Look at me! I'm QUILTING!

First the quilt, then the story!



You can't see the fabric well, but the green has large leaf patterns, the yellow has tiny leaf and vine patterns.



It isn’t very often that I embark on a completely new adventure, but when I do, I dive in head first! This is my journey into quilting, a road that I hope will be long and satisfying. I will TRY to keep up with other projects, but I fear, dear friends, that this will likely become more of a quilting blog over the next year. It’s that serious! I am in love!

About a year ago, I went to the fabric store and saw a special quilting kit that was a farm scene made up of tiny long triangles of fabric which results in shading in the proper places (think taking a photograph on a sunny day and trying to reproduce it using nothing but fabric, but in triangle mosaic!). It was beautiful, and I came so close to buying it, but I think I thought it was expensive at the time (compared to other kits I’ve come across recently, it was dirt cheap!).

Several months ago, the Jones Creek Library had a quilt show and display. I had seen a small quilt in the same style as the kit at the fabric store, but there was only the one of its kind amongst those displayed. It turns out that this is the same person who designed the farm scene quilt kit. I was inspired to look through some quilting books to see if this technique had a specific name, but alas, no luck. However, in looking through the books, I became inspired to make a quilt based on one of my favorite book series. I won’t mention which one, because I have looked and NOT seen anything like it online, so I’ll keep it under wraps until I am ready to design and create it (probably with a little advice from one or two people)!

At this point, Halloween is coming up, and I start to form decorating ideas and collecting items to accomplish my vision. I got the idea to make “witch jars” from an email sent to me by a friend several years ago. I was going to turn my mantle into this crazy jar display! One problem…my walls are blue! Works REALLY well with my Christmas decorations, but not so much with Halloween. That’s when I came up with the idea to create a creepy “window” to hide the blue, as though the mantle was an actual shelf in a potion shop or a witch’s house. I had thought of making it with paper, but then I had seen the quilts at the library, looked at the triangle mosaic (that is what I am calling it from now on, whether it is correct or not), and got the idea to quilt the “window” instead! I even went so far as to buy the PERFECT fabric for some decrepit-looking shutters. But I had so much else to do that I resigned myself to admitting it would be next year at least before I could learn enough to make it the way I picture it. So to the back burner it went!

THEN a friend of mine posted that she was thinking of joining a quilting bee! PERFECT opportunity! So she sends me the information, and it turns out to be…the library people! I look into joining myself, but it turns out it isn’t the right kind of club for me, for various reasons (lack of experience on my part being one, the fact that the meetings are more about showing projects than learning being another big one), nor is it for my friend, as she didn’t join either. So we band together and form our OWN quilting bee, currently of only two! But it works.

My first quilting challenge was to find a pattern that would give me experience, use a minimum amount of supplies (in case I ended up not liking quilting after all). Unfortunately, most of the quilts in the books are either very much not my style or have a MINIMUM of 5 fabric colors! I needed something that would be relatively easy and relatively cheap. Luckily I came across a pattern posted on the library people’s blog, and it looked easy and had only 2 colors. Perfect! I had one color already, I just needed a second. I wasn’t terribly excited about this pattern, but for a first quilt, it was the learning experience I needed it to be, and it was alright to make mistakes since there just wasn’t going to be the emotional investment in it that I planned for others. Here is the pattern I used: http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/feathered-star-productions-inc/Web01.pdf.

So here are my lessons learned. 1. Unless you have a rotary cutter and accompanying cutting mat, it is better to fold your fabric lengthwise until it is a relatively short width, then MARK it, and use the line as a cutting guide (I was using the straight edge of a table, and my strips looked quite wavy in places). 2. Invest in a special clear quilter’s ruler that is well marked (mine is in 1/16^th inch increments); even ones for only $5 make a WORLD of difference! 3. Colored chalk works WAY better than fabric-marking pencils and are so much cheaper (this is a tip directly from my quilting partner, which I chose to ignore the first time she suggested it; ignoring it turned out to be a ”costly” mistake, as I bought a $3 pencil that doesn’t even show up on my fabrics!). The chalk may not be as accurate (no sharp little points), but it is close enough, and compensating is easy enough. 4. If you are using a sewing machine, your fabric edges better be STRAIGHT! 5. And lastly, if one square seems smaller than the others, just cut a new square rather than cutting down all the others to make them match the one! That’s just plain lazy! However, lack of emotional investment made this excusable THIS time, but never again!

The end result of this project is that I ended up with something that, despite all my protests of this “lacking any emotional investment,” I ended up really liking and am very proud of! I also know what to expect with other quilting projects, how to avoid mistakes, and that quilting is something that is likely to be an enduring passion for me. I have since looked up patterns and pictures, and in one afternoon, I found at least 50 quilts that I would like to make, some of them not even for myself! This will be a very fun adventure!