional videos that go along with this. She is a great teacher, and having taken an in person class with her, heard her key note lecture at QuiltCon, as well as doing this BOM, her personality comes through and that is a good thing. I love the design, and I also love that it is a gentle skill builder. I believe it is billed as an intermediate pattern, and it is I think confident beginner friendly. The end result is more pleasing to me than her quilt Transverse, which was her last sew along. She points out in the first video that a medallion quilt has some risks associated with it, the first of which is that it is a medallion quilt, so with each layer outward there is a risk that it won't fit. Then she shows you the differences that occur if you sew an exact 1/4" and a scant 1/4" seam, if you press the seams open or to the side, and how quickly those differences add up when you are building in ever increasing outward layers. So the design has some fudge built in to it to allow for that. What a great idea! Then there is the fabric--I find the need for so many colors to be over kill, but then that is what she is known for--the colors. So maybe all is forgiven except that it is hard to sort and tag them all, and I am positive that by the end there will be design modifications. Already by month three I have some adjustments that have occurred, and the truth be told, I am not that great at following directions, and her written directions are a bit on the sparse side, so that is a perfect storm waiting to happen. The fabric is from the Windham Artisan fabric line, which has different colored threads in the warp and the weft, which gives it a beautiful depth and feel for a "solid", mostly because it isn't quite that, but oh my goodness, the fraying. If that drives you crazy, pick a different facbric. I have been sewing with Art Gallery Fabric Solids and they are so much the opposite of that! In any case, this is a bright, fun, and not too hard quilt that I am enjoying putting together, and hanging out virtually and not in real time with Tara Faughnan is icing on the top.

Quilt By Night

Becky Halvorsen, family medicine doctor by day and quilter by night. I first came to know her because she issued an FPP design for the Rebel Loon at the height of the violence in Minneapolis, and being a member of the Minneapolis Modern Quilt Guild, one of our sew on Zoom sessions had one member finishing hers, one talk about the one she had made and put on a bag to take to QuiltCon and another member piecing one that day. She was a quilt hero to us. And she make the pattern available without charge. The same is true for her rainbow heart and same with this FPP for the classic VOTE logo. She also has a lot of fun whimsical patterns on her website and in her Etsy shop, including letters, which you can use to make a VACCINES MAKE ADULTS and other things that seem obvious but are now seen as political. Here is the thing. Basic decency is now seen as radical. Lying about absolutely everything is happening on our governmental web sites. It is incumbent on all of us to speak up. And some of what is coming out of the fiber art world is absolutely amazing, so check her out, download a free pattern (she has one with stars that I am eying a scrap friendly and not too hard as FPP goes, so right up my alley), buy a pattern (I am a true amateur when it comes to FPP so I am building a library of alphabets and hers is a great one), and support democracy.

The Art of Protest

QuiltCon 2026 was full of quilts that expressed opinions about human rights, the erosion of democracy is the United States, the disappearance of people of color, and as a member of the Minneapolis Modern Quilt Guild, the terrorism being rained on us by our own government is very real. Quilting has always been about expressing yourself, and there has always been an a strong element of standing up for human rights and human dignity. The current administration has tried to make that seem political, but it is really about morals and values. I completely identify with the meme "Radicalized by Common Decency", which it turns out, is not all that common these days. Here is what the internet says about the meaning of that: "Decency is behavior that conforms to accepted standards of morality, respectability, and modesty. It acts as a foundational, everyday moral baseline for social interaction, fostering dignity through kindness, empathy, and respect. It is often described as the "common decency" required for proper, polite, or ethical, respectful behavior." Not happening in the White House these days, and no one, not my elected officials at least, are saying boo about it. I call or write regularly and not once have they advocated the decent thing. Our schools are gutted and we have successfully made Iowa an unsafe place for women of reproductive age to live, we are sealing our own fate by our lack of common decency, and we are now gutting our workforce by being unwelcoming of immigrants who do the labor that our citizens shun. In the meantime, we protest. I bought this quilt at QuiltCon because I know the woman who made it. She was an exchange student in Germany many years ago, and she was impressed by how strongly they teach their hisotry to avoid repeating it. We in the US are trying to bury ours, and instead it will bury us.

Peter Byrne, Modern Quilter

My quilt guild had Peter Byrne do a trunk show and wow, what amazing quilts he has made--and quite varied. He was a hair stylist in Toronto for 30 years, retired and was looking for a new creative outlet. In 2017, he joined the Toronto Modern Quilting Guild and when he walked into his first guild meeting, he had never quilted a quilt. He has come a long way since then--and after seeing his work, I am considering taking one of his virtual weekend quilt workshops to do a deeper dive into his process.

