First Quilt Ever

Sometimes it’s wise to pause in the headlong rush to completion and busyness and take stock of where you are before you jump off the cliff again, and summer is often a good time to do just that.  I’ve mentioned before that I began to photograph all my quilts.  First I had to make a list, and as people talked to me, I would pencil in another and another.  It’s like forgetting one of the children, but I think I’ve about got everyone.

Occasionally I’ll post about them, and as I do, I’ll catalogue them on my page Quilt Gallery–Body of Work.  Here’s the first quilt I can ever remember making: a whole cloth quilt made from some densely woven Holly Hobby print.

I was pretty clueless about this quilting business, but I had slept under handmade quilts on occasion so our family was not bereft of something original.  I picked out this fabric, layered it over a plain yellow backing with some lumpy batting and put it in a hoop and stitched around nearly each figure.

Why lumpy quilt batting?  They were all lumpy in the early 1970s–big polyester wads that you had to unfold and unfold and smooth out and then stitch fairly closely so it wouldn’t shift in the washing of the quilt.  Decorative edges were the norm; this one has 2″ eyelet ruffling with rounded corners.  I’m pretty sure I stitched it onto the top, then folded the backing over to meet it and whipstitched the edges together.  I wrote about this in an earlier post, and defend its homeliness.

The back.  So different than what’s au courant now.

And here’s the place where I couldn’t figure out how to stop or start–a nice little nub of thread under one of Holly’s shoes.  I think it was about another 5 years before I really figured out that beginning/ending of the thread thing.

I realize that looking at my first quilt is like that old saying about my child’s precious and lovely, and yours is coarse and picks its nose, but I hope that by showing this, you’ll be realize that everyone is somewhere on the quilting spectrum–from beginner to master quilter.  This is where I began, and if you post or write about your first quilt, come on back here and leave a comment so we can see how far you’ve come!