1st class 1994- log cabin pattern

This is the first quilt I made in a class after my brain damage and disability hit. The gal who taught it worked with disabled and brain injury people as part of their therapy. Elaine was the mom of the manager at the fabric store I always loved shopping at, so this worked well for me. Lauren (the store manager of Hancocks) had told me her mom would be in town and teaching numerous classes so why not try taking a class from her in hopes it would set my mind free in my learning and then I'd be able to quilt more on my own. It was suggested that I make a LOG CABIN quilt because there is a lot of repetition and its a good place to start. So that was the plan. My youngest daughter's 10th birthday was coming up in July so I figured I'd let her pick the fabrics for this quilt and I would give it to her for her birthday. There are bits and pieces of the memory I have lost about this process but I do know it was fun getting my daughter involved along the way. We'd bought the new house in March of 1993, and this was the following spring 1994.
My daughter walked through the whole fabric store of cotton fabrics and then went back and started pulling out 3 fabrics she really liked. I'm glad I was getting my patience back because this was a long process that day. Both of us though really enjoyed fabric stores so it was a good day, and SO fun to watch her eyes light up when she found cool fabrics.
This quilt (Elenor Burns Quilt in a Day LOG Cabin) required 3 darks, 3 lights, a center and 3 border fabrics. Mindy had scored a dark blue background fabric with blues, pink, purples with a bit of light teal in it as one of her fabrics, then she'd found a print that was a medium shade with those colors in it on a white background,and the dark purple. We spent another hour or so there while she continued putting her fabrics together. I marveled at her good color eye and for design. She knew what she liked and it was going to be a beautiful quilt IF I could figure this 'strip quilting' out. Because of this quilt being a twin sized, the layout was going to be 'fields and furrows', like a garden is planted. With these pictures you can see that is what it looks like. The pictures here are of this quilt finished, and a close up of one block so you can see her fabric choices.
This class was supposed to take 3 weeks of coming 2 times a week for 3 hours each class. My brain could only process for about an hour before I had to give up. I did some of the stuff at home in between the classes but it was a really HARD process for me this first time and certainly NOT the ZEN relaxing activity it NOW is for me!I did manage to get the 15 blocks done in the 3 week period BUT the quilting process by machine and those border techniques just confused me!Luckily for me Elaine was here longer and she worked with me for another couple weeks to get me learning how to do the machine quilting and borders done. HOWEVER the way she did the borders in what I now know is called a 'quilt as you go' method, just defeated me, so Elaine did those last parts for me after I had pieced the top and quilted the body of the blocks. Back then I was still having these realy horrendous headaches when something new was too much for my brain to handle, which was part of why this took me so long to do. Once the headache started, I had to stop whatever I was doing for hours or a full day ot let it pass by.
In this class I learned SO MANY QUILTING TECHNIQUES including; that you use a 1/4" seam on all parts. She gave me a little Dr Sholl's pad to use as my guide (something I use today for alll of MY students aged 7 to adult, as they first learn) because its so thick you can't go past it when you sew the 1/4 inch seams. I learned that you don't sew the seams open, as you would for making clothing but instead you iron them together in a certain direction so that makes the blocks lie flatter (each pattern tells you specifically which way to press your seams) and that was so cool to me because by trial and error I could see the WHY behind this method... or as I sometimes heard others say the madness behind the method, lol. I learned about color placement, as well as how to use the cutting mats, rotary cutter and special rulers for cutting. I learned about quilting or walking foot, other feet used in quilting, feed dogs, 1/4" foot, about using a medium gray thread on the obdy of the quilt so it blends into all the various fabrics, about safety pinning in preparation for quilting the top and sandwich of the quilt together, which in this one I did 'stitch in the ditch' and so many other things I am sure right now I am forgetting! THERE WAS SO MUCH information processed during this quilt making project.
I do remember this quilt made my head hurt a LOT but I also know I learned a ton and in the process I was becoming like a person lost in a desert searching for water, seeing an oasis in front of them, driving them on. FOR ME making this first quilt, in this class was the same thing. I had loved quilting and creating before, and I really needed and wanted a creative outlet besides the house projects that were nearly done (wallpapering etc).
After this quilt, I continued to take more classes every time Elaine came to town for another couple years until my divorce started in 1995. BUT THIS FIRST class quilt, to me, was just as important as the one I'd tried the year before on my own! IT turned out beautifully and is still being used today. The cool thing was that after I made this quilt for Mindy, she wanted to try a class on her own, not my teaching her ... WISE child to suggest someone else teach her. I was so proud of her first quilt she made. I think I will find her first quilt and put that in here at some point too because she, now at 25, is a fabulous quilter in her own right after taking a class at the age of 9/10! This first quilt gave Mindy and me a lot more than I think either of us realized back then! Mindy started the class before her 10th birthday and finished it the weekend after she turned 10. We were both sewing a lot and she wanted a machine of her own so we didn't have to take turns, so oln her 10th birthday not only did I give her the quilt I had made but also I gave her a Kenmore as her fist sewing machine, which she still uses and loves today. Since then she has made many quilts, friendship pillows and other things so I feel that gift was one that really opened her up for a creative outlet she enjoys. I will talk more about her 'friendship pillows' later in this blog. I was both a girl scout leader for both of my girls starting in 1984 with my oldest and then with my youngest when she got into first grade, and making log cabin block pillow became something Mindy wanted us to do in girl scouts. So we did. I will see if I can find those pictures and include an entry on here about them soon!

