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.