When I first started natural dyeing on linen, I started with yellows. They are the least expensive, relatively simple, and many of them were easy to grow or forage. But when I …

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Phases of the Month

Spring has been rainy and cold and full of weather and conversations about weather. I started seeds for the garden with zinnias, tomatoes, basil, hollyhocks, cucumbers, kale, herbs. My perennial garden is a mix of native plants, perennial foods, and a few dye plants.

My sewing machine is totaled! I realized my sewing machine has been feeding tiny pin-sized stitches. I’m not feeling optimistic about repairing it and have been considering replacing it with the Juki TL 2010Q. I worry a little about losing zigzag stitch functionality, though I can’t remember the last time I actually used it. This essay helped me make my decision and my new machine will be here tomorrow.

I experienced my first prom…lived vicariously through my oldest child. We went dress shopping, splurged a little on accessories, and I hemmed her dress with a train and dyed her hair . It was a lot of work, but I loved it.

Posts from Previous Month

• The Problem with this Quilt

• The Motivated Quilter

• Pelican Quilts Journal—April 2026

Working it Out in the Studio

Designing a new quilt. Three inspirations are feeding the design for this quilt. My friend wrote a book that will be published soon and I loved this picture on the front of the two hands. I know that there are no hands in this quilt (at least none yet) but the photo got me thinking about a two sided design that mirrors itself with two sides that speak to each other. This painting by Marissa Voytenko is obviously a clear influence. Agnes Martin is often on my mind, especially when building large grid style quilts. Can you see the connections to these inspirations? I’m curious if you can see how I got from these to my design. I was about to start working on the block method for this piece which my machine broke and I had to wait two weeks for a new one.

The Beige Living Room Quilt

I started making this one for the kitchen but the color was wrong. When I set it in the living room for a moment, it popped. I love our light beige couch sitting under the Agnes Martin inspired weavings but it is missing a quilt. This quilt isn’t very pinteresting. Since I started working on it, social media views went silent, but it is RIGHT for this space, and I love it. My machine broke right after I finished the last of the blocks. As soon as I get it back I will be sewing the blocks into strips then sewing those strips together. This quilt is a bit small, but I am tired of making this tiny block so I will keep it small.

Stitching the Curved Log Cabin

I designed a fun pattern for the sitting that follows a series of L shapes to make boxes on the back of the quilt. I like seeing them show up. In the lightest blocks, I quilted with ivory thread, but the rest of the quilt has black stitching. This way the stitches are mostly invisible on the front. I repurposed linen for the quilt back the has a little bit of elastic in it. The fabric is really hard on my hands because it is stiff so I am taking my time with this.

Dyeing with Audrey

I met Audrey in a quilt workshop I taught this winter. We decided to get together to do some natural dye experiments that I will be sharing about in essays this month. I learned a lot. We did a lot of yellows and olive samples, then madder, cutch, and this logwood bluey greys and blacks.

Aesthetic Literacy: The Post expressionist, Agnes Martin

One of my favorite artists is Agnes Martin. She was known for six foot square painting and drawings in grid structures. It makes sense, my love for her. Her pieces have quilt vibes flowing through them, but they also teach me about what a quilt can be and do as a piece of art.

She started painting after the era of expressionists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning in the 1940s and 50s. They were interested in painting by throwing paint at the canvas to express their feelings. She was not interested in this intensely expressed emotion. She was interested in making a space for the us to experience our own feelings. .

Her giant six foot grids are there to slow our minds and create space for attention. They invited viewers to become aware of quieter sensations and more subtle forms of experience. What a lovely goal.

Martin distinguished between emotions and feelings. Emotions were personal and tied to the individual artist. Feelings, for Martin, were more universal — experiences like innocence, joy, calm, or wonder that could be shared rather than performed.

Her interest in the universal experience appeals to me much more than expressing individual stories from my life. I enjoy telling stories and little anecdotes, but I’m drawn the Martin’s approach to art.

Color Study: Low Contrast

One of the ways that Agnes Martin achieved these reflective spaces is by working in low contrast colorways. Her work achieves a serene quality through subtle shifts in tone and value. In quilting, higher contrast work lets you see the pattern clearly, but when you are actually living with a textile, high contrast is not always the right mood for a room.

High contrast colorways make the eye jump rapidly between dominant light and dark areas, while lower contrast slows the eye down. Instead of locking onto bold separations, your eye starts noticing differences in chroma, texture, and temperature. Low contrast colorways invite you to stay and look longer.

My front room is a good example of this approach. The space is heavily inspired by Scandinavian design and is largely tonal: cream walls, light woods, a beige couch, and woven pieces inspired by Agnes Martin. There is really only one strong moment of contrast in the room: the dark wood stove. Because everything else stays within a restrained tonal range, the stove anchors the space without the room feeling visually busy.

That is also why I wanted the quilts for this room to stay low contrast. A highly graphic quilt would interrupt the calm atmosphere, while tonal quilts become part of the texture and feeling of the space itself. This texture is what keeps beige from being “sad beige.”

This approach extends throughout my home, even though the moods of the rooms change dramatically. Some rooms are light and airy while others are dark and moody, but all of them rely on low contrast.

Current Obsession: Hands

This month I found myself obsessed with hands. I found this adorable hand necklace, then a gold hand curtain pull, and finally, these hand hooks. I have a my eye on a hand knocker for my front door now too. Did you all see the hand fashion at the Met Gala and on the runways? What about that crazy hand sculpture in Wuthering Heights? There is something going on with hands.

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One of the main tools I use is batchwork.

But for me, batchwork isn’t really about speed. It’s about shaping the experience of the work itself so that I enjoy myself and stay motivated.

I want the process itself to feel good. Physically, mentally, and creatively.

Physically, it cuts down on a lot of repetitive movement that is hard on the body. Mentally, it helps support cognitive load. Creatively it sets me up to feel motivated by feeling finished every time I work on a project.

There are always parts of a project that are tedious or physically demanding. There will always be some frustration. But if most of the process feels good, those parts don’t take over. They become something I move through, not something that defines the whole experience.

Building a Rhythm

At first glance, batch work made me nervous. Was this turning me into a machine? A quilt factory. That is why I focus not on maximizing productivity, but on finding what I enjoy.

If I pin blocks in a batch, I don’t have to keep moving my chair back and forth. If I chain sew, I don’t stop and start at the machine over and over. If I use snips, I eliminate one small motion that eases my hand.

Batch work helps me do that by creating long stretches where I can settle into a rhythm. Instead of constantly switching tasks, resetting tools, or figuring out what comes next, I stay in one mode. That steadiness makes the work more satisfying.

This rhythm isn’t about being mindless but it is about comfort, my body, and cutting down on frustration.

The Feeling of Finished

There are always annoying parts to any craft, but a lot of the drudgery comes from a feeling of endless activity without a feeling of progress. The most important part of this for me is what I think of as the feeling of finished.

I don’t like to think about a project as a percentage. I don’t want to feel like I’m 30 percent done or 60 percent done. That kind of thinking stretches the work out without ever offering milestones that offer encouragement. A percentage only ever feels like you aren’t done.

Instead, I break everything into tasks that can be completed in a season or two.

Cut all the white pieces.
Pin all the edge pieces.
Sew one full row.

That way, every time I sit down, I can finish something—or come very close. That feeling carries through the entire project and keeps me motivated to continue.

