My Favorite Quilt... or Two... or...

Judy from Patchwork Times has asked about our favorite quilts... and I thought I'd jump in and tell ya about mine.  I posted about this quilt back in May.  It's what I call my Mothers Day Quilt because I made it from a quilt book my daughter gave me for Mothers Day back in 2001 when I began my quilting journey.

I love it for a lot of reasons.  It's the first real quilt I started working on (not the first one I finished though).  I learned sooo much in working on it.... let me tell you - I was a newbie and probably shouldn't have been given a rotary cutter to use.

• I learned that it's fun, fun, fun to shop for fat quarters!  By the time I had started I had more fabric in the don't use pile than in the use pile... yes it was the beginning of the stash!
• I learned that you don't have to cut all your fabric into 2 inch squares to make a scrappy 4 patch block... if I made it today I would have cut strips and put those together.
• I learned by cutting all the fabric into 2 inch blocks to make those 4 patch blocks to just slap pieces together... because it was way toooooo many pieces to worry about what did or didn't go together... just pick it up and put it together.
• I learned that no matter how hard you try - the same fabric is going to be next to itself someplace in the quilt... and you won't see it until you are finished.
• I learned that there is a difference between quilt shop quality fabric and craft store fabric.  Some of both were used in this quilt but I learned to be very selective.  Some craft shop fabric didn't hold up well after the pre-washing and wasn't used.
• I learned all about bias edges... and how to be careful with them... and what happens when your aren't.
• I learned the difference between PRESSING and IRONING.  Especially when handling those bias edges...
• I learned that quilting along the diagonal makes a very, very long line to quilt... knowing what I know now I'd zig zag up and down to get the same effect.
• My only regret is that I didn't make it longer to fit the bed better... but I got tired of slapping tiny little squares together - my bad!

Here is my favorite quilt that I made for a gift.  It's the quilt I gave my granddaughter after her birth.  A few weeks ago she brought it out for the Visiting Nurse to lay her new baby brother on.  My daughter said she announced to the Nurse that "this is my Turtle Quilt my Granny made for me... she's a very good quilter!"  OH My... I do love that little girl. 

 

 

Another quilt I love - it was the first real quilt that I finished.  I loved picking out the fabrics for it - it was a challenge as I was still a newbie.  It was for the first quilt class I took and it was the first quilt I sent out to be quilted.  My class 'neighbor' was a longarm quilter.  I enjoyed her friendship, appreciate her talents as a quilter, and enjoyed her as a student several years later when I began teaching at that same quilt shop!  So this quilt has a lot of great memories...

Oh and it was the first of many "there isn't a border I can't screw up".  Sometimes you cannot take shortcuts... like sewing the inner and outer borders together... unless you are doing a miter border - which I knew nothing about at the time.  This 'oops' cost me a ton of time and gas hunting down more of the background fabric.  And I still have that border fabric - maybe I should find something to use it with.

Finally... I love the scrappiness of this Broken Dishes quilt.  The blocks are from a year long block swap that went on at the quilt shop - and I only used about half of them!  Although I didn't make all the individual blocks - I did design the quilt using Electric Quilt.  I had a lot of fun working different possibilities around in the program.  Again a quilt I wish I had made bigger - it fits on my King size bed but I wish it had more drop.  It's also the quilt that used the most fabric for a binding... a long sad tale of miscalculations and mistakes in cutting that ended up using up over 4 yards of fabric... yeah just for the binding.  Good news is that I have lots of precut black bias binding just waiting for a quilt...

These are the individual blocks that I made through the year for the swap - there was a different color each month. I learned to hate lots of half square triangle methods... and learned to love the Triangle Square Up Ruler.

 

Well that's it... my favorites... sorry Judy I couldn't pick just one!