hand made baby flannel quilt 1976

As I was digging through pictures today, I found one of a quilt that I had hand stitched for a girlfriend of mine who's husband was in the same squadron as mine in Sacramento. I have to say in all honesty I do not remember making this quilt. but the notations are on the back of the picture telling mme when and how I made it and who for. I do remember Beth and can picture her face easily, but this quilt, yeah not so much. I guess brain damage is a strange thing of blanks and catalysts to kick start memories. At any rate. This looks like I knew what I was doing back then! At any rate, Beth was a new friend and neighbor of ours on base, in base housing. She was due to deliver in November 1976 around Thanksgiving, so her shower was in October. It seemed like most of us newlywed women were getting in the same condition! I knew I was pregnant as well, but the test hadn't come back positive yet. But I knew something was up because I wasn't allergic to siamese cats now! Instead of a dog from the pet store, we brought home 3 sibling kittens and I wasn't having a problem with them so something was up to be sure! There were so many of our group who were pregnant we teased about it being in the water and don't drink it lol. (Yes I was pregnant and delivered a baby girl in June of 1977, as just a side note and the cats had to go because once my water broke, they were toxic to me. I felt bad becuase I loved Capt. Hook, Mikko and Chopin).
Sorry I digressed, Anyway this quilt was for Beth Bonnellacording to what I wrote on the back of this picture. She lived across the street from us and this baby was her first one. I wanted to make something ultra soft and yet warm for when they traveled to their relatives who lived in really cold climates. It is made of flannel fabrics and this time I wanted to just make it all by hand and not use the sewing machine at all. I had been working on it for a couple months and decided to hand piece it entirely instead of doing any machine quilting on it. Since I wanted to make it super fluffy, I didn't want to quilt it, but instead tied it with all 6 strands of embroidery floss. It had taken me a a solid month of working on it every day in between my officer's wife duties and fun road rallies, but I really liked how it turned out.
After this quilt, I think most of the rest of mine have all been machine pieced and quilted or tied. I had learned much over the years about hand pieicing so this one went together well and didn't look anything like the one I had made as a child, thank goodness! In finding this old picture, I realize now that there is one quilt I can find no pictures of and that is one I had made back while in high school for my boyfriend back then. I guess both are gone and on to other things, so not having a picture is ok, I know what both looked like!
I think this flannel quilt for Beth was about 3 x 4 feet in size. Once she saw this, she wanted to learn how to make another one, so she and I worked on another one quickly before she delivered. She also learned to make baby clothes and we had fun, until graduation when all of our husbands were scattered to various bases around the US or Europe. I had also been pregnant and when I delivered my baby girl, Beth had made a quilt for me! I still have it, though it was so well loved it is in happy tatters!

