Two Older Quilts

It was probably 1995 . . goodness, that was 14 years ago!  My world wasn’t totally spinning out of control but it also wasn’t very stable.  I’m so thankful for quilting.  I had learned to quilt in 1980.  In about 1984, I learned to smock and was doing French handsewing and quilting took a back seat.  After my marriage breakup in 1994, I found quilting groups online and my interest in quilting was renewed.  On the weekends that Chad was with his dad, I would have gone nuts without my quilting.  Friends begged me to go out with them and being the homebody that I am, I only wanted to stay home and sew.  That probably kept me out of some amount of trouble! 🙂

At some point, I joined a two way round robin.  We got a list of names . . maybe 8 of us.  We made two centers, sent one to the name above ours on the list and one to the name below us on the list.  They made the grounds and in about a year, the completed top came back to us.

My tops took a back seat to other projects . . at the time I was making the bookshelf quilt for Chad’s teacher, I made a photo quilt for my grandma and a photo quilt for my ex-husband  . . goofy woman that I am!

In 1997, after Vince and I got married and Chad and I moved to Kentucky where Vince was already living and I couldn’t find a longarm quilter to do my quilting, I thought . . hey, this can’t be so hard.  I’ll just do it myself on my Bernina.  I started with the quilt on the right.  It is 102″ x 102″.  I didn’t know any better!  Now I do!  Looking back, I’m surprised I didn’t give up on quilting completely after that project . . down on the floor to baste it and then quilt it on my sewing machine.  I quilted the one on the left too but I didn’t do nearly as much quilting on it.

Even with my lack of knowledge of machine quilting, I knew I loved feathers so . . feathers are in those big triangles.

They’re definitely not award winning feathers but hey . . they may have been the first feathers I ever made!

These tops were made with fabric from House of Fabrics (which was what we had in Lake Charles back then), probably some really inexpensive fabrics used by the others in the round robin.  These two quilts have been on our bed for at least 10 years!  Really!  These two both have really thin . . probably Quilters Dream batting so most of the time, these two are on the bed with a nicer quilt on top.  I throw the nicer quilt off at night and we cover up with these two.  We use them; we wash them often and there’s no sign of wear on either one of them.

And, do you happen to notice that one day last week I was hanging clothes on the line?  Despite our nasty weather over the weekend, spring is comin’ and I can’t wait.