I think a lot of people get stuck because they never experience that. They spend time with a project but rarely feel encouraged at progress. If you’re stuck, one of the most helpful things you can do is give yourself a task you can fully finish. Even planning can be turned into a step that you can finish.

One thing I’ve learned is to stay in a phase longer than I want to. I don’t jump ahead to the fun part. I finish the part I’m in.

The exception to this is that I will move on to another step if one step is tiring on my body. Then I will move back and forth between the two processes.

Slowing Down at the Start

Batch work only works if you know what you’re making. That’s where sampling comes in.

Before I commit to a process, I slow down on purpose. I make a few blocks. I test how they look together. I pay attention to how the method feels.

Scale matters. Color matters. The way pieces interact matters. If I just work from one of my drawings without some sampling, I generally hate what I made. I like to pin samples to a wall near me to look at.

This part of the process is intentionally slower, but it protects everything that comes after. It allows the rest of the work to be more fluid and more enjoyable because I’m not constantly second-guessing my decisions.

Reducing Friction

Every part of a project has some amount of overhead—tools to gather, materials to prepare, things to remember.

When I batch those together, I reduce how often I have to stop and reset.

The same is true for thinking. There is always a small cost to remembering how to do something, even if it’s something I’ve done many times before. If I stay in one mode—like sewing curved seams—I can hold that knowledge in my head and keep working without interruption.

Reducing these small points of cognitive load makes the process feel smoother, which makes it easier to enjoy.

Matching Energy to the Work

Different parts of quilting require different kinds of energy.

Basting is one of the most physically demanding parts for me. Dyeing can also be tiring. Other parts require mental focus but less physical effort.

I try to match the task to the energy I have and the kind of energy the I have. That way I can keep working without pushing myself into exhaustion or avoidance.

Again, the goal isn’t just efficiency. It’s to keep the experience of working something I want to return to.

Breaking down the project

For this quilt, my batch work includes design work, planning, marking and cutting, pinning, chain piecing, and sewing the strips together. But every project is different. Some quilts, like the recent Matisse quilt, can’t be batched in the same way. When each block is unique, I use batchwork, but I have to design it differently to fit that project.

I just finished ironing all the pieces and am currently trimming them to size. Next I will begin sewing the blocks into strips, ironing the seas, sewing the strips together. Pretty soon, the quilt top will be complete.

Each month, Pelican Quilts Journal includes:

• Phases of the Month — how daily life is shaping my studio practice.

• Posts from the Previous Month — a list of essays shared this month.

• Working it Out in the Studio — a photographic overview of current quilts and experiments.

• Color Study — a deep dive into a color shaping my current work.

• Aesthetic Literacy — a close study of a design tradition shaping my work.

• Current Obsession — something visual I’m falling in love with and learning from.

Phases of the Month

Last year, I planted a garden and then got pneumonia. It grew mostly on its own.

This year, I planted again—with the hope that I’ll have the energy to tend it.

March is a return. The beginning of spring, our first gathering of the year for St. Patrick’s Day, seeing our neighbors outside in their yards, and a sense of life moving outside.

In the studio, I stayed busy: finishing the final piecing on the Green Star quilt, sampling a large section of a beige snowball check, working on a terracotta and black cushion for the kitchen, and teaching a rare quilt workshop. I reprinted my quilt zine for the class and have extra copies that I plan to offer here this summer.

Outside the studio, I’ve been thrifting—collecting old clothes and accessories, thinking about layering texture, shape, and pattern within a very limited palette. It’s striking how differently I dress from the way I work in color.

We ended the month with a trip I’ve been thinking about for over a decade: Oaxaca, Mexico. I spent time in a one-on-one workshop learning cochineal dyeing with a local artisan. It’s still too fresh to write about, but I’ll share more soon.

Posts from March

Catch up on posts you may have missed:

• The March Pelican Quilts Journal — on Iranian miniatures and their influence on my work

• Olive Green: A Technical Color Study — multiple approaches to achieving olive tones with natural dyes

• My Core Yellow Palette — written while deep in dyeing research for my natural dye zine

• 3 Approaches to Quilt Composition —How to work from inspiration artwork, quilt blocks, and existing quilts to develop your own designs.

Working it Out in the Studio

1. Green Star Quilt

I completed piecing this quilt. To put together blocks of a quilt, you sew them into strips and then sew them together, all sewn the same direction. This took a little tweaking as I worked to balance were I wanted the blocks.

I also completed the quilt back. I make a series of light and dark pink stripes, dyed with cochineal and lac. I also used a few pinks with a purple hue to them to break up the contrast in the stripes. The next step is to baste the quilt so I can begin quilting it. I haven’t decided on a direction for the quilting on this quilt or the Black and Grey Curved Log Cabin Quilt. I will start designing the stitch pattern this month. I plan to write more about the topic of stitch patterns on the scale of larger stitches.

2. Polka Dots and Checks

I made a sample for a bench cushion using the curved snowball block in a checkered formation. I loved the pattern but I didn’t like the colors for the kitchen. I used piles of scraps for this, but I have so many more. I decided that I will continue this to turn this sample into a full throw sized quilt.

The kitchen bench cushion will be this terracotta and black. I on keeping the underside simple and if we get spills on this one, I will just repair it. I still need to finish the construction and make a smaller one for the other seat.

I built a temporary table with shelving unit sides, but I am hoping to make turned wood legs for it. I have a dream to make them look like they are made from round wood balls to follow the theme of circles in this kitchen and the bench. Our local maker space, The Bodgery,, offers a wood turning class, but if I fail at that, I will be buying some off Etsy. Should I stain them or paint them?

Color Study: Beige

While working on a quilt sample for my living room—a space I’ve kept to warm whites, soft beiges, and a single dark anchor in the woodstove—I found myself wondering if beige could carry a whole quilt. It’s a color I usually use to support others rather than stand on its own. Neutrals like beige can act as anchors in a composition, giving other colors space to breathe and sing. But could beige do that work alone without sinking into boredom?

Beige isn’t a single color. Like grey, it can lean warm or cool, picking up yellow, pink, or blue. It sits somewhere between a darker off-white and a very muted, greyed brown. In paint, any color can become beige with enough white and black added, or with white and its complementary color.

In natural dye, beige often comes from exhaust baths or very light dye baths, sometimes followed by a weak iron afterbath. Adding complimentary paint pigments to a color will make grey, but with natural dyes, unless more iron is added, dipping a color in a dye bath of the complimentary color will usually read as beige rather than grey.

With beige, the key is keeping it from turning muddy. The undertones need to stay clear. Overheating a dye bath can push tannins toward brown and dull the color. When that happens, I usually set those pieces aside for overdyeing black.

In a quieter palette, where color is held back, beige stops functioning as support and begins to carry the composition. The pattern becomes more visible, and contrast has to be handled more carefully to keep it legible.

Some questions I ask myself when working with beige:
Is it still beige or has it become off white, grey, or brown? Are the undertones working together? Does the cloth feel bright or dull?

Aesthetic Literacy: Scientific Illustration

While books of scientific illustration contain some of the most beautiful and striking images, beauty is not the primary organizing principle. This style of composition is built around three principles: legibility, precision, and comparison.

Legibility means the subject is presented clearly and without distraction. Backgrounds are typically neutral—white or parchment—so the form can be easily read. The goal is to offer information, not decoration. You can see the edges of the wings, the vein structures, the patterning without interference.