movie HOW TO MAKE AN AMERICAN QUILT

Back in 1998 I saw the movie, 'HOW TO MAKE AN AMERICAN QUILT'. That movie talks (through Maya Angelou)in part about how a quilt is the weaving of one's life experiences into the threads of a quilt. And how each fabric, each square, each stitch... are all parts of a person's life, their experiences, feelings and relationship with all that is around them. I had asked one of the kids I made a quilt for in 1998 (who's quilt I will share later on in this blog), to write about the clouds, moon, stars, sun, rain etc~~ in the context of his own life experiences and his own home town back in Maryland.

How do I make a quilt more personal for the people I make them for? I want the quilt to reflect as much as possible the things held most dear by the receiver. It is something I have seen in my own life with the quilts others have made for me and those I have made for others as well. When I make quilts for others as a gift, I try to pick fabrics that speak to me about who the other person is. If the person I am making the quilt for picks their own fabrics, still I can see why they pick what they do and it makes it even more personal and fun for me to stitch together their life into this quilt. I remember my mother teling me that friendship and love are the strongest threads in a marriage and it seems to be the same in a quilt stitched with love that I make for others. I wonder if those quilts I made that sold through galleries or through the craft fairs(once I got pretty good at making quilts), could the people who bought them feel the love and care and see what I saw as I pieced the varoius fabrics into a whole quilt? Did the quilt speak to them as the fabrics had to me, when I first designed them? The quilt patterns, as well as the fabrics each have had a voice of their own for me as I stitched them. Some were quiet, calm and peaceful to make while others were very loud, and attention getting for their bright colors, made even more loud by the quilt pattern picked. LOL there have even been quilts I have made for others that I had to wear sunglasses while making because the colors were so bright and my window faced south! Some quilts speak of nature, others speak of personalities, and still others speak of moods - yet each one is a story in itself, as was the quilt being made in the movie HOW TO MAKE AN AMERICAN QUILT. If you haven't seen that movie I recommend it in hopes that it will speak to you as it had to me.
When I am in quilting mode, I put 5 very different CDs into my stereo and hit shuffle for 5 hours of music. Not all CDs will have singing, yet they each bring me happy moods as I quilt. I find such peace in the solitude and my spirit soars, then in time I realize that I have found myself in an almost ZEN like state of mind. I love these times of calm, when around me may be chaos. Chaos doesn't touch me while I quilt. IF I am having a bad day, I try to remind myself that quilting calms me and to go do a bit of sewing to calm my inner turmoil... and in no time at all I am in that happy place I love to be!

This is the first quilt I made after my brain damage. I had been trying to figure out since 1989 how to tell which side of the fabric was the right side and the wrong sides because I knew you had to put right sides together in order to qult, or sew anything for the most part. I really struggled with this quilt that was to go into our new house we'd bought with these colors in the formal living room. I don't remember now if I bought these fabrics or had them in some stash of mine from when I had quilted before. I knew back then that I didn't want to do this quilt like my mom and grandmother had, with cardboard templates. I had watched quilting shows on TV over the last year and saw they were doing something called 'strip quilting' and that looked like a lot of time saving effort. AND to me, for myself , with my no energy status these days, it just seemed like the right thing to try. So I thought about the size of quilt I wanted, how many blocks I wanted by how many in length and started to rip the strips to the right width. Then I sewed the colors together in what I THOUGHT was the right way I'd seen on the Quilt in a Day show. Once I got those sewn, I put them in rows and started sewing the rows together into the main part of the quilt. I did it in a day and was so proud of myself. The next day I added the borders and then didn't know what to do for a backing so I grabbed a sheet that looked like the right color, layered it all together, pinned it and tied it on the living room floor, using embroidery floss I had from an old project. The next day I bound the quilt by bringing the backing over the front, pinned and sewed it and it was done! I was so proud of myself for figuring this out on my own and put it on the couch for the night.
When I looked it the following morning though, I realized I didn't do it very well, and knew I needed help in learning how to quilt properly, again. I could see back then and especially now all the mistakes I made in not matching corners, not using the right fabrics (don't use a sheet if its not all cotton, when every things is else IS all cotton in your quilts) and more. BUT for me that day was a celebration for me to realize that all I needed was someone to show me how to do it right and it would unlock more of what I hadn't gotten on my own.
I was still learning it was OK to ask for help, because I was relearning something. I still couldn't make clothes at all but here WAS something of my old life, that was coming back, albeit slowly.
This quilt is one that I still display proudly as a piece of my past, and to remind me how far I had come from 1987 as a bedridden mother, with a 3 and 10 year old daughter, incapable of most things needed to survive, and now I had in 6 years begun to create again! I felt so excited, even if that quilt had tons of mistakes... I HAD MADE IT, and that was a new milestone for me! Even today in 2011 I display this quilt on my quilt rack, though in the back of it, as a testiment to my craft, to my TRYING to do something right, and LEARNING to accept that SOME THINGS OF BEAUTY ARE FLAWED. AND I learned that in those flaws, THAT IS WHERE THE BEAUTY LIES!

