My first quilt

Bonnie Hunter at quiltville has asked us to reminisce about our first quilts.  I didn't have to go far to take a picture of my very first quilt.  It is still in use, under two more recent quilts, on my bed.

It looks white in this picture, but that's because of repeated washings over its 30 year lifespan.  I made this when I was 17, between my senior year of high school and first year of college.  My grandmother on my dad's side helped me to make it.  It was very simple in design, just squares put together in a fairly random pattern.  I remember I drew a grid of squares and colored them in with different markers to represent four different fabrics.  I bought the material at Zayre (anyone remember that store?).  There were two fabrics that were printed with blue flowers, one with red flowers, and one with yellow flowers.  They were tiny flowers and even had a speck of green in with them.  When I got the fabrics home, I remember my step dad saying they looked like underwear fabrics!  Haha.  I bet he don't remember saying that, though!

The year was 1982 and the rotary cutter hadn't been invented yet, so like so many others, I used a pencil and a yardstick to draw on the back of the material, then cut each square out with scissors.  What a painstaking job that was!  I used a polyester batting and a light blue sheet for the backing.  Thinking I was really cool, I used two different colors of quilting thread.  I used blue in the squares that had blue flowers in them and white in the other squares.  And to be different, I quilted a diamond in the squares and along either side of the seam line of each block.  A LOT of the stitching has come out, but it's held together pretty good for the most part.  My grandmother actually finished the quilting for me when I had to start college and didn't have a lot of time, but when I got it back, it didn't get a binding on it.  I let it sit on my cedar chest and age nicely for a couple years.  Then I decided it would look really nice with lace, of all things, around the edges.  I bought some eyelet lace and proceeded to put it on the quilt.  Called it done and started using it on my bed!

After that first quilt, which by the way I decided to do on a pure whim, there would be more. I had just said, I'm going to make a quilt, and then did it.  Marriage and babies came a few years down the road and I didn't get back to quilting until 1994.  Then, I made 19 'quilts' one fall to give to family members.  I used different things, from flannel sheets, to purchased flannel, to make tied quilts, again with polyester batting, that I didn't bind, but did 'envelope' style.  With the scraps of flannel I made a backing for a top that I made from 29 pairs of my husbands old jeans, along with some thrift store jeans.  That quilt was also tied.  My son used that one until the backing completely shredded.  I have the top still, and think about making another back for him someday, since he loved that quilt to death.  It was soooo heavy, I had to take it to the laudromat to the industrial size machines to wash it!

I took a break again for a short time, maybe a year, but then got into quilting full swing.  By then rotary cutters had come onto the scene and I remember getting my first one and how totally thrilled I was with it!  Many years and many quilts later, I'm still loving it and hope to continue quilting until I can't do it anymore.  I still use the 1980 model Kenmore I got for Christmas that year from my maternal grandparents.  I also use a variety of other machines, that I have collected over the years.  That machine, and the Kenmore my grandmother had that I inherited are my two favorites  I hope to one day have a longarm machine.

So, that's my story!  Check out the other stories on Bonnie's blog:   http://quiltville.blogspot.com/2011/11/first-quilts.html