Before The Blog: My first quilt

When I started blogging about 10 years ago, I saw it as a place to record my quilting endeavors and all that goes with that.  However, there are quilts that I made before I started blogging that I wish to document here so that all my quilting efforts can be found in one place.  I've decided to do a a series of posts to highlight the quilts that came BTB, or Before The Blog.

I guess the best place to start is with my very first quilt, a queen size Rail Fence:

I made this quilt in a Night School Community Ed class.  I just wanted to make one quilt.  I had no idea what it would lead to.

The class supply list came in the mail.  (yes, this was before the Internet.).  It was a Xerox copy of a hand written list that stated that I needed four fabrics.   The class list included some advice  about standing back and squinting to see if there was enough contrast. (a technique I still use today.)

I went to my local JoAnn's fabric store and stood in front of their giant wall of quilting cottons, trying to decide what I needed.  As I was pulling bolts and putting them in a pile, I remember asking the opinion of another customer who was also there in the quilt section.   I told her my plan was to just make this one quilt.  She stifled a small laugh.  "Just wait and see", she said, smiling.

Undaunted, I eventually chose these four fabrics for my "one and only" quilt.

The class was enjoyable, although most of the sewing was done at home.  At the last class we brought in our finished quilt tops and learned how to tie them.  For the batting, I chose a Mountain Mist product called "Fatt Batt" which was a very thick, and my quilt turned out more like a comforter than a quilt.

Only thing left was the binding.  I managed to get a double fold binding sewn on to the top side, but the idea of hand sewing the binding to the back, all around the perimeter of that queen sized quilt was daunting.  I decided to try to sew it down by machine.

Remember, this was before the Internet so I had no access to helpful websites or Youtube videos.  But perhaps that was a good thing, because I had no idea what a difficult process I was about to undertake.  Had I known how hard it would be to sew  a straight line while managing the weight of a bulky queen sized quilt  hanging off the edge of my little sewing table, the process of hand sewing the binding would have seemed easy in comparison.

Tons of pinning, and much arduous stitching later, I was finally done wrestling that queen sized monster underneath my presser foot. The binding actually looked pretty good from the top side, as I did a decent job of stitching in the seam line where the binding meets the quilt.  The back side was another story entirely.  It was not pretty, but it was done.

I had it on my bed for many years until the seams started to pull apart in a few places.  I no longer use it, but, I still have it stored away.

So that is the story of my first quilt.  I now understand what the lady in JoAnn's was smiling about.