This Quilter's Journey-My Very First Quilt

I had thought it was gone forever, but when I happened to mention it to my oldest daughter, she said "Oh, I have it." So here today, I am going to show it to you. Before I do, I want to remind you that I made this quilt in about 1979, and when I did, I knew less than nothing about quilting. I made it from scraps leftover from sewing garments. Okay...ready?

 This is the patchwork side, all cut with scissors and hand sewn together. The denim around the outside was recycled jeans.

 It's lumpy as heck with polyester batting that has shifted since it is tied, and not too close together.

And this is the front. All stained, wrinkles and yuk! I am almost embarrassed to be showing this.

 Embroidery block with a very wrinkled ribbon on it. There was a popular set of sheets with a similar print back then and I tried to copy it, sort of.

 My philodendron plant that was in my livingroom.  All the leaves were hand appliqued by me with no fusibles. Heck, I don't know if we even had those back then. lol

 Another plant, this time with embroidered stems. I loved these two plant blocks. Still kinda like them.

                           A boat, once I decided it was going to be a baby quilt.

 Ewwwww, so stained...don't look. No, just kidding. All fabric scraps I saved for years.

 A cute little heart and some ribbon trim. The reason the applique is hand done is that my singer featherweight sews only a straight stitch.

And the odd orange gingham teddy bear.  Now I made this over the course of about 2-3 years, working off and on. I finally finished it when I was pregnant with my oldest daughter. It graced the bottom of our playpen (a perfect fit) through three babies.  Now my daughter brought it to me so I could photograph it for sharing here, but she doesn't want it back. I'm not sure what I will do with it. But anyway, that is how I started on my quilting journey some 35 years ago.  Hope you enjoyed the story. Talk to you soon.

This Quilter's Journey, Part 4

So there was the summer about 1996 I think, where I read Sandra Dallas' Persian Pickle Club which I got from the library. I loved that book. It had great characters and lots of quilting talk.  I was so in love with quilting or the idea of what I thought quilting was.  So I decided to make a sampler quilt so I could try out lots of blocks.  This is that quilt:

I had several books which had quilt blocks in them and I chose some of the easiest ones to make. I picked fabrics based on what looked right together in each block, not considering they would all end up together in one quilt.  I actually still have 3-4 blocks I didn't use in this quilt.

 Oh, I had to do plenty of math to make the blocks all come out the same size. And then, when they were done, I had to find a way to put them all into a cohesive quilt. I found a quilt in a book that used these triangles to make blocks on point, that kind of look like star points for the pieced blocks.  I never used black before, but I needed something neutral that would work with all the blocks.  Then I put it on the frame and had quilted the whole thing. I let each block lead me and tell me how to quilt it.

 I put the autograph block in the center, and signed my name and the year, 1996. That is the only label that the quilt has.  My family has loved this quilt about to death. It has been on picnics, to football games. It has held babies and even did a stint on our bed for awhile.

This is such an early quilt in my long quilting career, but I love it so much, even now.  Talk to you soon.

This Qulter's Journey, part 3

The next step on my quilting journey was to build a quilting frame for hand quilting. In those days (early 90's) all the quilting magazines had advertisements for quilting frames. Machine quilting hadn't really taken off yet. Most home quilting was still done by hand.  I loved the idea of having a quilt on a frame where I could sit down and take a few stitches whenever I had time.

They were pretty expensive, upwards of $300. I found one that would sell you the plans to build a frame and they sent you the plans and hardware. You bought the wood and the metal roller bars at the hardware store. So we did. My hubby helped me build and assemble it.  I think I quilted two quilts on it, and had this one on the frame when I had to take it apart and store it.

 The applique sections were made of old denim jeans and reds and yellow quilting cottons. They were fused on and zigzagged around. I loved the idea of recycling the old jeans.

 The star blocks were pieced, mostly from scraps left from earlier projects. I still had a very romanticized view of what a quilt should be. Scrappy was it.

 The pattern is in an old issue of Quilter's Newsletter Magazine. I have about 10 years worth, and haven't tried to find it yet.  I started hand quilting it in feathers  in all the white spaces.

 The whole thing is, I think queen size. It wouldn't all fit on the frame, so it is in two pieces. One big chunk and one smaller chunk.

 Here you can kind of see some of the quilting. My amateurish attempt at quilting feathers.

 I still love the look of this quilt and so much of the work is done on it, I know I should finish it. But I am stumped as to how. I already have an Irish Chain that I have been hand quilting on for about 5 years now and I just don't see this one happening.

If you have any ideas for me about how I can get this done, please, let me hear your ideas. For now, that is all from my quilting journey. I have lots more to say and show you. Talk to you soon.

This Quilter's Journey, Part 2

This is the second installment of my quilting journey.  You can read part 1 here.  The first several posts will be about a single quilt,as they were fewer when I began quilting. Later on, some of the quilts will be grouped together in a single post.  This is the story of my first "real" quilt.

 

.  I started getting books from the library on quilting when I would take my kids to the library.  This was 1992 and Georgia Bonesteel had a few books out about lap quilting.  I checked them out over and over and poured through them.  I checked out any other quilting books as well.  I liked Georgia’s method, since I didn’t have a frame to stretch a large quilt on.

When I felt ready, like I could really handle this, I bought a cutting mat, rotary cutter and ruler and some fabric.  I had designed a quilt that could be made and quilted in squares with the lap quilting method.  It took me about a year to make this queen size quilt.  Now I am stubborn and tenacious, as my husband can tell you, but looking back I was clueless too.

My first “real” quilt was a queen size quilt with tons of half square triangles.  I think I just liked the design.  I bought the fabric in calicos of dark green, dark blue and a sort of burgundy color.  I didn’t pre-wash and the green has since bled onto the adjoining muslin.  That’s another notion I had, that all quilts should have some muslin in them.

