Word of the year quilt

 Well, it's almost May and yes, I am just now getting around to sharing my word of the year quilt. That's because I JUST finished it this past week. Yikes! I chose a word before 2023 even started.... my word is Stretch! But I had no idea how to reflect it in a quilt.

When I was at Quiltcon in February, I took a design class, Inspired by Architecture, from David Owen Hastings. Let me tell you, David's design process is soooooo different from mine! I learned so much from him and was determined to apply some of his design strategies to my own quilts. This was a stretch for me! So what better time to apply it than with my word of the year quilt?

First up was to take an architecture photo that spoke to me. I took this photo in downtown Atlanta during Quiltcon and thought it was the perfect inspiration...

After printing my photo, cutting it up and drawing with colored pencils on graph paper, I came up with the improv piece used in my quilt.

I paper pieced my letters and quilted this mini (18"x20") with my walking foot on my Janome. I'm really happy with the results!

I'm excited to continue to stretch myself in the coming months.

Do you have a word of the year?

Quiltcon Review

Quiltcon 2022 is in the books! Phoenix was a blast (ok truth time here, I'm still in Phoenix! Hubby and I stayed a few extra days to enjoy family here, Dallas iced over and many flights were canceled. We'll make it home eventually!)

It was super fun to see my quilt Urban Emergence hanging in the Quiltcon Together winners exhibit! The ladies from Curated Quilts snuck me into the hall a few minutes before the show opened the first day and I stopped dead in my tracks seeing it hanging there. Oh, and they did an interview with me that you can listen to here. 

I love when people post who their "quilt neighbors" are at Quiltcon. It was an honor for me to have my quilt hanging next to Amy Friend's winning quilt, Crimped.

One big thrill at Quiltcon this year was when my beemate Sarah Ruiz won first place in the group category for the very first Quilts Unscripted quilt which she aptly titled "Unscripted". Just a fun side note, five of us who contributed to Sarah's quilt were also contributors to my quilt last year!

It was such a thrill to see the quilt hanging and we gathered the five Quilts Unscripted beemates who were present for a fun photo shoot.

pictured: Sarah Ruiz, Isabelle Selak, E.A. Cox, Loide Wasmund and me

Right across from Sarah's quilt was E.A.s quilt, Sinusoidal Sunset, another group quilt that I was so thrilled to contribute to.

And, of course, I dragged Sarah and E.A. over to my quilt for a photo shoot too since they had contributed blocks to it.

 What fun it has been to be a part of so many Quiltcon Group Quilts! I'm anxious to see what our bee can come up with for next year's event in Atlanta.

More Quiltcon highlights to come...

2021 year in review

 Whew! What a year! While it would be easy to focus on all of the crazy negative things going on in the world right now (no, I'm not going to list them. you already know!) I'm choosing to focus on the positive. And there sure was a lot of it in my world this year. Here are the highlights.... so I never forget how blessed I was in 2021.

Urban Emergence

In February, my group quilt, Urban Emergence was part of Quiltcon Together, the virtual MQG show that replaced in person Quiltcon this year. It was my very first quilt accepted into Quiltcon. Imagine my surprise when I won first place in my category! As if this wasn't enough, it was chosen for publication in the Quiltcon magazine! What an honor!

Later that month, Sarah Goer and I formed a pARTnership, inspired by Danielle Krysa's In 

tandem Art project. Sarah and I have continued to meet on Zoom every two weeks all year long, encouraging each other in our artistic journeys. One of the greatest things to come out of our friendship is the start of our new improv bee, Quilts Unscripted. This group is incredibly talented and inspiring! 

Again in 2021, I was able to participate in the Virtual Quilt Guild where I met so many amazing quilters. One relationship that came out of that group is my collaboration with Karen Bolan. Karen and I have also been meeting often on Zoom and have shared a collaborative quilt project (Welcoming Lamp), a series of blog posts (Exploring Collaboration) and coming soon..... a published article on Collaboration in Curated Quilts magazine! This was completed in 2021 and will be arriving in mailboxes early 2022.

Welcoming Lamp

One other thing I am so proud of this year is the completion of my Through Ellyn's Eyes project. When I set out on a six month personal journey to create a cohesive body of work and explore my creative voice it seemed daunting at best. The more I worked through it, the more joyful it became. I am so lucky to have had the time and the resources to complete this project and look forward to sharing it with guilds in the coming year.

Through Ellyn's Eyes quilts

So, 2021 proved to be a productive, fun year for me. Most of these things were not even on my radar a year ago, so who knows what 2022 will bring? Regardless, I look forward to sharing it with you. Happy New Year everyone!

baby quilt finish

 Well! I certainly did not intend to take 2 months off from blogging, yet here we are! I have been making making making..... which is not an excuse but it's been fun. 

