Quilting History

Quilting called to me for quite a long time.  My grandmother made quilts, usually out of fabric leftover from the clothes she sewed for us.  As a kid it was fun looking at all the squares and identifying them as “my pajamas” or “my sister’s shorts” or “my favorite sun dress.”  I think that’s where my love of quilting came from, but it took many years for me to get hooked.  When I first tried my own quilt, I carefully cut templates out of cardboard.  Then I traced around them with a pencil onto my specially selected fabrics.  I cut them all out by hand and sewed them together with my sewing machine.  One quilt made with that method was enough for me and I set quilting aside.  Several years later I found a book at the library called It’s Okay to Sit on My Quilt Book by Mary Ellen Hopkins.  It had quick quilting methods.  Add to that the introduction of rotary cutting and I was hooked.  I looked up the copyright date of that book.  It was 1989.  That means I’ve been quilting seriously for nearly 20 years.