Amish With A Twist Tula Pink Style

2026 is the Block of the Month year for me, and while the other 3 I am invovled with I have slipped behind in, this one has been easier to keep up. One is that the Facebook group is replete with people who do all the month's blocks the day they get the material and post their results lickedy split. I was gone when the first month arrived, the second month came a couple weeks later and while I was away for the Fourth of July the third month arrived, all while I had yet to open even one ofr them. So, not a great start for me, but I have rallyed and was done with the third month before the fourth arrived--one thing about the Pink Door preparation of the fabric is that it is possible to figure out what color is what, even with so many coming at once. I am really enjoying watching this come together, there is some space to go a little off road in some place, and after quilting for 50 years, I discovered two things that are pretty common and yet I had neither of them. One is design boards--there are so many different fabrics in each block that cutting out is a bit tedious, and it would be very unlikely that I could keep them all straight when sewing them together, and a 14" design board has been key. I have made some cutting errors, but with the design board as well as what the final block is supposed to look like, I have not had to seam rip because of wrong placement. The other is that I bought a ruler organizer--there are so many rulers that I have been regularly using for this quilt that it has been great to have them all organized and propped up so they are easy to move between as needed. We are a third into the quilt and it is coming together beautifully. The Facebook group has been a great source of inspiration--including someone who FPP a butterfly for her blocks! And provided the pattern so we all could if we wanted. There are a few people who I sew regularly with in my guild who are doing this as well, and the whole experience has been great. I would do another Pink Door Block of the Month if the pattern and final quilt moved me, but in some ways I would be just as likely to try this one again with fabric of my own choosing.

Patricia Belyea and Japanese Textiles

Patricia Belyea is a well known textile artist who imports Japanese textiles and leads trips to Japan for people to both learn more about the Japanese textile philosophy and to use more of them in textile art. Her origin story in quilting is that she made a baby quilt for a coworker, and has been a quilter ever since. I myself started with making a pinwheel quilt with fabric that my grandmother had used in the 1930's, 40's, and 50's, which I tied and used on my bed in college, and I too have been quilting ever since. It is a seductive craft, especially if you love fabric, and Japanese fabric is especially luscious. She is living these days in Wauconda WA with the ground squirrels, deer, and bears--it meets the definition of frontier living, which is an area with less than 2 people per square mile. She did a Zoom lecture to our guild from her studio there. Her relationshio with the textile process in Japan extends to growing indigo herself. It’s a big story — germinating seeds the size of a dot to growing plants with bright green leaves to extracting magical blue dye. It was the second time that Patricia Belyea attempted to farm and harvest Japanese indigo at her highland home. And it worked — with a yield of 5 pounds of indigo dye!

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.

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.

Sarah Goer Quilts

My quilt guild had a spring retreat that happened two weeks after I had should replacement surgery on my dominant arm. I did not sign up for it, appropriately worried that I would not be able to participate, but then 5 days ahead I got my brace off and was just in a sling. When I asked if I could sew, the APP seeing me saud "Sure." Things were looking up! The next day they were again dashed, because my physical therapist said that I could do nothing that essentially required me to shrug for several weeks, if not months, and surely sewing was again off the table?? I got an adjustable table that made typing at least possible, and waited.

The day before the retreat I decided to pull the trigger. The cost was modest, and I knew I could at least attend the lecture--which was with this improv quilter--this was such a gentle gateway into how to start improving, I really loved it. She does teach some on line classes, and I will definitely consider them once I am two handed again. The retreat itself went well. It turns out I mostly sew left handed--not sure I could sew without the left, but sewing with an impaired right was quite doable. I had cut out my BOM and not gotten it together and managed to finish that month and start the next. I also won a door prize of essential notions and so the cost of the retreat was practically nothing, and the abilty to spend a whole day with my guild mates was both fun and distracting. Two thumbs up!

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.

