In the beginning

And now a bit more about me and my quilting. I started quilting in about 1993, which would have been about grade 10. Gran taught me how to do English paper-piecing, and in return I taught her cross-stitch. She is now an amazing and prolific cross-stitcher
(this is one of hers, the pattern chosen by Grandad, and given to me for Christmas a few years ago) while I barely do any these days.

On the other hand, Gran hasn’t done any more quilting after her hexagons, while it has become my biggest time and money waster! I started with some 4x4 checker-board blocks with 5cm (metric!) squares, using all sorts of fabrics, but never actually turned them into a quilt. My first quilts were 2 single bed size Around the World patterns; first one for my sisters bed (in blues with some green) and then one for mine:
These were made by drawing on the fabric with pen around hand-cut cardboard 10cm sq templates, cutting the fabric with scissors, and sewing the squares along the pen lines! I didn’t know about layering and binding, and I used thick polyester wadding. Admittedly that makes them very snuggly, great for on the sofa at night or when sick. I did try a bit of quilting on mine months after it was made, but again didn’t know about pinning or basting, and distorted the quilt badly, and because of the thick wadding, the stitches are very tiny, and impossible to unpick – I’ve tried on and off for years in order to fix it!

This is part of my one and only hand-pieced quilt. It uses the same paper-piecing templates as my first efforts, but I created my own 4x4 block layout, already wanting to design my own work! It’s big enough to hang down the sides of our king-size bed, and the piecing was completed between Easter 1997 and Easter 1998. I made it as a doona-cover, and made my own inner using that same polyester batting, and it was on our bed for years. It got quite faded, and our dogs Shadow and Cocoa managed to chew a few holes, because it wasn’t quilted. So a few years ago I tok it apart and replaced some of the worst blocks, and am now in the process of quilting it properly, with decent wadding, and will then bind it and put it back on our bed – eventually!