Precision comes through standardization. Unlike how we encounter animals, insects, or plants in nature, their orientation is fixed. With moths, the wings are extended, the body centered, and the form held in symmetry. Color is controlled and descriptive rather than exaggerated. Any beauty that emerges comes through this restraint and clarity rather than expressive flourish.

And finally, comparison. Scientific illustration is rarely about a single image. It operates through collections—grids, plates, multiples—where similar forms are placed side by side. Meaning emerges through small differences across a field of likeness.

Nature is often taken up in art through exaggeration, but this mode works by holding that impulse back. The result isn’t boring—it’s layered. It pulls you in and asks you to look more closely, to stay with it a little longer.

This was the starting point for my Moth Eaten Quilt. Each moth was embroidered at the same level of detail, held to a limited palette, and placed within a simple circular form, almost as if it had been pinned. The composition is symmetrical and restrained, but it invites study. Each moth is based on a real specimen.

I can imagine many directions from here—some literal, like this quilt, and others that take up these principles more abstractly.

Current Obsession: Moths

One of my goals for the year has been to put some things on the walls, but I am hesitant. I like simplicity and I don’t want clutter and I love this wallpaper, but I would love to hang a few special pieces. I decided that it wants a little collection here. The obvious collection for a moth wallpaper by a moth quilt are moths. I found an Esty maker who does these incredibly real looking felt moths that I want to order. I haven’t picked out the ones I want yet, but aren’t they beautiful?

I also want to hang some real moth and beetle specimen in lovely oval frames. Aren’t these so pretty?

I am often asked by people who want to begin designing their own quilts where to start. I work from three primary starting points: an inspirational piece of art, a quilt block exploration, and another quilt. In each case, I am not trying to copy, but to build on what I see. Below I will explain what I look for when I am looking at an inspiration and how I translate that into design and thinking tools. I hope these examples inspire you to feel more confident in doing your own design.

In my practice, quilting is fundamentally about design and composition.

Designing from Art

With this approach, I often work from more than one piece of art or image for a quilt design. I use this not only for appliqué but any kind of other design as well, though the examples I’ll share below will focus more on the

I begin with the art and then return to quilting traditions to determine form. I am not reproducing an image, but working from its underlying composition, color relationships, and spatial logic.

Many improvisational quilters do not work in this way, but I think this limits creativity not expands it. Even highly improvisational quilts rely on inherited visual systems. What can appear to be a constraint is actually generative. Quilting traditions function as a kind of formal grammar, and it is through working within and against that grammar that new compositions emerge.

I am less interested in inventing something entirely new than in transforming what already exists. Innovation, in this sense, is not purely individual, but emerges through shifts within shared forms and practices.

I have made several appliqué quilts from this starting point, including the Pelican Quilt, the Red Matisse Quilt, the Queens Quilt, the Antigone Quilt, as well as non figurative/applique quilts like the Indigo Hex Quilt and the Peach and Gold Log Cabin. Each of these works translates source material differently—sometimes through composition, sometimes through color, and sometimes through structural layout rather than direct imagery.

These sources range from some of my favorite artists such as Agnes Martin, whose work emphasizes grid and restraint; Henri Matisse, whose use of color and interior space informs several quilts; Louise Bourgeois, whose work explores form and psychological presence; and Louise Nevelson, whose assemblages suggest structure and repetition. I also draw from textile traditions such as lace, medieval encaustic tiles, and photographs from my travels. Here are two examples:

1. The Pelican Quilt.

This quilt combines three distinct sources into a single compositional system: a medieval tapestry, a contemporary illustration, and a historical quilt.

I began with the pelican from the Osterteppich, a medieval tapestry from 1504, which became the central appliquéd motif. Rather than reproducing the full image, I drew and simplified the figure and treated it as a dominant visual anchor.

I paired this with an illustration by Carson Ellis, whose use of repeated framing elements (like the sawtooth stars) suggested a medallion structure. This led me to look more closely at early 19th-century American medallion quilts, like this one with the quadrant triangle (QST) borders and layered frames to organize space.

Each source contributed something different: the tapestry gave me the central figure, the illustration suggested repetition and framing, and the historical quilts helped me see that I was part of a longer tradition and opened up new directions. Sometimes knowing where to look when others have worked on this problem is the most important thing you can learn.

The biggest issue I dealt with in the composition was proportion. The relationship between the central motif and the outer borders had to stay balanced, or the pelican would start to get lost. As I added more borders, it became clear pretty quickly when things felt off—the center stopped holding its place. Managing that balance ended up being the main constraint that shaped the quilt.

2. The Red Matisse Quilt

This quilt works from two paintings by Henri Matisse, each of which contributes a different structural component.

I wanted to work in red, but as I was nervous about my use of this color since red is a color I shy away from. I decide to lean into a master of color - Henri Matisse. The first painting established the background for the quilt. The frames and paintings scattered around the room provided a rich array of complimentary colors. It struck me immediately that these frames could be constructed of log cabin blocks.

The second painting provided the large-scale appliqué figure. Because I was working at a larger scale the sketch really helped with the planning. I also wanted to translate this into my own style. Drawing on graph paper gave me a way to keep the blocks proportionate. Drawing in my own hand gave me an image that felt like my own style.

Designing from a Block

This is the most common way that I work. I start with an idea that is a block and stay with it over the course of a year, sometimes several. The two blocks I’ve spent the most time with are the Log Cabin and the Snowball. What holds my attention is the problem of composition: how far I can push a single structure through shifts in scale, contrast, and color.

I’m also interested in what happens at the edges of a block’s identity. Sometimes, if you push far enough, the block becomes something else. I have a form I think of as a curved Snowball that most people read as a Drunkard’s Path. It isn’t exactly that—the traditional block is only one quadrant of what I’m doing—but the resemblance is close enough that I don’t think that reading is wrong. That ambiguity is part of the point.

During the research phase, I draw, look at historic quilts, and then draw again. I’m trying to become literate in the block. That means learning the names of traditional layouts and understanding how they operate: Barn Raising, Sunshine and Shadow, Streak of Lightning, Fields and Furrows, single-block layouts, half-cabin variations, and others. I want to see the full range of what has already been done, and how those variations shift across time and place. One of my favorite examples of this kind of structural thinking is the wrapping patterns used in Egyptian animal mummies.

My instinct is to move quickly from drawing into sewing. I’m less interested in refining a design on paper than in working it out in linen. Usually I draw once and then start. The perfectionism comes later, in the execution rather than the design. That’s idiosyncratic, and not always ideal—some quilts would benefit from more patience earlier on—but I also value the ways this keeps the work from becoming too fussy. I work quickly, and that shapes the balance I strike between planning and making. Others might need or prefer more time in the design phase before committing. In either case, there’s a limit to what a drawing can resolve. The structure only fully emerges once it is made.

1. My Snow Ball Quilts

These are four of the major explorations I’ve made with this block. I’m linking to the full design processes for each one—this is just a way in.

The first, the Red and Black Quarry Quilt, came from the red and black quarry tiles I saw everywhere in the UK. It uses the block in its most classic form, but working within that constraint pushed me to think more carefully about color and layout. The full process shows how much variation is possible without altering the structure at all.

The next exploration came from rotating the square block into a diamond. That small shift changed the internal pressure of the design—especially at the pinch points where shapes meet. I only used a few of these in the final quilt, but they opened up a completely different way of thinking about the block.