Nippori Fabric Town, Tokyo, Japan

Tokyo has neighborhoods and Nippori Fabric Town lies in a quiet part of Nippori, just east of the Yamanote Line station and makes for just as exciting of an adventure for fabric aficionados, as it does for most of us non-connoisseurs. There are dozens of shops selling anything from fabrics, leather, buttons, zippers, beads - you name it - Nippori Fabric Town has established itself as a hotspot for Tokyo’s textile lovers over the past century and is an ideal place to get some inspiration for your next creative endeavor. Start your journey through Nippori Fabric Town by making your way up the central street (Chuo-dori) that runs towards the east of Nippori Station and you’ll soon notice the yellow signs that mark the beginning of textile heaven. Tomato is perhaps the neighbourhood’s most famous and easily most recognizable establishment, boasting several shops along the main street and a main building that stretches over a whopping five floors. Each of Tomato’s stores is dedicated to slightly different types of fabrics including textiles for interiors, a shop dedicated to sewing kits and even an outlet where can have your very own fabric designs printed. There is a lot of high quality Japanese fabric for very good prices, but if you are looking for kasuri or shibori, you need to go to a used kimono store to find that.

Quilted Postcards with Sarah Ruiz

Sarah Ruiz is a NASA space engineer by day, quilter by night. She spoke to our guild about her 100 postcards in 100 days project that she did during COVID. First she started with her idea about doing something over and over again for a 100 days as a way to get better at something. You do it every day--which is in itself a commitment. I do it with language acquisition (which I have been doing more or less for seven years), and it definitely has improved my ability to communicate in a couple languages that are not my first language. So I was intrigued by this idea when it comes to crafting skills. I had an inherent avoidance of FPP, even though when I have done it I have been impressed with the precision achieved with it and how compatatively low skilled it need be. So it is basically in my head and I need to do more of it if I am going to get over it. So maybe in 2026 I will figure out a 100 day project for myself. So she had this whole 100 days thing going on when the pandemic kept us all more or less at home (as a health care worker I left the house, but it was home or work, no exceptions, with contactless grocery pick ups and dinners outside at seperate tables per household). She decided she would do a pieced postcard every day and mail it to someone. One of my guild mates was lucky enough to receive one--but it was a way to distract herself, work within a small palate, and to brighten someone else's world. Also on the plus side, they are something you could crank out in an hour--and she has some free patterns on her website to get you started. Check it out!

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.

Audrey Esarey of Cotton and Bourbon

Wow, wow, wow. I have really loved seeing Audrey's quilts in person at both the 2024 and 2025 QuiltCon meetings--I was impressed with them the first year I went, and the second year she was winning awards, which was both well deserved and not surprising. Her sense of graphics that she then translates to quilts is both stunning and astounding to me.

So despite the fact her talk to my guild fell on my anniversary AND that I had an expensive fixed price dinner to go to, I did not miss her talk. I brought a sack full of containers to the dinner, and enjoyed 4 of the 7 courses from the comfort of my parlor and sat for an hour listening to her talk about her design process. She walked us through the evolution of her designs for a couple of her quilt series, step by step in some cases, and it was both instructive and an interesting peak into how she thinks about next steps--once you fall in love with something, how do you change it slightly and yet significantly into something that you can love just as much? She is a wonder, and if you ever get a chance to see her work or hear her talk, I would grab it. Well worth it.

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!

Codes of the Underground Railroad

There is a fair amount of disagreement about whether quilts were used as codes on the Underground Railroad. The evidence in the affirmative comes from oral history, passed down through families over time. We know that stories that families tell are like a game of Telephone, you hear what you want to hear and disregard the rest, but on the other hand, slave stories were largely oral history. They were not taught to write and they weren't allowed to be literate so while there were those who defied that, the majority could not.

There is agreement that spirituals were important as communication of the railroad to the north and that there were codes within them that helped in planning and navigating your way northward. The North Star pattern at least reflects the importance of the Big Dipper in helping escaped slaves navigate at night. The destination for many slaves was Ohio. Cleveland was known as 'Hope', but was also a crossroads for slvaes traveling from the south and from the west to get passage northward--I know this pattern as Jacob's Ladder, and made it over 35 years ago for my eldest son. I also made him a Monkey Wrench quilt, another symbol stemming from slavery. The blacksmiths on plantations were slaves, and they were the slaves who were afforded more privlege than field workers--it is plausible they were the local communicators. There is so much we don't know.