During Quiltcontogether everyone was sharing the cool things they were creating in their virtual classes. For a couple of reasons I had not signed up for classes, and I found myself feeling a bit of FOMO. A little digging in my WIP pile and I found some blocks I had started at Quiltcon in Austin in 2020. I had forgotten all about these and honestly had not touched the project bag since.

The class I took was called Magic Numbers and the instructor was Katie Pederson (sewkatiedid) from Seattle. I will confess that I completed exactly ONE block during her class (I might be that girl who gets distracted easily and talks too much? maybe). Anyways, several other blocks were partially constructed or the pieces were cut, and all of the fabric were there in the bag so it was easy to get started on it again.

These are improv blocks, right up my alley. I a matter of days I had finished the 12 blocks I needed for a baby quilt, quilted a grid on my domestic machine and shipped it off to a new baby! I don't know why I had put this one off, but it was a pleasure to make now, maybe the timing was just right? who knows, but it is finished and gone.

I am recommitting to blogging at least once a week and I promise to do my very best! Thanks for hanging in there with me....

Quiltcon Together 2021

 I had so much fun going through the Quiltcon Together virtual quilt show this weekend. As always, there was a huge array of stunning quilts in all of the categories. I found the community service quilts to be especially beautiful this year, and I was so proud of my guild, the McKinney Modern Quilt Guild for our contribution. Together in Turbulence was spearheaded by my friend Chris and many many quilters had a hand in the assembly. I was thrilled to contribute some blocks to the quilt.

I had no idea that receiving a first place ribbon for my Urban Emergence quilt was only the beginning of the weekend's fun. I received invites to visit with different guilds throughout the weekend and even did an interview with Steph and Isabelle, the hosts of Scant Quarter Hour in Instagram TV. It was fun to chat with lots of other quilters about my quilt and about their experiences with the online format. All in all, Quiltcon Together was really well done and lots of fun, despite the challenges. I missed the hugs and can't wait to gather with friends in Phoenix next year. Urban Emergence will get to hang at Quiltcon 2022 in Phoenix with the other winners from this year!

Quiltcon Together awards ceremony

 Well Quiltcon sure does look different this year. In my continued effort to create community during the virtual event. I organized a zoom party for several friends last night during the awards. Of course, Texas being the mess that it is, our power was in and out all day yesterday. A friend who had steady power and internet invited us to bring our technology to her house and watch from there, so we did (we being hubby and I).

Don't you love my fancy setup? One laptop for zoom party. A second laptop for the awards ceremony. Phone for texting friends, oh and fancy mask for safe social distancing. All set.

It was so much fun to chat with friends before the presentation and then watch together. Several friends could not attend due to power outages and the like (seriously Texas, get your act together!) and we missed them. Partway into the awards this happened.....

My quilt, Urban Emergence, won first place in the group/bee category! Most of the girls on the call had contributed blocks to the quilt. You can see their delighted faces on the screen when they heard the news. So much fun! Since they called the winners ahead to video our reactions for the show, I already knew. That was a hard secret to keep!!! 

Another fun thing that happened is that Urban Emergence was featured in the gallery section of the new Quiltcon magazine! So, also, my first published quilt....

You can order a copy of the magazine here.

So that's the exciting news from here! Life has been a whirlwind, celebrating a big birthday, a big quilt show win, a huge winter storm and failed utilities, and, oh yeah, there's still a pandemic, isn't there? 

Here's a bit of sunshine that will be coming my way soon....

MQG Mini Swap

Tonight, Quiltcon Together begins with the awards ceremony and I'll be zooming with quilty friends during the webcast. It's the best we can do during these strange times. 

One of my favorite parts of Quiltcon each year is the mini quilt swap. Participants are assigned a partner and make and swap minis during quilt con. This is my fifth year participating and I have beautiful minis from all of my partners hanging in my house and have formed strong friendships with my former partners. Of course that looked different this year too!

My partner, Kathleen, and I have actually "known" each other for a while now on social media, which was a first for me! We decided to do our swap over zoom, saving our unopened packages to open together. What fun! Of course an in person meeting complete with hugs (will we ever be allowed to hug again?) would have been best but in a pinch, this was a good solution. Hoping we can meet up at Quiltcon in Phoenix next year.

 I just adore the beautiful mini Kathleen sent to me! It's all solids (my favorite!) and the colors she chose really sing....

It's already hanging in my studio and makes me smile every day!

And here is what I sent to Kathleen....

 Also solids,  a different version of my funky dresden which she seemed to like. 

So Quiltcon Together is off to a fabulous start for me! Will you be there? 