In Moth Eaten, I curved the corner pieces and scaled them up. When the blocks come together, they generate circles across the surface of the quilt. This quilt is simple and elegant, but the circles generate enough surprise and compositional interest.

The final set of quilts pushed this idea further. I wanted the circles to read as if they were painted across the quilt, which meant every corner circle on the blocks had to be placed intentionally. That required mapping the entire composition in advance and then translating it back into individual units. I then added another layer by cutting the blocks in half to introduce vertical striping. The Baby size design process, called the Bebe Quilt, is broken down in the linked post.

2. Log Cabin Quilts.

I’ve made more Log Cabin quilts than any other style. Log Cabin were among my first set of quilts and it’s still the block I recommend starting with. It’s simple, but it opens easily into your own design language. I’ve used it in single-block formats, all-over repeats, multiple variations, and in very abstracted ways.

Here are a few single-block quilts. This is one of the best ways to study color—working within a fixed structure while pushing contrast and value. The Yellow Housetop Quilt post walks through that process in detail.

I’ve also worked with more traditional repeats, used the block as a border in the Queens Quilt, and as a background structure for appliqué in the Matisse Quilt. Other variations, like the Kaleidoscope Quilt and the Black and Grey Curved Log Cabin Quilt, push the block further into pattern and distortion. Each of those is broken down in the linked posts.

Designing from another Quilt

This is the approach I find the trickiest. I often want to work from an idea another quilter has already explored, but I also want the quilt to be mine. It’s very easy to slide from influence into imitation.

I don’t think that’s inherently a problem, as long as the source is clearly credited. Quilts, at least in my experience, function more like a shared visual language than a strictly commercial one. Mimicry is one of the most direct ways of learning how a structure works.

Many of my housetop quilts were influenced by the quilts of Gee’s Bend, though I pushed those ideas in different directions. The piece that stayed closest to its source is the one I call the Broken Mirror Quilt, inspired by a quilt by Catherine Marie Longtin.

You can see her quilt on the left and mine on the right. There are four significant changes: I altered the size of each row and column, changed the color system, reworked the stitch pattern, and used a different construction method. Even with those shifts, the design remains close enough that I always reference her quilt when I talk about this piece.

The full process for making this quilt—and where those changes mattered—is in the linked post.

Quilting as Composition

All three of these approaches—working from art, from a block, or from another quilt—are ways of entering into the same problem: how to take an existing inspiration and make something of your own from it.

For me, quilting is about taking an idea from an inspiration and playing with it through color, form, and composition until it becomes something of my own. The more fluent you become in these tools, the more confident you will feel.

The examples here are only a starting point. In each of the linked posts, I go deeper into the design decisions, the construction process, and the specific problems I was trying to solve. If you’re interested in working this way, those will give you a clearer path into the process.

Please share your sketches and quilts with me if you start working along these lines. I would love to see them.

Greens with natural dyes can be tricky because you often need indigo and if you are a beginner, that requires a bit of a learning curve. Olive greens and chartreuses are much easier to achieve for be…

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There are so many yellow natural dyes, but to narrow them down, I created aa core set of five natural dyes for my studio. I use these to make a wide range of yellows, from soft straw tones all the way through to orange-leaning yellows. With a small amount of iron or logwood, these same dyes can also shift toward olive and mossy greens.

One of the strengths of this core palette is that it isn’t just a list of yellow producing plants. It includes three different chemical families—flavonoids, tannins, and anthraquinones—and a range of related compounds. This means that the tones and shifting abilities gives them depth, variety and makes them useful in different ways for over dyeing.

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Each month, Pelican Quilts Journal includes:

• Phases of the Month — the life context shaping my studio practice.

• Posts from the Previous Month — a list of essays shared with paid subscribers.

• Working it Out in the Studio — a photographic overview of current quilts and experiments.

• Color Study — a deep dive into a color shaping my current work.

• Aesthetic Literacy — a close study of a design tradition shaping my work.

• Current Obsession — something visual I’m falling in love with and learning from.

  This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Welcome to the March edition of Pelican Quilts Journal.

I spent the last month diving into Iranian film and art. I love watching movies during the dark winter evenings, so I picked the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. The day after I started writing the section on Aesthetic Literacy and the Persian Miniature, I read about the attacks on Iran. As the news intensified with these attacks and the assassination of Ali Hosseini Khamenei, whose rule has shaped Iran for over 36 years. For me the sense of powerlessness in the middle of world events is overwhelming. I believe that thinking and reading are important ways of orienting ourselves in the midst of heartrending events. Instead of trying to keep up with every piece of news, art can give depth that headlines don’t and sometimes it’s art and fiction that tells the deeper truth.

In this edition, I share what I have learned about an ancient Iranian form called Persian miniature and how they influenced the films of the Iranian filmmaker, Abbas Kiarostami. Both of these are highlights of Iranian art. They also have important things to say about textiles and quilts through their use of pattern and repetition. I can’t wait to see how they influence my designs.

Phases of the Month

If you live in the north, February might be the longest month of the year. The holidays are long over, but the cold blows through my clothes. I love the winter, but even I tend to tighten up a bit by the end of this month. This month was balanced between watching lots of films of Kiarostami, finishing painting and decorating Dave’s office, and mostly spending long hours in my studio.

Posts from February

I don’t want to flood everyone’s email every week. Lately I have been sending out quite a few posts for my paid subscribers. If cost is a barrier but you’d benefit from the content, reach out — I’m happy to share. Here is what I shared this month.

• Nothing Lasts Forever, But Some Natural Dyes Last Longer— A simple guide to tannins, mordants, and colorfastness

• New Quilt in Progress—The black and grey circle log cabin

• How to Make Mitered Corners—Elegant corners for an heirloom quilt

Working it Out in the Studio

The Black and Grey Circle Log Cabin Quilt. I finished piecing this quilt in just a few weeks and now it’s ready to quilt. Along the way I removed two blocks that didn’t fit in and replaced them with all cool-toned greys and purples. The front of the quilt is subtle so I love the bold purple stripes on the back.

The ________Star Quilt. I asked for the name of this quilt block and received a dozen different answers. If you google Sun Ray Quilt Block you will find it along with some tutorials. That’s the name I’ve decided to use. My version is based on this quilt from Maura Ambrose composed of the same block that she calls Star Light. I fell in love with the extra tall points of this star in her quilt, so instead of making this as a nine-patch, I made the center block 4″ finished and the outer squares 6.5″ finished. Each of the star triangles is 4″x6.5″ finished.

Color Study: Olive Green Yellow

I’m currently making an olive green quilt, and I ran out of fabric. I attempted to dye-match an olive green for this quilt twice — and failed both times. Instead, I ended up creating several other beautiful olive variations.

Let’s talk about olive green.

Olive green is not actually a type of green, it’s dark yellow. Olive green is made in pigments by adding the smallest tint of black to yellow. When building an olive green I start with the same idea; begin with a strong yellow base and then build some inky tones into it to try to shift it toward olive.

My method includes a mix of osage orange or weld for my yellows. Then I used iron and logwood for my darkening colors. I find that using only logwood tends to brown out the color because it has a lot of red in it and just iron isn’t quite dark enough for the real olive color. Too much iron it can push the tannins all the way toward grey.

Weld is expensive so I use osage orange, which dyes very intensely and, in my experience, dyes a deeper olive green. The version I have tried with weld leans more toward chartreuse.