peace by piece I learn as I go

here is what I woke up with this morning.... for the direction my blog will now take. Its been swirling around in my head how to proceed, but I woke up suddenly at 430 this morning, and HAD to write this down I will add it to my blog after I swim in my PT class this morning, unless I can do a copy paste.: copy paste works... yay.. I LOVE easy buttons!
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Finding a great me in the forgotten sea... peace by piece.

Peace by piece I have traveled into a place of knowing myself, loving the new me that had to be and making peace with my brain damage, my illness (chronic Fatigue Syndrome), and my 'DIS- ability becoming instead 'differently abled', whatever that meant at the time. And while doing that I was still trying to be the great mom, wife, daughter, friend, girl scout leader I had been along with any other hat I had worn before. Quilting and DIS ability walked hand in hand stitch by stitch, in time piece-fully and peacefully. BUT like anything, it was a process that came to be, over time, trial and error, a great learning curve with great results.
This blog was to be only about the quilts I have made, but instead has become more now as I realize the role each quilt I have made since 1987 has truly been a part of both journeys - the journey recovering from the darkness of brain damage, and making peace with my CFS and Fibromyalgia and all the other things taken away from me. It is about those things given back to me in a jumbled mess of puzzle pieces as well. What 'life' picture would these pieces make when I was done? What would each quilt look like when I finished them? What had I learned about myself in the process? did any memories come back to the surface, when I had held so many years of blankness in the beginning and still do after more than 22 years? What short cuts had I learned in quilting techniques? When had I realized that as I pieced quilts, ripped out seams and made something whole and beautiful out of strips, scraps and torn pieces of fabric - that I gained peace in these pieces!!
Now I see in retrospect why quilting has been so rewarding for me! As I piece together quilts from scraps, I too am piecing together the broken parts of my brain, my 'dis' ability helped me make peace with my past and now I am merely differently-abled than I used to be. I am putting together a puzzle full of multitudes of pieces into something whole, beautiful and awesome in my new me. And it is the same with my quilting, all those pieces are becoming something new from what they used to be as well. As I quilt, I am finding a new me in the forgotten sea - each wave, each quilt, each piece finding its right place stitched in time, stitched in place... piece by piece I've made peace with myself and I find not only an awesome woman coming out of darkness but too I have found an almost Zen like inner state of peacefulness while quilting that carries over into my daily life away from my quilts..



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`Two roads diverged in a wood,
and I --I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
~Robert Frost

in the beginning, how this came to be and when I was 5...