Peter’s quilt Starring You won Best in Show at QuiltCan 2020. It is an amazing feat on so many levels. First, it is full of negative space. Composed of white and black fabric, the central eight-pointed star is machine appliqued onto an all-white background. Three of the star points were cut away and sliced further into 90 bits and pieces each, appliqued – again by machine – in a way that mimics an explosion. All of the quilting was done on a home machine, and the black lines you see? Those are quilted with black thread. Think about it: with that kind of contrast, you just can’t make a mistake.

Organic Shapes with Carolina Oneto

First off let me say that the Modern QUilting world is a big and generous world. I was able to participate in this virtual workshop with a teacher who is living in Buenos Aires with a quilt guild in Rochester, all while I am in yet another location, and it worked out great. I have not been able to get a class in person with Carolina at QuiltCon, and so the chance to do this was too good not to take. She has had some really gorgeous quilts in that show, and while I did not have a need to learn this technique--I already have so many UFO's that I have joined not one but in 2026 will be adding another one to be able to stay on task and quilt more, so that I can continue to get inspired and do more and work my way through my truely impressive stash of fabric. Oh, and also so that I might have way to much to do that when I retire I am relieved to be able to spend more time in this hobby. The class we all took was an improv round shapes class. Think building cairns with stones, but they are more colorful, and do not have to balance on each other. The thing I like about this expereince beyond the actual learning and expanding my ideas and skill set is that it is so convivial to be with strangers in a virtual environment and create together. My own quilt guild, which I am deeply invovled with and invested in, is in a city I do not live in--so I know most of the members virtually. I do meet up with some people IRL on occasion, but most of it is while I am in my parlor or my dining room at home, and I feel connected and that I know them. As a non-gamer, this is a new experience for me, and my creativity has been expanded exponentially through this. Can't wait to do another course like this!

Sewing In The Fog with Radha Weaver

I want to pause briefly to say how much I love my quilt guild, which is the Minneapolis Modern Quilt Guild. I work remotely in Minneapolis, and I met a coworker (on purpose) at QuiltCon, the modern quilting's annual meeting, and wow wow wow, I fell in love with modern quilting, hook, line, and sinker. It was a crash bing bang all consuming love at first sight, and I joined her local guild, which had switched to an on line format during the pandemic, and now I really cannot get enough of the lectures we hear every month from modern quilters who talk about who they are, where they came from, and what they are doing. Our October speaker was Radha Weaver, who grew up on a commune in the Bay Area, and then after college worked in the garment industry for 15 years. She traveled to places where fabric is produced, like China and Bangladesh, and saw first hand both the process of fabric production and the conditions that the workers experienced and decided it was time for her to bow out of that work. She pivoted to recycling, or what is popularly known as upcycling, fabric. She works primarily in denim, some with leather, and now she not only uses previously used fabric in her work but she helps people connect with each other to exchange or off load fabric they have purchased but no longer want. She is adamantly not opposed to buying or selling fabric--she does want to get away from the fast fashion idea, where you buy something and wear it once or twice, but do not wear it out. That is unsustainable, and she is offering ideas about what to do instead.

Art Quilt Workbook: Exercises & Techniques to Ignite Your Creativity by Jane Davila and Elin Waterston

This is a great How To book about how to move your creative side as an artist towards making fiber arts. I took a collage class with Lisa Thorpe at the Minnesota Quilters retreat and there is a section of this book that totally applies to this. There is information about copyright and how to avoid violating it in your work, which I have not seen much in books related to quilting. This is more about the art than the quilting. There is no instruction on how to piece or sew contained within it, it is all about making your art on fiber--so painting on fabric, dying fabric, printing on fabric, and how to put it all together--with examples from the both of the author's own works--which are very different from each other, so very helpful in the visualization of how it would translate depending on the artist. Recommended if this is a direction you want your quilting to take!