I am working on a blog post this month where I will detail my favorite olive green recipe along with notes about everything I tried this month. It was an adventure.

Aesthetic Literacy: The Persian Miniature

This month I’ve been watching the films of Abbas Kiarostami, and I kept thinking about the Persian miniature, which is influential on his movies.

A Persian miniature is a small, highly detailed painting that developed in medieval Iran. These were often included in manuscripts along with poems or stories and painted in brilliant colors, often jewel tones— lapis blues, vermilion reds, glowing gold. They are meant to be held close which means they can be studied slowly.

These paintings are built on repetition. The images aren’t showing the world from one individual’s point of view. They prioritize structure and order over intimacy and imitation of real life. Instead of using perspective to create realism, the miniature arranges people, animals, and buildings into patterned fields of repetition. Gardens are shown from above and from the side at once. Buildings open up as if sliced, revealing interiors like a dollhouse. Figures do not cast shadows but are painted at the same brightness as the landscape around them.

You can imagine why the textile lover in me is drawn to these.

Instead of giving you a list of how to find these in the wild, I will offer a challenge that I want to take up myself this month. Practicing this approach deepen our design skills as pattern makers and show us how to tell stories through our patterns. Please share yours with me and let me know if you have ideas for how this will affect your quilt designs and please don’t worry if you feel you can’t draw. This is just for fun.

• Start by finding or writing a poem about some part of your life. Your drawing will be used to illuminate that poem.

• Use no single perspective.

• Repeat important elements, allowing elements like trees and buildings to feel like textile pattern.

• Don’t add shadows to subjects or architecture.

• Add ornament to every surface.

• Use jewel tones and gilded golds

• Remember, multiple moments of time can occur at once.

Current Obsession: Abbas Kiarostami

I love watching a director’s full catalog during long, dark evenings. I had heard Abbas Kiarostami’s (1940–2016) name for years but had never seen his films. Kiarostami was an Iranian filmmaker, thought of as one of the most important directors of late twentieth-century cinema.

My two favorites so far include Where Is the Friend’s House? and Taste of Cherry (both on the Criterion Channel). If you’re wondering where to begin, start with his first short, Bread and Alley. It’s ten minutes long and already shows his humor, restraint, and style. If you like it, you’ll likely love the rest. I want to show this short to everyone I know.

If you watch his films you will see how closely they relate to the Persian miniature. Watching these films changed the way I see repetition. His films feel like poems unfolding into space. His stories aren’t that interested in a character’s intimate perspective but that doesn’t make him dull. His movies are funny and serious and dramatic— even heartrending.

His films feel similar to looking at quilts and textiles: attention to light, repetition, structure, and interruption. What moves me most is how they quietly reveal ways of thinking and acting within the patterns we are caught up inside. Sometimes I think we assume a story carries more cultural weight than patterns like those that that show up in quilts. These movies were meaningful because they affirm a way of seeing life through repetition —embracing both its successes and failures. In our culture, this is a lost way of seeing. I’m beginning to see my quilts less as pictures and more as patterned worlds.

Read more

TLDR: Everything fades eventually. The goal isn’t permanence but understanding which dyes and methods last longer, and choosing what makes sense for how the fabric will be used.

Natural dyeing is magical, but it also comes with a common question: Will the color last? When I started learning about natural dyes I was often frustrated by the recipes that said what to do but not why. “Let simmer for one hour,” “This mordant is the most colorfast.” Okay, but why? How can I really learn if I am only following instructions? I’ve been doing more research lately and sharing my notes. The question for today: What makes a natural dye colorfast?

Before I dig in, a few thoughts about perfectionism. My dye mantra is: everything fades eventually. I want to make and live with colors and with natural dyes and you have to learn by doing. My goal isn’t perfect permanence. It’s understanding what affects colorfastness and choosing a method that matches how the fabric will be used and most of all, what is enjoyable to me.

Types of Natural dyes

TLDR: Most natural dyes need a mordant to be colorfast, indigo works through a different chemical process, and tannins sit somewhere in between.

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Phases of the Month

Each January, I attend the International Puppetry Theater Festival, and it shapes my month. Being away from home for several days disrupts my routine, but the festival fuels my creativity for the year ahead. This event is something special. It’s both cutting edge and lowbrow at the same time. It’s craftsmanship and story and a little bit of magic.

A highlight this year was a performance featuring a full-size rhinoceros inspired by Albrecht Dürer’s 16th-century woodcut. The craftsmanship was astonishing.

In my studio, I was rushing to finish the Red Matisse Quilt and the Lone Star quilt, adding final elements like binding and quilt signatures. I wanted them completed in time for the festival, where I planned to give them to friends who had flown in for the event.

Working It Out in the Studio

The Black and Grey Curved Log Cabin Quilt
I couldn’t wait to do something totally new this month. I haven’t started a new quilt in months. I started by going through my black and grey scrap bin. I cut all the pieces into strips and organized them by tone till I had a nice selection of black and grey strips.

I often work from a plan, but this one began with a sample block and unfolded from there. I made two samples—one light and one dark. I originally intended to include them in the same quilt, but ultimately decided to separate them into two.

Dyeing
I am currently dyeing colors that will allow me to finish several quilts already in progress.

I made black to finish the Black and Grey Curved Log Cabin quilt. I dyed olive green for a green star quilt I want to make for our green TV room. I needed one small piece of navy blue to finish a curved blue, green, and yellow quilt. To achieve this, I took indigo-dyed linen and dipped it into a light bath of cutch, creating a rich, tonal navy.

Color Study: Grey

Working on the new Black and Grey Curved Log Cabin got me thinking a lot about grey. Some of the undertones in this quilt include purple, blue, brown, and pink.

I photograph greys and organize them by undertone. This practice helps me attune my vision. Another way to explore grey is with paints. You can make rich greys by blending complimentary colors —purple and yellow, green and red, blue and orange—then adjusting the balance to lean warmer or cooler.

Because I make my own colors with natural dyes, this is also how I approach grey in cloth. I create greys by placing tannin-dyed fabric into an iron afterbath. The iron adds additional mordanting and saddens the color, greying it out. Higher percentages of iron produce deeper, more intense greys.

Current Obsession: The Harpy

This month my current obsession is the harpy—a medieval bird-woman figure who appears again and again in manuscript margins, bestiaries, and later revivals. She is strange, excessive, unsettling. She does not fit neatly anywhere.

What draws me to the harpy is her hunger. In medieval stories, harpies are always hungry—stealing food, contaminating meals, refusing restraint. They are not polite creatures. They represent appetite, need, and desire in its most uncomfortable form: the thing we cannot live without and cannot fully control.

I love that desire appears here not as something romantic or refined, but as something embodied and insistent. The harpy does not disguise need as virtue. She exposes it. In that way, she feels deeply honest.

Guilty Pleasure

This month, I added a harpy to an existing tattoo—layered over an earlier medieval motif. It felt right. The image I picked is from the Russian artist Ivan Bilibin, who drew heavily medieval art in his illustrations of Russian folk tales . This particular images frames from his first series of Fairy Tales, published in 1899.

Aesthetic Literacy: Medieval Animals

You can find Medieval animals primarily through bestiaries, manuscript illumination, and tapestries. These images were not meant to look real, but to carry stories.

