My First Quilt...

Quote of the Day:

"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."

~Confucius 

Over at Bonnie Hunter's Quiltville blog she posted about her first quilt and offered to let her followers link up a post about our first quilt, so I thought I'd do just that!  :)

Before I had ever quilted my first quilt, I had embroidered 2 quilt tops that my Aunt Priscilla then hand-quilted for me.  The first of those two was this full-sized sunflower quilt...
 

I started embroidering this pre-printed top in 1978 when I graduated high school...but with 5 years of college, a new marriage, starting a career and having 2 children...it didn't get finished till 1991.  It took Aunt Priscilla 3 weeks to hand-quilt it!  LOL

My dad came from a Mennonite family and quilting ran through their veins like blood runs through everybody else's.  LOL  

The second quilt top that I embroidered was a set of 6 blocks with animals pre-printed on them that I then joined together to make a quilt top for my then unborn first child, a son.  I did these while I was pregnant with him, sent them to Aunt Priscilla, who then added a border to it and then quilted it, along with 3 other of my aunts.  They each embroidered their name in the four front corners of the border!  :)     Because of the "specialness" of this quilt... having all the Aunt's names embroidered on it... I never did use it...it remained stored away where Paul couldn't spit up on it or have a diaper leak on it.  Today, this quilt is with my son and daughter-in-law, so unfortunately I don't have any pictures of it to post.  :(

Up till this point, I had only embroidered the quilt tops and had not actually "quilted" them. 

When I was pregnant with my second and last child, I decided to embroider a pre-printed top for her, too.  However, since I was working full-time, suffering with 7 months of morning sickness, maintaining a household, and raising a toddler, I didn't get the embroidering done till she was about 4-5 years old!  :(  

By this time, I was beginning to get interested in learning how to quilt and decided that I'd "learn" on this quilt.  I called my Aunt Priscilla and, over the phone, asked her a million questions about hand-quilting.  She was patient and answered them all!  I bought a simple round hoop for a few dollars at the local fabric/craft store, polyester batting, some hand-quilting thread, a package of "betweens" needles, and some fabric from the "$2 Fabric Store" for the border and backing!  No, really...there was a store that sold "seconds", etc, and the name of the store was "$2 Fabric Store" and all fabric was $2/yard or less!  I don't even know if the fabric was 100% cotton or not.  The fabric was NOT good quality, but I was cheap and I about fainted the first time I went into a true "quilt fabric store" and saw that in the early 1990's they were charging $6-8/yard of fabric.  (This was southern California.)  HOLY MOLY!!!  I had been fabric sewing since 1975 and had NEVER paid those prices for fabric!  HIGHWAY ROBBERY!  LOL

Anyway...my kids were past the toddler stage so I was able to spend some time hand-quilting this quilt, and was able to complete it over the course of a summer...

Nobody told me that you needed to have dense quilting when using polyester batting to keep it from shifting inside the quilt!  YIKES! 

By the time this quilt was finished...in 1993, according to my primitive label, LOL...Erin was 6 years old, so never actually used this quilt, either!  

Thanks for taking this trip down memory lane with me...oh, the things I've learned since then!  :D

Loretta