100 days of bojagi

It's been 100 days since Quiltcon 2020 in Austin. 100 days since we hugged new and old friends, stood in lines (close together!), ate tacos in crowded restaurants, chatted with vendors with no masks and thought nothing of it. 100 days since I sat in a classroom at the convention center with new and old friends and learned to do Korean Bojagi from Daisy Aschehoug.

Daisy is a warm, kind, bubbly human who currently lives in Norway (yes, she flew across the ocean to teach us, another thing people could do way back in February). She's an awesome teacher. By the end of the evening, I was totally in love with this new hand sewing technique.

For the record, I used several colors of Kona cotton for my bojagi project and a spool of 12 weight, Wonderfil Spagetti thread that I bought at Quiltcon. Size 24 chenille needles worked perfectly. I also highly recommend a clover needle threader that I never knew about before quilt con and now cannot live without. It's so sturdy, and perfect for large eyed needles and thicker thread.

 This is how far I had gotten that first night. My stitches were a bit uneven and way too tiny and tight, but the more I stitched, the better they got. I casually said to Daisy "I really want to get good at this...." and she suggested I make it a 100 day project. Well, I had always wanted to do a 100 day project but had not found something I wanted to commit to for that long! This was it. I started counting that very day and stitched on my bojagi project for the next 100 days. Some days I added one small piece. Other days I put together a whole section, or joined larger sections together. You can see my progress pictures here, at #ellynlearnsbojagi.

Today, May 31, 2020, is day 100. Here is my final piece....

While it is not perfectly square, it measures approximately 28"x28", and, if I'm counting right, it has 145 pieces, varying in size. If you look closely, you can see how my stitches relaxed, got larger, and more even as I learned, which was exactly my goal.

One of the cool things about bojagi is that the back is finished (no raw edges) as is the front. kind of hand sewn flat felled seams if you will. Here is the back of mine...

My plan is to hand hem the edges (Daisy taught us how) and keep this as a sample/art piece. I'm so happy with it, and very happy that I stuck with it and did the work for 100 days! Now if we could just get back to hugging people again, I'd be even more pleased. Be well...

Neapolitan Evolution

clearly a bit windy to shoot photos today

Today I have a quilt finish to share with you! This quilt has had many lives, and is finally to the point where I actually like it and can call it DONE! Let me start at the beginning.....

In November of 2018, some friends and I took a class from Sherri Lynn Wood, hosted by the Dallas Modern Quilt Guild. The class was color exploration, using improv strip sets. When the day was over, one of my large strip sets looked like this...

Now, these are NOT colors I am drawn to and I really didn't like it one bit. To me it screamed neapolitan ice cream (of which I'm really not a fan) Not one to waste fabric, after a few weeks of mulling it over at home, I drew up a design (planned improv if you will) and ended up with this.....

which I tried to like. Really I did. I mean, there are elements I like. the partial framing of the blocks, and the way it seems to "worm around" the quilt.... something I might explore down the road. But the colors still really bugged me. I thought "maybe this could be a baby quilt?" but honestly, if I make a baby a quilt, it's because I really care about them and I couldn't imagine dumping something I disliked on a sweet innocent baby. Know what I mean?

So, like any good quilter would do, I folded it up and shoved it to the back of a shelf, never to be looked at again. Or so I thought.

Fast forward to February of this year, when thousands of us gathered at Quiltcon in Austin, TX. We hugged old friends (and new friends), snuggled up next to each other in vendor booths, touched all the things. No one was wearing a mask and it all felt right. But I digress...

On Saturday I attended the keynote address by Victoria Findlay Wolfe. The entire lecture was inspiring, but one thing really stuck with me. She talked about how she had chopped up one of her finished quilt tops because she wasn't happy with it. Then she reassembled it into something new. She gave us permission to do the same. Before we even left the lecture hall, I had found the above photo in my instagram feed, showed it to my friend Chris, and said "this one. this baby is HISTORY!".

Honestly, I had no idea where this top even was. For a brief time, I thought maybe I had put it in the guild's charity donation box. I couldn't remember. But, with a little digging, I found it, shoved in the back of that shelf, a wrinkled mess.

A couple of months ago, I took a dresden ruler and my rotary cutter and set to work.....

This is where I landed! I already loved it. I auditioned lots of colors for the background (including my go to teal blue) and even polled my instagram followers (several suggested lime green) but in the end, I decided not to compete with the scheme by adding another color. I ordered Kona Cobblestone online and impatiently waited for it to arrive.

I really love the end result! I machine appliquéd the dresdens to the background, straight line quilted it on my domestic machine then hand appliquéd prairie points and circles before binding. Don't look too close, the quilting is horrendous (so many folds and ripples. ugh) but the end result is better than anything I could have imagined.

I'm calling it Neapolitan Evolution.

Checking this one off my UFO list.