 I hand quilted it in squares and joined them together.  Oh, and I wanted it to be hefty, so double batting.  I don’t know where that crazy idea came from.  That is one heavy quilt.  I think I had so many comforters over the years that were store bought and very fluffy, I must have thought that was a good thing. That quilt was on our bed for years and we still have it.  I signed the back with my name and the year, 1993.

 This is the quilt, today. Sorry that it is rainy and overcast, so the lighting isn't great. This quilt spent a lot of years on our queen size waterbed.

 It is very lumpy due to the double layers of a poly batting I used, and all hand quilted by my untrained hands.

 The points don't match up in many places due the the way the blocks were joined together. I understood the concept, but it was tough to execute.

 You can see here on the back how the green fabric bled when washed. I don't remember pre-washing these fabrics.

My sharpie signature

 The corners of the quilt, once I figured out the border.  All quilts had borders back then.

And here you can see how worn it is. It is dirty and stained in places too.  I still have a soft spot in my heart for this old quilt, my first creation.  See you soon for another installment.

Let's Start at the Very Beginning

A very good place to start. I have that song in my head from the Sound of Music. Anyway, today I am going to start my new series about my quilting journey and how I got from there to here. A couple of years ago, after I discovered the quilty blogging world, I decided to write an essay of sorts, about my quilting experience from the beginning. I wanted to document my quilts with words so I could show where I began and where I am now. I am going to share that here with you. I will still of course post more recent things here as well. So here we begin with the first installment.

Quilt by Quilt… A Quilter’s Journey  

By Charlotte Maxwell

 I have known how to sew since I was a young girl.  My grandmother taught me to sew buttons onto scraps of fabric so that I could handle a needle and thread.  I learned to tie a knot; a very large knot.  When I was about 10 years old, my other grandmother, who had been a professional seamstress for a time, helped me to make a pink, pleated skirt for a doll I had at the time.  I remember that skirt vividly.  It had a waistband and she taught me how to do an almost invisible hemstitch.  It was sewn on her Singer Featherweight.  I remember being so proud of that.

My mother and grandmother made lots of clothes for the girls in our family.  They also did sewing for the home; drapes and curtains and slipcovers for furniture.  It was what many women did in the 50’s and 60’s to save money.  I watched them.  A lot.

 I’m not sure when I started sewing in earnest.  I was required to take home economics when I was 12 and in the 7^th grade.  There were two or three sewing units that year, and I enjoyed it enough to take another year in 8^th grade.

Some time after that, I began sewing at home.  I could now read a pattern and follow it.  I made a baby bib for a friend’s child.  I made a halter-top for myself, and a swimsuit.  I only sewed with cotton for the most part.  Other fabrics scared me and I never thought to ask for help.

My mother would buy fabric or give me money to buy fabric to make clothes for my sisters and myself.  I made shorts and tops and a couple of pretty fancy dresses.  I started saving fabric scraps at about that time.  I thought that maybe some day I would make a patchwork quilt with the saved scraps.  I don’t really know where that idea came from.  We had no quilts in our home that I remember.

My very first quilt was started in about 1977.  I took some of the scraps and cut squares, with scissors and a cardboard pattern and began stitching them together by hand.  I didn’t live at home anymore, so I had no access to a machine.  I also did a few larger squares that had appliqué on them of plants and flowers that I had in my apartment.  They were done by trial and error, as I had no one to teach me the skills.  I didn’t get very far and I put it all away.

In 1981 when I was pregnant with my first child I pulled it all out again and finished it in a small size.  It was probably about 36 inches square.  I don’t remember what I used for the batting.  It was tied, though.  That first effort ended up in the bottom of the playpen for quite a few years, through two children.  I did not attempt any more quilts for a while, but I did keep sewing clothing and saving scraps.

I sewed lots of clothes for my girls when they were young.  I enjoyed it and I had a friend with whom I sewed.  Our kids were all about the same ages and I would take my machine to her house and set up on her kitchen table with her and sew.  By this time I had my grandmother’s old Singer featherweight for my own.  She had Alzheimer’s and couldn’t use it any longer.  My mother gave it to me.

My friend Linda and I would hit up Hancock’s and buy as much inexpensive fabric as we could afford.  We had a couple of patterns for shorts and tops and we made them over and over to outfit the kids for the summer.

In about 1990 when we were living in Dallas, I bought a Kenmore sewing machine, which I thought was the best thing ever.  It could zigzag and do buttonholes and a stretch stitch.  Since I was still sewing garments, this was appropriate for me.  I still had the Singer, but it didn’t see much action.

After I got the new machine, I saw an ad for a quilting kit to make a log cabin wreath quilt to hang on the wall.  Never being one to spend money on a kit with directions, I bought some fabric and squinting at that small picture, I made one on my own.  I thought it needed to be hand quilted; was there any other way to make an authentic quilt?  So I built a small square frame with my husband’s help, and stretched it onto it and away I stitched.  I guess it’s called the stab and stitch method.  I didn’t have any training in quilting yet.

I don’t remember how long it took me to finish it; at least a year or so until it was done and off the frame.  By then we had moved to Florida.  I don't have any photos of the first quilt from the playpen days, but here is the second quilt.

 This little quilt is only 30 inches square and all the fabric was bought at my local Hancock fabrics in Dallas. It has very little actual quilting on it, is backed with unbleached muslin and has never been washed. It spent lots of years hanging on the walls in our homes.

 The binding is single fold, and each side is sewn on as a single piece since I didn't know how to turn corners back then. Each square is quilted with a fleur de lis in the center of the square.

I hope you enjoy my journey. I will be back soon for another installment.