In the medieval world, animals meant something. I love poring over these bestiaries and learning about their stories. Several have imprinted themselves deep in my heart.

Medieval art and design uses repetition and patterns. Pattern fills the space rather than trying to be naturalistic.

This visual language reappeared hundreds of years later through the Arts and Crafts movement, with designers like William Morris. He liked that there was a kind of collective authorship not a focus on individual genius — just like how quilt designs are made by all of us, the designs of this era were made by the community through their repetition. Morris was interested in the way medieval art was brought into everyday objects like books, furniture, textiles and walls.

I find myself especially attuned to these values. The animal art of this period reminds me to fill my world with pattern and story.

How to Spot It

An aesthetic field guide to medieval beasts:

• Simple and exaggerated bodies

• Emphasis on story

• Non-professional drawing logic

• Recurring animals

• Patterned decorative environments

• Earth and mineral tones in minimal palettes.

• Strong outlines

xoxo

Sarah

I thought I would hop in here just to share with this inner circle a little bit about what I am cooking up that is totally new. This is the first time I’ve started a new quilt in what seems like forever. This one is coming out with very little planning but I wanted to share some behind the scenes WIP with you. Sometimes after a season of a lot of planned quilts, I find myself making quilts more spontaneously like this.

I am often asked if I make patterns, but these instructions are really the best I can do. I love this kind of freeform quilting so sharing my process is what I have to offer, not patterns. I hope it’s fun to follow along like this! Please let me know if you have questions.

Read more

I’ve accomplished more than I set out to do as a quilter when I started in early 2021. I made quilts for every room in my home. I wrote over 100 blog posts here on Substack, I have kept a few years of daily studio journal with social media. I have met and connected with other quilters and I have dyed all my own fabric along the way. Now I can feel something new beginning in my quilting practice, but I can’t yet see its shape.

In this essay I will show how I am tending to this feeling and how the practice of thinking with quilts supports change and movement in our work. I am drawn to the grounding work of naming what matters to me as an artist and a quilter, to a few formative moments that clarified those commitments, and finally back to the daily rhythm of making: stitch after stitch.

Thinking about the Invisible

Do you ever find yourself thinking about something that you can’t directly think about? I have been having dreams lately that I can’t quite remember, but I catch flashes of them that feel like déjà vu. What I am not quite thinking about is my quilting practice. It feels like something stirring inside of me, around me. A storm rolling in, or a baby waiting to be born.

When my first child was inside me, I thought about her all the time, but I had no reference point. I had no sense of what she was. She didn’t even have a face, that most basic characteristic that grounds our connection to another person. She was invisible yet absolutely real. That’s a little how I feel now.

I’m not telling you this to say that I have been brewing up something behind the scenes that I am keeping secret from you, ready to reveal. I am brewing up something behind the scenes that I am keeping secret from myself. Oh, the anticipation. Sometimes thinking through quilting means sewing in the dark.

During phases like this, what do you do? When I was pregnant, I was horrible at nesting. When we had our child we never made a nursery. I was so attached to my single life and so excited for parenting that I reacted with a mix of denial and commitment. My mom gave me a changing table and I said, why would we need this? Can’t we just change her on the bed? My spouse said, Sarah, this will be useful. Babies need a lot of stuff, and we can put it all here. Good point.

Naming My Taste that Guides my Choices

During that time I did have one kind of nesting, though it didn’t look like a nursery. This was the grounding work of naming what matters to me. I spent hours on Pinterest, making collections of things I liked. Rooms, clothes, paintings, colors, textures, objects. It wasn’t pre-verbal or vague. It was an act of articulation. By choosing, grouping, and returning to certain images, I was making clear statements about myself. I could see the shape of my attention, written back to me. And in retrospect, that mattered more than any preparation I refused, because it gave me a way to keep myself in the room while my life was being rearranged. That’s the kind of preparation I’m capable of now too: not trying to know the future, but tending the thread of my own taste until it can pull me forward.

When I was pregnant, we talked about what it would be like to parent. Naming what mattered to us. We talked about who we were and who we wanted to be. I remember saying together that our parenting philosophy would be that each day this child would move a little more toward her own independence. It would be our challenge to give her the support she needed while not holding on too tight. The first and most visceral expression of this was to be her moving from my body.

There is something comforting about an idea or a new movement in your work when it is still just an idea. It could be anything. It doesn’t have a face. It is unnamed. It is inside you and you own every part of it. The moment a thing comes into the world, you lose that control. It takes on a little independence. It starts doing its own thing.

Naming the Principles that Guide my Practice

So during this phase right now, I react the same thing I did when I was about to give birth to my actual child. I resist nesting, but I do little things to prepare that I can bring myself to. I think about my philosophy as an artist, a quilter. I try to capture glimpses that pass through the corner of my eye. The déjà vu moments from my dreams provide the smallest hints, but none of them make any sense. Even so, I am thinking through quilting.

What I am circling toward is not just a feeling, but a set of principles that have quietly guided my work for years. Here are some of the ways I have thought through quilting in my life. The grounding principles of my practice, like that slow dance between dependence and independence, are the same ones that have guided my parenting all these years, and they guide me here too.

My work as a quilter is made within a lived, domestic, and material practice. It is one that ends in the home, on a bed, covering a body. At the same time it draws on the reflective, self-aware modes of artist writing more commonly associated with fine art. I call myself an artist and I call myself a quilter. I am not attempting to reconcile or elevate quilting within the art world. That hierarchy isn’t interesting to me and that split isn’t useful for me. I am not trying to get galleries to take me seriously, because I want my work to live in a home. On a body, not on a wall. To me, a quilt is fully sufficient.

I find it useful to take on some of the modes of the fine artists. I constantly borrow the reflective vocabulary artists use to think publicly about their work. This is meaningful to me because it offers me, and possibly other quilters too, a way of engaging our work with depth, intention, and cultural awareness without abandoning the intimacy, tradition, and use of the quilt. I have found it so useful to use my quilts as a place to reflect just as you would with a painting or sculpture.

Naming our Era

There are material realities for us not just questions of our own identity that we have to think through. For many, it is about how we make our living. As artists, we make things out of the ingredients of our souls that can be placed in a store and sold for money. This is odd. It creates deeply conflicted feelings and, of course, all kinds of insider and outsider groups. It separates those who can sell their work for large sums and those who have exquisite craftsmanship yet cannot sell their work for anything near a living wage.

This is further exacerbated in an era where artists see their ideas stolen and then made for pennies. I won’t pretend that I understand what is happening with all of this on a larger cultural and global scale. What I do know is that despite all this, I want to make art in a deeply specific, traditioned, and well-crafted manner.

Naming the Past

I also use this time of waiting to reflect on the changes I have gone through in my work. These are the moments of remember an initial spark, a breakthrough, a rupture or meeting a goal. One big goal for me was to become a writer, using quilts as a medium for these essays. I had a significant roadblock to this goal.

I spent most of my twenties and thirties being deeply uncomfortable with any thought of my anonymity being broken. My thoughts were my own. I didn’t want to share them to be examined or judged. That’s a big problem is you want to be a writer. What is a writer without a reader?

In my forties something shifted and I felt exactly the opposite. I wanted to write and share my work for the first time ever. It was an epoch shift for me. It was something I didn’t see coming and something that shocked me. I have been weird about it just like I was weird about welcoming my first child: unwilling to nest, barely willing to prepare, yet fully excited about the ride.

