My first quilt

The theme for show & tell at our guild meeting today is “My first quilt”, so I have dug mine out (with a lot of other stuff that I’ll get back to later).

I did a lot of needlepoint before I started quilting. My needlepoint was kind of like my quilting; I drew a design on a piece of paper, transferred it to the background and went to work armed with lots of different colours of yarn.

Then daughter got sick and we spent weeks and weeks at the hospital. Having a portable hobby made a huge difference in the vacuum that is hospital life. During a little break on a rainy Thursday afternoon, I bought a book about antique American quilts for inspiration. Browsing through it my daughter said “Oh, I would love one of those”, so I started quilting.

Unaware that there was such a thing like quilting fabric I went to IKEA and got lots of striped (rather heavy weight) cotton fabrics. I read through the very short helpful hints in the back of the book, and also got some cutting tools. A couple of weeks later daughter got her quilt for Christmas. It has been much loved and used and washed, it's soft and cuddly, and the colours are still bright. It’s a great quilt.
I learned a lot from this quilt:
1. When you cut pieces for a quilt:, don’t mix inch and centimetre rulers. I did not quite like my first ruler, so I got another one. It looked alike to me, but was not. I discovered this when I started sewing all the pieces together.

2. A piece of paper with snippets of fabric glued to it, does not make a great design wall.

3. Heavy weight fabrics make a heavy quilt.

4. Heavy weight backing makes a heavier quilt.

5. Cotton batting makes an even heavier quilt. I could probably put “moving around under the quilt” on my exercise program.

6. When the instruction for quilting in the ditch says “start quilting in the middle”, this does not mean in the middle of the quilt. You should really start on the edge every time.

7. I love quilting.


Here are some details of my matching points and creative quilting in the ditch.