Hi!

Well, now I know for sure that no one reads this blog, which is fine, it gives me a place to think by writing.  I'm just about ready to rejoin the human race, now that it is 2019, and Justin has been gone for quite a while, now.  He's always with me, in my thinking, in my doing, in my watching for hummingbirds (I'm pretty sure he sends them), in the rain that falls, and in the flowers that bloom on the last plant he gave me, and the fan-shaped leaves on the Gingko tree we planted in his memory.  

I've been thinking, today, about what makes me happy.  Pat fixed my hummingbird indoor fountain, today, and restarted the fountain I gave him eons ago for his workspace.  Fountains make me happy - and now 3 of our 5 fountains are working.  I added some glass candleholders and candles to one fountain, fixed the leaves/tiers of the other one, and realized that having things working, having things add nature to our indoor space, makes me happy.  

I got up this morning and realized that Pat had gone to his Breakfast with Porsches (which makes HIM happy), and that the dishwasher was full of clean dishes; the sink was full of clean dishes; and the counter was full of dirty dishes.  This did not make me happy; so I made a cup of tea and proceeded to empty the dishwasher, empty the sink, clean the dirty dishes and/or put them in the dishwasher, wipe the counters, clean the stove, fill the dish soap dispenser, and sweep the floor.  A clean kitchen, it turns out, makes me happy; as does a made bed, a vacuumed floor, mail that has been sorted and/or thrown away, bills that have been paid and filed, cooking good food for family and friends who appreciate it, playing with my grandchildren, visiting with my siblings & mother, going out to dinner and the beach and quilting venues with my husband, and laundry that has been put away.  

Other things that make me happy - tiny finches eating bird food in the back yard, hummingbirds sipping and flitting, flowers blooming, a quilting project going well, going to Zumba and watercolor classes, going to my quilting guild meeting, doing talks & workshops, singing & playing music, walking 5 miles a day (when it's not raining), reading and writing, traveling to family or Europe or unknown places, paying bills with money still in the bank, sitting in the front yard with Pat in the sunshine, and drinking wine as the world walks by.  

I've decided not to list things that make me unhappy, because that would just compound the problem.  The less you think about unhappy things, the better; which is why I do not read the newspaper or listen to the news, buy stuff I don't need, or allow stuff to clutter up my space.  I was at a conference, once, doing a talk, and there was a speaker (the Fly Lady?) who said that one resolution she made was to always keep the kitchen sink empty.  For me, that's right up there with making the bed, dealing with mail on a daily basis, keeping the garbage emptied, the kitchen floor swept, and emptying the dishwasher as soon as possible.  Do those things, and you can go quilt with an easy mind. 

Life is what it is.  It's hard and it's easy.  It's beautiful and sad and dreary and wonderful, all at once.  There are my granddaughter's hugs (even though she's only 18 months, she is a champion hugger!), my grandson's amazing skills and smiles, troubles and tribulations and triumphs and losses - it's all part of life, and you just have to roll with the punches.  True, we just lost a bundle of money on our GE stock, but we paid off my new car and a trip to Europe with it; if it had been doing well, we would have just kept it until we died.  Life is a mystery, and you just have to fumble around in the dark the best you can.

Blessed be.

​Linda

I haven't written in this blog for a long, long time because I just couldn't.  My son killed himself on May 7th, and anything I could have written would have been drowned in my tears and just bummed everybody out.  During those first few weeks, I created this quilt for him.

The laws around the inner border came from a poster on his wall.  The image was from his website, My Body of Knowledge.com.  I painted him using Setacolors onto fabric, then appliquéd it all onto a wild piece of hand dyed fabric.  My son was a personal trainer, a world traveler, a good friend, a brilliant philospher, and I miss him so much every day that I feel I'll never be truly happy again.  Most of my family and a lot of my husband's family, and many, many, friends came to celebrate his life on June 17, 2017.  In the meantime, we had literally hundreds of cards, letters, e-mails, calls, flowers, and condolences from all over the world, including from Ratan Tata, one of his former employers in India.  The celebration was full of color, movement, love, and testimonies from his dear friends and family, who will keep him alive in their hearts.  We also celebrated the coming of new life - my two-week old granddaughter, Elizabeth Catherine, who will never know her uncle.

A mother should never have to mourn her child.   It should be the other way around.  

