I am asking for your help with this post.  My mother recently moved from Vista, CA to Robinson, IL.  She packed the two quilts I made for her in a box and had it placed in the moving van coming east.  They did not arrive.  Here is the first one, a Boston Commons quilt with a Card Trick border.  it is approximately 100 x 100" and is signed, dated and dedicated…

I'm calling it Marmalade.  What I mean when I say that is, like an orange Marmalade cat, but what keeps running through my head is the song "Marmalade." The lyrics kept haunting me while I made this quickie quilt (two weeks, start to finish using a couple of jelly rolls). "I met Marmalade down in old New Orleans, strutting her stuff on the streets."

I…

This is my granddaughter, Sylvia.  She is beautiful and wacky and crazy and kind. One of a kind.  I love her with all my heart and when it was time to make her a baby quilt, life got in the way and I never got to it while she was a baby (she is almost four).  Things were further delayed by the fact that her momma, my daughter Becky, wanted to cross stitch…

Every once in awhile, you meet a person who is so very special in so many ways and you feel so fortunate to know them.  This is true of my friend and former supervisor, Catena Bergevin.  Catena and I worked together for about four years at The Westmoreland Museum of American Art and she hated anyone to introduce her as "my boss." This October, she married her…

My first born granddaughter, Ruby Charlotte is only 4 years old.  She is normal sized as 4 year olds go, maybe a little tall and fun to be with.  She and her brother (and mom and dad of course) spent nine days with us at Thanksgiving and as soon as they left, I got started on finishing up her Christmas quilt and here it is.  The funny thing is (and the reason…

If 2013 was the year of the Christmas quilt for me, this year was the year of the Christmas pillow.  I got this crazy idea that I could make Christmas pillows out of ugly (or not so ugly) Christmas sweaters so off to the Thrift stores I trotted.  I ended up making 18 pillows.  You can see all but one in my album, "Christmas 2018 Pillows." After making a few, I…

Hello Campers:

I have not posted since winter had us by the throat and would not let loose (it lasted til the end of April, for God’s sake) so here I am again to give you an update on what is happening around the quilting house of Leiner Inc.  In a nutshell, I am stuck on making quilt tops (and only quilt tops) that have “inchers,” or one inch squares as I am told they are called.  There is a reason for this, of course.  There always is a reason and that is the story for…

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/arts/design/quilts-ken-burns-international-quilt-study-center-museum.html?smid=fb-share

While browsing facebook in my pj today (a rainy Sunday), I found this short piece on Ken Burns and his quilts.  Awesome.  This man is brilliant!  Aren't you all so proud to be of this tradition?  I particularly like the idea that…

I haven't talked about it much here but I have decided I am a tired old dog.  I have an excuse of course.  Every old dog does and here is mine.

In March 2017, I had my artificial knee on the left replaced with a new artificial knee as the old one came loose and moved left.

In October 2017, they determined the right artificial knee was infected and took it out, replacing it with a spacer for 5 weeks.  Turns out they were wrong, it was not infected (good news for me) but the…

It's January and apparently a slow news week.   I made the newspaper (print and online version) with a short video and print interview about quilting.  The reporter, Shirley, is a museum friend and called asking me if I would like to talk about quilting.  Can you imagine me saying no???

She asked me to bring my latest project so I brought in Ruby's Christmas quilt.  The top is finished and I think I will wait until I have Sylvia's done as well before I pin and quilt them both.  Maybe…

Merry Christmas morning to you all!  As I sit here this snowy morning, alternately sipping my Christmas tea and Diet Coke, I am contemplating the year soon to end and another about to begin.  I once told someone a good year was three quilts completed and by that definition, this was a good year.  I finished Becky's wedding quilt (finally!), made a new Halloween pumpkin quilt…

My family was blended long before that became a fashionable term.  My parents divorced in 1958 (I was 3) and my dad, who had custody of my sister Bev and I remarried a wonderful woman in 1959 who became Mom to us and gave us our sister, Denise.  Mom was a 26 year old secretary with her own car and the family lore is that Dad married her for that car!  Not true I am sure…

"There is no remedy for love but to love more."  (Thoreau);  "A happy marriage is a long conversation which always seems too short." (Andre Maurois);  "Trust your heart if the seas catch fire, live by love though the stars walk backwards." (e.e. cummings)';  "All, everything that I understand, I understand because I love." (Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace); "No one has ever measured, not even poets, how much the human heart can hold." (Zelda Fitzgerald).

These are the five quotes about…

Hello fellow quilting fanatics. This has been a very busy month around the Leiner household.  We sold one rental house and bought two more so I have been kept from my quilting by landlady duties.  But I am happy to report that I am making progress on the quilt for Beck and Todd, the quilt that has stymied me all year, and am to the point of putting the border on the black…

My quilting friend, Riana Noyes asked me to do a post on the Halloween cross stitch quilt which is #108 in my albums.  The following are  pictures and some explanations/descriptions of how that quilt came to be.

First the back story.  I have been quilting since I was 18 years old.  I had my first child, Jamie at 23 and my second, Becky at 27.  All through their childhood, I was making quilts and once upon a time, cross stitching as well.  in 1984 or 85 I decided to do a Christmas…

I know I have been incommunicato for awhile but I have been busy quilting!  Here is the most recent quilt I finished just tonight, a few scant hours before Halloween.  No, you are not crazy, this is a Christmas quilt.  Sometimes, we just don't get to choose the timing of when things get accomplished. 

The pattern is your basic log cabin with cross stitched Christmas…

Hello Campers!  Welcome to spring and are you all busy on your quilt projects?  I am supposed to be working on my 2nd Daughter, Becky's wedding quilt (they will be married five years next weekend - I am a bit behind) and it has been a challenge from the get-go.  We picked out the fabric last spring during a visit to her house in Plano, Texas.  Here are the fabrics: Not feeling…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmaSTtsYcmU

We are a few weeks into the second half of my quilt show and here is the youtube video from the second half.  I talk about two quilts in particular, Mosaic Wedding Quilt which belongs to my nephew and neice-in-law in Oak Park Illinois and Topography of a Marriage, the lastest wedding quilt for Tom and Artemis Vasilou, my unofficial third daughter.  Here they are:…

Hello Campers!  Back at it again after a short hiatus.  Life set me back abit between my father's passing and all the family visits this winter. I visited daughter Becky and granddaughter Sylvia in early February and daughter Jamie and grandson Wyatt were out here in Pennsylvania this week.  Good times all around but I am glad to be back to spending time in my quilt…

It is with profound sadness that I write to tell you of the death of my father, Gene Edward Long, 82, who died peacefully in his sleep in the early morning hours of December 23, 2015.  He will be sorely missed by his family and friends. 

Rest in peace,…