Positively Spring

My friend Jayne, from Twiggy and Opal, recently designed a beautiful table runner for Modern by the Yard called Positively  Spring. When she posted her second version, made exclusively in Peppered Cottons, I fell instantly in love and knew I needed to make one too!

I have to back this up a bit and tell you a story..... more than a year ago, at Quiltcon 2019 in Nashville, Jayne and I finally got to meet face to face. We had a great time chatting and getting to know each other better. On the final day, Sunday, I was sitting on a window sill outside the vendor hall, resting my weary feet when Jayne came dashing out of the door in front of me, a huge stack of beautiful Peppered Cottons, in all of the bright and cheery colors. Now, I had been a fan of Peppered Cottons for a while, love the woven texture, the soft hand.... all of it!  It was all I could do not to tackle Jayne right then and there and run off with her stack!

When I admired her purchase (ok, maybe I coveted it a bit?) Jayne told me that one of the vendors (gosh I wish I could remember which one!) had marked them all more than 50% off! Jayne pointed me in the right direction and settled herself into my seat on the window sill and off I went! You don't have to tell me twice!

Minutes later, I returned with my own yummy stack of Peppered Cottons, which have been displayed on my studio shelf ever since. I've been waiting for the perfect project  to entice me to cut into them, and this was it! 

I will tell you that Jayne's pattern is flawless..... clearly written and easy to follow. Also, Jayne has a link on her post where you can get the pattern for free! Score! I had the top together in a matter of hours (honestly the hardest part was choosing colors and creating my layout!).  Before it could disappear into my stack of "things I really need to quilt but am afraid of ruining" I stuck that baby under the needle of my Janome and began straight line quilting. 

I'm getting better at the quilting, but I still have a long way to go. 

Now all I need is an excuse to clear off the table and display my new runner. Also, don't be surprised if I make another one of these. or two?

learning something new

I've always been that girl who tries every new hobby she comes across. Some of them stick for life (quilting, weaving, embroidery) others are a fail for me (painting, knitting) but hey, I tried! Quiltcon classes are an excellent opportunity for me to learn something new. This year's adventure? Korean Bojagi. What's that, you ask? Great question. I'll be honest, when I signed up for the class with Daisy Aschehoug I didn't have a clue. I only knew that it was being held in the hand sewing room so it had to be good, right?

my first attempts at Bojagi

It was better than good! It was awesome. The cool thing about Bojagi is that it is finished on both sides. The Korean's often use the finished pieces as gift wrapping. I have seen pictures of them hung in windows (so beautiful when the light shines through), incorporated into clothing, bags, etc. So many possibilities! I am working with Kona cottons for mine.

Daisy suggested making this a 100 day project, adding pieces every day for 100 days and watching my progress. I decided to do exactly that. Here's where I stand at day 15 of Bojagi...

My stitches are getting neater and neater! Do you want to follow along? I'm using the hashtag #ellynlearnsbojagi on Instagram. I also plan to teach this technique to others as I improve. 

What new thing have you learned lately?

Quiltcon Miniquilt swap

Hello Friends! Here I am fresh out of the car from Quiltcon..... laundry going and ready for a nap. Seriously. This was the most exhausting, crazy fun weekend I've spent in a long long time. There is much to process and share, but today I thought I'd talk a bit about the mini quilt swap, which I entered for the fourth time this year. And look at this incredible beauty I brought home with me....

Tish from Toronto made this for me and boy did she hit the nail on the head! I love it so much. And.... she gave me a huge bag of treats from Canada; a Starbucks mug, some adorable fabric, a jug of maple syrup and more! Thank you Tish! Here's the mini I made for her...

It was wonderful to meet up with her and swap in person...

Wouldn't this be a great day to reflect on previous quilt con swaps? Last year I was paired with Julie....

Julie's amazing improv mini hangs right over my ironing station and I think of her often when I see it! The year before I was matched up with TziTzi ....

clearly we love the same colors! TziTzi was a newish quilter when we swapped and it's been fun to watch her evolve into a very accomplished quilter. 

The first year I swapped, I did not go to Quiltcon, but swapped in the mail. Back then they were not pairing us off. I made this for Sandi....

And received this gorgeous quilt from Jane...

This one hangs right by my front door. Jane and I have since met and become dear friends. I was delighted to spend a good bit of time with her this year in Austin.

Have I been a lucky girl or what? I can't wait to swap in Atlanta next year.

McKinney Modern Quilt Guild QuiltCon charity quilt

Hi again! Leave it to me to disappear for 3 months and then post 2 days in a row. I just wanted to let you know I have a blog post up on the McKinney Modern Quilt Guild blog with the story behind our charity quilt for QuiltCon next month. I'm super proud of this quilt and the guild members who had a hand in creating it.

I encourage you to hop on over here and read the full story! Happy Tuesday friends.