​There is something helpful that my daughter sent to me.  Perhaps it will help you, if you are ever in the position to mourn a loved one:

"Death is nothing at all.  It does not count.  I have only slipped away into the next room.  Nothing has happened.  Everything remains exactly as it was.  I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged.  Whatever we were to each other, that we are still.  Call me by the old familiar name.  Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.  Laugh as we always laughed at the jokes that we enjoyed together.  Play, smile, think of me, pray for me.  Let my name be ever the household word that it always was.  Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it.  Life means all that it ever meant.  It is the same as it ever was.  There is absolute and unbroken continuity.  What is this death but a negligible accident?  Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight?  I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just round the corner.  All is well."

So I try.  I take one breath after the other and keep living my life, watching the hummingbirds fly and the flowers grow, and have faith that's he's really just around the corner, but happy now.

Hi! Just wanted to mention that my Elements in Fabric class is starting soon on www.AcademyofQuilting.com; I'm teaching January 18-21 at the World Quilt and Textile Show in Orlando, Florida; and my Quilting Cruise to Hawaii and Ensenada are a go for February, 2018!

I've been making some unusual quilts, for me, at least.  I've made two fairly traditional pieces in the last few months, and here's the article I wrote about the making of them:

I haven’t made a strictly traditional quilt for a long, long, time…..probably 15 years, or so; but I just made two traditional quilts this last month. So, why now?   Part of the reason is that I took a workshop and made traditional blocks in the class in pretty batik colors that would be a shame to waste.  Part of it is that when I looked around for some old blocks I thought would go with the new blocks, I found those signature exchange blocks we made for 3 different retreats (way back when), some miniature blocks given to me by Kathy Levesque, and a doll quilt made by my daughter when she was five years old.  None of the old blocks would play nicely with the new blocks because the old ones were all made out of calicos; so I had to make 2 quilts.  But, still, why make them into quilts, at all?  Sheer stubbornness not to have an unfinished project around?  Possibly, but I think there was another reason.

I think it’s due to an unusually frustrating, emotionally distraught, annoying couple of months at my house.  I find that when times get hard, when I hit that wall and can’t quite get over it, if clutter I can’t control is in my space, my creative brain won’t work properly and the only thing I can do is put lots of pieces together perfectly to create the illusion that I am in control of my environment.  It’s a Zen thing.

The basic rules of quilting, I think (and this is my own, totally irrational theory, not based on any historical fact), were made by women on the prairies as a self-protection mechanism.  A prairie woman could not control the Indians or the grass fires or the locusts, and she couldn’t even get clean on a regular basis.  She could not access Weather Scan on the Internet, she couldn’t call AAA when the wagon broke down, or Webvan and have groceries delivered.  She was out there in a lonely wilderness, often completely helpless; therefore, she had to have something to cling to, something to give her the illusion that she had some control over her environment. I think that that when she could make ½” squares meet perfectly, diamonds and triangles with sharp little points, and quilt evenly 20 stitches to the inch, she felt in control of that quilt, and thus part of her life. Seriously, don’t you think that’s where the rules came from in the first place? 

I do.  I’m a contemporary art quilter.  I don’t do repetitive blocks, sashing, or traditional quilts anymore, but that’s what I’ve been working on lately.  Something about putting squares together in neat little rows helps me tolerate the mess in my bedroom while the workers are reconstructing the master bath.  Something about cutting nice straight sashing and adding in corner squares distracts me from the emotional angst some family troubles is putting us all through.  Something about making all those scrappy blocks flow together in color waves helps me ignore the chaos in the backyard where my husband’s construction project has lain in bits and pieces, strewn with tools, for months.  And let’s not even talk about the falling-down fence (is the fence company really backed up for 5 months????), the half-stained deck, and the irritating tangle of computer/camera/phone/charger cords that inhabits the desk in the back office.  

No, let me go into my sewing studio where I can cut and piece and reminisce about when my daughter was little and played with that doll blanket; about all of those friends whose names are on the nice, square, blocks; and keep sewing them in pretty patterns whose colors ebb and flow around me as I drink my tea, listen to country music and sew order and peace out of the chaos. I can retreat into my nice, little illusion that I am in control of my environment. 

It’s my illusion, and I’m clinging to it.

