Quilting

I've always been intrigued by quilts, even as a child I loved to look at quilts and dreamed of making one. In the early 90's I started looking seriously at making some quilts but was intimidated by the process of templates. Rotary cutting and strip piecing was starting to be popular at that time but most quilt patterns I found still were along the lines of "cut 1000 of template A and a zillion of template B, sew together". Uh - no thanks!

When I first started quilting in the early 90's, I stayed with small wall hangings. Few pieces to cut, little money invested and quick satisfaction. In 1993, I bought the fabric for a queen size quilt. I finished piecing the top in 1998, which I guess isn't too bad. I started quilting it in 1999, the partially quilted quilt is stored nicely in the top of my closet. One day...one day...it will be finished.

The first books I had on quilting showed quilts made from solid colored fabric. Remember these were patterns from the late 80's and early 90's. So, I had it in my mind that you choose solids and maybe one print for a quilt. Around 1994/95, I went to a quilt trunk show and the woman pulled out quilts that were full of various prints! There were AMAZING! I didn't know you could do that! The woman explained that in a quilt you can put together prints you would never wear together.

Not long after that I took my first quilt class at a local quilt shop. It was odd to work on a wall hanging quilt that had a striped bunny on a print background. Those weren't realistic colors for a bunny! I pushed myself along and enjoyed the wall hanging. By this time I had numerous wall hangings. My then-husband said "If you sewed all those together you would have a quilt big enough to use." MEN! They just don't understand the practice involved before making that big leap to a "big" quilt!

Soon I became brave and decided to do a "big quilt". I even got brave enough to use 3 prints in one quilt. This was my first "big" quilt, done in the late 1990's.

Here is a close up....machine pieced and hand quilted.