Connie Martin spoke to my quilt guild, and she tells the stories passed down to her great-grandmother Lizzie of how her family survived the antebellum period through trials and tribulations, and how they used quilts that contained hidden codes and secret messages to assist abolitionists–white and black–to guide enslaved people to freedom through the Underground Railroad to Canada. During this presentation, Connie shared eighteen different quilt patterns in replica quilts and refers to a book her mother, Dr. Clarice Boswell, wrote about their family called Lizzie’s Story: A Slave Family’s Journey to Freedom.

A New Deal For Quilts by Janneken Smucker

I stumbled upon this book as I try and read a lot of books about modern quilting in general (which is not what defines this book nor the quilts shown within) and quilting in general--this I would categorize as the History of Quilts. I did not know this, but might have surmised it if I had thought about it for half a minute, but during the Great Depression there was a large resurgence in quilting--quilts were used not just for bed, but because so many people became homeless during that time, they were used to delineate makeshift dwelling, and served as door and window cover for people living in broke down sheds and abandoned buildings. The photos in the book are as telling as the narrative, and are largely taken by government workers. They show quilts made by women and the women making them in some instances--there are black women and white women. There are poor women and middle class women. There are women living outside and those living inside. It was a time of making do with what you had, but some of these quilts were just exquisitely designed and pieced out of things that they had and things that they repurposed. They were an ode to scrap piecing, and fit beautifully into the throw nothing away philosophy of modern quilting.

Chris Manchini--Just Finish It

Chris Manchini of Rose City Originals spoke to my quilt guild and there was a lot to be learned from him. First, it is nie to see someone who is not a cookie cutter quilter. He is a man, there is that, but he is also a pattern maker who does large format quilting, which is not the norm. He has been sewing almost all his life, but he came to quilting about a decade ago, and pretty quickly found that things that he wanted to make did not have readily available patterns. When you look at what he has created, you can see why he had to figure it out--there is a higher than usual percentage of skulls than you see in traditional (or even non-traditional) quilts. Then there is how he lays out the patterns--he uses a Lego assembly approach, which is modular assembly paired with a lot of graphics to help you keep it organized. So while this is not in my usual wheelhouse, I was very happy to hear him talk about his art and his process. Then there was his take home message, which is "just finish it". He says that the pile of unfinished projects that most all quilters have languishing in hidden corners of our crafting spaces carry a psychological burden, and so when we finish them, we lighten our load. He hypothesizes that in order to do that we have to overcome some obstacle, and that often that involves feeling like the project has a flaw and that we need to ignore it and move on and that we will be rewarded in two ways--that it will be done, which is a huge plus, but that also once done, the flaw that we saw is diminished, that the finished project is greater than the sum of it's parts and we cannot see that until it is done. I am inspired by this, and hope to follow through on his advice.

Crumb Quilts by Emily Bailey

The subtitle of this book is: : Scrap Quilting the Zero Waste Way. There is a growing movement within quilting to use ALL of the fabric when quilting. It is perfectly acceptable to make a quilt that inherently generates some waste, but the next step is not to compost it or throw away the left overs, but rather to use them to make something else. I have always done this is a casual way. Some fabric that I used almost 10 years ago in one of the first quilts that I made when I returned to quilting after a many year hiatus following my diagnosis of ovarian cancer used some Guatemalan fabric that I bought in the 1980's that was well used when I got it. I used some of the leftovers in a baby quilt a few years after that, and I just added some of it to a Block Of THe Month Quilt that I made last year with the Minneapolis Modern Quilt Guild. So not opposed, is what I am saying, but also not particularly systematic either.

This is my favorite quilt from the book and it demonstrates something that I have not done, which is organize my scraps by color and value, and then essentially piece together a back ground to use for making quilt blocks. I really like the star as a design feature, and these slightly wonky stars very much appeal to me--but the pieced backgrounds are an added plus. This is all in the interest of wasting nothing, or as little as possible, and while I came from a family that valued this (Depression Era parents), the fact that textile production uses so much water is another reason not to waste it.

