Disclaimer: This post was published to this blog on Feb 27, 2012. I decided that this post needed a face lift with nicer images and added copy. Not because I love the quilt but because it was the first quilt I made and it has a special place in my heart. [And hopefully my blogging skills have improved a little.
Of course I had sewn before. I am a 4-H’er through and through. But this is where it all started for me. I can remember it clearly. We were at JoAnn’s – but not just any JoAnn’s; it was JoAnn’s Etc. If you have never been to one of these, you’re missing out; it’s like a Hobby Lobby on sewing steroids.
My First Quilt Ever
I was with my mom (she was visiting), sister (who I lived with), and nephew (who was just a baby at the time). Our purpose for this great excursion was to find fabric to reupholster two of my mom’s chairs. After spending four hours in JoAnn’s Etc., I started pulling fabrics. My way is the stacking system. I pull bolts of fabric from all around the store and stack them on top of one another. If they blend together, they stay. If they don’t, they get kicked out. I use colors from the border fabric to get my colors for the inside blocks. After spending four hours in JoAnn’s, my mom did not find the fabric for her project, but I found my way into the quilting world.
Plaid Prints for Sashing?
Maybe I was a bit braver on my fabric selection for this first quilt. Or maybe just naive. Using a plaid as a border and sashing is very unusual. I wanted the blocks to blend into the background but somehow still pop out. What I was thinking? I didn’t even have a pattern yet! It was hard to keep the lines in the plaid straight. Those line that I thought were so cool made it obvious when fabric was not straight. It can even give the illusion that the fabric is not straight when it was. I didn’t know any better and have never used plaid as my sashing again.
Finishing My First Quilt
As many of my first quilts, I quilted this by hand. For the binding, I bought and attached blue pre-made double-folded bias tape, which I also bought at Joann’s. I think that is the perfect binding for a new quilter. My first five or six quilts were bound with store-bought bias tape. I think this helped me to focus on piecing. Letting a new quilter learn and perfect one thing at a time. I have since used ribbon as binding and made my own bias tape.
A happy mistake of mine was that I bought way too much fabric for my first quilt and had enough to make two quilt backs from my scraps, but since my mom bought me the fabric for this quilt it was a happy mistake. 🙂 This is one of the few quilts I have made that has assorted blocks. Here are some of my favorite blocks.
Photos were taken at The Hacienda At The River
