Wednesday 16 September 2009

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.

5 comments:

  1. I love this quilt! I love the energy, the colors and even those miss-matched points. What a great mom and talented artist you are!

    (And at least your first quilt turned out... my first effort resulted in a quilt that had the backing in the middle and the batting on the back. I was as clueless as they came!)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hello Mrs Moen! First of all, thank you for stopping by my blog yesterday. I appreciate the comment. :)

    Second, I LOVE this quilt. I'm very impressed that this is your first one and that you finished it in only a couple of weeks! Amazing! You are truly talented. I'll have to post about my first quilt and if my sister can find it, I'll then go back and post a photo. You'll get a big laugh out of it when that happens.

    I'm going back to read some more of your blog now.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Well I must admit I am still a "stitch in the ditcher" girl...LOL....I love the patchwork part but dont like the quilting part....hugs Khris

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks for commenting on my blog! I'm so glad that you did because now I am enjoying reading yours. I love the colors in your quilt.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I love this quilt, too. I have admired it from across the room for an entire evening. It is so cheerful and intensely colorful, you have to smile and cheer up!

    ReplyDelete

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.