I'm a fledgling blogger as well as a fledgling quilter - so all mistakes on this blog are absolutely my own. I'm starting this blog with the hope that it will help me organize my thoughts, my projects and my explorations into the world of quilts. I know that blogging is a time-consuming past-time - but I'm going to give it a whirl. If I decide to stop blogging, I commit to be clear about it in my last post - so that if anyone should happen by and decide to read my miscellaneous rambles they won't be left hanging!
In this post I thought I would just record how I came to be captured by this past-time. Back in the late 70's, I had a 'friend of the family' grandfather-figure who gave me a set of templates, and suggested that I might like to quilt. My family did not sew. The templates were made of cardboard. I was about 12, and daunted by the task of figuring out how to accurately use them. I never followed through. I look back at this event as the reason I had always wondered if someday I'd like to learn to quilt. To be truthful, the aesthetic of quilts had never been appealing to me in my younger years - seeing quilts as purely 'country', and not urbane enough for me. Hah. That'll teach me.
Fast forward 30+ years. I had picked up a bit of crosstitch in my 20's for a bit, and picked a bit back up in my 40's. And there is a wonderful store in Huntsville, AL (where I now live) called Patches & Stitches (http://www.patchesandstitches.biz/) where you can buy the specialty linens for crosstitch - and where half the store is devoted to quilting. I wandered in and out of there for a year or two, and decided to take a quilting class just for grins-n-giggles. That was a year ago. I wasn't planning on it - but I got hooked.
And here I am a year later having finished one little quilt for my daughter (now 11), and having started on piecing two others. I'll try to post pics. I do not have any particular talent. I'm challenged when it comes to following written directions. I have difficulty visualizing how colors come together. I get impatient, and will just run rough-shod over machine quilting 'just to get it done'. I am absolutely not the one to be consulted on the finer points of this art. Not yet anyway. I have hope - I aspire to be a 'real' and capable quilter. At the rate I am going that will take quite a while. But if you're a beginning quilter too, or even a seasoned veteran who has forgotten (or never experienced!) some of the struggles of the common folk, read along as I tell my tales, watch my interests scatter and coalesce, and generally glory in this intensely interesting and fabulously absorbing art known as 'quilting'.
Warmly,
Gail