City Sampler: 100 Modern Quilt Blocks by Tula Pink

I got this book as a present almost about the time that it came out. I looked at it and thought Wow, there are a lot of tiny pieces of fabric in each of these 100 blocks--hard pass. Fast forward to the present when I have been in a Modern Quilt Guild for 18 months, and I know more about scraps and the process of making textiles and the very commendable trend of using ALL your fabric, mix that with one of my friends who quilts is now making her second one of these (she is over 75% done with it in fact) and voila, I am thinking why haven't I made one of these. The book is essentially mostly the blocks--with pictural directions for sewing and written instructions for cutting (I am on my 4th block and I have already made a mistake in cutting, so this is not going to be a breeze), and then various designs for assembly to finish it out. You can make this with scraps and that is my intention--my sewing table, which doubles as my dining room table seating 14, is a total mess, but this is well done and I think it will be fun once I get the hang of it. I also love that something so long buried can be resurrected again.

The Many Coats Of Rachel Clark

I had the pleasure of taking a two days class with the quilter and garment maker Rachel Clark. I cannot emphasize enough how magical it is to listen to her talk about her creative process, the making of her coats and the origin story that they each have. Some of them stem from an idea that she wants to convey of celbrate, like her watermelon coat or her Obama coat. Some of them are the celebration of a fabric, like her Japanese fabric coat or her rickrack and polka dot coats. She brought a couple dozen of her coats with her so that we could examine them in class, be inspired by them, and when we got to the design process, we could see examples of directions we could go with the coat. The absolute best part, is just to watch her work. She sorted fabric for several people in the early design process, and then as people made some progress, she highlighted several directions they could go so that the class could benefit from those who were further along. I loved listening to her, and I would take another class with her in a heartbeat if it were offered nearby and I could swing it. She is someone who is fun to be with in person, but I watched a lecture she gave at QuiltCon, and she translates well to the recorded world as well. She is a treasure.

Interaction of Color by Josef Albers

If you are going to take one color theory book with you to a deserted island, this is the one. Designers tend to think of Josef Albers (1888–1976) only as a color theorist because Interaction of Color is a classic design school text. However, outside of the design world, Albers is better known as an abstract painter. His work, particularly his Homage to the Square series, influenced Op-Art artists who furthered his explorations in human perception or “the discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect.” He was the first living artist to have a solo show at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. This book was originally published in 1963 and it still stands up as the best way to think about the relationship between colors. Here is a quick summary: 1. Color is the most relative medium in art. 2. Experience is the best teacher of color. There is no shortcut to your 10,000 hours towards mastery of this subject. Unless you experiment with colors in the manner in which Albers prescribes, you will not fully grasp how the exact same color can look different in a small quantity than it does in a large quantity or how the same color looks different surrounded by another color. Color is constantly related to its neighbors and to changing light conditions. 3. It is difficult to visualize specific colors. Visual memory is very poor by comparison to auditory memory. 4. People have strong preferences in regard to colors. No way around it, other than to try to add in a color you don't care for and see if you can change your mind. 5. Few people are able to distinguish tonal value in different hues within close intervals. There are apps to try to help you develop this skill. 6. When two colors have the same value, they “vibrate.” Because the eye reads value more than hue, vibrating colors compete for the eye’s attention and are uncomfortable to look at. 7. While there are innumerable colors, in most of the world’s languages, there are only about 30 names for different hues. 8. Any color can “go” or “work” with any other color, it is principally a matter of in which proportions they are used. Albers often required students to use colors that they disliked in order to have them realize this relational aspect of color. You might say there are no ugly colors, only ugly uses of color. These principles are astoundingly useful in modern quilting, and I cannot believe that I have been quilting for 50 years and never read this book--my only defense is that I have zero design background!

Lisa Thorpe: Backyard Bird Fabric Collage

I went to the Minnesota Quilters show in St. Cloud last month and took a workshop from Lisa Thorpe doing collage with birds as the central theme. The one on the right is hers and the one below is the collage I made. There were so many things to love about this workshop, not the least of which was that I finished what I started that day and I was very happy with it. I also left inspired to do it again, and the teacher provided all the tools to make that happen, from how to create my own fabric with pictures of birds to selling a do-it-yourself kit.

I have taken a number of classes from great teachers over the years, but rarely have I had a teacher who came so prepared to make her students successful. The first ingredient to that was that her supply list was detailed enough that I actually packed well for the class. I brought things that I had that had bird themes, adn I brough fabric that would work in the background. If that wasn't enough she literally had enough materials with her that if you had packed 100% incorrectly (as has often happened to me) you could be successful because she brought lots of bits and pieces to do collage with, may that she had printed or hand stamped herself. Finally, if you just did not want to make choices, she has wonderful kits that you can assemble. It had beginners, intermediates, and advanced crafters all covered, everyone left with a project well on it's way to completion, and they were all different even though we had the same shared class.