First Machine Quilted Quilt

This is a story I’ve told before but when I lived in Louisiana, I worked part-time, was a single mom and didn’t have a ton of time for quilting so I only made a couple of tops per year. There was a machine quilter local to me who did my machine quilting. When we moved to Kentucky, the lady in Louisiana didn’t want to mail the quilts back and forth so I had to find a quilter there. There were several quilters but one only did pantos, one only used poly batting that she provided and I can’t remember all the issues I ran into so I decided I’d just quilt my tops on my sewing machine. I took a couple of machine quilting classes at the Paducah quilt show that year and I was ready to get quilt my tops. You might think I’d start with something small. No!

I had two tops that had been part of a round robin. It was one where you made two centers, sent one to the person above your name on the list and one to the person below your name on the list and the two made their way around the list and you got back two tops ready to be quilted . . two tops that were approximately 102″ x 102″.

Every “row” or section had specifics we had to follow. I guess I started with the nine patch stars in the center and it went from there.

This size quilt was not a good quilt to start with. I thought I’d never finish it and it was the last big quilt I ever did on my sewing machine.

I did get some rather beginner looking feathers quilted in there.

As I was putting clean sheets on the bed today, this quilt is one we’ve been using for probably 15 years or more and even though it isn’t very pretty, it’s held up well, and it always makes me smile remembering wrestling that quilt through the sewing machine.