The regular practice now of making work and writing about it has become so integral to my life. Its so part of my regular rhythm now that it seems shocking that there was a time I could not imagine doing this. Writing became another way of stitching. It is slow, though more exposed.

This dream to be a writer was tested soon after I began to write publicly. A year or so into sharing my interest in quilts online I had an internet thing happen. Someone who didn’t like my approach began calling me out and contacting professional colleagues to besmirch my name. This was painful because it damaged some very exciting opportunities and I was treated so aggressively and impersonally. They didn’t call me or try to get to know me. They spoke against me online and then blocked me. This was someone I had been inspired by and respected.

I have come to see this as an internet thing because it is indeed a type of thing that happens commonly online. The reality is that while I love this person’s work and ideas, I also don’t agree with them about many things. They are subtle differences, but they are differences. In an ideal world, these things could be talked about with nuance and in a manner that respects the complexity of the world and traditions of textiles and quilts. Instead, the internet, with its short statements, gates, and walled gardens, can become a shockingly violent space.

I was invited by a publication to do a public debate, and I found this too confusing. I was hurt and had never even had a conversation with this person, nor had I heard their argument against me in a coherent way. I didn’t have my footing for a public debate.

Instead, I decided for the first time to write my own ideas long form. That rupture did not end my work; it clarified why I needed a longer form to hold it. That conflict was really the beginning of these essays. It brought up a real desire to create more nuance and more complexity within myself. I am not here to change one person’s mind on the internet. Yes, it hurt, and it sucked to lose out on things I was excited about. But I also saw a real opportunity to move from writing my ideas in one-liners or short paragraphs to really working them out in a nuanced and complex way.

That is what the last few years of quilting and writing have been for me. That is the matrix of the creative space that opened up in my life. It turned out all my fears of losing my anonymity were correct, and yet I wouldn’t trade it for the ability to write.

Enough Names. Just Make Something Already

There is a third thing I do to prepare that is very practical. I will continue to make quilts. I have several designs I completed more than a year ago that are ready to make. So I’m going to keep working on what is in front of me. I’m not going to abandon my own practice just because something new feels like it’s coming. If anything, it’s the opposite: when life is about to shift, the insistence on my work is what helps me not disappear inside the shift. I’ll finish the designs I’ve already chosen, and I’ll trust that whatever is arriving will emerge from that steady contact with the material, not from my trying to force it into view.

What is coming next for me and my quilts? I see little incomprehensible glimpses. Instead of trying to pry open the future, I am naming what guides me and the cracks and explosions that have formed me. When it came to becoming a parent, no amount of nesting would have prepared me anyway. Having a child was a dramatic shift. It was total, irreversible. What saved me wasn’t the right furniture or the perfect plan. It was the insistence, even then, on keeping the thread of my own work intact: a practice that reminded me I was still here, still myself, even as new things emerged. That’s part of what I’m reaching for now.

Thinking through quilting is so helpful in these times when it feels like new things are emerging. These new things are nameless and faceless so what can we do? We can think. And keep quilting.

Phases of the Month

January 1 marks the turning of a chapter, a revolution around the sun. I have been frantically trying to finish two quilts—the Lone Star Quilt and the Red Matisse Quilt—before the clock strikes midnight.

I work on so many quilts at a time that it can be hard to place them in a particular year, since many take multiple years to complete. I consider quilts to belong to the year they are finished.

I’m not going to make the deadline, but I’ve decided I’ll ask the teacher (me) for a one-week extension and still consider these quilts part of the chapter of 2025.

Color Study: Blacks

My current color study has been black. I’m thinking about black and silver, warm black, cold black, soft black, chalky black, barely black. I’m designing a black quilt, but even more than that, I am thinking about my wardrobe. Even though I often dress in black, I want to play with layering, accessorizing, pattern, and form. I love this color, but I want it to be more than an afterthought (though some days, that is exactly what I need).

I like how black makes me feel: moody and artistic. Disciplined, and maybe a little continental. Intellectual. Like Audrey Hepburn when she runs off to France as a beatnik in Funny Face.

I love using naturally dyed black in my work. One favorite is the back of the Moth Eaten quilt. Black is a multi-stepped color to create but I committed this precious naturally dyed fabric to this piece because it is a quilt curtain—this means it is basically a two sided quilt and the design of the back was just as important as the front. If you want a dye recipe for this naturally dyed black, check out this post.

Color Field Guide: Warm black vs cool black, chalky vs inky.

Current Obsession

All year I’ve found myself adding modifiers to my Pinterest searches like “Victorian Halloween,” “Gothic Christmas,” or “Victorian solstice.” These aesthetics strip away modern brightness and excess and replace them with shadow, texture, ritual, and restraint. Dark greens, blacks, and burgundies instead of primary colors. Celebration done as atmosphere.

I started the year by finishing a very Gothic Revival–feeling quilt—the Queens Quilt. The arches and window-like blocks. The carved-looking frames for each queen. The textiles ornamented with extra embroidery on the figures.

Aesthetic Literacy: Gothic Revival

The Gothic period—the one that Gothic Revival is reviving—refers to the medieval era in the 12th century. Medieval Gothic refers primarily to an architectural style focused on bringing light into large, dark spaces. Many aspects of the early Medieval period is really important to me and carries a strong influence on my art and quilt practice.

In the 19th century, Gothic forms returned at the very moment when industrialization and mass production were transforming everyday life. For the Victorians, Gothic offered something the modern world seemed to threaten: tradition, craft, moral seriousness, and restraint. It stood in contrast to the speed, sameness, and abstraction of new technologies. Living in an era of fast technological innovation is unsettling.

Gothic Revival becomes a way of managing that anxiety by holding onto beauty and craft in a rapidly changing world. Pointed arches, dark woods, and ornate detail slow the eye down.

How to Spot it. Use this as an aesthetic field guide:

• Architecture— window tracery, spiky rooflines, pinnacles and spires

• Interiors— dark wood, arched mirrors, thick drapery, tapestry florals.

• Ornament and detail—patterned surfaces, ornate wallpaper, wrought iron.

• Atmospheric lighting—Low light, candlelight, stained glass.

• Color and Palette—black, deep green and burgundy, jewel tones (emerald, wine, sapphire), aged brass, tarnished silver, dark iron, oxidized metals.

Working It Out in the Studio

I’m finishing two quilts, and each has its own challenges. I’ll be writing more about both in the next few weeks.

Quilting the Lone Star Quilt: When hand quilting (stitching the layers together), it’s important to work from the inside out. This keeps the fabric lying flat. This stitch design curved back in on itself, so I had to be very mindful about direction and when to pause to keep puckering to a minimum. It was really challenging—definitely not a pattern for a first-time hand quilter.

Appliqué for the Red Matisse Quilt: The appliqué pieces were so complicated that I was nervous the figure would end up sitting crooked on the quilt. I hand-basted the entire piece together, laid it on the quilt, and then appliquéd it in place. I’ll walk through all the mechanics of this in the next few weeks in a studio notes post.

Guilty Pleasure

Each year for the New Year, I commit to trying things that feel too frivolous. I have come to realize how important these things are. This year, I will experiment more with accessor

ies—necklaces, earrings, maybe a new tattoo. I got some amazing necklaces for Christmas, so I’m off to a great start. I’m sure you’ll be seeing a lot of silver and gothic influences this year.