The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Claire

I really like color--I was drawn to quilting because of my love of fabric, but color is a big part of where I go as a quilter, but in reality I know very little about it. This year I took a class with Tara Faughnan at QuiltCon, and it really got me thinking about color and how little I really understand or know about it. This book is a part of my quest to better understand color, and hopefully not get too crazy on the the way that I lose my sense of what I love about it. I got this out of the library, but when I got about halfway through it, I bought a (used) copy of it. The book begins with an introduction on how we see and what colors actually are. The science behind the different interactions of dyes and pigments with light is actually very cool, as well as how this information is processed by the cellular machinery in our eyes and brain. This is followed with a small discussion on the history and language of color, which raises some interesting points such as the ancient Greeks not actually having a word for ‘blue’ and the implications of how the absence or presence of these descriptive words in a language shaped the perceptions of colors and the world at the time. The bulk of the book is devoted to discussing the members of 10 different color families. In a charming piece of design, the margin of each page is colored to match the subject, so don’t worry if you’re not confident differentiating your orchils from your heliotropes. Each family of colors is separated by two blank pages, showing a gradient composed of all the upcoming members in all their glory. The layout is a stroke of genius and each color only has one or two pages of accompanying text, making it a perfect book to pick up when you only have a few minutes--the stories that she tells about each color are very informative and entertaining, and the whole time I was reading it I was contemplating color and color choices that I make. This is a fun and approachable way to see and think about color.

Scrap Management a la Colby Cartledge

I do not in any way manage my scraps. Our guild does all of it's monthly meeting on Zoom, and Colby asked people to put in the chat how they manage scraps and someone posted a clear plastic bag, and that very much resonated with me. There was a time when I threw them away--a practice that is slightly horrifying to me now that I know more about using them and also how much water the textile industry uses. And so now I go through them when getting ready to do a new quilt and pick out some pieces that are bigger and can be used in the quilt. Colby was very non-judgemental, other than saying you should gift them if you don't want them--there are homes for them.

She described in detail her system, which is to cut things into 2.5" strips, 5" strips, 2.5" squares and 5" squares. Save the less than 2.5" strips for string quilts, and then you can do you--cut pieces that generally work for you--this works for her. Then she showed a trunk show of quilts that are either string pieced (she does the blocks on used dryer sheets--genius, as they are all precut to the same size and basically trash) or use the sizes that she cuts her scraps to, and then here are two take home messages for me--one is to "shop your scraps first", and then the corallary being "pick a color way, not a particular fabric", which means that you don't need to have enough of the scrap for the whole quilt, but rather enough of many scraps that are the same color way and value to do the quilt. The string quilts are pretty scrap forward, or color crazy, but a lot of the scrap quilts were harmonious, just not the same. She says that she designs a quilt with the scraps in mind, so if she has beaucoup blue, the next quilt will revolve around that, and so on. She supplements with yardage, but she doesn't start there. It was just awesome to hear her walk us through her thinking, and it also gives me a starting point as I think about managing my scraps, rather than having them all laid out on a table!

Mama Loves Quilts--Minimalism

I listened to a short lecture by Nicole Nesbitt on the Modern Quilt Guild webste and it was helpful to me in thinking more about how to approach a minimalist quilt. She offered these thoughts on "What is Minimalist?" * It is whole cloth like * Bold and Graphic * Lots of Negative Space * Solids Regin--it doesn't have to be all solid, but it often is * Quilting is Supreme--where there is little in terms of variety in design, there is room for a lot of creative design with the quilting She taught a class at QuiltCon this year and I hope that I get a chance to take one with her some time in the future--if not, she has a quilt design on the Modern Quilt Guild website that I might do a deep dive on.

Improvisation In Modern Quilts--Shashari Kiburi

There is a short video on this subject on the Modern Quilt Guild's website that is well worth watching. It is almost a tangent but the artist dyes some of her fabric, and just looking through her website and listening to the talk made me want to get back into dying a bit. This is both educational on the subject of improv quilting as well as a demonstration of her process, so if you are someone who learns by watching and doing rather than by reading, yet another reason to check this out. The characteristics that are important to her in her own work are: * Wonky * Bold Colors * Use of Negative Space * Change in Scale * Use What You Have And a corallary is to Do What You Know. She favors half square triangles and Drunkard's Path, which are two things that I favor as well. She lays things out, then decides to slash a block and insert something into it, which is both bold and less initimidating, because you start with something traditional and then you literally cut it up to make something else.