Flashback Friday

Despite the transition to Spring, for a lot of us it still looks like Winter.  I've seen several photos lately of bright yellow or purple crocuses bravely springing up through the snow, and I was reminded of this quilt that I made back in the early 1990's.

I've never written down anything about this quilt, so I thought I would blog about it to have a record of this stepping stone on my quilting journey.

I wish I still had the pattern so I could remember what it was called.    It was perhaps the 4th quilt I had ever done.  Looking at it now, I can see how far I have come since then.

My fabric choices were okay, although not very exciting.

My piecing was pretty good.  I had a few years of garment sewing under my belt, which came in handy.

I quilted it by hand, something I never do anymore.

The binding, however, is pretty awful.  I really had no clue about how to bind a quilt. This is just one of four very rounded and puffy corners:

I didn't know about joining binding strips, so I folded the end over the beginning and it's got rather a lumpy spot where they meet.  (Remember, this was before we had the Internet with it's vast array of helpful tutorials, how-to's, and instructional  videos.)   The smartest thing I probably did, which was more lucky than clever,  was to use a multicolored fabric for the binding so that the errors could hide a little bit.

Okay, so everybody has to begin somewhere.   I really liked how it turned out and actually entered it in the Challenge category of our guild's annual show that year.  The theme was "flowers", so I thought "Why not?".  Thankfully, the judge was kind and left me some encouraging remarks while noting that I needed to improve on my binding skills.

So that's the story of  my little "Spring flowers in the Snow" quilt.  I displayed it proudly in my front hall for a number of years.

One thing that strikes me about this quilt is that with it's white background, and a fairly large amount of "negative space" it sort of looks like a Modern quilt.