This simple, little scrappy lap quilt could be a turning point for me.
Up until now, quilting has been a learning experience. Nearly every quilt I have made has been a challenge, which is why I still consider myself a quilting newbie, despite the 25 years I have been making quilts.
Nothing drives me more than a challenge. It is personal for me. I have no desire to enter shows or to win ribbons. I just want to continue to do the best of my ability and to perhaps enhance that ability along the way. There are so many skills I have yet to master. That can only happen through diligence and often times, repetitiveness. I haven’t given myself that opportunity. For varied reasons, I haven’t devoted myself to quilting. I’m afraid this attitude has limited me. I struggle way too much to enjoy the absolute joy of quilting. This little project may be a signal. That may be changing.
In addition, I have always had a desire to design my own quilts, rather than simply following someone else’s pattern. I want to change that, which circles back to this quilt.
It started years ago
This quilt was a fun project in that many months and maybe even years ago, I just started sewing pieces of scrap fabric, of which there is a mountain of it, into configurations that could be trimmed down into blocks. The exercise is very enjoyable. I put on an audio book and listen while I sew. It is mindless work, which makes it easy to concentrate on the book, rather than what I’m creating. Once enough pieces are sewn together, they are trimmed to make blocks. While doing this recently, it occurred to me that I had enough blocks to make a small lap quilt.
I added a few border pieces around the blocks, added sashing and corner squares to ‘round it all out,’ and I ended up with a quilt.
When it was all put together, I had no idea how I’d like to quilt it, so I started with the dense quilting on the bottom border. I wanted to create a shadow effect, so I wanted the bottom border to be darker than the side border. I tried to achieve that through quilting. When I finished that, I wondered what to do about all those wonky blocks. The answer to that was pretty simple – stippling.
Stippling was a turning point for me
I remember the first time I encountered a quilt that was machine quilted with stippling. It was during my journalism career when I covered a quilt show for the local newspaper for which I worked. It was a long time ago – back in the 1990’s – when machine quilting was just starting to compete with the long held tradition of hand-quilting.
I fell in love with the effect. It is so simple; it is one of the first stitches new machine quilters learn. I asked the quilter about it and right then and there, I was hooked.
That was the day I decided I wanted to make my first quilt.
I have no idea where this journey will take me, but so far, I’m enjoying the ride.