A small change to a familiar tradition

For the last few years, I’ve ended the month with Quilty Secrets & Guilty Pleasures. This recurring post let people in behind the scenes of my studio. I loved looking back each month, taking stock, and sharing this with you.

I’m keeping the spirit of that tradition, but I’m changing the form.

Starting in 2026, I’m retiring the old “10 things” format and replacing it with a new monthly post called:

Pelican Quilts Journal

It will still include guilty pleasures and quilty secrets. But it will also widen the lens. I want this monthly post to be less like a list of what happened and more like a record of how I’m cultivating my life as a creative.

Each month’s Journal will have six recurring sections:

Phases of the Month
Each month I reflect on what helps me and what got in the way of my creative process; the progress I made and the life that shaped it. I hope to inspire you to reflect on your creative life.

Current Obsession
Our obsessions inform our work and imbues it with a liveliness.. I think the artist is responsible to cultivate obsession, attention and interest. I will bring my love of being in love to this space and inspire you to do the same.

Color Study
Working with color is a big part of my creative practice. My goal is to start with a color story that excites me and then to talk about it with technical language in a way that really helps me understand it better.

Aesthetic Literacy
Aesthetic literacy is both being able to name styles and their conventions (Amish quilts, Shaker design, 1920s aesthetics) but also being able to talk about how we make judgments about beauty and taste. The more we understand aesthetics, the more powerful we are as creatives.

Working It Out in the Studio
When I quilt I am constantly trying to solve problems of composition. This section will be particularly interesting for quilters, but I think the process of trying something totally new to me and working through the challenges could be useful to anyone who loves to make things or learn about making things.

Guilty Pleasure
Whether it is indulging in something special for my studio, skin care, fashion, films and TV or something else, I want to share a guilty pleasure each month. Why? I don’t think you can embark on a creative life without a brush with guilt and indulgence.

Who it’s for

Quilt lovers and creatives of all kinds who want to cultivate aesthetic literacy for everyday life.

Quilts are the anchor here - the core of my studio practice, but the questions spill outward: color, taste, attention, style, the home, other craft practices, the studio, the slow formation of an eye. If you make things, if you’re trying to see more clearly, if you care about the objects and images you live with, this is for you.

How it works (free and paid)

Everything essential is free here: the full picture, real studio thinking, and useful inspiration. The monthly Pelican Quilts Journal is part of that. So are my longer ideas essays in The Quilt on the Couch series which come out 6-8 times a year.

Paid subscribers are those who want to stay longer. Paid is where I publish the deeper dives: Studio Notes and Quilt Case Studies—extended posts, the process, the decision-making, the experiments, and the problem-solving behind the finished work. And, candidly, paid is also for anyone who simply wants to be a patron of my work.

Like always, I promise that you can expect this space to be thoughtful and supportive. It will be a visual feast.

Read more

I am currently writing a blog post about the making of this Grey Argyle Quilt, and I decided to do a round-up of all the reels I made during the process. Some of them explain what I was doing, and others are reflections—more like quilt poetry. Either way, I think it’s sometimes easier to understand the logic of the quilt when you can see it come into shape.

This quilt was made improvisationally. This means that if you decide to make a similar one, you will have to be ready for some wonky seams and willing to enjoy the messy process. The most difficult part of this quilt was working with the angles. As you will see, mine doesn’t line up perfectly—but that is part of its charm. The effort to get them to meet, and all the little failures, show the hand of the artist. This failing is just like life, where all we can hope for is to fail, fail again, and maybe fail better.

Read more

1. Quilting the Lone Star Quilt. I take more naps than I can count at the Porcupine rustic cabins. But even so, I always have time to quilt. This time I brought the Lone Star quilt along to start quilting. I finished a quarter of it so I’m hopeful that it will be complete by the New Year. Yes, I do sleep with these quilts as I make them.

2. Porcupine State Park. November started out with a trip five hours north where we stay at these rustic cabins several times a year. We love these public land rustic cabins that are part of the Michigan’s Porcupine Mountain State Park.

3. Matisse Red Room Quilt top. I finished piecing this quilt top! I’m racing to the end of the year to try to get the quilt finished. I have only completed 1 quilts this year so I am really hoping to finish two more. I had intended to complete 6 this year but due to my health issues and other priorities, I quilted less than I have in ages.

4. My Weld Garden. I don’t have enough space for a real dye garden but I thought it would be fun to see a few dye plants grow, just to understand them a little better. This is all the weld that came up but I am excited to see how it dyes. I likely will never grow enough to dye a substantial amount of fiber, but it is so pretty and fun to understand the colors from the root up.

5. The Falling Star Quilt. I bought these variated beiges and browns to stitch this quilt to add some texture. I’ve been thinking about this quilt a lot lately and wondering if this is the right quilt for the person I made it for. I am considering changing the back and keeping this one for myself and using the back that I made for this one and doing a new quilt top. For me, I would rather keep working on idea till it feels right to me. Its definitely slowed this piece down, but that’s okay. Its all about the process, BABY!

   

I’ve been thinking about what that means lately - that its the journey, not the destination. It struck me that it is funny to use a short aphorism, a cliche, to describe something that is supposed to be about a long intricate experience.

6. Quilt back and Appliqué. I used these pale pinks and blues for the quiltback. At first I thought I would make it from reds to continue the red theme, but I often don’t have enough red and I didn’t want to use the last of it for this quilt. Of course, if it had been right, I would have sacrificed it, but it felt too heavy. I love the way that the pink or blue peaks out on this quilt as it is on a bed. I will write more about the process of scaling up this drawing. It is directly from a Matisse painting that I love. I am not sure I will ever get these pieces to go back together now that I cut them up though.

7. Chicago Birthday. Dave had his birthday this year in Chicago. We work together and had the excuse to stay overnight in the Robey Hotel in Wicker park. We worked all day the next day at the Chicago Botanical Gardens. We will be making a video game teaching about aquatic invasive species as part of the public media work we do together for our work with Field Day Lab. I love that Dave picked out this incredible Ukranian restaurant where we ate our weight in pickles.

8. Planes, Trains and Automobiles. We flew to Austin as a family for the first time to see one of my bests friends for thanksgiving. I do not recommend flying on a holiday weekend and this trip was a sacrifice that we paid for in travel nonsense. We were delayed 7 hours on our way there and 2 days on our way home. Somehow it was a restful and lovely trip regardless. I made my favorite pies and salads and cranberry sauce. The Texas folks smoked every type of meat they could get their hands on. Taking a trip as a family to see family friends is really special. We literally had to take a plane, an uber, a train, and a rental car to get home.

9. Austin. We did so many great Austin things. From hikes around the Green Belt, shopping on Congress Ave, eating at Cosmic and getting lots of bbq. I got a chance to forage for cochineal for the first time ever. It snowed over a foot at home but getting back to the snow and my dog felt amazing.

10. Visiting the Grey Argyle Quilt. I forget that I make the quilts that I have given away and it’s like seeing an old friend when I visit. This quilt was made as a wedding gift for my friend two years ago. I don’t think I’ve ever written up directions for how I made this so if anyone wants to know, just send me a message and I’ll write it up.

I have an inordinate amount of love for the John James Long Darner. In my opinion, it is the best hand-quilting needle available. I’ve tried any number of sashiko needles that were either too thick or pulled on the linen. I’ve tried Japanese brands, English brands, American brands — all with the same frustration.

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