What’s the first quilt you ever made? Do you have a picture of it?
Well, the first quilt I ever made was over 20 years ago. It was a fence rail pattern that I made for my (now) mother-in-law (aka MIL). My sister helped me pick out the fabrics. We looked for fabrics that reminded me of my MIL and that went together. I remember learning about how colors went together, and different scales of fabric patterns. Then we prewashed, and ironed the fabric. I thought it was a lot of work just to get fabric ready to cut. My sister was there every step of the way to help me along. I did the quilting myself – stitching in the ditch as best I could.
I gifted it to my MIL and she loved it. She used it ALL THE TIME. In fact, she used it so much that it started to fall apart. I was horrified back then, when I was a new Average Quilter, because I didn’t understand that someone would love my gift so much that they’d use it to death. Now I see it as one of the biggest compliments an Average Quilter can receive. My MIL put the quilt aside into storage so that it wouldn’t get damaged any further.
Is there a picture? Well… no. Back then I didn’t have a cell phone that took photos, and I certainly didn’t think to take a photo of my quilt! I’m hoping that I’ll get my hands on the quilt to repair it soon. If/when that happens I’ll certainly take some photos and share them out!
The 2nd Quilt
All that said, I do have the second quilt I ever made. As in, I actually sleep under it sometimes.
I made this log cabin quilt for my mom, using the Quilt in a Day Book by Eleanor Burns. I don’t remember why I went with the colors I chose for her – other than the lightest pink, they’re not really her colors. My sister helped me pick the fabrics (she’s a good person to have in your back pocket for that), but I wanted to put it together and quilt it all on my own. The fabrics were also pre-washed, so again, no squishy crinkled look. And I did stitch in the ditch quilting, with no real idea how to do it!
Looking at it with my more experienced eyes, I see lots of things that I’d do differently. And perhaps, if I wasn’t so stubbornly insistent about doing it on my own, I might have had someone else’s input to guide me more. This was done before YouTube and tutorials were so readily accessible and my little introverted self certainly wasn’t going to reach out to strangers! So of course there’s puckering and seams that don’t line up… and that binding! It’s definitely not something an expert made.
But, what I’ll say is that this quilt was made with love. And my mom absolutely LOVED it, mistakes and all. She slept under it every night until we had to relocate her to a care facility once her dementia became too advanced for us to handle. I’m sure she noticed the mistakes, but she felt my love every time she went to sleep. And now I feel connected to her every time I snooze under it too.
Here are the pictures that were in my camera roll. They’re not well lit (most of my pictures are terribly lit). They show off the mistakes, but that’s to show you that all Average Quilters start somewhere – and all of our mistakes are pretty average.