Tangle Falls

I met a photographer by the name of Mountain Mike at last year's Art and Wind Festival in San Ramon.  He graciously gave me permission to make a quilt based on his photo of Tangle Falls, which is in Jasper Park in Canada.  This was great fun, especially since I took great liberties with the colors of the rocks, and added a few animals in, just to make it a bit more interesting.  For instance, there's a bear in the lower falls and a moose on the middle ground to the right of the falls:

There's a wolf up on a rock to the top right of the middle falls, and three bears down and to the left of the wolf:

There are two eagles diving towards the water in the center of the falls, and three curly horned rams on the left side, hiding in the rocks:

Hi!  Well, this is what I have been spending my time on, lately, creating this fireworks extravaganza and writing a class for the Academy of Quilting on how to make this.  I had to learn as I went along how to make all of these different sorts of fireworks, and also how to keep the whole thing flat and straight while doing so.  Some of these are made with foil, foil glue and foil glitter, most of them are stitched with free motion stitching, a lot of them incorporate Angelina and/or Tintzl fiber, and they are all embellished with Schwarovsky crystals and/or rhinestones.  The city in the distance is the San Francisco skyline, and there is even a tiny crystal on the top of the TransAmerica building.  Great fun!  I have submitted the class to www.AcademyofQuilting.com, and hope to have it available soon!  I'm also creating an in-person class on this to take to Guiolds and other workshop venues.  

Here's another quilt I just finished, a memorial quilt for Tom McCormick, using his Hawaiian Shirts to create most of it, but the bar scene in the center is an appliqued and hand painted version of a photo taken in a bar in Hawaii.  Aloha, Tom.

Well, I just finished my currently favorite quilt, my daughter in a hat shop in Carmel.  This was quite a fun quilt to make, with all of the hats, the tiny hats in the reflection, the creation of the sweater out of fibers with my Embellisher, the yarn hair (also with the Embellisher), the hat stands of Puff Paint, the 3-D decorations on the hats, the ribbons floating free, the shadows - just the thing for somebody with a short attention span!

Well, I found out something VERY interesting today.  It is possible to piece a quilt without making a mess!  

We're having the Porsche Christmas party at our house tomorrow evening, so I cleaned the house, including the mess I've been making, making paper-pieced Hawaiian shirts for a memory quilt for a friend.  There were tiny scraps of paper, bits of fabric, thread, cut-off parts of old shirts, pins, and an incredible mess everywhere, including the trail of fabric that led from the studio at one end of the house to the studio at the other end of the house.  So, I straightened up all the fabric and put it in a nice basket, swept up all the pins with my magnetized pincushion, picked up the big scraps, vacuumed up the rest, put all of the tools away, and Voila!  Clean sewing room!  

Then I cleaned and vacuumed, decluttered, and got the dust bunnies under control in the rest of the house, but still had a hour left before I had to quit for work.  Well, that wouldn't do, so I decided to make one more shirt block.  That's when the revelation hit me.  I have a wastebasket into which I can put scraps, a magnetized pincushion that eats pins, and I'm perfectly capable of piecing a block without making a mess.  Amazing!  

Well, Pat's Porsche almost got me killed on Wednesday. My car was in the shop, so Pat wanted me to go to Easy Auto in Emeryville to get a couple of parts (seat belt holder broke). So, I got in the car and well on my way on Hwy 580, and ju...st before the Keller exit, with traffic flowing 65-70 miles an hour, in the third lane over going up a hill, the engine stopped humming at its normal sound, and the power completely disappeared. Frantically, I tried to get over to the side, but at those speeds, with my car losing power all the time, it was an iffy proposition. It finally came to a dead stop in the second lane, with traffic whizzing by on both sides, and piling up behind me. I couldn't restart it, nothing I could do worked, and the horns started blaring. It was amazing I wasn't plowed into 6 or 7 times. Luckily, an angel in a tow truck behind me saw what was happening, pulled ahead of me in the first lane with his lights on and started directing traffic around me. Then he had me put it in neutral and slide backwards over to the shoulder, with a little push from him. Then he disappeared up the road without another word.

Left on the side of the road, I got out my cellphone (which luckily had a charge, which it usually doesn't), I was able to call AAA and get a towtruck sent out. While I was calling, a police car came backwards down the shoulder and stayed with me until the tow truck came. Turns out, the battery had a bad cell, so the alternator gave up the ghost, and the starter had to be replaced, as well. Who knew?

Just grateful to be alive, today.

Oh, and here's my latest entry for the Porsche Art Show Parade this week. Vote for me for Viewer's favorite!

Well, I finally finished it.  I ripped the old kite off, painted a new one and added different streamers to it, added a sheer ribbon border, stuck a fork in it and declared it DONE.