My girls decided I needed to start a quilting blog around Christmas time 2009. "Mom it will give you a place to share your quilts, get you talking with other people who love to quilt, and give you a chance to start writing about each quilt, how you started quilting, your journey from brain damage to these quilts now and so much more... COME ON MOM YOU can do this!" SO here I am finally starting to try to figure out how to do this thing that will be so fun for me. LOL... I DO LOVE quilting and its has been quite the learning process again after brain damage in 1987.
My journey and love affair of quilting though started when I was a little girl of 5. I learned to quilt while watching my mother and maternal grandmother cut, piece and finish their quilts for our homes. I was in awe of how they would use tracing paper, cardboard patterns and paper sacks to make their pattern pieces. They would lay them out on the fabrics and cut maticulously around them with really sharp scissors. I remember how fun it was to play with their stashes of fabrics which consisted mostly of old clothing we all had worn, or from left over pieces of cloth from the home made clothes we all wore. Back then it was more fun than playing with crayons and blank paper! I learned to thread their needles IF they were doing it all by hand, or just enjoyed watching them pull out their patterns and piecing the blocks on their sewing machines... the old black Singer. My grandmother decided that when I was 5 1/2 I was old enough to make my first quilt when I was visiting her home. I was there for a week. She brought out all of her fabric bags and asked me what colors I wanted to make it. I told her blue, pink and white. So she emptied her bag of blues and told me to pick 3 fabrics I liked, then we did the same thing with the pinks and her whites too, until I had 9 different fabrics. I had no idea white came in so many shades or tone on tone (though I didn't know they were called that back then). We decided I would make what I now know is called a '9 patch' doll quilt that when finished was supposed to be around 9" x 9". She handed me a cardboard square that was 3 1/2" in size and told me to take my pencil and draw around the square on each of my fabrics. She helped me a LOT to do this so it wouldnt look too bad. Then she handed me my own scissors that were left handed! I was in hog heaven! She helped me cut out my blocks and that was the end of my day one lesson. When my granddad came in I had to show him what we had done and he seemed really happy for me. I think he was really amused by my wanting to get this done and not wanting to eat dinner or do anything else. But we were done for the day. The next morning after we did other things, it was time to get my next lesson. I learned how to place the 9 squares in the order I wanted them and then she let me thread a needle and begin to hand sew them together. I had sewn other silly things already when my mom was sewing, in order to keep me still and quiet. Otherwise I was known in my family as 'chatty Kathy'. Between lunch and dinner I had sewn two rows of 3 blocks each together, pricked my fingers many times since I was doing something new, and had been delighted at my progress. The next day I finished the other row and got them all sewn together into one big 'almost' square. THEN grandmother ironed them for me, not trusting me to do it myself, which was fine because ironing was for big girls and I wouldn't be big until I was 6! The next day my grandmother and I ran errands and then settled down again with her bag of blues since she knew that was my favorite color and we found a print that had been a dress my mom had made for me when I was little... that is when I was 4! and we placed my little doll quilt on top of it to again trace around it with a pencil before cutting it out. Then my grandmother showed me the batting and I chose a really fluffy one because she told me the thicker the batting the fluffier the quilt would be and I wanted my doll to be really warm in our Colorado winters. She then showed me how to pin the layers together and get it ready for hand qulting. I wanted to keep working on it that night but I had to put it away for the next day. BUT I was getting impatient... something that was, even back then rare for me. After breakfast the next day my grandmother decided that instead of 'stitching in the ditch' which would take a long time that instead we would just tie each corner and get it done faster so I could go play and do other things during my visit. I didn't quite know how to tie my shoes yet but I was really great at tying a mess of knots! She showed me how to do it and then just let me go ahead and do them all MY way. That didn't take too long to do and then all I remember was bringing the backing fabric over the front and creating a binding that way. I know I made a mess of the seewing at that point becuase I just wanted it done... and when she saw what I had done, she stopped me, made me tear out my stitches and do it more uniformly... which really made a difference. It took me all that night to finish it while we watched some show on tv.
I had that quilt until my high school years when we moved out of state and I really don't know what happened to it. But I do remember it was getting pretty tattered by then with all the use it had gone through. That was the first quilt I made as a child but not the last one.
I still have quilts both my mom and my grandmother made when I was a school aged girl. I will have to see if I can find pictures of these old things because the fabrics will be AHAA moments for anyone who remembers the 40s, 50s and 60s. I will try to get this up and written on more often than seldom so bear with me while I work on this over the next few months.