My First Quilt

Recently I attended my first ‘Quilter’s Zone Day’ and had a wonderful day sharing with fellow quilters from the North Coast of NSW, Australia.

We were asked to share any quilts we had that were at least 20 years old and so I took the first quilt I ever made – my first quilt.  It brought back so many memories I thought I would share it with you.

In the early 1980’s I became the co-ordinator of the local Adult Education Learning Centre – a centre that serviced the surrounding rural area.  I canvassed my friends, contacts etc to gauge interest areas for classes and one of the suggested areas was  a quilting class.

A tutor based in the closest city agreed to travel to our little centre if I got enough interest and you guessed it – we did!

Now to keep a long story short I joined the group and made my very first quilt.

I had no

STASH

ROTARY CUTTER

QUILTING RULER

SELF HEALING MAT

LOCAL QUILTING STORE

I did have

my GEOMETRY SET from school

GRAPH PAPER

SCISSORS

SCRAPS from making my clothes

I also had a friend who had a father who was a travelling fabric sales rep. He had passed on some of the fabric samples sheets to her and she in turn, passed them on to me.

With all that I set about to make my first quilt – it was supposed to be a single bed size but my fabric constraints meant that mine became a knee rug for my Grandmother!

The ‘plains’ were gabardine scraps from my ‘work’ clothes  and the ‘floral’ from the samples – look at those points!!

The yellow is more of a poplin

The backing looks like ‘drill’ and I can’t believe the quilting without a walking foot!

and look at those wide bindings! The wadding of course would have been that polyester, fluffy stuff…..

Never the less, it was much loved by my darling Grandma and it was returned to me on her passing.

and now resides permanently in my craft room, covering a table made using the base of Grandma’s old Singer – Oh  how I wish I still had that!!

What memories!

Thank you for letting me share – do you still have your first quilt?  I would love to see them and hear the stories that went with them!

Until next time

Nanny xx