A little personal quilting history

For several years I've blogged as Knitting Granny on Re-born Knitter. Recently I've begun quilting again - hence Re-born Quilter. I've been frustrated with some aspects of blogger (and I freely and openly admit that the biggest problem is my own lack of knowledge/ability to figure out how to solve those problems), so I tried WordPress for a few posts but ran into huge problems there...like, when I published a new post, it took the last post I had published and squeezed it into my sidebar. What's up with that???? And one post it just refused to publish at all, no matter how many times I told it to.

So here I am back with blogger, resigned to keep putting up with my own personal blogger-problems. I really do want to post about my quilting adventures, and it's just not fair to my Knitting to keep posting quilting things on Re-born Knitter.

Double Wedding Ring Quilt, pieced and quilted by my Aunts and Grandmother and given to my mother on the occasion of her marriage.


When I was just a little girl, I remember sitting under a quilting frame while my Aunts and Grandmother sat around it, quilting and visiting. I would watch as the stitching lines inched forward making their wonderful patterns on the underside of the quilt. When I was older, I became the needle-threader and kept everyone supplied with ready-to-go needles. Grandma taught me how to measure enough thread (not too much, not too little) and how to knot the end of the thread that came off the spool first. She said it helped keep the thread from getting knots in it during the stitching.


Sadly, by the time I was old enough to actually add my own stitches to a quilt, the Aunts had moved away and Grandma couldn't see well enough to quilt. All through my teen years and college and young woman-hood I kept thinking about quilts and quilting. When my babies came along I made a couple very simple quilts for them (machine quilted). Then came several sets of place-mats and pot-holders (patchwork on the machine, and machine-quilted), and then I quilted a quilt-top my mom made. What a learning experience that was! I had no idea at all how to hide the knots - ended up leaving them on top of the quilt! (We used that quilt for years and the knots never bothered me, not once - even after I learned how to hide them!)

A dear friend took a quilting class - I couldn't afford it - and every week she would come over to my house to pass-along the things she learned in class. Bless her! I hand-pieced a wall quilt for charity, and quilted several quilts for pay and for gifts...but never kept a quilt that I had made from start to finish.


Now, I have two big quilting projects in the works, besides my beloved knitting. More next time!