My First Quilts

My very first quilts were very rough. Fortunately, I don’t have any photos of those! 🙂 I started “quilting” at a very young age. I’m not sure exactly how old I was, but I wasn’t a teen-ager yet. I cut out pieces of fabric and sewed them onto a piece of solid white fabric, with the raw edges exposed. A “rag quilt” is a cute style with fringed seam allowances that are exposed on purpose. Mine were not rag quilts. Mine were just a mess! But I was just a kid, so that’s okay. 🙂 My quilting skills have improved a lot since then!

Sometime in my early teens, I learned how to piece fabric together. I made a few throw pillows and tote bags, and pieced and quilted a cover for a 2-drawer filing cabinet that was rather ugly.

Around age 16 or 17, I started a “Roman Coins” pattern, which is rectangles of fabric sewn into a long strip, with sashing strips between each “stack” of coins. My color scheme was blue, green, & purple. My piecing is inconsistent. I used whatever fabric I could use, including some clothing that was nearly worn out. I quilted it very simply, using what I now call the “old clunker” sewing machine. It’s terrible – the quilt top got wrinkled & I just quilted it anyway! Despite all of that, I finished it in 1994 & used it on my bed for about 10 years. As the fabrics started wearing out, starting with the pieces cut from work-out clothing, I mended it using the few decorative stitches on that “old clunker” machine – if it has to be mended, might as well make the mending interesting, right? I still have the quilt, but it’s too worn out to be used now. (Sorry for the bad photo quality. This photo was taken on one of my first digital cameras, and the quilt is too worn out now to re-photograph with a good camera.)

In the early 1980s, my mom pieced a quilt top using a pattern for a huge star block, but she never quilted it. The calico fabric showcases the fabrics available in the first few years after America’s Bicentennial in 1976 triggered a renewed interest in quilting.

I found the quilt top about a decade later, in 1994. I added borders to the top and bottom to make it almost-fit a double-sized bed, then hand-quilted it. I used an old store-bought factory-quilted blanket for the batting, because I didn’t have money to buy actual batting. This wasn’t the best idea, as the print from the old blanket shows through the white areas a bit, but I used what I had available. The hand-quilting took about two years, and my mom and sister helped with some of the quilting. I named this the North Star quilt, because it felt like the project never moved! It did get finished eventually. 🙂

Around the same time, I started a very ambitious project – a Double Wedding Ring quilt. If you know anything about traditional quilting designs, you know that a Double Wedding Ring includes curved piecing. I was a young teen-ager, and had been sewing and quilting for only a few years. I was too young to realize how difficult the pattern was, so I just jumped in anyway! 🙂 My parents were about to celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary, so I made the quilt for them. The peach and green color scheme for the “joining” blocks matched their bedroom. I finished the top in 1995.

I started the hand-quilting, but it was a very ambitious project & it took so long that I got busy with work, then got married & moved away. My mom and sister worked on the hand-quilting, and eventually, the quilt was finished! I honestly can’t remember now if I did the faced edge or if my mom or sister did. Whoever it was, we did that to avoid needing to get binding to go around all those curves and into the corners. The quilt was finally finished in 2001.

The fourth bed-sized quilt from that era is a Flying Geese quilt. I started the top in 1994. Every “goose” is from a different fabric except for two that match as an “on-purpose mistake!” No, I can’t find the matches anymore, but I do remember that one of the two matching geese is in a corner, and the other is in the center of the quilt. The colors go from dark at the bottom to light at the top.

I named the quilt Birds of a Feather, and I used a blue-on-white print with birds for the sashing strips. It was long-arm quilted by Joan the Shelby Stitcher in 2006, and was one of the first quilts that she long-armed for someone besides herself! (Check out her YouTube channel & contact her if you need any quilts long-armed. This is not sponsored – just trying to help out a friend & give credit where quilting credit is due.)

I promise that the “geese” columns are straight. 🙂 Some of the corners are cut off, but considering how young I was when I started this quilt, I think that’s okay. Done is better than perfect, right? This is another quilt that is now too worn out to re-photograph, so I’m stuck with these photos from the lower-quality digital cameras that I had at the time.

That’s enough of a walk down memory lane for today. 🙂

Happy stitching!

— Elizabeth